Does anyone know whether Clark Ashton Smith ever read and/or commented on Charles Robert Maturin's Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer? I know that Lovecraft, Poe, and Smith's hero Baudelaire adored the book and would be surprised if Smith never got around to reading it.

You piqued my interest. So I did a search. Anyone who wants a pdf of the story it's here:

[www.horrormasters.com]

But I will have to read it later.

Keep in mind that this is only a very brief excerpt from Maturin's lengthy novel. Few seem to have the patience to read Melmoth in its entirety. Even Lovecraft did not read the complete work, so I doubt that Ashton Smith did, either. If anyone has evidence to the contrary, however, then I'd also be curious to read it.

How much of it did Lovecraft actually read? I'm actually ploughing through the whole thing, but I'd be curious to know the bit that he must have been referring to in his essay on supernatural horror.

Well, HPL didn't read the whole novel before he wrote "Supernatural Horror in Literature", just the excerpts included in The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories and Tales of Mystery -- BUT he received the entire novel as a gift from W. Paul Cook (see letter to James F. Morton, 12 January 1933), and since he was so enthusiastic (he says in another letter that he has been searching for this book since 1919) I think it quite likely that he actually read the book in its entirety.

Martin, I would tend to agree. His enthusiasm for what he had read was very high indeed, as one can see from both the section in SHiL and his letters, and his response to receiving the book would also tend to back this up. Whether CAS ever read it or not, I don't know, though I would very much like to.

As for the novel itself... having read the thing in its entirety twice, I'd say it deserves its reputation, though on a second reading I found that parts of it do drag a bit at times. Nonetheless, there's a lot of very powerful stuff in that book, and I recommend it (along with The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk, each of which I've read more than once) to anyone interested in the original Gothics....

Yes, I should have clarified that Lovecraft had not read Melmoth before he wrote at some length about it in his Supernatural Horror in Literature essay.

I have my doubts that CAS read much of Melmoth, but, again, I'd be interested to read evidence to the contrary. There are others here who are much better qualified to comment on this subject than I, but my sense is that CAS did not have much interest in the 18th- and early-19th Century Gothic novelists and their works, in general, aside from Beckford's Vathek.

Melmoth may have its longeurs (although like most such matters, that is a matter of opinion), but I find it to be an extraordinary work, overall, and to contain some titanically powerful extended sections.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 30 Jul 08 | 03:19PM by Kyberean.

Kyberean Wrote:
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> Keep in mind that this is only a very brief
> excerpt from Maturin's lengthy novel.

OK, that's embarrassing. I didn't look through it before I posted. To make up for that the complete story is here:

[gutenberg.net.au]

But it's much easier to read from a real book.