He moved through the Lovecraft circle and a circle of Forteans.
About Clark Ashton Smith there is much written—though he remains, even today, less famous than his peers, H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard—and one approaches discussing him with trepidation: for their is also fanatical devotion to him, and mis-steps will be severely reprimanded. Still, it is worth a brief biographical overview, to highlight some of the lineaments that ultimately supported the Fortean community as well as Smith.
Clark Ashton was born 13 January 1893 in Long Valley, California, to Fanny and Timeus Smith. Early on, the family moved to Auburn, California, and built a cabin that served as Clark’s home for most of his life. The younger Smith never attended high school, reputedly because of a fear of crowds, and instead was taught at home. Famously, he read through a dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica (which was also the reading material of another Fortean, whose circle was tangential to Smith’s, Kenneth Rexroth). He taught himself French and Spanish.
Smith was something of a writing prodigy, selling stories to “Black Cat” magazine when he was 17. Among other genres, “Black Cat” published fantastic fiction and was warmly remembered by the later Fortean Miriam Allen Deford. Indeed, the magazine even published Fort’s fiction, “How Uncle Sam Lost Sixty-Four Dollars,” in 1904, not long before Smith broke into its pages.
About Clark Ashton Smith there is much written—though he remains, even today, less famous than his peers, H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard—and one approaches discussing him with trepidation: for their is also fanatical devotion to him, and mis-steps will be severely reprimanded. Still, it is worth a brief biographical overview, to highlight some of the lineaments that ultimately supported the Fortean community as well as Smith.
Clark Ashton was born 13 January 1893 in Long Valley, California, to Fanny and Timeus Smith. Early on, the family moved to Auburn, California, and built a cabin that served as Clark’s home for most of his life. The younger Smith never attended high school, reputedly because of a fear of crowds, and instead was taught at home. Famously, he read through a dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica (which was also the reading material of another Fortean, whose circle was tangential to Smith’s, Kenneth Rexroth). He taught himself French and Spanish.
Smith was something of a writing prodigy, selling stories to “Black Cat” magazine when he was 17. Among other genres, “Black Cat” published fantastic fiction and was warmly remembered by the later Fortean Miriam Allen Deford. Indeed, the magazine even published Fort’s fiction, “How Uncle Sam Lost Sixty-Four Dollars,” in 1904, not long before Smith broke into its pages.
At the beginning of his writing career, Smith was mostly interested in poetry. He was taken under the ing of George Sterling, a San Francisco poet and central figure in that city’s then-waning Bohemian scene. (A lot of the Bohemian activity moved down the coast, to Carmel, after the earthquake of 1906.) Sterling introduced Smith to Jack London and Ambrose Bierce—that figure of Fortean speculation—and the poetry of Baudelaire.
He published “The Star-Treader and Other Poems” in 1912, when he was 19. Sterling introduced H. L. Mencken to Smith’s poetry, and his work later appeared in the magazine that Mencken co-edited, “The Smart Set,” which also ran works by late Forteans such as Benjamin DeCasseres and Ben Hecht. In 1922, he published “The Hashish Eater, or The Apocalypse of Evil.” There was the poetry, too. His output, though, was compromised by ill-health and severe poverty, which forced him to take on jobs doing manual labor. Sometime in the 1920s, he became associated with the “Auburn Journal,” the local newspaper, acting as an editor occasionally and doing a column that, by reports, was epigrammatic.
During this period, he had also befriended a coterie that later coalesced into the so-called Lovecraft circle, including Donald Wander and, around 1922, Lovecraft himself, who wrote a letter appreciating “The Hashish Eater.” In the late 1920s, with the Depression putting pressure on his already weakened economic resources, Smith turned to writing fantastic fiction. He wrote over a hundred short stories in a five year span. In these, he created vast, inhuman alien landscapes. The stories appeared in science fiction magazines, such as “Wonder Stories” and, of course, “Weird Tales.” The stories were well-received, and he was soon corresponding with other writers of the genre.
Smith lost his parents in the mid-1930s, his mother in 1935 and his father at the end of 1937. This was the same period that saw the suicide of Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft’s death. It is also about this time that Smith virtually stopped publishing fiction—though in 1942 Arkham House put out his collection “Out of Space and Time” followed by “lost Worlds” in 1944. Smith turned his attention to his first love, poetry, and other artistic expressions, including painting and sculpting grotesque figures.
