•
Rating: Clark Ashton Smith, born in 1893 in Long Valley, California, was one of the pillars of early 20th-century American fantasy alongside H.P. Lovecraft and R.E. Howard, writing for the renowned magazine "Weird Tales". His decadent, baroque, and visionary prose transports the reader's mind to realms beyond time and space.
Today, the American writer is remembered for his horror stories, but his literary career actually began in the field of poetry. His translations of Baudelaire are still considered some of the most effective. Between 1918 and 1922, he published two famous collections of poetry: "The Star Treader and other poems" and "Ebony and Crystal," the latter dedicated to his poet friend Samuel Loveman.
During this period, he frequented George Sterling and perhaps met Ambrose Bierce. The quality of his poetry certainly placed him among the minor American poets of the time. Clark Ashton Smith was indeed able to achieve the "sublime" in verse, beyond the macabre and fantastic themes he tackled, through the use of one of the most varied and rich vocabularies known. The poetic cultural extraction of C.A. Smith can also be found in his prose, sometimes overly baroque and redundant, which characterizes most of his stories.
His activity as a sculptor should not be overlooked, with which he depicted the malevolent deities "evoked" in his writings.
In 1922, the acquaintance with H.P. Lovecraft was crucial. The epistolary exchange between the two writers proved to be fundamental. C.A. Smith was encouraged to write stories for "popular" magazines. Between 1928 and 1935, his legendary stories appeared in "Weird Tales". The fervent imagination of the Californian writer knew no bounds: unforgettable story cycles set in the imaginary continents of "Hyperborea" and "Zothique" were born in this way.
In particular, the "Zothique" cycle, set in a distant future where the sun has darkened and the ancient arts of necromancy have been revived, is considered his masterpiece. The stories in this cycle perhaps constitute the essence of his lush writing influenced by Baudelaire and Verlaine: a prose characterized by the use of sophisticated vocabulary that creates an atmosphere of aesthetic decadence, as in the splendid story "The Empire of the Necromancers".
It is worth highlighting how, despite part of his work having affinities with science fiction, the "philosophy" and aesthetic of C.A. Smith is "cosmic" and anti-anthropocentric, and thus stands at the opposite pole of the emerging American Science Fiction of the period, embodied by various Edmond Hamilton and E.E. Doc Smith. When C.A. Smith wrote more "canonically" science fiction stories, in the vein of H.G. Wells, he did so for commercial reasons and under editorial pressure.
Another fascinating cycle of stories is set in Medieval "Averoigne", an ancient French region dominated by dark legends and magic. These are in any case stories not devoid of a certain Gothic and grotesque charm. During his most artistically fertile period, "The City of the Singing Flame", considered a masterpiece by many science fiction writers like Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury, is worth mentioning. This story is inspired by a "real" excursion the writer had in the Crater Ridge region and features a memorable cosmic atmosphere.
Unfortunately, by the late '30s, with the deaths of his writer friends H.P. Lovecraft and R.E. Howard, and the decline of the magazine Weird Tales which would close in 1954, the creativity of the Californian writer progressively faded. The never-too-praised Arkham House of August Derleth and Donald Wandrei preserved his work and published, in 1942, "Out of Space and Time", his first hardcover collection of stories.
The influence exerted by Clark Ashton Smith on the evolution of fantastic fiction is considerable: his extra-cosmic imagination had a decisive influence on writers of the caliber of Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, Tanith Lee, and many others. Unfortunately, his work seems today obscured and buried along with much "outré" supernatural fiction that is no longer in vogue. It is time, therefore, to rediscover and bring to light this removed "strand" of fantastic literature and let these phantasmagoric "visions" shine once more.
Essential Italian Bibliography
Zothique (Nord – 1977 – 1992))
Genius Loci e altri racconti (Meb -1978)
Mondi perduti (Meb – 1979)
Gli orrori di Yondo e altri racconti (Meb -1979)
Al di là del tempo e dello spazio (Meb – 1979)
Il destino di Antarion (Fanucci – 1986)
Le metamorfosi della Terra (Fanucci -1987)
Averoigne (Fanucci – 1988)
Hyperborea (Fanucci -1989)
Xiccarph (Fanucci – 1989)
Malneant (Fanucci -1990)
Ombre dal cosmo (Yorick Fantasy Magazine – 1999)
Loading comments slowly
