Northwest Smith stories by C. L. Moore from 1933 and '34

As I have been telling you, I have been reading H. P. Lovecraft's letters in a sort of casual and haphazard way.  One thing that stands out in the letters is the high regard Lovecraft had for the work of Catherine Lucille Moore; for example, in a June 17, 1934 letter to Duane W. Rimel, Lovecraft writes, "C. L. Moore is certainly the most powerful & genuinely weird new writer secured by W. T. in many years."  I've read quite a few Moore stories myself, and blogged about them, but I think they have all been stories printed after Lovecraft's death, most of them written in collaboration with Moore's husband, Henry Kuttner, whom she married in 1940.  So let's read some of the stories by Moore that we can be confident Lovecraft read.  Today we'll tackle the first four Northwest Smith tales, all of which made their debuts in Weird Tales in 1933 or 1934.  I'm reading them in my trade paperback copy of Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams, a Moore collection published in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series in 2002, but they are widely available, including in scans of 80-odd-year-old issues of Weird Tales you can see at the internet archive.

"Shambleau" (1933)

This is one of Margaret Brundage's
better efforts, in my opinion; beyond the striking
central idea, of a woman enamored with a dead
bone or Death itself, the symmetrical
 composition and use of color are effective

I actually read "Shambleau" shortly before I started this blog, and so am reading it again after a relatively short interval.

A little italicized prologue to the story assures us that before the rise of ancient Greece there was a human civilization on Earth, now almost entirely forgotten, capable of travelling to other planets, and that the myth of Medusa the Gorgon no doubt is based on dim memories of an alien creature encountered by that prehistoric spacefaring civilization.

It is the future, and Earth has founded colonies on Mars, multicultural little towns with narrow streets inhabited by Earthers, Martians, Venusians, and all kinds of other aliens.  Northwest Smith is a criminal packing a heat pistol, and a brown young girl ("sweetly made") runs from an angry mob, looking to him for protection--the mob wants to kill the girl, whom they call "Shambleau."  After he drives off the mob by brandishing his energy pistol, he notices the girl is an alien, with four clawed digits on each hand and foot, no hair anywhere on her body, pointy teeth, and a strange turban on her head.  Smith is used to dealing with aliens (his partner in crime is a Venusian space pilot named Yarol) and so he ignores the horror and disgust everybody else in town has for the girl and lets her shelter in his crummy hotel room while he goes about his criminal business.

During the day he spies on the space port and collects rumors at the bars, and at night Shambleau tempts him with her curvaceous human-like body--he lusts after her, but something deep within him, what Moore calls his soul, finds her revolting, and he resists his body's carnal urges...but not for long!  On their second night together Shambleau takes off her turban, revealing a nest of five-foot long slimy worm-like tendrils, and with her hypnotic gaze she wins Smith's passive consent to the most thrilling and most disgusting sex of his life, which Moore describes at length, not graphically but euphemistically:

So he stood, rigid as marble, as helplessly stony as any of Medusa's victims in ancient legends were, while the terrible pleasure of Shambleau thrilled and shuddered through every fiber of him....

Despite her sharp teeth, Shambleau doesn't eat regular food; part of their sex act is those worm-like tendrils sucking out Smith's life force!

Smith spends three days in that room, like a junkie, three days of pleasure in those slimy tendrils, progressively losing his physical strength and mental awareness as Shambleau feeds on his life.  Then, luckily, Yarol the Venusian arrives, resists Shambleau's effort to seduce him in turn, and burns the monster down with his ray gun.

"Shambleau" is perhaps Moore's most famous story and her most celebrated, and it is good and I like it, but still think it is somewhat overrated.  For one thing, it is too long, too wordy, for the little bit of plot it describes; Moore's descriptions of the mixture of pleasure and horror Shambleau inspires in men get repetitive and thus lose some of their power.  Another issue is that the plot is obvious--we know immediately, because of that little prologue about Medusa, that Shambleau is a dangerous monster.

There are at least two aspects of the story that are worthy of note because they go against the grain and thus help make it more interesting.  Firstly, fiction is full of depictions of heroes standing up to lynch mobs as Smith does in "Shambleau," but normally those lynch mobs are depicted in a very negative manner, their behavior denounced as bigoted and as contrary to simple justice and our traditions of everybody accused of some crime deserving a fair trial.  (Somewhat paradoxically, our popular culture is full of lone vigilantes who mete out summary justice when the state has failed to neutralize malefactors.)  But here in "Shambleau" the mob turns out to be right, to be guided by the wisdom of folk traditions that warn against monsters like Shambleau, and Smith's decision to stop them from eliminating the threat to their community is a risky mistake.