The 1950s saw drastic changes in Smith’s life. He made the acquaintance of the man who would become the best friend in his dotage, George Haas. He suffered a heart attack. And, aged 61, he married Carolyn Dorman; they moved to Pacific Grove, near Carmel, where they lived with Carol’s children from an earlier marriage. Smith gardened—as Haas did, as well—for money. He suffered a series of strokes early in 1961.
Clark Ashton Smith died 14 August 1961 in Pacific Grove. He was 68.
************
Given the circles in which he ran—the Bohemian one centered on Sterling, and the weird fiction one centered around Lovecraft—it would have been remarkable had Smith never heard of Charles Fort. Almost certainly, he saw references to Fort in the Lovecraft’s work and the writing of others, such as Edmond Hamilton, in the 1920s. As it is, though, the first time he mentioned Fort was in 1930.
In a letter dated 24 October 1930, Smith wrote to Lovecraft, in passing, “I have just been reading “The Book of the Damned,” which I procured from the State Library at Sacramento. (Unluckily, they don’t loan fiction by mail—only ‘serious books.’) Fort’s volume is certainly fascinating—one of the oddest books I have ever encountered. I don’t care for the style—but the assembled data is quite imposing, and worthy of close study.” It is as though Fort’s was one of those forbidden books invented by Lovecraft—the Necronomicon, say—but in a telegraphic prose, rather than the luxuriant style favored by Smith.
From this point on, Fort’s writing would be referenced by Smith over the years, a red thread in his career: not essential, necessary, but ubiquitous. One Smith scholar thinks that Fort’s influence can be seen in Smith’s “The Light from Beyond,” which was written around this time, though called “The Secret of the Cairn” and not published until 1944. And in November, he made another slight remark about Fort in a letter to Lovecraft. In the course of discussing how mundane—in both senses of the word—were interplanetary stories, he wondered that ancient civilizations weren’t better used in fantastic fiction: “All sorts of new claims could be staked out in the pre‐glacial or antediluvian epochs of the earth. Interstellar travel and traffic was probably in its prime, as Charles Fort suggests!”
(It’s worth noting that Morris K. Jessup would use this idea, of ancient interplanetary traveling civilizations, to explain UFOs in another two decades; and he, too, would draw upon Fort.)
That Fort shaped Smith’s thinking can not be doubted. On 4 May 1931 he wrote to William Whittingham Lyman, “And when it comes to fictional inspiration, I had more in the writings of Charles Fort, author of “The Book of the Damned,” than in any of the orthodox crew. Fort has spent his life amassing a gorgeous collection of data rejected or disregarded by professional scientists because it didn’t fit with their preconceived theories.” It should not be ignored that Smith read Fort, and expressed this enthusiasm, right in the middle of his most productive period of story writing, when he was putting out fantastic fiction for “Weird Tales” and related markets. A red thread.
And now he could reinterpret his own experiences in Fortean terms. He wrote Lovecraft in November 1933, “Of course it would seem that the arguments of material science are pretty cogent. Perhaps it is only my innate romanticism that makes me at least hopeful that the Jeans and Einsteins have overlooked something. If ever I have the leisure and opportunity, I intend some first‐hand investigation of obscure phenomena. Enough inexplicable things have happened in my own experience to make me wonder. I am pretty sure that I saw apparitions in my childhood; one instance remaining especially vivid in memory. The phantasm was that of a bowed and muffled woman, weeping or at least sorrow‐stricken, which appeared one night in a corner of my bedroom in an old house which my parents had rented for several months. It certainly left an eerie impression. Another queer happening, of a totally different kind, occurred four or five years ago. A woman‐friend and I were out walking one night in a lane near Auburn, when a dark, lightless and silent object passed over us against the stars with projectile‐like speed. The thing was too large and swift for any bird, and gave precisely the effect of a black meteor. I have often wondered what it was. Charles Fort, no doubt, would have made a substantial item out of it: for one of his volumes.”
Even as he drifted from fiction writing, Smith thought that Fort was important to the history of his genre. In the Spring 1949 Arkham Sampler—put out by a publishing house originally created to perpetuate Lovecraft’s legacy—he wrote a short comment on the previous issue, Winter 1949, which had been devoted to science fiction. He thought the symposium had erred in not plumbing science fiction’s roots in folklore and mysticism, as well as the writings of the likes of Rabelais: there was too much focus on the now. The same could be said for science fiction’s undue deference to currently accepted theories and wariness of straying too far from them. But, he said, “What pleased me most about the symposium was the prominence given to Wells and to Charles Fort.”
