Let me congratulate you on this very fine board. There's an admirable level of scholarship here!

I also want to invite any fans of Jack Vance to the Jack Vance Message Board: [pub1.ezboard.com]

Not surprisingly, CAS is occasionally mentioned on the JVMB--but he is never, of course, discussed with the erudition that I find here! Eddison's name also appears there (usually thanks to me). But any or all of you would be most welcome to share your Smithian, Vancean, Eddisonian, or simply random thoughts with us.

Again, congratulations!

I never really got the Jack Vance CAS connection though I have only read one slim volume by him but do now have the Fantasey Masterworks Dying Earth trilogy. Of course if you want dying earths' Gene Wolfe does that well. I actually think if CAS had ever wrote a novel in latter life, taking in to consideration the accessibility of the language he usually uses, he would write much like Wolfe.

Boyd Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I actually think if CAS had
> ever wrote a novel in latter life, taking in to
> consideration the accessibility of the language he
> usually uses, he would write much like Wolfe.


Reading Selected Letters I now think this highly unlikely, CAS just didn't get humans, or the human interest in Humanity.

Quote:

CAS just didn't get humans, or the human interest in Humanity.

On the contrary, I think that he "got" them all too well, hence his admirable* lack of interest in the "human aquarium".



*from my perspective

Bravo, Kevin. I couldn't have put it better myself.

Lest anyone think that CAS did not understand humanity, let him read "The Voyage of King Euvoran" or "The Seven Geases," "The Last Incantation" or "The Dark Eidolon." Smith was a keen observer of humanity and all its weaknesses, and could wax sardonic in recording them. At the same time he was capable of describing true love and heroism, as in "Phoenix," or something truly tragic and poignant, as in "Morthylla." This doesn't mean that he couldn't recognize a tendency towards self-aggrandizement on man's part, nor does his propensity for deflating such inflated senses of self reflect anything but his own sense of justice. Best, Scott

I was referring specifically to my earlier statement on making a work saleable. Gernsback often rejected CAS works as all description, not that I'm entirely supporting Gernsback. CAS does have some interesting things to say about the human condition, but he also talks in his letters about not wanting to write about humans at all.

Hands-up who reads CAS for his character studies?

Let the games begin :-)

B.

P.S Scott, found an error in SLoCAS, you can fix for the next edition, Index - Einstein, Albert 152 not 125. (Einstein Wagging CAS really should have gone to high school!)

Quote:

I was referring specifically to my earlier statement on making a work saleable.

Sorry, but that wasn't clear--at least, not to me. I took it at face value for a more global statement. I doubt seriously that CAS could ever have satisfied Gernsback, and I'm surprised that CAS placed as many tales with him as he did.

At any rate, my point was simply that CAS's keen insight into human nature led him to realize that, in the main, humans really aren't very interesting; hence, his concentration on the extra-human. I think, though, that, misanthropy aside, there were also serious philosophical and aesthetic reasons why he felt that too much focus on human interest and characterization is ruinous for a weird tale. For instance,

"In authors such as Algernon Blackwood and Walter de la Mare, it seems to me that the accent is primarily on human character. But in their work (at least, in any of it that I have read) one fails to find the highest imaginative horror, the overwhelming sweep of black, gulf-arisen wings, such as is conveyed in the best tales of Ambrose Bierce, Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, where human character is treated more briefly and subversively".

Quote:

EinsteinWagging CAS really should have gone to high school!)

Was Einstein taught in the high schools from 1907-1911 or so, when CAS would have attended? I doubt it, but no matter--he's certainly not the only one who thinks that Einstein overstepped his bounds on occasion. I love Niels Bohr's retort to Einstein's famous assertion that "God does not play dice with the universe". Bohr justly replied, "Stop telling God what to do!"

Just a reminder, CAS dropped out of school at age 10 - 1903-4.
He was well-versed in the science of his day, and stayed fairly
current. As to Einstein - I like the line from Close Encounters --
"It looks like Einstein was right." - answer: "Einstein was
probably one of them."

Dr. Farmer

On the topic of the place of humanity in weird fiction: Though CAS often seems to deny the anthropocentric viewpoint, I would say that many of CAS's best tales meld a sense of human tragedy with the indifference of an alienating and incomprehensible universe. "Xeethra" would be a good example of this type of tale, as would "The Planet of the Dead." Weird fiction traditionally eschews character development in its pursuit of the cosmically terrible, but I must disagree with the literary theories of both CAS and Lovecraft in that I believe a well-developed sense of the human is necessary for the reader to fully comprehend the inherent horrors of the universe and man's situation in it. This is why I think the strange tales of Robert Aickman are so effective: the supernatural nightmares that Aickman creates are so inextricably linked with human psychology that the two are indistinguishable. I'm not denying the efficacy of the cosmic perspective in weird fiction (indeed, time has shown that more readers identify with Lovecraft and Poe than de la Mare and Aickman), I just think that both approaches deserve an equal hearing.
As for CAS, I think that he also had an essential interest in the human tragedy, no matter what his philosophies on weird fiction may have been. His themes are those which have essentially haunted mankind since the inception of literature: mortality, loss, ennui, hubris, and so on.

Atropos:

CAS often does deny, not "seems" to deny, the anthropocentric viewpoint. See, for instance, the essays and letters contained in Planets and Dimensions, all of which, I believe, are reproduced on this Web site.

