Weird Tales of Modernity: A Very Personal Retrospective

In July of 2019, I published an academic book titled Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. Lovecraft. Academic books typically don't attract a large readership, with sales of 100 to 200 copies considered successful in the humanities. However, the true measure of an academic book's success lies in its influence, often gauged by reviews in academic journals.

My book received two significant reviews. The first, in The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, a leading journal for literary studies scholars who focus on fantasy, stated: "Carney’s book is a valuable addition to the literature on its topic. It deserves a wide readership, and a prominent place in the scholarship of American fantastic literature in the early twentieth century." This recognition was encouraging, affirming my book's contribution to 20th-century fantastic literature scholarship. The second review, from American Literature, a flagship journal in literary studies, noted that my book "plac[es] pulp fiction in a broader historical and literary context." This suggested that my work could help traditional American literature scholars link interwar pulp fiction with the broader saga of American literary tradition.

2019 was shaping up to be a promising year, especially as I anticipated the academic year 2019-2020. Publishing an academic book in the summer typically leads to opportunities to share work, respond to rebuttals, and clarify contributions at academic conferences. I was looking forward to attending events like the National Conference of the Popular Culture Association and the International Conference of the Society for the Study of the Fantastic in the Arts, expecting to disseminate my unique perspective on pulp fiction.

However, the unforeseen events of March 2020, just 8 months post-publication, disrupted these plans. The pandemic led to the cancellation of most academic conferences. The shift to online classes consumed my focus, leaving little room to consider the potential impact on my book's influence.

Nearly three years later, I realize the unfortunate timing of my book's release. It's disappointing because I believe my study is important. Traditionally, scholars have separated the histories of canonical literature and genre fiction. My book aimed to bridge this gap, illustrating how both must be understood in response to the same social, economic, and aesthetic developments.

Despite the setbacks, my book did begin to make waves in the academic world, with positive reviews in The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and American Literature. Additionally, genre fiction enthusiasts also reviewed it. Dave C. Smith, a celebrated sword and sorcery writer, wrote a thoughtful review for Black Gate. Bobby Derie, a Lovecraft scholar, also reviewed it positively but noted its challenging appeal: Would scholars find its focus on pulp fiction (i.e. noncanonical literature) a barrier? Would genre fiction fans find it too theoretical, dense, and granular? Derie concluded, "Weird Tales of Modernity sits comfortably on a shelf next to The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales (2015), Conan Meets the Academy (2013), and New Critical Essays on Lovecraft (2013). Whether it will find an audience only the future can tell, but it certainly deserves one."

Reflecting on the years spent working on the book and its modest impact thus far, I feel a tinge of sadness. But academic books are often slow burns. I remain hopeful that in time, people will discover it and engage with my ideas.

A Brief Analysis of a Clark Ashton Smith Letter to George Sterling, October 6th, 1911

There is an excellent webpage, Eldritch Dark, that is a repository of all things Clark Ashton Smith. I used it a lot when I was writing Weird Tales of Modernity. I recently watched the documentary Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams (2018, dir. Darin Coelho Spring) which reinvigorated my reverence for Clark Ashton Smith and reminded me of Eldritch Dark. Here is my review on Letterboxd. One of the great things about this Eldritch Dark is that it compiles a lot of Smith's correspondence (among other things). 

The first letter in the correspondence section of this webpage is dated October 6th, 1911. Smith would have been 17 at the time he wrote this letter, which was addressed to the poet George Sterling (1869-1926). The entire letter can be accessed here.

In this letter, Smith begins by commenting on a photograph of himself. He states, "To me the eye of a camera always looks like the mysterious, murderous muzzle of a thirteen-inch gun, and I am apt to look like the enemy." Most of the pictures of Smith suggest that the young poet did not enjoy getting his picture taken. He doesn't seem to smile (I don't think it was conventional in the early 20th-century to smile in portrait photos). He tends to look very anxious in his photographs and somewhat put out.

Later in the letter, Smith refers to his poem "The Star-Treader" and admits that he doesn't know what Sterling will think of it. "The Star-Treader" is an excellent, ridiculously ambitious poem. Here is the first stanza:

A voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams,

Saying, "Make haste: the webs of death and birth

Are brushed away, and all the threads of earth

Wear to the breaking; spaceward gleams

Thine ancient pathway of the suns,

Whose flame is part of thee;

And deeps outreach immutably

Whose largeness runs

Through all thy spirit's mystery.