Secondly is the fact that, while this is a story written by a woman, it depicts women as dangerous in a very traditional way: a tricky deceptive woman uses her sex appeal to exploit a man, seducing him and then parasitically sucking his blood!

As I have suggested, "Shambleau" has been very successful.  We can see in Sam Moskowitz's fascinating article "The Most Popular Stories in Weird Tales: 1924 to 1940" that "Shambleau" was not only the most popular story in its issue, but the second most popular story in the magazine in the period covered by the article, with a staggering 85 readers writing in to praise the piece. Only a fraction of stories in Weird Tales ever garnered even half that many positive letters (over the 15 year-period, only 29 stories ever got 40 or more positive votes.)  "Shambleau" has been reprinted in many Moore collections as well as in anthologies of stories about vampires and of SF stories by women.

"...the distinctive quality of 'Shambleau' & 'Black Thirst.'  In these tales there is an indefinable atmosphere of vague outsiderness & cosmic dread which marks weird work of the best sort."

--H. P. Lovecraft, Jan. 28, 1935 letter to William F. Anger

"Black Thirst" (1934)

"Black Thirst" made its debut in an issue of Weird Tales that also included Robert E. Howard's Conan tale "Shadows in the Moonlight," which I enjoyed when I read it in 2018 under its alternative title "Iron Shadows in the Moon," and stories by Edmond Hamilton and Clark Ashton Smith that I certainly hope to read some day.  In an April 13, 1934 letter to Duane W. Rimel, Lovecraft declared this issue of Weird Tales better than average, saying that "Black Thirst" was "magnificent" and the Howard and Smith stories "excellent."  Weird Tales readers felt that "Black Thirst" was the best thing in the issue.

We find Northwest Smith hanging around the bad part of Ednes, a port city on Venus, in the shadow of a warehouse by a wharf.  He is accosted by a Minga maid, one of the geishas of Venus, bred for beauty ("long-limbed, milk-white...bronze hair ") and trained from birth to charm men.  She invites Smith into Minga, the forbidden city of Venus! 

At the appointed time the forbidden door into Minga is opened to Smith by a eunuch who leads the Earthman through labyrinthine corridors to the chamber of the maid, Vaudir.  Smith learns all about Minga and its ruler, the Alendar.  In short, the Alendar is a thousands-year old monster who feeds on beauty, which it is revealed is a tangible force, and Minga, which rose long before mankind had come down from the trees of Earth, and about which the native Venusians built Ednes when they discovered it, is the place where the Alendar breeds women for ever greater beauty; the least beautiful of his specimens he sells to princes and potentates.  Vaudir, though more beautiful than any normal woman, is one of these lesser beauties--and there is something else wrong with her; while the products of the Alendar's breeding program are generally submissive, vacuous, almost soulless, Vaudir is independent and intelligent, and has come to realize what Minga is all about and dread her fate at the hands of the Alendar.  Thus, she summoned Smith, famed as the bravest and most resourceful of men, to aid her.

The Alendar has great psychic powers, and quickly gets control of Vaudir and soon Smith finds himself deep underground, by the black pool of slime from which the Alendar rose over a million years ago!  The Alendar gives Smith a tour of his lair, showing off some of his productions, mindless women so beautiful that it is painful for Smith to behold them.  He then says that, in order add some variety to his diet, that he is going to devour Vaudir and Smith's beauty (a process which will kill them)--it has been a awhile since he has fed on people with any intelligence or courage, and since he has savored male beauty.  The Alendar tries to conquer Smith's mind and a psychic battle ensues, but when Vaudir adds her psyche to the struggle the Alendar stumbles and Smith whips out his ray pistol and hoses him down, reducing the Alendar from a fiend in human shape to his native form, that of a blob of black goop that slides down the cliff back into the pool of slime from which it came before the first cave man to wield a tool was born on Terra.

Vaudir's soul has been corrupted by its exposure to Alendar's, her psyche pushed beyond despair by the direct knowledge that she is a product of the Alendar's evil, and she wants to die, but first she guides Smith out of the monster-haunted labyrinth of Minga.  She tells Smith she wants a "clean" death, fearing that otherwise her soul will join Alendar in the primordial slime, and asks the Earthman to shoot her down with his ray gun, and he obliges.