Though Wells would turn up his nose at Fort, for Smith the two authors were both important influences on science fiction. Smith did not spell it out, but one suspects he approved of Fort’s refusal to kowtow to scientific theories, but rather let his imagination roam. Three years later, in another essay on science fiction, August Derleth—champion of Lovecraft and Smith, founder of Arkham House—wrote, “Above all, a sort of Fortean challenge to the imagination has resulted in fresh, new themes, as well as different approaches to the more standard themes of science-fiction. In a sense, perhaps, Charles Fort did more to stimulate the imaginations of writers and readers alike than any other writer. His persistent amassing of curious facts inexplicable to science, set forth in such books as Lo!, New Lands, The Book of the Damned, and Wild Talents, undoubtedly had a catalytic influence on many writers. Certainly something of his attitude influenced Dr. David H. Keller, who, however lacking in outstanding literary skill, managed to put into his stories in the genre a healthy and subtly delightful edge of satire at the expense of human foibles. Perhaps the fruition of experiments in atomic fission only completed a process of scientific inquiry and challenge inaugurated among writers and readers by Fort.”
And, indeed, Smith continued to move in Fortean circles at this time. He wrote a foreword to Fortean Lilith Lorraine’s collection of poetry, “Wine of Wonder.” The book came out in 1952, though without Smith’s contribution: “The summer lightning of fantasy, the storm-piercing levin of imagination, illume these superbly wrought poems. Lilith Lorraine, poet and seer, walks intrepidly the ways that science has opened into the manifold infinities. She widens the scope of wonder into stars and atoms, into ulterior worlds and posterior ages.”
…..
“This volume can be recommended unreservedly both to poetry lovers and devotees of science fiction. The muses of lyricism and science have united, as seldom or never before, their twofold afflatus in this distinguished volume.”
And in 1953, Smith met George F. Haas, a fan of weird fiction and devoted Fortean. Through him he met other Forteans, Robert Barbour and Anton LaVey, later founder of the Church of Satan. recalling the day he first met Klarkash-Ton, as Lovecraft nicknamed him, and mixing it with later intimacies, Haas wrote, “Klarkash‐Ton's, too, was a Fortean mind, ever questing, never denying. He was intensely interested in the unexplained, the unknown. I remember our discussing ‘The Books of Charles Fort’ that day and our discussion naturally turned to UFOs, the ‘flying saucers.’ Klarkash‐Ton had seen one, had seen something, a year or two before. It was on a hot night and he had been lying outside on his sleeping bag, gazing upward into the depths of space. Suddenly he became aware of a large object, like an indistinct shadow, darker than the night, passing slowly above him, blotting out the stars.” Likely Haas got the details slightly wrong here, and this was the dark meteor that Smith had seen many years before—but the general point still holds: he thought Fortean anomalies a part of the universe’s structure.
And, indeed, there were even posthumous Fortean connections. In 1985, a plaque was placed near the Auburn library commemorating Smith’s residence in the area. Among those who came to the ceremony was surrealist poet and Fortean Philip Lamantia. Lamantia said that Auburn’s famous fantasist explored what Islamic scholars called the Mundus Imaginalis: a world of pure imagination operated according to its own, sometimes twisted, logic, a world free from modernity’s determinisms. And for the surrealists, as well as for Smith, Fort was something of a guide to this world, a possessor of its records.
He published “The Star-Treader and Other Poems” in 1912, when he was 19. Sterling introduced H. L. Mencken to Smith’s poetry, and his work later appeared in the magazine that Mencken co-edited, “The Smart Set,” which also ran works by late Forteans such as Benjamin DeCasseres and Ben Hecht. In 1922, he published “The Hashish Eater, or The Apocalypse of Evil.” There was the poetry, too. His output, though, was compromised by ill-health and severe poverty, which forced him to take on jobs doing manual labor. Sometime in the 1920s, he became associated with the “Auburn Journal,” the local newspaper, acting as an editor occasionally and doing a column that, by reports, was epigrammatic.
