NECROPSY, a sort of on-line version of the late lamented NECROFILE, just published a fine review by S. T. Joshi of these two titles at

[www.lsu.edu]

Scott:

Congratulations on this review and the nomination of SELECTED LETTERS for an IHG Award. I am glad to see S. T. Joshi's assessment of Smith's fiction warming since the days of the HPL biography and his Afterword to Brian McNaughton's THRONE OF BONES.

Jim

Thanks, Jim. S. T. is one of my oldest friends, and I have been working on him for the past few years regarding the quality of CAS's fiction. I agree that it is a secondary facet of his creativity, CAS was first and foremost a poet, but there is still much artistic merit in the fiction regardless of its mercenary origins.
Best,
Scott

I, too, am glad to see that S.T. Joshi's opinion of CAS's fiction is being revised upward. Although I think that Joshi is correct in seeing much of CAS's fiction as an extension of his poetry, and other instances of it as routine hack work, his overall dismissal of it in the HPL biography was quite surprising to me.

I confess that I still have a bit of trouble grasping the basis for Joshi's tastes in weird fiction. For instance, in the HPL biography, he refers to James Blish and, especially, Fritz Leiber as if they are titanic figures in the field, whereas, in an article on Robert Aickman--for my taste, an infinitely better writer of "weirds" than Blish and Leiber combined--Joshi was somewhat harsh with him. My guess (perhaps very much off the mark) is that Joshi doesn't care much for ambiguity and obscurity in weird fiction. He has criticized Thomas Ligotti on that score, as well, but with much greater justification, in my view. At any rate, I'm glad that Joshi is starting to give CAS's fiction its due. I concur with Scott regarding its merits relative to his verse, but the tales themselves contain great swaths of poetry.

I think that one of Joshi's primary problems with Aickman is with his theories about weird fiction (as put forth in the introductions to the volumes of Fontana great ghost stories that he edited). However, I can't reconcile Joshi's squeamishness with Aickman's, Smith's and Ligotti's work with Lovecraft's theories (which seem to have exerted not a small influence on Joshi) about atmosphere in weird fiction. Lovecraft identifies atmosphere as one of the most important elements of a good weird tale, and the aforementioned authors generate atmosphere in spades.
I was unaware that Joshi had reacted so negatively to CAS's prose, though I had known that he was more fond of the poetry. Could anyone summarize what his main criticisms of it are? Anyway, I thought that Joshi's comments on both SLoCAS and Red World of Polaris were very equitable and insightful (as would be expected of a scholar of Joshi's caliber), though I must say that I enjoyed both of the other Volmar stories, probably because I love to indulge in the sheer grotesque exoticism of Smith's sci-fi (even the hackwork).
Speaking of Red World of Polaris, I noticed while reading this work the similarity between CAS's sci-fi stories (and some of his more sci-fi oriented fantasy such as "The Door to Saturn") and the work of the Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem. They both share a passion for the grotesque and the ironic; traits which are evident especially in Lem's earlier, more light-hearted fare such as his tales of Pirx the Pilot and Ijon Tichy. Anyone else care to comment on the CAS-Lem connection?
-Daniel Harris



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 6 Feb 04 | 12:49PM by .

Daniel,

There's much in your post that inspires thought and potential comment, but, as I'm going out of town this weekend and must depart soon, I'll have to limit myself to the CAS-Lem affinities. The only work I've read of Lem's is Solaris, but it seems to me that what CAS would have appreciated in that great work is Lem's satire of pedantry and, to return to my pet theme, as well ;-), Lem's attempt to portray an entity that is completely alien to human motives, psychology, or comprehension, as well as the sometimes noble, sometimes pitiable, attempts to grasp the nature of, and make contact with, such an entity. In a word, I see the themes of the cosmic and the utterly non-human, and the wicked satire directed at man's attempt to grasp it, as being common elements of Solaris and much of CAS's fiction.

