AFTERWORD
Reading again after many years this biographico-critical essay that I wrote in the early 1960s, I discover that there is very little about it that needs correction or other changes except the purely statistical data (mostly found at the end of the first and longest of the essay’s three major sections) and other material of a similar nature. These few corrections and changes (some of them still involving an educated guess) I have accordingly made, but for the most part the essay remains more or less as it was when it made its first appearance in August of 1963. Other tributes and memorial publications in honor of Clark Ashton Smith have since presented themselves to the interested reader. However, the Klarkash-Tonophiles (that solid core of Smith’s admirers both inside and outside the U.S.A.) remain indebted to Jack L. Chalker and his associates, then centered at Baltimore, Maryland, for sponsoring and publishing their chapbook In Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith, that initial and large-scale tribute, during that long-ago summer of 1963. Apart from the few corrections and changes deemed fundamentally needed, the opinions and evaluations expressed in this essay by me concerning Smith’s output in verse and prose remain the same. I formulated these in my latter twenties, and albeit I am in my early seventies now, I have not changed my mind in regard to the general or specific uniqueness, beauty, and worth of his poetry and fiction. At least on this one subject I still hold the same opinions now that I held back then, and (if such is possible) even more obdurately.
Looking back on the person that I was then—in that era just before the arrival of the Beatles in the U.S.A.—I note how concerned I was, and with very good reason, to give Smith his just critical due. Apart from those articles and reviews (1911–1927) resulting from his early poetic career (beginning in 1910 and ending in the latter 1920s), there existed in the early 1960s very little critical writing on C.A.S., especially material that interrelated the poetry with the later fiction. That Smith like H.P. Lovecraft had become by the time that he died one of the great outsiders of his over-all period, seemed obvious enough, and I made this condition the solid basis for my critical evaluation. If he did, or does, not quite compare with anyone else born in the latter 1800s, and expiring sometime in the 1900s whether early or late—except perhaps his poetic mentor and progenitor George Sterling, as well as his counterpart in fiction, H.P. Lovecraft—then that fundamental condition freed me completely. I could thus roam through the literary history of the Western World—from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance on through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to find those writers and poets with whom I sincerely felt that Smith could honestly compare.
As a poet in verse and in prose Klarkash-Ton (as H.P.L. playfully dubbed him) ranks as a great and unique artist, particularly in view of all the profound changes that have happened just in the art or science of verse technique, that is, of prosody, in the English language. Smith remained true to the poetic tradition to which he was born, and which he learned, painstakingly, with genius and originality, to use from the time of his early adolescence until his death. Such a poet does not change his practice to suit the latest fad or fashion of the passing moment—a poetic tradition, moreover, inherited from hundreds of years of experimentation as well as of genuine achievement. At this late date in time one is constrained to admire such rare integrity, no less than the solid belief that he maintained in the poetic tradition that he received and that he mastered. As he was in life, so is Smith in death: sui generis.
Tsathoggua Press rendered a real service by republishing this essay in January of 1997 as a separate booklet, thirty-three years after its first appearance, just as Silver Key Press, the English-language imprint of the French nonprofit small press La Clef d’Argent, renders a no less valuable service by republishing it again today. On behalf of Klarkash-Ton I personally give the successive publishers of this essay—Mirage Press, Tsathoggua Press, and Silver Key Press, and now Night Shade Books—all possible credit and gratitude.
Donald Sidney-Fryer
Westchester, Los Angeles, February 2007.