As for your reading of CAS's fiction, it differs from mine. Of course, there is a minimal human element within it, but CAS typically devotes far more loving attention to the description of a strange flower than he does to subtle delineations of character. His point is not to eliminate every vestige of the human from a weird tale (although that would certainly be an interesting experiment), but to subordinate it to the weird phenomenon or extra-human atmosphere in question. As he writes in "On Fantasy and Human Experience",

"After all, why shouldn't literature, or at least one literary genre, emphasize what [Gray] calls the 'inhuman,' which, more properly, is the non-human or extra-human? Isn't it only the damnable, preposterous and pernicious egomania of the race, which refuses to admit anything but man's own feelings, desires, aims and actions as worthy of consideration?"

As to whether CAS's best tales evoke human pathos, that is a matter of opinion and a value-judgement, and therefore is not open to debate, since neither proponent of the opposing views can prove the other wrong. What I can say is that I certainly derive from the work of CAS and Lovecraft a vivid sense of all the "inherent horrors" that you mention, despite these two authors' relative indifference to the "human element" of their work. I dare say that this is true for others, as well.

I agree with you that both approaches deserve at least an equal hearing, but not that cosmic horror is more popular than psychological horror, or even that it is remotely as popular as psychological horror. For instance, many are those who drop Lovecraft's name, but few are those who actually read his works, so far as I have been able to observe. It is the "mythos", and the "monsters" associated with it, that is popular, not the actual ideas and writings of Lovecraft himself. As for CAS's alleged "essential interest in the human tragedy", I suspect that, in both life and literature, he was interested primarily in the joys, sorrows, and fates of particular, usually superior, individuals*, and felt little other than disdain or indifference toward the human herd as a whole. Even in this case, his interest in loss, mortality, and the like was precisely related to the fact of even the superior individual's inconsequentiality and helplessness in the face of the vast, powerful, and indifferent cosmos. The theme of the outer cosmos itself, which is the backdrop to all the other themes you mention, failed to make its way into your list, for some reason. ;-)


*In his fiction, poets, royalty, magicians, clerics, and scientists predominate as protagonists--not exactly the common ruck of humanity at large!

Kevin,
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.
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.
Anyway, I have found your analysis of CAS's themes enlightening. I was perhaps over-emphasizing the human element of his work (I've been devoting too much time to re-reading the Zothique tales).
Respectfully,
Daniel Harris (for some reason, my username is displaying on my posts instead of my real name)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2 Feb 04 | 10:02PM by .

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".

Quote: "the poetry cycles dedicated to Genevieve Sully and Madelynne Greene (idle query: I wonder how Eric Barker felt about these last!)[....]" From what I can determine, Eric and Madelynne had a very open relationship. There is of course no evidence that CAS' relationship with Madelynne was ever anything more than platonic, but there is also no evidence that it wasn't. "The Hill of Dionysus" poems certainly reveal a high degree of _emotional_ intimacy that some people might have found more objectionable than mere physical infidelity, but again, Eric was a poet and a Bohemian.
I for one would give a lot for a photo of the three of them.
Kevin, outstanding posts. I would love to see you whip these up into an essay for LOST WORLDS. Remember, we actually _pay!_ (Money--what a concept!) Best, Scott

The above interchange is very interesting, but if an older scholarly
type might make an observation...
Clark did not share the obsession with navel-gazing which has followed
in the dreadful wake of the faux sciences spawned by Freud and his ilk.
For example - Freud used the term "analysis" - the modern psychologist
is attempting to sneak in the word, "diagnosis." (for depth on this
subject read Dr. Tana Dineen's excellent analysis/expose' "Manufacturing
Victims"). Clark, rather, followed a more Victorian (and earlier) pattern in focusing on the impact of one or more of the "seven deadly
sins" - ie, literary archetypes - and their consequences.
Schizoid Creator - Pride and arrogance of Dr. Moreno.
Weird of Avoosl... - Greed/avarice
You see, Clark recognized that what is often considered a virtue
by the modern world (ie - the profit motive), is, in reality, no more
than the old familiar snake in new garb. It is no accident that my
old friend DSF has discerned the connection between Spenser and
Smith in this regard. The results of defying the cosmic, or eternal
laws - regardless of childhood deprivations, abuse, body chemistry or
the myriad simple minded excuses we now hear for excusing aberrant or
criminal behavior, or indifference toward one's fellows -- will result
inevitably in catastrophy.

In explicating an example of "pride" in classic literature, it is rare
find a "personality study" - One might recall youthful studies in
Shakespeare and hearing of the "tragic flaw". While an author may
not view himself as part of the "culture" in which he is born, and
indeed sees himself as opposed to it, nevertheless, the inherited
centuries of language and imagery impose upon writers a stern constraint
nearly impossible to overcome. Moreover, its presence is rarely even
recognized - the "pathos" of the "human condition" even in the writings
of CAS is that "man" is "fallen".

Scott,

Thanks for the information and the encouragement. If I ever collect my scattered thoughts regarding CAS and put them to paper, then I'll certainly send them your way.

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I for one would give a lot for a photo of the three of them

I'd love to see one, too. Perhaps you'll be able to unearth one in the course of your research. In the meantime, here's a link to the only photos of Madelynne that I've been able to find on line. I dare say that you've seen them already, but perhaps others here have not, and would be curious: [www.phantomranch.net].