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Fantasy Aspects, issue 2, November 1947
Page 14
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serve. In the meantime, the pertinant question is: Does Smith deserve the damnnation his admirers have visited upon him? And the business wiht which I concern myself is to answer this question in a milieu as remote as possible from the unselective happiness which which the average Weird Tales reader has greated every tale of Xothique or Averoigne, upon the premise that such an estimate is grossly unfair to the poet and scholar which is Smith at his best. For Smith as his best is a fine creative scholar. I know of no more impressive way to introduce Smith to a stranger than with The Kingdom of The Worm, which was published in THE FANTASY FAN many years ago. The episode was perfectly in the style of its ostensible period; it could have been easily slipped into The Voyage and Travel of Sir John Mandeville, Knight without the unwary reader detecting it in his persual of that recondite volume; as an entity in itself it held together beautifully, and preserved throughout that atmosphere of naive wonder mixed with uneasiness which is the literary signature of the great French liar -- and a far more difficult thing to achieve than a mere parroting of stylistic tricks. Some time later, in R.R. Barlow's excellent mimeographed magazine LEAVES, Smith addressed himself to the fragmantary narratives of the prisoners of Elbis which Beckford had planned for Vathek but never included. If anything this performance was the more exacting of the two; Vathek anticipated the main course of literary development by a century in several ways, but in general Mandeville's way of doing things is much closer to what we know as the "Smith style" than Beckford's, since the last-named remained always an undoubted child of the Eighteenth Century, wherein Neither Smith nor Lovecraft, despite the propaganda, could reasonably be expected to feel at home; but Smith carried it off with manifest ease and pleasure. One of the consequences of these observations is to seperate his poetry rather sharply from his prose, in a manner which will become clear in a moment. A study of his poetry will convince anyone seriously interested that its idiom is the product of a pyramind of influences --- Poe and Wilde particularly, and then Shelly, Milton, James Thompson and a lengthening list of stragglers, who exert their effects not in concert but one at a time in the most marked fashion. The Constellations of the Law, for instance, is The Massacre at Piedmont to the life; Satan Unrepentant advertises its parentage too loudly for me to even bother naming it; Requiascet is Wilde's, well-thumbed; and so on. It is not so easy to attach single names to individual prose stories of Smith's, though the influances are plain enough (I am not counting, naturally, the prose-poems, though even there Lanier occasionally nibbles at the edge of the Baudelaire.) One expects poets, however, to be an ancestor-worshipping race, and if Smith (cont. on page 20) ----(Page 14)----
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serve. In the meantime, the pertinant question is: Does Smith deserve the damnnation his admirers have visited upon him? And the business wiht which I concern myself is to answer this question in a milieu as remote as possible from the unselective happiness which which the average Weird Tales reader has greated every tale of Xothique or Averoigne, upon the premise that such an estimate is grossly unfair to the poet and scholar which is Smith at his best. For Smith as his best is a fine creative scholar. I know of no more impressive way to introduce Smith to a stranger than with The Kingdom of The Worm, which was published in THE FANTASY FAN many years ago. The episode was perfectly in the style of its ostensible period; it could have been easily slipped into The Voyage and Travel of Sir John Mandeville, Knight without the unwary reader detecting it in his persual of that recondite volume; as an entity in itself it held together beautifully, and preserved throughout that atmosphere of naive wonder mixed with uneasiness which is the literary signature of the great French liar -- and a far more difficult thing to achieve than a mere parroting of stylistic tricks. Some time later, in R.R. Barlow's excellent mimeographed magazine LEAVES, Smith addressed himself to the fragmantary narratives of the prisoners of Elbis which Beckford had planned for Vathek but never included. If anything this performance was the more exacting of the two; Vathek anticipated the main course of literary development by a century in several ways, but in general Mandeville's way of doing things is much closer to what we know as the "Smith style" than Beckford's, since the last-named remained always an undoubted child of the Eighteenth Century, wherein Neither Smith nor Lovecraft, despite the propaganda, could reasonably be expected to feel at home; but Smith carried it off with manifest ease and pleasure. One of the consequences of these observations is to seperate his poetry rather sharply from his prose, in a manner which will become clear in a moment. A study of his poetry will convince anyone seriously interested that its idiom is the product of a pyramind of influences --- Poe and Wilde particularly, and then Shelly, Milton, James Thompson and a lengthening list of stragglers, who exert their effects not in concert but one at a time in the most marked fashion. The Constellations of the Law, for instance, is The Massacre at Piedmont to the life; Satan Unrepentant advertises its parentage too loudly for me to even bother naming it; Requiascet is Wilde's, well-thumbed; and so on. It is not so easy to attach single names to individual prose stories of Smith's, though the influances are plain enough (I am not counting, naturally, the prose-poems, though even there Lanier occasionally nibbles at the edge of the Baudelaire.) One expects poets, however, to be an ancestor-worshipping race, and if Smith (cont. on page 20) ----(Page 14)----
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