During this period, he had also befriended a coterie that later coalesced into the so-called Lovecraft circle, including Donald Wander and, around 1922, Lovecraft himself, who wrote a letter appreciating “The Hashish Eater.” In the late 1920s, with the Depression putting pressure on his already weakened economic resources, Smith turned to writing fantastic fiction. He wrote over a hundred short stories in a five year span. In these, he created vast, inhuman alien landscapes. The stories appeared in science fiction magazines, such as “Wonder Stories” and, of course, “Weird Tales.” The stories were well-received, and he was soon corresponding with other writers of the genre.
Smith lost his parents in the mid-1930s, his mother in 1935 and his father at the end of 1937. This was the same period that saw the suicide of Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft’s death. It is also about this time that Smith virtually stopped publishing fiction—though in 1942 Arkham House put out his collection “Out of Space and Time” followed by “lost Worlds” in 1944. Smith turned his attention to his first love, poetry, and other artistic expressions, including painting and sculpting grotesque figures.
The 1950s saw drastic changes in Smith’s life. He made the acquaintance of the man who would become the best friend in his dotage, George Haas. He suffered a heart attack. And, aged 61, he married Carolyn Dorman; they moved to Pacific Grove, near Carmel, where they lived with Carol’s children from an earlier marriage. Smith gardened—as Haas did, as well—for money. He suffered a series of strokes early in 1961.
Clark Ashton Smith died 14 August 1961 in Pacific Grove. He was 68.
************
Given the circles in which he ran—the Bohemian one centered on Sterling, and the weird fiction one centered around Lovecraft—it would have been remarkable had Smith never heard of Charles Fort. Almost certainly, he saw references to Fort in the Lovecraft’s work and the writing of others, such as Edmond Hamilton, in the 1920s. As it is, though, the first time he mentioned Fort was in 1930.
In a letter dated 24 October 1930, Smith wrote to Lovecraft, in passing, “I have just been reading “The Book of the Damned,” which I procured from the State Library at Sacramento. (Unluckily, they don’t loan fiction by mail—only ‘serious books.’) Fort’s volume is certainly fascinating—one of the oddest books I have ever encountered. I don’t care for the style—but the assembled data is quite imposing, and worthy of close study.” It is as though Fort’s was one of those forbidden books invented by Lovecraft—the Necronomicon, say—but in a telegraphic prose, rather than the luxuriant style favored by Smith.
From this point on, Fort’s writing would be referenced by Smith over the years, a red thread in his career: not essential, necessary, but ubiquitous. One Smith scholar thinks that Fort’s influence can be seen in Smith’s “The Light from Beyond,” which was written around this time, though called “The Secret of the Cairn” and not published until 1944. And in November, he made another slight remark about Fort in a letter to Lovecraft. In the course of discussing how mundane—in both senses of the word—were interplanetary stories, he wondered that ancient civilizations weren’t better used in fantastic fiction: “All sorts of new claims could be staked out in the pre‐glacial or antediluvian epochs of the earth. Interstellar travel and traffic was probably in its prime, as Charles Fort suggests!”
(It’s worth noting that Morris K. Jessup would use this idea, of ancient interplanetary traveling civilizations, to explain UFOs in another two decades; and he, too, would draw upon Fort.)
That Fort shaped Smith’s thinking can not be doubted. On 4 May 1931 he wrote to William Whittingham Lyman, “And when it comes to fictional inspiration, I had more in the writings of Charles Fort, author of “The Book of the Damned,” than in any of the orthodox crew. Fort has spent his life amassing a gorgeous collection of data rejected or disregarded by professional scientists because it didn’t fit with their preconceived theories.” It should not be ignored that Smith read Fort, and expressed this enthusiasm, right in the middle of his most productive period of story writing, when he was putting out fantastic fiction for “Weird Tales” and related markets. A red thread.
And now he could reinterpret his own experiences in Fortean terms. He wrote Lovecraft in November 1933, “Of course it would seem that the arguments of material science are pretty cogent. Perhaps it is only my innate romanticism that makes me at least hopeful that the Jeans and Einsteins have overlooked something. If ever I have the leisure and opportunity, I intend some first‐hand investigation of obscure phenomena. Enough inexplicable things have happened in my own experience to make me wonder. I am pretty sure that I saw apparitions in my childhood; one instance remaining especially vivid in memory. The phantasm was that of a bowed and muffled woman, weeping or at least sorrow‐stricken, which appeared one night in a corner of my bedroom in an old house which my parents had rented for several months. It certainly left an eerie impression. Another queer happening, of a totally different kind, occurred four or five years ago. A woman‐friend and I were out walking one night in a lane near Auburn, when a dark, lightless and silent object passed over us against the stars with projectile‐like speed. The thing was too large and swift for any bird, and gave precisely the effect of a black meteor. I have often wondered what it was. Charles Fort, no doubt, would have made a substantial item out of it: for one of his volumes.”