Here, for those who may be interested and who do not have a copy of this (inexcusably) out-of-print volume, are the relevant comments on CAS's prose from S.T. Joshi's H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (1995):

"Smith did not help his cause by churning out reams of mostly mediocre stories of fantasy and science fiction in the late '20's and early '30's, some (perhaps much) of it inspired by Lovecraft, or at least written under Lovecraft's encouragement. This body of work hangs on after a fashion as a very acquired taste, but to me it is incalulably inferior to his verse [...]. If Smith did any good work in prose, it is in the prose poem, some of which Lovecraft admired in Ebony and Crystal". [p. 281]

"Like much of Howard's work, a large proportion of Smith's fiction is routine hackwork, although very different in subject-matter, and because Smith was writing primarily to make money (chiefly to support himself and his increasingly feeble parents), he felt little compunction in altering his tales radically to suit the various pulp markets he cultivated". [p.504]

"Smith's stories also exact widely differing responses. They are overcoloured almost beyond belief--and, to some, beyond tolerance; but while Smith unleashes his wide and esoteric vocabulary without restraint, his plots tend to be simple, even simple-minded. My belief is that Smith's fiction is an outgrowth of his poetry--or, at least, has many of the same functions as his poetry--in the sense that what he was chiefly trying to achieve was a kind of sensory overload, in which the exotic and the outre' are presented merely as such, as a foil to prosy mundanity. There is, therefore, by design little depth or profundity to his fiction; its chief value resides in its glittering surface". Ibid.

"Naturally, some facets of Smith's work are better than others. The Zothique tales may perhaps be his most successful, and some of the tales meld beauty and horror in a very distinctive way. Smith was, in fact, not very successful at pure conventional horror, as for example in his Averoigne tales, which lapse into conventionality in their exhibition of routine vampires and lamias. His science fiction tales have dated lamentably, although "The City of the Singing Flame" [...] is intoxicatingly exotic, while the horror/science fiction tale "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" [...] may be his single finest prose work". [p. 505]

Joshi certainly finds much to praise in the work of such authors as Aickman and Ligotti, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise; in fact, I dare say that, if Joshi had found their prose valueless, then he wouldn't have devoted articles to their fiction, at all. My impression is that, although Joshi senses and acknowledges the atmosphere and other admirable qualities in these writers' works, he also finds countervailing flaws that, from his perspective, keep him from praising their work unreservedly. My own sense is that he is too critical of Aickman (and, although I have not read the prefaces to the Fontana volumes that Daniel cites, I do recall that Joshi refers to them with scorn).* For my taste, Joshi's strictures are more applicable to Ligotti. On the one hand, I enjoy some of Ligotti's tales and little prose-poems/vignettes very much, and appreciate his acute and poetic sense of the weird. On the other, I also find there an excessive obscurity, preciosity, and cold over-intellectualism that keep me at arm's length from his work. In addition, I rather dislike the relentlessly defeatist nihilism of the author's world-view that permeates his work, but this is merely my personal opinion.

*Although I cannot recall exactly where, I believe that somewhere Joshi even goes so far as to reiterate confidently HPL's ridiculous statement that the best weird fiction is written by non-believers in preternatural or supernatural phenomena. This assertion is patently absurd. To cite only a few of any number of counter-examples, three of Lovecraft's four "modern masters"--M.R. James, Arthur Machen, and Lovecraft's favorite (despite his criticisms), Algernon Blackwood--all believed in the supernatural to varying degrees, whereas only Dunsany (by far the weakest of the lot, in my estimation) shared Lovecraft's skepticism.

Cooper Square Press is reprinting the Joshi bio in April, so it won't be oop anymore. Hurrah!

Joshi is of course quite entitled to his opinion, but shouldn't he be judging Smith by his best prose work, like The Double Shadow, &c.? HPL churned out some pretty mediocre stuff, only it wasn't printed under his name.

Kevin Shelton Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Here, for those who may be interested and who do
> not have a copy of this (inexcusably) out-of-print
> volume, are the relevant comments on CAS's prose
> from S.T. Joshi's H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (1995):




Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 9 Feb 04 | 11:01AM by .

