Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. Lovecraft
Jason Ray Carney
McFarland & Company (205 pages, $39.95 in paperback/$23.99 digital, July 26, 2019)

Jason Carney’s thesis in Weird Tales of Modernity is that, in their reaction to modernism, the artistic and literary movement that upended culture as it had been accepted in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the Weird Tales Three — Howard, Smith, and Lovecraft — turned modernism on its head with innovations they introduced in their fiction. Make no mistake: the word thesis here is apt. Weird Tales of Modernity is a formal dissertation. Making use as it does of academic jargon, the book will not be for every reader.

Straightaway, for example, Carney introduces us to the term ekphrastic to make clear what the Weird Tales Three were expressing. Ekphrasis is the representation in language of a work of art. Any of us can do this; go ahead and write your own personal, detailed description of Cthulhu or explore how you react to Frank Frazetta’s artwork. Ekphrasis “acts as an organizing principle in poetry and fiction, making explicit the connection between art, storytelling, and life.” This definition is from Patrick Smith’s guest blog on the website Interesting Literature. Smith quotes Michael Trussler in defining ekphrasis as “a kind of ontological mixture that signals a world beyond the confines of the text.”

There we have it: ekphrasis “signals a world beyond the confines of the text.” We are now in Lovecraft’s frightening, paranoid, awakened world of the Cthulhu mythology — alive beyond the confines of the text — and Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne and Poseidonis, and Robert E. Howard’s brutal Valusia and Hyborian Age. As Carney says early in Weird Tales of Modernity, “When a literary artist, like [Clark Ashton] Smith, artistically describes or fictionalizes a work of art by transforming it into an unreal echo or shadow of the actual, that is ekphrasis.”

Carney devotes an early chapter to the history of Weird Tales and then two chapters each to the three authors of his study, introducing them and then exploring their artistic innovations. He begins his study with an examination of what he terms pulp ekphrasis. “In several of their enduring works,” he says,

Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith engage in a form of artistically inflected criticism termed ekphrasis. They do so by fictionalizing modernism, transforming the real artistic movement into an unreal shadow modernism, a strategic distortion of actual modernism. After many creative iterations honed over several stories — e.g., Pickman’s demented art, Malygris’s sorcery, the fell mirrors of Tuzun Thune — this shadow modernism becomes an inhuman technology that, functioning like a cognitive prosthesis in the virtual world of fiction, thereby reveals the secret truth of history: history is a cruelly accelerating process of deformation. The ordinary is ephemeral. History is an interplay of form and formlessness with formlessness terminally ascendant.

The ordinary is ephemeral. Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard were keenly aware of this truth and reacted to it in their fiction while other Weird Tales writers were moving right along in the modern world, writing their stories of scientifiction, offering narratives of ominous cults and mad scientists (with at least one nude woman per story),  or revisiting the tropes of Victorian horrors.

A panorama of Weird Tales. Covers by Margaret Brundage

We all are familiar with Howard’s and Lovecraft’s discomfort with the modern age, as they called it. And Clark Ashton Smith, after initially keeping company with the modernists (he was published alongside Yeats and Pound in the third issue of the famous little magazine Poetry, “a primary site of academic modernism’s emergence”), was very soon out of step with the new aesthetic. He did, however, explore “his uneasy feelings linked to actual modernist art by fictionalizing and distorting it, as if by a funhouse mirror, thereby rendering an unreal shadow modernism.” He used “modernist art to produce something like knowledge, a sinister intimation that the future, as its recognizable forms deform, will grow increasingly strange.”

The modernism that the Weird Tales Three reacted against (while making use of it in some of their own fiction) was a reaction to and an advocate of the enormous changes occurring in the Western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — industrial, philosophical, artistic, and literary. This is the machine age, and the era of Eliot’s The Wasteland and Picasso and Braque’s cubism, of atonal music in the orchestral hall, of the infamous New York Armory Show of 1913 and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which caused such a disturbance at its premiere the same year. It is scientific. It is concrete. It is brutalist architecture. It is “triumphant” form enduring forever.

More Brundage Weird Tales covers

In contrast, the pulp ekphrasist — Lovecraft, Smith, Howard — “focuses on formlessness.” Howard’s ancient, decaying cities in ruins. Lovecraft’s Erich Zann, “a modernist who transgresses and also a traditional artist who maintains the unknowledge of the ephemerality of the ordinary.” Smith’s Ubbo-Sathla, a formless mass that reposes “amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave.” As Carney makes clear:

Smith, Howard, and Lovecraft go beyond unsophisticated repudiation in order to engage in ekphrasis and so artistically project onto a distorted and ultimately fictional shadow modernism their fears and hatreds concomitant with their identification as stewards of a threatened European aesthetic tradition.

Many of us, perhaps most of us, have long considered the “Weird Tales three” as a handy construction of L. Sprague de Camp’s. Why he settled on these three — or even settled on three rather than two or four or five — remains a mystery to me. I surmise it’s because he saw in them an extension of the famous Lovecraft circle expanded to include two more successful Weird Tales writers (and correspondents) who shared concepts and ideas, including them in each other’s stories.

Dr. Jason Carney

Carney’s use of the phrase now supersedes de Camp’s rather arbitrary representation by placing the three on solid ground. Unlike other writers who appeared in Weird Tales, these three writers did indeed react personally and artistically to the “threat” of modernism, comprehending the new worldview even while artistically defying it:

They are fundamentally pulp writers who eschewed the intellectualist literary trends of their day to concentrate on stirring their readers with wonder, horror, and excitement; accordingly, they were ambitious literary artists who took their pulp fiction craft seriously and encoded thoughtful philosophical speculations in their fiction. Put another way, they were literary artists who had no faith in literary immortality, who viewed their work soberly, as ephemera, as pulp, as decaying plant matter.

I had not conceived of these authors and their time in this way until I read Weird Tales of Modernity. Jason Carney has put Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard in a context as self-evident as it is eye-opening, as artists in a period of artistic vitality reacting to that modern tidal wave of vitality by methods that, in retrospect, seem damned heroic and even more remarkable than they have been given credit for. Jason Ray Carney has provided great insight into their legacy and, for me personally, has widened my appreciation of their accomplishments.

---

David C. Smith (born August 10, 1952, in Youngstown, Ohio) is an editor, writer, and author, recently retired after working nearly thirty years as a medical editor and managing editor of a peer-reviewed orthopaedic journal. He is the author of twenty-six novels and collections and of many short stories and articles, as well as of a post-secondary English grammar textbook.

He loves writing and editing and the English language and is available as a freelance editor. Smith lives in Palatine, Illinois, with his wife, Janine, and their daughter, Lily, and their cats, Rosebud and Corabelle. He is on the web at blog.davidcsmith.net and on Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ David_C._Smith_(author).

His last article for Black Gate was a review of Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery by Brian Murphy