A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Another person with whom Lovecraft came into contact at this time, although only by correspondence, was Clark Ashton Smith. Loveman and Smith were long-time correspondents, and the former showed Lovecraft Smith’s paintings and sketches, while Galpin and Kirk, respectively, presented Lovecraft with copies of Smith’s early collections of poetry, The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912) and

Odes and Sonnets (1918). So taken was Lovecraft with both the pictorial and literary material that he forthwith wrote Smith a fan letter toward the end of his Cleveland stay. This almost effusively flattering letter initiated a fifteen-year correspondence that would end only with Lovecraft’s death.

Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) has suffered an anomalous fate precisely because his work is so distinctive and unclassifiable. His early collections of poetry are in a fin-de-siècle

vein somewhat in the manner of Swinburne or George Sterling (Smith’s early mentor), but very distinctively Smith’s own. Indeed, upon the publication of that first volume, at the age of nineteen, Smith—a native of California who was born in Long Valley and lived most of his life in Auburn—was hailed by local reviewers as a new Keats or Shelley. These accolades were perhaps not far from the truth. To my mind, Smith’s early poems are quite superior to the ‘cosmic’ poetry of George Sterling, although he has clearly learnt much from Sterling’s The Testimony of the Suns (1903) and

A Wine of Wizardry (1907). The problem for Smith—or, rather, for his recognition as a significant poet—is that the tradition of weird or fantastic poetry is not very deep or substantial; moreover, modern enthusiasts (and critics) of weird literature seem uncomfortable with poetry, so that the tremendous body of Smith’s verse has been ignored by exactly those readers who might be expected to champion it and keep it alive. And although Smith wrote some free verse, much of his work is written both in formal metres and in a very elevated, metaphor-laden diction in utter contrast to the flat, conversational, and (in my judgment) entirely prosaic work of the ‘poets’ who, following the dreary example of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, are currently fashionable. Is it any wonder that Smith’s poetry, after its initial praise on the West Coast, fell on deaf ears and remains one of the lost jewels of twentieth-century literature?

Smith did not help his cause by churning out reams of fantasy and science fiction tales in the late 1920s and early 1930s, some (perhaps much) of it written under Lovecraft’s encouragement. This body of work hangs on after a fashion as a very acquired taste, but to me it is much inferior to his verse; I shall have more to say of it later. If Smith did any good work in prose, it is in the prosepoems, some of which Lovecraft read and admired in the volume Ebony and Crystal

(1918). This work is toweringly impressive, and it could be maintained quite plausibly that Smith is the best prosepoet in English; but this form is too recondite to inspire much of a following or much critical attention.

As for Smith’s art work, I find it quite amateurish and crude, and have no idea why Lovecraft so rhapsodized over it. Smith was a self-taught artist, and it shows; this work is, to be sure, reminiscent of primitive art, and occasionally some startlingly weird effects are produced, but much of it—in pen and ink, crayon, watercolour, and oil—is imaginatively powerful but technically very backward. His small sculptures and figurines are somewhat more interesting. Lovecraft, however, never ceased to admire Smith as another Blake who could both write great work and illustrate it.

For the time being, however, it was the benefits and delights of travel that were in the forefront of Lovecraft’s mind. Leaving for New York on 15 August, he spent at least two months as Sonia’s guest in Brooklyn, making an unheard-of total of nearly three solid months away from 598 Angell Street. This long trip was made possible by the unstinting generosity of Lovecraft’s friends: just as Loveman, Galpin, and Kirk insisted on picking up many of his expenses (especially meals) in Cleveland, so did Long (or, more precisely, his parents) frequently have Lovecraft over for lunch or dinner, and no doubt Sonia made or paid for many meals as well. I do not believe there was any condescension in this: Lovecraft’s friends surely knew of his lean purse, but their hospitality was a product of both their own kindness and genuine fondness for Lovecraft and their desire to have him stay as long as possible. We shall find this becoming a repeated pattern in all Lovecraft’s peregrinations for the rest of his life.