HPL churned out some pretty mediocre stuff under his own name, as well (namely the Dunsany pastiches that he wrote earlier in his career. Lovecraft was never meant to write pure fantasy). I'd have to agree with Scott that it seems Joshi isn't focusing on Smith's better prose. Also, I don't agree with Joshi's criticisms of Smith's plots. In Lovecraft's work, plot is often times nearly absent (such as in "At the Mountains of Madness"). This is not to criticize Lovecraft, as I don't believe that plot is the sole reason to read a story(after all, I enjoy Peake's Gormenghast novels). Rather, in Lovecraft's work plot is merely a vehicle for the communication of cosmic obsceneties, which is the real reason many of us read HPL's work in the first place. There is no need for the plot to be anything more than skeletal.
The same is true of CAS; plot is not a means to an end, it is a vehicle for Smith's creation of fabulously decadent and morbid worlds. I do think that in some of CAS's finer prose work (the Hyperborea, Zothique and Poesidonis cycles), CAS's plots are quite original and incorporate devices such as irony to an extent rarely found in fantasy. Also, CAS usually avoids resorting to the standard good vs. evil quest plot. However, I would have to agree with Joshi in that the extent to which a reader is interested in the cosmic, the outre, and the exotic will determine their enjoyment of Smith.

On the Smith-Lem connection, though it is apparent in Solaris I think it is even more obvious in some of Lem's work in the short form, such as Memoirs of a Space Traveler, as well as some of his earlier novels like Eden or Return from the Stars. I would encourage CAS fans to hunt these titles down (it's not too difficult to procure his works second-hand).

Finally, on Ligotti's work, I think that almost all the tales in Songs of a Dead Dreamer and most in Grimscribe are excellent, but I did not enjoy as many of the stories in Noctuary, though credit must be given for "Mad Night of Atonement" and "Ms. Rinaldi's Angel." If anything, Ligotti suffers from harping on the same theme excessively, especially in his newer work, where he really seems to be treading water. Though In a foreign town, in a Foreign Land was enjoyable, his endless references to "great pigs wallowing in their own blackness" have become self-parody in My Work is not yet Done and especially Crampton. However, he is still one of my favorite authors and I hope to see him return to form in the future.

Joshi has revised his opinion of CAS in the latter's favor since writing those remarks, and has done invaluable work in unearthing CAS' juvenile fiction. This latter has revealed that the young CAS had mastered such things as plot, so that if latter stories do not use as such then it must be a deliberate choice.
Regarding weird fiction and skepticism: Bierce was also a skeptic, as were REH, George Sterling and of course CAS (who was even skeptical of skepticism itself! William Hope Hodgson was also a free thinker. As for Machen and Blackwood: while both were believers, neither was by any means a conventional believer, while IMO the ghost stories of M. R. James reveal a tension between an outward semblance of belief and inner doubts as to the existence of a just and loving deity overwatching mankind. James also stated for the record that he had no particular belief in ghosts, although once again this is subject to some doubt.
Best, Scott

Scott:

Quote:

Joshi has revised his opinion of CAS in the latter's favor since writing those remarks, and has done invaluable work in unearthing CAS' juvenile fiction.

I figured that this must be the case, and I'm glad to hear it. I've read somewhere--perhaps in this forum--that Joshi was first exposed to CAS's stories via the science fiction in Tales of Science and Sorcery--one of CAS's poorest collections--and that this initial negative impression somewhat tainted his opinion of CAS's tales as a whole. No matter. It would be nice, though, if, for the forthcoming reprint announced above, Joshi would revise his comments according to his current perspective. I suspect, though, that such revisions may be too expensive to undertake, even if Joshi were inclined to do so.

Quote:

Regarding weird fiction and skepticism: Bierce was also a skeptic, as were REH, George Sterling and of course CAS (who was even skeptical of skepticism itself! William Hope Hodgson was also a free thinker. As for Machen and Blackwood: while both were believers, neither was by any means a conventional believer, while IMO the ghost stories of M. R. James reveal a tension between an outward semblance of belief and inner doubts as to the existence of a just and loving deity overwatching mankind. James also stated for the record that he had no particular belief in ghosts, although once again this is subject to some doubt.