Go forth, and tread unharmed the blaze

Of stars where through thou camest in old days;

Pierce without fear each vast

Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past.

A hand strikes off the chains of Time,

A hand swings back the door of years;

Now fall earth's bonds of gladness and of tears,

And opens the strait dream to space sublime.

This is such a fever-dream, mind-blasting vision. The poet is basically being hailed by the cosmos. The cosmos is telling the poet that the time has come for them to cast off their earthly form and reunite with eternity, rendered as "the blaze of stars." The rest of the poem is really intriguing and it's worth reading in its entirety. But this first stanza gives you a good sense of the scope of Smith's artistic enterprise. It often seems that being a mere human (a dirt person), for Smith, is a prison. Humans are detached from the cosmos in a tragic way. We are eternal souls that have somehow fallen into a prison of ephemeral form and the poet and artist feel the constraining nature of this ephemeral form most acutely.

Later in this letter, Smith discusses a few of his other poems and shares a few observational lyrics with Sterling. One lyric is titled "Wind Ripples." It is very different than "The Star-Treader." Here it is:

Did Beauty's unseen spirit pass

With tread unstayable and fleet?

Surely I saw the crested grass

Bow 'neath supernal feet!

This is a beautiful little poem, iambic tetrameter, with an abab rhyme scheme. The speaker has felt the caress of the wind and imagines that an invisible angel is passing near them. It's really fascinating that Smith could just write a lyric like this with little effort. I also like the idea of observational lyrics. Poets are basically acutely sensitive sensoriums who, unlike us mere mortals, make interesting and unique observations, and the genre of observational poetry clarifies this fundamental role. 

I would also argue that this random four-line observational lyric is almost the inverse of Smith's poetic enterprise in "The Star-Treader." Where an ephemeral lyric written in a letter is meant to be low-stakes and effortless, "The Star-Treader," is highly intentional and structured. It's like an oracle prophesying or a spell being cast.

The letter concludes with Smith discussing one of his poems, "Abyss," which I think is a shortened title referring to "Ode to the Abyss." Commenting on how a certain reader didn't grasp the theme, Smith states to Sterling, "I am astonished to find how few really grasp the sublimity and vastness of the stars and star-spaces." Smith certainly grasped the sublimity and vastness of stars and star-spaces, but his observational lyric, "Wind Ripples," also clarifies that Smith could attend to more granular elements of the human experience, i.e., the hidden beauty of a caress of the wind.

There is a lot in this letter and worth reading and pondering over. Eldritch Dark is a wonderful website, and I'm glad it exists.

Reflection on Clark Ashton Smith's "The Return of the Sorcerer"

I recently participated in a discussion on the RPG podcast Plot Points about a Clark Ashton Smith story, "The Return of the Sorcerer" (Strange Tales, September 1931).  Here is an excerpt from Plot Points description: discusses "table-top role-playing games and their supplements as literature. Our quirky panel discusses games old and new, spotlights innovations in the hobby, and links to literature."

The discussion was with Ben Riggs, the host, and Clinton Boomer, a game writer and designer. The concept of the discussion was "Appendix N University." We selected a single author from Gary E. Gygax's "Appendix N" and discussed a story written by that author.

"Appendix N" is a famous list of (mostly) pulp writers that influenced Gary E. Gygax as he co-designed Dungeons and Dragons. It was revised for the recent 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons and has been re-labeled the "Appendix E."

Curious enough, Clark Ashton Smith is not actually on the original Appendix N (but instead appears in the Appendix E of 5th edition). Pulp canon usual suspects, such as H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, are there, but Smith isn't included, and his absence is something of a controversy. When people discuss the Appendix N, it is common that Clark Ashton Smith is referenced. Most assume that Smith is an Appendix N author and only realize later that Gygax left him off. Perhaps this is why they included him in the updated Appendix E?

As an enthusiast of the Weird Tales Three (Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith), I have something of a theory about why CAS is left off the original but I can't verify this. I speculate Smith was left off because Gygax wasn't able to read Smith's works. In the late 1970s, Lovecraft would have been available in at least the Arkham House editions and probably (more likely) the Ballantine Editions. Howard's Conan stories would have been available in the Lancer editions. Alas, Clark Ashton Smith wouldn't have been available except for the original pulps and some earlier, rarer paperback editions, such as the Panther Lost Worlds anthologies. Am I wrong? Were the Panther's of CAS widely available?

