The Maker of Gargoyles by Clark Ashton Smith

 


Since I'm particularly taken by the art and music of the Middle Ages, The Maker of Gargoyles by Clark Ashton Smith counts as one of my personal all-time favorite short-stories.

“Among the many gargoyles that frowned or leered from the roof of the new-built cathedral of Vyones, two were preeminent above the rest by virtue of their fine workmanship and their supreme grotesquery.”

The two gargoyles were created by the stone-carver Blaise Reynard. Reynard grew up in Vyones and, on the strength of his artistry, spent his adult years traveling Europe as one of the most preeminent artists working in stone.

Sidebar: What I personally find so fascinating about gargoyles is what they signified for the actual medieval artists, well-trained craftsmen who could let their imaginations soar well beyond any fixed rules set down by the church. The creation of gargoyles was one area that went uncensored by authorities and where the very human capacity to imagine and express itself in all its breathtaking and bizarre, stunning and wacky, fabulous and weird fullness became manifest. Ah, the ultimate breath of artistic freedom in the medieval world.

But there's a conflict in the city of Vyones. Ambrosius, the city's archbishop, loves art and especially appreciates the accomplished artistry of Reynard; matter of fact, if it was up to Ambrosius, Reynard would have received a commission to carve all the gargoyles for the city's new cathedral. However, the people of Vyones take exception to Renard's art, judging the carver in league with the devil since, after all, his two gargoyles exude an unnatural air most sinister, malignant and evil, as if his two gargoyles embody the very stench of the demonic. Besides which, the people knew Reynard from his boyhood, a boy and now a man taciturn and saturnine, a dark-skinned one with slanting, ill-matched eye and bluish-black beard.

Clark Aston Smith employed sophisticated rococo language as magical incantation to transport a reader to dark realms beyond the ordinary. Here's how the author describes the gargoyles perched on opposite corners of a high tower of the cathedral:

“One was a snarling, murderous, cat-headed monster, with retracted lips revealing formidable fangs, and eyes that glared intolerable hatred from beneath ferine brows. This creature had the claws and wings of a griffin, and seemed as if it were poised in readiness to swoop down on the city of Vyones, like a harpy on its prey. Its companion was a horned satyr, with the vans of some great bat such as might roam the nether caverns, with sharp, clenching talons, and a look of Satanically brooding lust, as if it were gloating above the helpless object of its unclean desire. Both figures were complete, even to the hindquarters, and were not mere conventional adjuncts of the roof. One would have expected them to start at any moment from the stone in which they were mortised.”

As we continue reading this tale, it becomes evident the gargoyles mirror their maker, Blaise Reynard. For, as critic Ted Gioia notes, “Even more than Poe or Lovecraft, Smith anticipated a deadly age in which the greatest destruction came not via ghosts or goblins but from deep inside the human soul.”

Destruction, anyone? You're familiar with the expression of how a great work of art can take on a life of its own. Well, the city of Vyones finds out the hard way this simple statement can translate into literal truth.

One evening returning home, two prominent citizens are attacked. One is torn to shreds and the second flees, telling afterward how “a flying monster, black as the soot of Abaddon” swooped down with flapping wings and seized the other with enormous teeth and talons.

And this is just the beginning. The gargoyles continue their murderous rampage, in the streets, in the cathedral itself and finally in a tavern where Blaise Reynard leers with lust at the innkeeper's daughter, Nicolette.

And it's this scene in the tavern where the intimate connection between the gargoyles and the heart and soul of Blaise Reynard becomes supremely manifest, harking back to the stone-carver's reflections on his own creations:

“He would have said, if asked for the reason for his satisfaction, that he was proud of a skillful piece of handiwork. He would not have said, and perhaps would not even have known, that in one of the gargoyles he had imprisoned all his festering rancor, all his answering spleen and hatred toward the people of Vyones, who had always hated him; and had set the image of this rancor to peer venomously down for ever from a lofty place. And perhaps he would not even have dreamt that in the second gargoyle he had somehow expressed his own dour and satyr-like passion for the girl Nicolette — a passion that had brought him back to the detested city of his youth after years of wandering; a passion singularly tenacious of one object, and differing in this regard from the ordinary lusts of a nature so brutal as Reynard's.”

I've read and listened to the audio book for The Maker of Gargoyles multiple times. By the author's use of language, his descriptions, his impeccable timing and arc of plot, I judge this Clark Aston Smith short-story a work of sheer perfection.