with Henry Kuttner
"See You Later"
"A Gnome There Was"
"When the Bough Breaks"
"The Children's Hour"
"Housing Problem"
"Absalom"
"Call Him Demon"
"A Gnome There Was"
"When the Bough Breaks"
"The Children's Hour"
"Housing Problem"
"Absalom"
"Call Him Demon"
Damn, that was a lot of copying and pasting--I think my intern is going to quit!
Anyway, let's read three more stories by C. L. Moore.
"Nymph of Darkness" is a collaboration between Moore and noted SF and porn enthusiast Forrest J. Ackerman. It was first published in the fanzine Fantasy Magazine in 1935, and then printed in Weird Tales in 1939; according to isfdb, the Weird Tales appearance is expurgated. "Nymph of Darkness," the sixth Northwest Smith story, would later be included in anthologies like Echoes of Valor II and Ackermanthology. My efforts to find electronic or physical copies of this story online and at Wonderbook in Hagerstown have yielded only the Weird Tales version at the internet archive, so that is the one I am reading.
Oy, this story is poorly written; it is like a draft that was never revised, and its many mistakes are distracting and irritating. Reading "Nymph of Darkness" is like reading a student's paper-- the poor word choices and weak sentence construction jump out at you, begging for the red pen treatment. One example: "It was typically a Venusian structure" instead of "It was a typical Venusian structure." Grating on the nerves!
As the story starts Northwest Smith is walking on a dark street in a dangerous part of town and hears approaching footsteps so he puts his back to the wall and puts his hand on his holstered pistol. He can tell the person approaching is a woman because the sound of the footsteps is a "light patter." But a few paragraphs later we are told the "footsteps came storming down the dark street." I don't need to tell you that "light patter" and "storming" don't really work together. Anyway, the woman bumps into Smith in the dark and asks Smith to hide her. All of a sudden it becomes apparent that there is "a pile of barrels at Smith's elbow," so he puts the girl behind the barrels. The person from whom the girl is fleeing walks by, searching for her with some kind of weird flashlight. This joker doesn't think to look behind the barrels beside which Smith is standing. When the searcher has passed out of sight, Smith calls to the hidden girl and we are told "The all but soundless murmur of bare feet heralded her approach," reminding us that "storming" made no sense and making us wonder how long this "approach" can be--isn't this pile of barrels right there, "at Smith's elbow"? The whole story is full of bad writing like this, superfluous phrases that are repetitive and add nothing but confusion.
The plot is no prize either. The girl, Nyusa, is the daughter of a human woman who had sex with a god called "Darkness." Somehow, being a daughter of darkness means Nyusa is invisible. Darkness is worshipped by a bunch of people who are like slugs or worms, people short, squat, and pale, with what the authors call "formless features, intent and emotionless." Nyusa has to dance at their rituals--they use their special flashlights during the ritual so they can see her dance. Nyusa is sick of being their slave, and so has fled from them. But in the middle of the story, after explaining her background to Smith, she suddenly decides to participate in the next ceremony anyway, and she leads Smith to the location of the ritual so he can watch her dance. The slug people don't punish the girl when she returns, so Smith by putting her behind those barrels Smith didn't save her from anything. In fact, Smith does nothing in this story to change the course of Nyusa's life or of the story's plot.
As we would expect, Smith is mesmerized by how beautiful Nyusa is when she dances, illuminated by the special flashlights of the slug people. If the central scene of your story is a guy being entranced by watching some chick's dancing, why bother to make her invisible? The fact that Nyusa is invisible adds nothing to the story. While he is watching Nyusa's dance the slug people's guard monster detects Smith and attacks; Smith kills it with his ray pistol, but then the slug people overwhelm him and capture him. Smith has another gun in a secret holster, and when he is dragged before the slug people's leader, just a few feet away, he kills him with it. The rest of the slug-peeps are about to kill Smith when Nyusa unleashes her true power, scaring the worshipers of her father into leaving Smith alone. There is a tedious surreal scene during which Smith closes his eyes as Darkness fills the room and fills his soul and Nyusa kisses him--his very atoms shudder, the kiss is both hot and cold, all that kind of goop. Then Nyusa leaves for the dimension where her father lives. The end.
Obviously Moore and Ackerman deserve to be harshly criticized for the state of this terrible story, but Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, also merits a sizable share of blame. Why did he publish this piece of junk? Wright is famous for rejecting stories, including stories from geniuses and heroes like Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft, and for making writers revise stories again and again to meet his requirements--in a 1977 interview in the fanzine Chacal, Manly Wade Wellman says that Wright made his wife Frances Garfield revise "Forbidden Cupboard" four times before he would buy it. Wright was a very hands-on editor in no way reluctant to refuse stories or insist on changes to stories--why didn't he reject this disaster or force Moore and/or Ackerman to fix its glaring problems? Was he afraid of offending these popular members of the SF community? We also have to wonder if the original unexpurgated version was better...or even worse!
This is the worst story I have read in a long time. Bad!
"Jirel Meets Magic" by C. L. Moore (1935)
In the opening scenes of the story Jirel is leading an assault on horseback, taking the castle of the wizard Giraud, whom she has sworn to kill because he ambushed some of her men recently. The defenders are wiped out, and we get a taste of Jirel's leadership style as she calls her soldiers names ("fools...varlets...hell-spawned knaves") because they can't seem to find the wizard. She dismounts and hunts for Giraud herself; in the very last tower she finds a shuttered window--when she opens the shutters she finds herself looking out upon another world, a beautiful place of singing birds and lovely trees. No doubt Giraud fled this way.