Perhaps I should have stated my point more clearly. Lovecraft claims, in essence, that mechanistic materialists write better weird fiction than do believers in the "occult" and the like because, for the former, the violations of the "laws" of ordinary space and time seem more stupendous to those who believe in them, as opposed to those whose sense of reality is more fluid. For the latter, there is no real sense of the "weird", because the "weird" depends first upon a norm, and then on a violation of that norm. In any case, I was not referring to "skepticism" as it pertains to conventional religious belief, at all. In addition, the point isn't to array the materialists against the non-materialists, but to demonstrate the patent absurdity of Lovecraft's formulation. I haven't the slightest doubt that mechanistic materialists write excellent weird fiction--Lovecraft, for instance!--but I would hardly draw a line between the quality of work of either party based upon of their view of the nature of reality, as Lovecraft does.

A propos of the particular authors in question:

Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood believed in occult phenomena and in a spiritual dimension of existence. Both inveighed often in their writings against the persistent materialism of the age.

M.R. James stated for the record that he was open-minded on the subject of ghosts' existence, and that he would impartially consider any evidence on the subject brought before him. As the preface to the Oxford U.P. collection Casting the Runes indicates, however, in private, James may well have admitted to believing in ghosts. Further, as a practicing, believing Xtian, he would also have to accept, among other dogma, the doctrines of the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus, either of which by itself would suffice to place him within the non-mechanistic materialist camp.

As for CAS himself, he was certainly a skeptic of any conventional dogma, but that includes mechanistic materialism, as his letters and essays make abundantly clear. (It's too bad that, as his letters reveal, CAS was so reluctant to debate with HPL on the subject. Perhaps CAS realized that, if he did so, he would receive a twenty-page screed on the subject via return mail, and preferred simply not to bother!). CAS's open-mindedness on the nature of reality itself makes me quite reluctant to place him among the "non-believers" as I have used the term here (again, defined as materialists who believe that the universe proceeds according to fixed, natural laws discernible by human reason, and that that is all there is to the matter).

Daniel:

Quote:

HPL churned out some pretty mediocre stuff under his own name, as well [...]

And Joshi would be the first to acknowledge that fact, as his biography of HPL makes plain. Joshi even goes so far as to state that (I'm paraphrasing from memory here), if HPL had stopped writing before 1926, he would most likely scarcely be known today--much too harsh a judgment, in my view. In the end, though, I gather Joshi feels that HPL wrote enough stellar fiction over his entire career that, overall, the balance is very much in HPL's favor. At the time Joshi wrote his comments on CAS in the Lovecraft biography, he seems not to have felt that way about CAS's fiction. I'd be interested to know what proportion of CAS's fiction Joshi had read when he wrote these comments.

A propos of Lem and CAS: Solaris is all that I've read of Lem, so, as I mentioned, I cannot comment on any other works of his. If the books and tales you mentioned are even closer in theme to CAS than Solaris, however, then I'll eagerly seek them, as the parallels between Solaris and CAS's perspective are extremely obvious to me.

An aside regarding Solaris and Tarkovsky's film of the book: Tarkovsky's compulsion to change the entire theme of Solaris from the possibility of understanding of, and contact with, something utterly alien and inhuman to a study of--once again--human relationships suggests that either some individuals simply have no understanding of the theme of the cosmic and the non-human, or find it so alien, and perhaps terrifying, to their sensibilities that, when they get their hands on a work dealing with that theme, they must mutilate it almost beyond recognition.

Ah, Tarkovsky's Solaris. Yes, Tarkovsky certainly did a number on the theme of the novel, in order to fit it into his unrepentantly humanist perspective. In fact, Tarkovsky is a good example of a man who was firmly opposed to the materialistic and who relentlessly asserted that man's primary existence is spiritual. Unfortunately, this made him completely unqualified to adapt any of Lem's works for film. However, I would not impeach the rest of the Tarkovsky canon, as Stalker is one of the most moving science fiction movies I have seen and one of the few movies that really drives home the tragedy of what man has lost to materialism. Also, Andrei Rublev consists of some of the most beautiful images committed to celluloid. Anyway, apologies for going slightly OT.
-Daniel Harris

I think that off-topic digressions are permitted here from time to time!

