Re: What Are Clark Ashton Smith and HP Lovecraft desribing in their Works?
Posted by:
Kyberean (IP Logged)
Date: 10 March, 2003 08:15PM
"Escape" was not the best choice of words for the point I meant to express, but it seems to me that the point is obvious enough, and I do stand by it. As CAS wrote to Lovecraft, "My own standpoint is that there is absolutely no justification for literature unless it serves to release the imagination from the bounds of everyday life". In a similar vein, the "escape" that I have in mind is not merely a mundane escape from hardship, but, far more important, an escape from the strictures of time and space altogether. It may be simply a matter of semantics, but it seems difficult to deny that there is an element of "escapism" inherent in this attitude. It is, however, only an element, and that fact in any case does not vitiate what I consider to be an admirable perspective. Here, following Tolkien, we have an instance of the escape of the prisoner, not of the deserter.
I realize that some might take issue with the term "prisoner" in its mundane sense. It seems to me, however, beyond dispute that CAS felt that way at times; see, for instance, the following passage from a 1937 letter to Robert Barlow:
"Truly, as you suggest, America has killed her finest artists. And when she hasn't killed them, she has driven them into exile as in the cases of Hearn and Bierce. Personally I am goddamned sick of the killing process (I seem to die hard) and have fully and absolutely made up my mind to quit the hell-bedunged and heaven-bespitted country when my present responsibilities are over. I haven't any definite plans, but will probably gravitate toward the orient. Anyway, I shall remove myself from Auburn, California and the USA, even if I have to stow away on a tramp steamer. [...]Writing is hard for me, since circumstances here are dolorous and terrible. Improvement in my father's condition is more than unlikely, and I am more isolated than ever. Also, I seem to have what psychologists call a 'disgust mechanism' to contend with: a disgust at the ineffable stupidity of editors and readers think that some of my best recent work is in sculpture: and there I find myself confronted with another blank wall of stupidity. Oh well and oh hell: some one will make a 'discovery' when I am safely dead or incarcerated in the bughouse or living with a yellow gal ln Cambodia".
No doubt, this wasn't the governing mood throughout CAS's lifetime. It would, however, be equally inaccurate, I think, to suggest that he was always a paradigm of emotional equilibrium, and that imaginative release from his often-difficult circumstances did not serve, at least in part, as a "safety-valve" in his "disgust mechanism" from time to time.