Clark Ashton Smith is famous for his extensive vocabulary, though some critics might say "infamous". They adhere to E.B. White's rule in THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE: Avoid fancy words-do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, willing and able.

When to use the twenty-dollar word (and how to effectively use it) is up to the individual writer. I think one reason CAS was able to do so was because he felt comfortable and confident with his large vocabulary. I can't recall reading one of his stories and thinking, "Okay, that word doesn't sound quite right."

One of the less remarked-upon uses of Smith's vocabulary is to create a humorous effect. Take these lines from THE TALE OF SATAMPRA ZEIROS:

The monstrosity was too awful to permit of even a brief contemplation; also, its intentions were too plainly hostile, and it gave evidence of anthropophagic inclinations, for it slithered toward us with an unbelievable speed and celerity of motion, opening as it came a toothless mouth of amazing capacity...We saw that our departure from the fane of Tsathoggua had become most imperative...

Am I the only one who finds this hilarious?

Yes, it's funny, and CAS uses a sort of dry, understated, ironic humor a great deal, in my opinion.

--Sawfish

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Funny, yes. Reminds me a bit of Vance's verbosity, which IIRC, also has a humorous effect sometimes, though I think Vance's style is usually not quite this polysyllabic.

I definitely think CAS frequently uses humor and you gave a good example. Anyone who insists on 10 cent words should stay far away. I see Clark Ashton Smith as being weird fiction's Hieronymus Bosch. How could that be done with everyday words? Does anyone know if CAS ever saw Hieronymus Bosch's paintings? I cannot recall him being mentioned in his stories.

CAS has a style of humor I don't often see. Even other satirical fantasists of his time and beyond were usually too obvious and blatantly self-aware. I like how he could weave such wry comments into the most frightening or suspenseful moments.

I dare say CAS was occasionally hilarious, like in "Necromancy in Naat", when he described that quick-paced chaos in which every character was trying to kill each other at the same time, and yet everyone was incompetent!

weorcstan Wrote:
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> I definitely think CAS frequently uses humor and
> you gave a good example. Anyone who insists on 10
> cent words should stay far away. I see Clark
> Ashton Smith as being weird fiction's Hieronymus
> Bosch. How could that be done with everyday words?
> Does anyone know if CAS ever saw Hieronymus
> Bosch's paintings? I cannot recall him being
> mentioned in his stories.


I don't think he mentioned Bosch in his published letters, but I'd be surprised if he wasn't aware of his work. CAS discussed many artists in his letters, primarily of the weird, romantic, decadent, or highly stylized schools, such as Boleslaw Biegas and Kay Nielson, and the more famous ones such as John Martin and Aubrey Beardsley. He was seeking any unusual artist he could find.

The comparison to Bosch is perfect, and I always imagined the demonic court of Thasaidon illustrated in Bosch's style!

Another visual artist I'd compare to CAS' literary work is Rosaleen Norton, an infamous woman who painted glorious scenes of pagan gods, naked witches, grotesque demons, and lustful satyrs, earning her a bad reputation with the law. I learned she was a fan of Lovecraft, and wrote a dedication to the King in Yellow, so it's enticing to imagine what her illustrations of CAS' work would look like.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 17 May 22 | 12:19AM by Hespire.

He comments on basic human behavior, like social observational humor. At he risk of tremendous redundancy (it's one of my favorite observational passages in CAS) from The Dark Eidolon, Zotulla's main concubine, Obexah, when she first sees Namirrha...

Quote:

And Obexah, peering beneath lowered lids, was abashed and frightened by the visible horror that invested this man and hung upon him even as royalty upon a king. But amid her fear, she found room to wonder what manner of man he was in his intercourse with women.

All this, and yet she wonders what he's like in bed...

Could you imagine HPL writing this?

Then there's the repeated insults of the much vaunted Ralibar Vooz (itself a fairly comical name) in The Seven Geases when he is basically rejected seven consecutive times as a potential blood sacrifice. He's not worth the effort...