Even as he drifted from fiction writing, Smith thought that Fort was important to the history of his genre. In the Spring 1949 Arkham Sampler—put out by a publishing house originally created to perpetuate Lovecraft’s legacy—he wrote a short comment on the previous issue, Winter 1949, which had been devoted to science fiction. He thought the symposium had erred in not plumbing science fiction’s roots in folklore and mysticism, as well as the writings of the likes of Rabelais: there was too much focus on the now. The same could be said for science fiction’s undue deference to currently accepted theories and wariness of straying too far from them. But, he said, “What pleased me most about the symposium was the prominence given to Wells and to Charles Fort.”
Though Wells would turn up his nose at Fort, for Smith the two authors were both important influences on science fiction. Smith did not spell it out, but one suspects he approved of Fort’s refusal to kowtow to scientific theories, but rather let his imagination roam. Three years later, in another essay on science fiction, August Derleth—champion of Lovecraft and Smith, founder of Arkham House—wrote, “Above all, a sort of Fortean challenge to the imagination has resulted in fresh, new themes, as well as different approaches to the more standard themes of science-fiction. In a sense, perhaps, Charles Fort did more to stimulate the imaginations of writers and readers alike than any other writer. His persistent amassing of curious facts inexplicable to science, set forth in such books as Lo!, New Lands, The Book of the Damned, and Wild Talents, undoubtedly had a catalytic influence on many writers. Certainly something of his attitude influenced Dr. David H. Keller, who, however lacking in outstanding literary skill, managed to put into his stories in the genre a healthy and subtly delightful edge of satire at the expense of human foibles. Perhaps the fruition of experiments in atomic fission only completed a process of scientific inquiry and challenge inaugurated among writers and readers by Fort.”
And, indeed, Smith continued to move in Fortean circles at this time. He wrote a foreword to Fortean Lilith Lorraine’s collection of poetry, “Wine of Wonder.” The book came out in 1952, though without Smith’s contribution: “The summer lightning of fantasy, the storm-piercing levin of imagination, illume these superbly wrought poems. Lilith Lorraine, poet and seer, walks intrepidly the ways that science has opened into the manifold infinities. She widens the scope of wonder into stars and atoms, into ulterior worlds and posterior ages.”
…..
“This volume can be recommended unreservedly both to poetry lovers and devotees of science fiction. The muses of lyricism and science have united, as seldom or never before, their twofold afflatus in this distinguished volume.”
And in 1953, Smith met George F. Haas, a fan of weird fiction and devoted Fortean. Through him he met other Forteans, Robert Barbour and Anton LaVey, later founder of the Church of Satan. recalling the day he first met Klarkash-Ton, as Lovecraft nicknamed him, and mixing it with later intimacies, Haas wrote, “Klarkash‐Ton's, too, was a Fortean mind, ever questing, never denying. He was intensely interested in the unexplained, the unknown. I remember our discussing ‘The Books of Charles Fort’ that day and our discussion naturally turned to UFOs, the ‘flying saucers.’ Klarkash‐Ton had seen one, had seen something, a year or two before. It was on a hot night and he had been lying outside on his sleeping bag, gazing upward into the depths of space. Suddenly he became aware of a large object, like an indistinct shadow, darker than the night, passing slowly above him, blotting out the stars.” Likely Haas got the details slightly wrong here, and this was the dark meteor that Smith had seen many years before—but the general point still holds: he thought Fortean anomalies a part of the universe’s structure.
And, indeed, there were even posthumous Fortean connections. In 1985, a plaque was placed near the Auburn library commemorating Smith’s residence in the area. Among those who came to the ceremony was surrealist poet and Fortean Philip Lamantia. Lamantia said that Auburn’s famous fantasist explored what Islamic scholars called the Mundus Imaginalis: a world of pure imagination operated according to its own, sometimes twisted, logic, a world free from modernity’s determinisms. And for the surrealists, as well as for Smith, Fort was something of a guide to this world, a possessor of its records.