Like "Shambleau," "Black Thirst" is a little too long and wordy--its many lengthy descriptions of mind-blowing beauty and psychic combat and slime and despair become redundant.  The Alendar shows Smith one woman after another, when one would have been enough.  But it is a good story and actually more to my taste than "Shambleau," as I like ancient lost cities and sinister mazes and cruel immortals and evil breeding programs and people who long for death and that sort of thing.

Perhaps interesting from the psychological or sociological point of view is Moore's writing about beauty.  The Alendar explains to Smith:

"Beauty is as tangible as blood, in a way.  It is a separate, distinct force that inhabits the bodies of men and women.  You must have noticed the vacuity that accompanies perfect beauty in so many women...the force so strong that it drives out all other forces and lives vampirishly at the expense of intelligence and goodness and conscience and all else." [Ellipsis in original.]   

It is hard not to see this as Moore, a smart and bookish young woman, expressing her resentment and envy towards women considered more physically attractive than herself.  But maybe we can put a feminist gloss on it and say Moore is rebelling against the way our male-dominated society judges women by their looks.  We can also see Vaduir, the smart woman whose intelligence and courage leads to her own destruction as well as the destruction of the evil entity of Alendar and his dehumanizing beauty-project, as a sort of feminist martyr.  Vaduir is also an example of the Lovecraftian theme that too much knowledge of your true origins and your true role in the universe will drive you insane or kill you. 

"Black Thirst" has been reprinted in many Moore collections and at least one vampire anthology.
 

"Scarlet Dream" (1934)

Lovecraft in a June 1, 1934 letter to Duane W. Rimel wrote that "The May W T was much above the average, with 'Scarlet Dream', 'Queen of the Black Coast' & 'The Tomb Spawn;'" here we see HPL putting Moore in the same rank with Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, something he does several times in his correspondence.  More readers wrote in to Weird Tales to praise "Scarlet Dream" than did for either Howard's Conan story or Smith's "The Tomb Spawn," making Moore's the top story in the issue.

In a Martian street market Northwest Smith buys a red shawl with an intricate pattern, the likes of which he has never seen.  The merchant says it was found in a derelict spaceship found floating in the void.  Back in his quarters, Smith examines the scarlet thread that runs over the fabric's blue background, trying to trace its hypnotic labyrinthine path.

When he sleeps at night under the shawl Smith dreams he is in another world, where he meets an hysterical woman covered in blood.  She says a monster has killed and eaten her sister.  When Smith says it doesn't matter as this is only a dream the woman says that when we dream our souls travel to other universes, but that this universe is special--once your soul arrives it cannot escape!  Here in this world one must endure until devoured by the nameless monster!

In "Shambleau" Moore made much of how sexual congress with the title monster was a paradoxical mix of ecstasy and disgust, pleasure and horror, and in "Black Thirst" Smith looked upon women so beautiful that their beauty caused him pain, threatened to drive him insane.  In this story Moore again presents this sort of paradox with her utopian but hellish dreamland.  Here Smith and the lovely girl live as lovers, under a beautiful sky, on a lovely beach, in sight of a magnificent temple of wide halls and noble arches and broad staircases; there is no work to do, no TV and no books, so they spend their time laying on the beach and having sex.  But the very grass and trees writhe with hunger for their blood, at any moment the nameless and purportedly invulnerable monster may attack, and the only thing to eat is blood that comes out of spigots in the Temple--the inhabitants of this nightmare dreamland put their mouths to these spigots like babes to the teat!  Gross!     

Day follows languorous day.  Smith, a man of action, eventually decides he must leave, must explore the parts of the Temple the girl tells him are dangerous, or journey away from the Temple environs, even though the girl says that he will surely starve without access to those blood spigots, this dreamscape's only source of food.  Perhaps in response to Smith's resolve, the monster suddenly attacks, but Smith's heat gun, apparently, destroys it.  The woman then decides that she would rather die than live without Smith, and agrees to sacrifice herself to send him back to his universe.  Upon a wall in a chamber of the Temple is written the same pattern as woven into that shawl; the girl can read the pattern aloud, voicing a verbal representation of the pattern, which will open a gate.  The opening of the gate kills the person who says the magic word, but another person can quickly pass through the gate.