CAS definitely had a ready sense of the absurd and the ironic, and was not reluctant to use these devices to orchestrate his narratives.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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There are passages in Clark Ashton Smith‘s stories that make me laugh but I am not sure if they are meant to be funny, maybe it is a case of unintentional humour. For example:

"Madness took me then for awhile, and I knew not what I did. Recovering my senses in a measure, I poured gallon after gallon of corrosive acids into a great tub; and in the tub I placed the thing that had been Jasper Trilt, or which bore the semblance of Trilt. But neither the clothing nor the body was affected in any degree by the mordant acid. And since then, the thing has shown no sign of normal decay, but remains eternally and inexplicably the same."

Minicthulhu Wrote:
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> There are passages in Clark Ashton Smith‘s
> stories that make me laugh but I am not sure if
> they are meant to be funny, maybe it is a case of
> unintentional humour. For example:
>
> "Madness took me then for awhile, and I knew not
> what I did. Recovering my senses in a measure, I
> poured gallon after gallon of corrosive acids into
> a great tub; and in the tub I placed the thing
> that had been Jasper Trilt, or which bore the
> semblance of Trilt. But neither the clothing nor
> the body was affected in any degree by the mordant
> acid. And since then, the thing has shown no sign
> of normal decay, but remains eternally and
> inexplicably the same."

I think the imagery there is intentionally humorous, but is balanced by the psychological treatment and matter-of-fact narration of the revenge-driven narrator to create the absolute masterpiece that is "The Supernumerary Corpse"... all kidding aside, the tale is underrated; delineations of the inexplicable appealed strongly to Smith's imagination. It would be cool to film it. Someone I know worked up a scenario for a screenplay, in fact.

jkh

Do you see this story as:

1) inspired/influenced by Poe; and

2) Like many Poe narrators, an example of unreliable POV?

--Sawfish

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Sawfish Wrote:
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> Do you see this story as:
>
> 1) inspired/influenced by Poe; and
>
> 2) Like many Poe narrators, an example of
> unreliable POV?

1. Yes, in Smith's story not only the style of the first paragraph, but the murder plan itself, which "requires that his victim be conscious", are an echo of Poe's classic. As Jay Jacoby further elucidates: "When Montresor thrusts a torch through the remaining opening in the new masonry, he makes a final, even frantic effort to arouse his victim, suggesting that he is beginning to suspect that Fortunato is already dead (Fortunato, whose name can be translated as "the lucky man," in dying quickly may be considered relatively lucky). Since the opening is six or seven feet above the floor and four feet from the back of the recess, Montresor's act is brutally direct: the flaming torch is thrust toward the victim's head and allowed to drop to his feet in the confined space. The jingling of the bells that "came forth in return" is often interpreted as a sign that Fortunato is still alive, but it seems more probable that here, as elsewhere, they jingle involuntarily, either struck by the torch or shaken when Fortunato slumps in death. Surely a conscious Fortunato, no matter how stoic, would have cried out in response to the flame" ("Fortunato's Premature Demise in "The Cask of Amontillado", Poe Studies, Dec. 1979). The repeated coughing spells of Fortunato support this reading. 2. No, I take it that the phenomena actually happened as described. Margrave does say in the pivotal moment, "Indeed, I doubted my own senses, doubted my very brain, as I hung up the telephone" (OD 248-49), but finally speculates about the unknown properties of the drug he used to torture and kill Trilt. I also think that Smith was mocking the mystery genre's fixation on the condition of murder victims. Imagine a detective novel in which the corpse keeps reappearing from chapter to chapter. R.A.J. Walling's novels of the period bore such titles as "The Corpse With the Eerie Eye," "The Corpse in the Green Pyjamas," "The Corpse With the Blue Cravat," "The Corpse With the Floating Foot," and in the 40's, "The Corpse Without a Clue". So,the story's lightness of touch masks a tincture of satire.

jkh

I took the replication of the corpse as a psychological manifestation of the killer's guilt, in much the same way as in Poe's The Telltale Heart.