I've seen only a few Tarkovsky films, and, oddly enough, Solaris is my favorite so far. I just try to forget that it is supposed to have anything to do with Lem! It is a testament to Tarkovsky's artistry and sense of the poetic that the film moves me deeply, even though it runs very much counter to my own philosophical instincts. Of course, it is also much too long; the whole "Mother/Mother Russia" fever dream is awful, and could be cut in its entirety to the film's benefit. The ending, though, is quite touching, although I can see why it revolted Lem. Also, the performance of the actress who played Hari was what we would call "Oscar-worthy".

I was about to write earlier that Tarkovsky has no sense of the cosmic, but that would be untrue. His sense of the cosmic is merely a conventional God-centered one. My impression from Lem's comments on the film is that he resented, and found inexplicable, the fact that Tarkovsky could find nothing moving in the nature of the confrontation with an unknowable force and in the almost child-like futility of our attempt to understand it. Instead had to make a Dostoyevsky-esque drama of guilt and redemption in order to involve himself emotionally in the narrative.

Kevin Shelton Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

Quote: Perhaps I should have stated my point more
> clearly. Lovecraft claims, in essence, that
> mechanistic materialists write better weird
> fiction than do believers in the "occult" and the
> like because, for the former, the violations of
> the "laws" of ordinary space and time seem more
> stupendous to those who believe in them, as
> opposed to those whose sense of reality is more
> fluid. For the latter, there is no real sense of
> the "weird", because the "weird" depends first
> upon a norm, and then on a violation of that norm.

I am currently rereading Northrop Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, and came across the following which I think is germane to our discussion: "In a true myth there can obviously be no consistent distinction between ghosts and human beings. In romance we have real human beings, and consequently ghosts are in a separate category, but in a romance a ghost as a rule is merely one more character: he causes little surprise because his appearance is no more marvellous than many other events. In high mimetic, where we are within the order of nature, a ghost is relatively easy to introduce because the plane of experience is above our own, but when he appears he is an awful and mysterious being from what is perceptibly another world. In low mimetic, ghosts have been, ever since Defoe, almost entirely confined to a separate category of 'ghost stories.' In ordinary low mimetic fiction they are inadmissible 'in complaisance to the scepticism of a reader,' as Fielding puts it, a skepticism which extends only to low mimetic conventions." This is a part of his discussion of Aristole's theory of modes. From the rest of the discussion it seems to me that what he is that in a naturalistic ghost or weird story, one in which the hero is neither superior to others nor to nature but recognizably lives in the same world that we do, the appearance of a ghost or other weird event runs counter to the beliefs of the reader and the hero of what is possible in the real world. This isn't all that different from what HPL said. Also, Peter Penzoldt in THE SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION opined that the rise of the ghost story coincided with a decline in the belief in ghosts. Best, Scott

Now, I wish that I could find the exact quotation by Lovecraft, as I recall that he seemed to make the point that materialists' weird fiction was at least potentially more effective than that of the non-materialists, and that, I think, is rather different from the Frye material that you cite--as well as, I would continue to insist, indefensible.

As for Frye, I'm afraid that he loses me right at the beginning, as I have no idea what he means by the oxymoronic phrase "true myth". In every genuine (is that what he means?) myth that I have ever read or heard told, there is, in fact, a distinct demarcation between the human and divine realms--although, of course, the gods and spirits often interact directly with humans. As for Penzoldt's observation, it seems to me to be a rather banal one, since, as Lovecraft states, the weird tale as a literary phenomenon is a child of the 18th Century, an era known (at least in England) for its skepticism and materialism. So, yes, weird tales as a literary genre coincided with a reduction in the popular belief in supernatural phenomena, but ghost stories and the like as part of the oral tradition have always been tremendously popular.
As for the incomprehensible (at least, when taken out of context) business of "high mimetic" versus "low mimetic", etc., such jargon reminds me of why I declined years ago to pursue a Ph.D in English following my Master's degree in that subject. When it comes to "literary theory" in general, (as opposed to genuine literary criticism, which focuses on the author and the work, as opposed to focusing on the critic and his agenda, his pet theories, his jargon, and so forth), I can only echo Dr. Farmer's disdainful remarks on the subject.