Smith awakens in his room on Mars--Yarol the Venusian is there beside his bed with a doctor, relieved that his partner has awakened from his coma.  The shawl has been given to some other spaceman--the sight of it gave Yarol a headache.  Smith realizes that the woman in the dream never told him her name.

A decent story, one of the many SF stories which pour cold water on utopianism--life must present challenges to be worthwhile.  The utopian dreamworld where people must drink blood to survive also reminded me of the dream in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain--a beautiful world with a monstrous underside.

Even though they both end with a guy burning down a monster with an energy pistol, both "Shambleau" and "Black Thirst" are about Smith in a battle of wills with the monster, a battle he needs help to survive.  I think we can see "Scarlet Dream," which also ends with a monster destroyed by a heat pistol, the same way.  It doesn't make much sense that Smith has his heat gun with him in the dreamworld--the pattern on the shawl didn't move him physically to another universe (his body is in a coma back on Mars), it moved his soul there.  The heat pistol is, in my theory, a representation of Smith's willpower, his refusal to fatalistically accept the fact that he is stuck in the dreamworld and has to drink blood and wait for a monster to kill him.  He stands up to the dream world, and, with the help of another, is able to escape it.

No doubt Lovecraft appreciated this tale's dreamy nature--Lovecraft's fiction and correspondence are full of descriptions of people's dreams.  I appreciated that Moore's writing in this one is less repetitive than in the earlier Smith stories.  I also like the device of a complex pattern, which turns out to be esoteric writing, being the key to somehow opening a portal to another universe; perhaps an allegory of the power of books to carry one to another world?

Besides the many Moore collections, "Scarlet Dream" has appeared in a book of horror tales about dreams and at least one vampire anthology.

"Dust of Gods" (1934)

Millions of years ago, before the rise of humankind, a planet orbited the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, a planet upon which resided the first of the gods of the solar system, Pharol!  Pharol was from another dimension, and, to interact with man, needed to manifest itself a physical form.  Eventually this form broke down; today it is only dust.  At least, this is what an odd character tells Northwest Smith of Earth and his partner Yarol of Venus in a saloon on Mars one day.

This guy knows where the dust of Pharol rests, and wants the dust for himself--he has books of magical formulae which, he contends, will allow him to reach into Pharol's universe and contact that horrifying black god, even control it, if he has the residue of Pharol's material form.  Smith and Yarol think this guy is off his rocker, but agree to go get the dust for him when he offers them fifty thousand Earth dollars for the job.

Smith and Yarol fly in a plane to the icy and mountainous North Pole of Mars, then hoof it through a series of caves, emerging on the far side of a mountain in a city that has been abandoned for hundreds of centuries and today is little more than a field of rubble.

Using their heat guns, the adventurers cut their way through the rubble to a tunnel that leads to a buried asteroid.  This asteroid is a fragment of that lost planet; after it crashed on Mars, burying itself; the faithful built above it the now-ruined holy city as a place of worship to their god Pharol.  The asteroid is hollow, and inside it Smith and Yarol find Pharol's throne room and, upon a pedestal, the dust of that alien god's manifestation in our universe!  When they realize that nut from the saloon knew what he was talking about they decide to destroy the dust with their ray guns to make sure it doesn't fall into his hands.

There is not a hell of a lot to this story.  Moore describes some alien guardians, but they are of the hypnotic type (like Shambleau and Adenar) and Yarol and Smith have strong enough psyches to escape psychic domination.  The protagonists encounter several strange phenomena related to light that are apparently the result of light from another dimension coming out of the asteroid into our dimension, but these phenomena are not dangerous, so they are simply curious rather than thrilling.  "Dust of Gods" is really lacking in the conflict and tension and danger we sort of expect to find in stories; I can only give it the grade of "barely acceptable."

"Dust of Gods" is not as popular as the earlier Smith stories we have read, as evidenced by its failure to win the highest volume of Weird Tales reader praise for the issue in which it appears (that honor went to "The Three Marked Pennies" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman, who beat out not only Moore but Robert E. Howard, who had a Conan story in this issue, and Frank Belknap Long); it also seems to have been anthologized fewer times, at least in English.

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Three of these stories are easy to recommend to aficionados of the weird and those interested in sexuality in speculative fiction and SF by women.  The fourth is a little flat, but not actually bad.  Of course there will be more C. L. Moore and more Weird Tales in our future here at MPorcius Fiction Log, but first we'll check out some critically acclaimed SF from 1967.