Daniel,
Quote:I agree with your discussion of CAS's views and his overriding interest in the cosmic (it is pretty obvious when reading CAS that he would never be the type of writer to produce character studies). However, CAS is not so limited as to only explore one theme over and over again (as some other writers of weird fiction are wont to do). I would provide for example the "black ennui" that often siezes his protagonists, the concern with loss and grief in much of his poetry as well as tales such as "The Last Incantation," the tales of Averoigne with their clear interest in human love and sexuality and the punishment of hubris in "The Dark Eidolon." Of course, these are secondary themes, but they are also themes not to be found in the work of Lovecraft, who I would tend to regard as more purely cosmic than CAS. This is not to downplay the cosmic perspective in CAS's work; it is still the primary element of his oeuvre.
I think that we agree, then, that the cosmic element is paramount in CAS's works. As I mentioned, I certainly don't deny CAS's fictional representation of somewhat more "human" subject matter than, say, HPL, but it does remain very much subordinate to the cosmic theme as a whole. I'm curious, though, how much the presence of these "human" themes in CAS's fiction owes to the fact that the majority of it was written for commercial markets. CAS always wondered why HPL didn't write and try to sell more of his own work, as opposed to earning much of his living from ghost-writing or revising the work of others. The reason, for this, I think, is that, for HPL, his tales were his primary
artistic outlet. Unlike in the case of CAS, fiction was not a (or the) principal means of HPL's livelihood, and thus HPL largely refused to compromise or co-operate with editors who wished to mutilate his works--an idealistic luxury that CAS could not, or would not, afford.
To uncover the themes dearest to CAS's heart, I think that one needs to look at the works of CAS that exist in the form that was
his primary vehicle of verbal artistic expression, namely, poetry. Love poems abound in his work, to be sure, but, in his letters CAS admits that many of them were written to please a paramour* of the moment. Subtract these, and the poetry cycles dedicated to Genevieve Sully and Madelynne Greene (idle query: I wonder how Eric Barker felt about these last!), and one finds mostly poems dedicated to the weird, to the cosmic, or to themes of nature (or sometimes all three). So, I would agree that CAS's fiction is less purely cosmic than Lovecraft's, albeit primarily for reasons of personal and familial survival. I think, however, that CAS's inner sensibility was at least as attuned to the cosmic as HPL's--perhaps, in some ways, more so. For instance, in one of his letters, CAS mentions that HPL was an outsider primarily in time, whereas he (CAS) was an outsider in both time and space.
Quote:Also, I would not want to be misunderstood on the point of cosmic horror versus psychological horror. I don't think either is inherently better than the other; it depends on the skill of the author. CAS's "The Weaver in the Vault" and "The Seed from the Sepulchre" along with Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and "The Colour out of Space" are among the select few weird tales that have really made my skin crawl. I love cosmic horror's absolute negation of human importance, and many of my favorite horror and non-horror authors (such as Ligotti and Kafka) write from this perspective. I would agree with you about Lovecraft name-dropping, but I would not dignify the tripe that clogs the local mega-bookstore shelves with the name of psychological horror or cosmic horror. It is not horror at all, it's more influenced by teenie slasher films than Poe and Lovecraft. However, I don't think that it can be argued that Lovecraft is more widely read than Aickman. True psychological horror is a rare beast indeed, one that I would estimate to be even more rare than undiluted cosmic horror.
I don't think that any genre of art is
objectively or
inherently better than another, but we all have our preferences, and mine is strongly for cosmic horror. Psychology=human, and humans just don't really interest me that much--aside from a practical Nietzschean psychological dissection of them and of the types of life that they represent! I think, though, that I now better understand what you mean by "psychological horror". I agree that there exists very little fine psychological horror, but not that it is as rare as fine cosmic horror. Again, though, that leads us into the inevitably subjective fields of value-judgments and interpretations. I do think that the notion of psychological horror, however degraded it may be, appeals to more readers than does cosmic horror, and thus is more prevalent than the latter. For instance, psychological horror often crosses genres, such as into the field of mysteries and "thrillers". You seem to be writing of something much more refined than that, though. I'd be interested to read further examples of what you consider to be fine quality psychological horror.
As for Aickman, I'm not certain that I would put him squarely into the psychological horror category, myself, although I confess that I'm not quite sure where he would fit! A propos of Lovecraft's popularity versus Aickman's, I suspect that, if Aickman's work were in print and properly distributed in the U.S., then perhaps his readership would begin to approach that of HPL (as opposed to the
name-droppers of HPL and his works, which Aickman certainly would never approach). Again, I really don't think that many persons actually read HPL, but, rather, devour "mythos" fiction churned out by sundry hacks. Aickman, I suspect, needs his Derleth to help to increase his visibility, but, as we know from Joshi's biography of HPL, that could be quite a mixed blessing, should it ever happen!
*Two areas in which HPL was distinctly less "human" than CAS were that of sexuality and bibulousness. It's interesting that, in one of his letters, HPL writes the following:
"I have no respect or reverence whatever for anyone who does not live abstemiously and purely--I can like him and tolerate him, and admit him to be a social equal as I do Clark Ashton Smith and Mortonius and Kleiner and others like that, but in my heart I feel him to be my inferior--nearer to the abysmal amoeba and the Neanderthal man--and at times I cannot veil a sort of condescension and sardonic contempt for him, no matter how much my aesthetick and intellectual superior he may be".