In the first two Jirel stories, Jirel went through a portal into another world, and here in story #3 we see her doing it again. What, is Mother Earth not good enough for this kid with the yellow eyes and the red hair?
In this lovely wooded world Jirel soon comes upon a tall imposing woman with purple eyes who is using magic rays to torture a dying dryad, a naked girl with green hair whose tree has been felled. The sorceress is Jarisme and after a little dialogue she teleports away. The expiring dryad gives Jirel a talisman which can detect Jarisme and also perhaps destroy the lady wizard.
At Jarisme's tower Jirel finds her sitting on a couch with Giraud, who is like Jarisme's boy toy or something--Jarisme is obviously the one in charge in their relationship. Jarisme teleports Jirel away and her tower moves to a mountainous area, but after a dreamy sequence in which our heroine passes through a "tropical garden" of flowers whose fragrances have a hallucinatory effect, Jirel climbs the mountains to enter the tower again. Jarisme appears as a great cat with purple eyes, taunts Jirel, and leaves; Jirel navigates a "great door-lined hall;" these doors open on to other points in the universe, among them a snow planet, Hell, and outer space (a rocket even flies by.) Finally Jirel opens a door that leads not to another world but to a descending stairway; at the bottom Jarisme awaits her in a room of one hundred mirrors.
In this crystal room we get a long psychedelic scene as Jarisme plays a flute and Jirel can see the notes, "flying slivers of silvery brilliance," ricocheting about the room, and then in the mirrors she can see alien worlds. From the alien worlds arrive a sort of coven or quorum of evil alien wizards--a giant snake with a one-eyed human head, a black blob like a giant amoeba, etc.--whom Jarisme has summoned to witness the punishment of Jirel. Giraud is there, and warns Jarisme about the prophecy that Jarisme will be killed by an Earth woman, but Jarisme brushes aside this warning.
The worst possible punishment, opines Jarisme, is for a person to be physically frozen but have her mind free to contemplate her past, to be forced to relive all the regrettable things she has done. Jirel suffers this punishment and is forced to remember killing Guillaume--Guillaume's name is not used, so you have to be a real Jirel fan to grok what is going on. The pain and injustice are so great that Jirel becomes enraged enough to break free of Jarisme's spell. She throws that talisman the dryad gave her at Jarisme's feet, and the tower collapses and the wizards disappear. Except for Giraud, who knew how to escape the explosion. He doesn't know how to escape getting stabbed to death by Jirel, however.
This story is about surreal sights and big emotions--it is about seeing things and feeling things, less about doing things. The plot is just there to move Jirel from one crazy place where she is angry or sad to the next crazy place where she is angry or sad. It's alright, no big deal.
"Jirel Meets Magic" debuted in the same issue of Weird Tales as one of my favorite Edmond Hamilton stories, "The Avenger from Atlantis." It has reappeared in quite a few fantasy anthologies, as well as "women in SF" anthologies and the numerous Jirel collections. (It is interesting to see the same story in both books purporting to offer "high fantasy" and those appealing to fans of gritty and gruesome sword and sorcery tales. Well, if the covers below are any indication, aficionados of both vaguely defined subgenres share a love of boobs--boobs are a uniter, not a divider.)
"Here Lies..." by C. L. Moore (1956)
Cliff is at the beach in California when a woman in pink cries out and points--another woman, the skinniest Cliff has ever seen, is climbing up a fence, apparently a suicide trying to jump off the pier and down to the rocks below!
Cliff stops the skinny woman from accomplishing this desperate act and they sit in a bar, she drinking heavily and telling him her story. Anne married some smart dude, Brewster, some years ago, worked hard to put him through law school, and then he divorced her and married Louise, a more intelligent woman who could offer him more help in his career. For years now Anne has been thinking of a way to kill herself that would cause a scandal and ruin her former husband's career. Well, today Brewster is in town, campaigning for a state senate seat, and this is her chance! And Cliff ruined her chance!
Cliff tries to convince Anne to stop letting this turn of events dominate her life, to give up on suicide and get a new job and so on, but Anne is having none of it. She flirts with Cliff and gets him to agree to walk with her to her car. It is night, they walk a long ways along the road, out of sight of town, and Anne whips out a revolver and begs Cliff to kill her. She forces the gun into his hands, they wrestle, the weapon goes off, blowing away half of Anne's face, killing her.
A car drives up. It is the woman in pink! She believes Cliff's story; she says she knew Anne, how wacky she was. Cliff helps the woman in pink put the skinny corpse in her car and she drives a long distance into the desert, where he helps her bury Anne. Then the woman in pink reveals her identity: she is Louise, the current Mrs. Brewster! She put a distinctive item of Brewster's in the grave with Anne, so now she can blackmail her husband, whom she suspects would like to divorce her to get a still more helpful wife once he is a state senator. Louise also has the revolver with Cliff's prints on it, so she can blackmail him into never speaking a word about this horrible adventure. The End.
This is a competent mainstream story; no big deal. Moore's stories often revolve around dangerous sexual relationships or love affairs, and here we see another example. I guess you could call "Here Lies..." a feminist revenge story, but it is also, like so many Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories, a story of how if you are a man and get yourself mixed up with some woman because she is sexy or because she is in trouble you are perhaps asking for major trouble of your own because women are tricky and manipulative and will go to any lengths to achieve their (not necessarily rational) goals.
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There's a lot more C. L. Moore and Weird Tales in our future, but in our next episode we'll be checking in with our pal Barry Malzberg, so stay tuned if you feel alienated, are scared of technology, and/or suffer from sexual dysfunction.
