"Perhaps Clark Ashton Smith, with his delightful mixing of morbidity and humour and his evocative use of language, is the chief influence on McNaughton; but let me say bluntly that, in my hunmble opinion, McNaughton is a better prose writer than Smith."


Yeah, well, even Joshi is entitled to a boneheaded opinion from time to time. That would be a good phrase, come to think of it: "in my boneheaded opinion". Guess it's too late to get it into the paperback.

McNaughton writes very, very well in "Throne of Bones." I'm much less impressed with his other work. I think Joshi's comparison of McNaughton and CAS is unfair all around. McNaughton is influenced by CAS, but has digested that influence and used it to create something original. This is in direct contrast to the Lin Carter pastiches of CAS found in "The Book of Eibon."

To his credit, though, Joshi deems Smith a very fine poet. Although I haven;t seen a manusctript yet, I assume S. T. has written a decent introduction to The Last Oblivion.

Once, a guy made the comment to me that Smith should have stuck to sculpture! It takes all kinds, I guess.

Derrick

Derrick is correct, and Joshi does praise Smith's poetry in his introduction of THE THRONE OF BONES.

Jim

And I believe he's on record as saying he considers Smith's prose poems to be the greatest in the English language. Not sure there's that much competition, but hey, we take what we can get.

Hey ho, mi amici! I happen to have 4 copies on hand right now of the Wildside trade paperback of Throne of Bones by McNaughton ($16.95) which are all just meeping with anticipation of meeting their new owners. To adopt one of them, do drop me a note. PayPal accepted with my e-mail address, checks and money orders welcome. $2.00 post.

Gavin Smith
3408 Pleasant Run Road
Irving, Texas 75062-3255

My own take on the Joshi quote, the only thing boneheaded about it is the way Joshi (apparently) leaves it to our imaginations as to how he means that McNaughton is a "better" prose writer than CASmith. My own intuition here is that he may mean that, if all you want is a good prose writer, CASmith being ever so much more than just that (if that), many writers are clearly "better", but to what end? Let's not forget how hard it is to read Smith. But it is worth the effort. If all you want is a competent writer with a clear style, Smith is obviously flawed. From that angle, many writers are "better".

Think about who we are talking about here: does anyone thing that Joshi does not "get" Smith? This is not a head-scratcher, folks.

>>Does anyone thing that Joshi does not "get" Smith?

Why not? Critics have blind spots. And for all his worthy achievements Mr. J's also suffered the occasional embarassments. Much discussion of that in the Zothique Nights archive, Gavin, you may recall.

Everyone has their blind spots. I suspect that Mr. Joshi is simply more honest about his than most people.

Jim

I've heard that Joshi formed his initial opinion of CAS' fiction after reading "Tales of Science and Sorcery" and nothing else. While there are some good stories in this book, it is certainly not representative of Smith's best work.
There was also the bit in the HPL Bio. "A Life" where Joshi dismisses Smith as simply a hack who needed some quick money. That's pretty harsh. Joshi does seem to be revising his opinion of Smith's fiction for the better these days, and he has always had a high regard for his poetry.
-Ron

This thing ate my first attempt to answer your post, Ron. Here is another attempt.

It is not only unfortunate that Mr. Joshi might have used TALES OF SCIENCE & SORCERY to forge his opinion of Smith's fiction, it also strike me as unfortunate. In his essays devoted to individual authors, Joshi strives to read as much of an authors' work--fictional, nonfictional and verse--as possible before formulating an opinion. That is one of the sources of my respect for a majority of his work. I may not agree with his conclusions all of the time, but I know that he arrived at them more conscientiously than do a lot of other critics. It is too bad that if he was willing to voice his opinion of Smith's work on limited acquaintance, that he did not have access to either OUT OF SPACE AND TIME or LOST WORLDS from which to do so. Smith's collections tend to be organized in terms of diminishing worth. There are good fantasies in each of them, but the best scientifiction tales tend to be in the first two books. Most of the scientifiction in subsequent volumes either bores or irritates me. The first collection represents Smith's own selection of his best and the second volume those favorites he had to squeeze out of the first, with the subsequent volumes representing uneven selections of the good and the indifferent. Since Joshi's obvious (and stated) bias is toward supernatural realism, I suspect that he would tend to take those tales set in contemporary settings and the straight-forward scientifiction tales--genres at which Smith not only did not excel, but in which he showed little interest in writing and little sympathy in reading--more seriously than the heroic fantasies and the scientific fantasies at which Smith excelled. I suspect there may be a (temporary?) temperamental divide separating Joshi from appreciation of Smith's fiction, just as there is between Joshi and the fiction of M. R. James.

Jim

I'm of the opinion that it's pointless to compare CAS to HPl; although they both wrote in the genres of Fantasy and the Macabre, their individual approach to writing was completely different(in most cases.) CAS used an artistic, poetic approach, and did not usually develop an intricate plot. HPL utilized an exacting documentary style that depended heavily on a meticulous development of plot. Of course it's impossible to sum up the writing technique of these two masters in one sentence, but to seriously attempt comparison is like comparing apples to oranges.
I also have to say that if CAS was simply a "hack" then he certainly put a lot more effort into his tales than was necessary, and gave the editors and readers alike much more for their money than other pulp writers. Of course, there are some tales, such as the "Volmar" stories, where CAS stoops to hackwork. But usually, as in this case, he does so at the editors specific request.
-Ron

I agree with you, Ron. On those occasions when Smith did write hack-work, I believe, as you do and as Smith has recorded in his letters if I remember correctly, that he was forced to do so by the editors of the magazines for which he was writing. As we have seen in such tales as "The Dweller in the Gulf" these editors were not even above reshaping Smith's fiction to meet their perceived market needs without the author's knowledge or consent.

By the way, in my irritation over having to write my prior post twice, and recall whatever point I had been attempting to make, I wrote "not only unfortunate. . . but unfortunate" when I meant that last word to be "inconsistent".

Jim

>>Of course it's impossible to sum up the writing technique of these two masters in one sentence, but to seriously attempt comparison is like comparing apples to oranges.


I always find this an odd simile. Why can't we compare apples to oranges? Let's see...apples are red (sometimes green or yellow), oranges are orange, they are both fruits, they both grow on trees, apples have a smooth, think skin, oranges have a bumpy, thicker skin....

See, it's not that difficult!

All right, Gabriel! Now do pomegranates and kiwis.

Francis D'Eramo wrote:
>
> All right, Gabriel! Now do pomegranates and kiwis.

kiwis are small nocturnal flightless birds, pomegranates are small flightless fruit.