Anyway, as a supplement to the podcast, I want to briefly analyze "The Return of the Sorcerer," the story we discussed in the podcast episode linked above. Spoilers below.

Plot Summary (spoilers): The story is about an out-of-work Arabic scholar, Mr. Ogden, who is hired by a scholarly recluse, John Carnby. Carnby wants Ogden to translate certain passages from the dreaded Necronomicon. Ogden does so. The first translated passage tells of how sorcerers can return from the dead to perform evil acts, and most often for revenge. Carnby then has Ogden translate another passage and this one treats "a singular incantatory formula for the exorcism of the dead" (17). By and by John Carnby confesses that he has murdered his twin brother, Helman Carnby, and so mutilated his body; alas, the many pieces of Helman's body have been shambling around the house. John Carnby is sure that his brother is going to wreak vengeance and so he struggles to exorcise his spirit from the house. The story ends when Helman's mutilated corpse reconstitutes into a gruesome form and murders Carnby. Ogden runs screaming from the house.

I love this bizarre story. There are so many elements that are just right. The way that setting and atmosphere are put to the service of characterization is one element that I want to touch on. Consider this description of the house:

It was a large, two-story house, overshaded by ancient oaks and dark with mantling of unchecked ivy, among the hedges of unpruned privet and shrubbery that had gone while for many years. It was separated by a vacant, weed-grown lot on one side and a table of vines and trees on the other, surrounding the black ruins of a burnt mansion. (11)

The house is painted with shadow and choked by unruly vegetation. On the left is an empty, abandoned lot; on the right, another house, a charred ruin, a fleshless architectural skeleton. Although Smith is rendering a conventional haunted house here, he does so masterfully. It's almost as if the house has a disease. The lots in proximity to it have suffered for their closeness.

Another element of the story that I love are certain descriptive passages. Consider this description of Carnby's study:

There were tables strewn with archaic instruments of doubtful use, with astrological charts, with skulls and alembics and crystals, with censers such as are used in the Catholic Church, and volumes bound in worm-eaten leather with verdigris-mottled clasps. In one corner stood the skeleton of a large ape; in another, a human skeleton; and overhead a stuffed crocodile was suspended. (14)

This description is so satisfying and suggestive and bears some of the weight of characterizing John Carnby and his sorcerous endeavors: Carnby is meditating on the stars (charts), mortality (skull), the past (books), and the evolution/devolution of life (ape, skeleton, crocodile). In a highly compressed description, the narrator has given us a sense of the intellectual hubris of the the character.

I love when writers braid characterization into setting. Even though we have heard very little at this part in the story from Carnby, we have experienced his house from the outside and his study, his intimate space, and so we learn a lot about him.

The final passage I want to look at is the climax, when Helman Carnby's shambling corpse kills John Carnby, his murderous brother. Focus on the shadow and notice how what Smith hides is just as important as what Smith describes:

Huge, elongated, misshapen, the shadow was seemingly cast by the arms and torso of a naked man who stood forward with a surgeon's saw in his hand. Its monstrosity lay in this: though the shoulders, chest, abdomen, and arms were all clearly distinguishable, the shadow was headless and appeared to terminate in an abruptly severed neck. (26)

The shadow of a headless corpse wielding a surgeon's saw to murder: this is pulp at its finest, a kind of literary "Death Metal." The fact that we are not getting the bald description of the phenomenon but instead the shadow cast by it makes it all the more enthralling.

Smith is a masterful storyteller. "The Return of the Sorcerer" is a tightly constructed horror narrative that is structured around the climax of the demented murder. The climax is only one intense paragraph. So, Smith uses that rest of his words to build up to this most important of moments.

In this story, character and setting are inextricably linked; place shines light on character. By contrast, consider the protagonist, our surrogate, Mr. Ogden, who is almost a non-character, an abstract avatar (and strategically so). His function is to allow us, the reader, into this strange world to see for ourselves the horrible, climactic spectacle.

I highly recommend "The Return of the Sorcerer." I read it from an anthology, The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith published by Prime Books in 2009. It has an excellent introduction by Gene Wolfe.

Read the story, check out the podcast episode, and let me know what you think.