The fact that the sole source of the phenomenon is the killer, and that the incorruptibility was mysteriously manifested in the clothing, as well as the victim's body, seemed to go well beyond any actual phenomenon: it was as if the image of the victim existed <i>permanently</i> in the mind of the killer.

In no part of the story is the reader directed toward anything supernatural, and all falls within the realm of physical reality--the mixture being merely a unique blend of known toxins. So it's quite a jump, without any supporting provenance, when the replication happens. So this, in combination with the sole observer being the killer, is why I leaned toward the unreliable POV.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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"A phantom shell--face, hands, clothing, etc.--which attaches itself temporarily to a living person, giving him the aspect of one long dead" (The Black Book of CAS) Well, it can't have happened, but it did. Since the plot takes a page from "The Cask of Amontillado", which has a very reliable narrative POV, your sense that Margrave is an unreliable narrator is dubious from the start. Equally obvious, Smith did not go in for unreliable narrative POVs. Your claim that "in no part of the story is the reader directed toward anything supernatural" is a nice try but isn't consistent with Margrave's incredulous musings on the object ("cadaver or ka", "whatever it was", etcetera). The story closes with his logical doubting of a materialistic orthodoxy, based upon his esoteric research as an experimental chemist. Other than the humor (the subject of this thread), the reading you lean toward is supported only by the fact that the manifestation is "quite a jump", as you put it, which is only to say it's fantastical, and by the valid point that Margrave alone sees the supernumerary corpse. But Smith's idea of describing such while paying tribute to Poe is fully realized in the tale without recourse to an alternative reading. And I'm afraid that your suggestion of a guilty
conscience having anything to do with it is patently absurd. If there is a bisecting point in Smith's ouvre here it is with "The Plutonian Drug", not "The Face by the River".

jkh

What about the parallel to "The Telltale Heart"?

Did you overlook this comparison, Kip?

Why?

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Yes, the stark terror in Trilt's eyes as he is taunted by Margrave compares in detail with The Tell-Tale Heart", but aren't the motives and mental states of the confessors in contrast? Also, the victim in Poe's tale is not tortured as in "The Cask of Amontillado" and Smith's yarn. Thanks for calling my sluggard attention to this; I neglected your larger point behind the comparison, which was the possible hallucinations and madness of the narrator. An interesting possibility, indeed. And the long gestation period before Smith eventually plotted and wrote the story (paralleling the wasted years of Margrave's possibly debilitating chemical experiments), could support the view that the basic idea needed reshaping. In their notes on the story, Connors and Hilger indicate that the title appeared among others in an early list, presumably (?) with the short note, "A man dies, and leaves two corpses, in two different places" (Collected Fantasies Vol. 3). The same notes also refer us to Smith's mention of his "ghastly and gruesome ideas" in a letter to Lovecraft: "One is about a man who dies in two different places at the same moment and leaves two corpses!" (SL 136). However, my literal acceptance of Margrave's account is based on his attempts to rationally process what was happening to him, such as his reference to the Egyptian concept of a soul remaining in a physical object. Also, given Smith's ironic or fatalistic sense of humor, the idea of Margrave's best-laid scientific plans laid to waste by something utterly defying science?

jkh

I agree that the story can be reasonably read either way (as a tale transcending the natural, or as a tale of the psyche of an evil-doer) and I certainly do not insist on my preferred reading.

In a narrative sense, there is an important difference between TTH, in which the narrator is clearly disturbed into an unrealiable POV, and SC, where the issue of narrator reliability is ambiguous. The difference is that it TTH, there are present in the room other individuals who are in a position to hear the heartbeat, but do not. This tends to underscore the madness of the POV.

But in SC, while it's true that no other objective observation of the extra corpse happens, neither is there the sort of objective corroboration that there is NOT an anomalous event (extra corpse), as there is with the police inspectors failing to hear the heart in TTH.

So in truth, the CAs story is ambiguous even in that area, which makes it all the more intriguing, because the actual existence of the corpse is in question: it could be the figment of a guilty murderer, or it could, in fact, be the unexpected result of the new toxin.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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