C. L. Moore: "The Tree of Life," "Werewoman" and "Song in a Minor Key"

Let's read the last three stories of C. L. Moore's interplanetary rogue and babe magnet, Northwest Smith.  We've already read the first nine; click the links below to be whisked off to my blog posts on them:

"Shambleau"
"Black Thirst"
"Scarlet Dream"
"Dust of the Gods"

"Nymph of Darkness"

"Julhi"

"The Cold Grey God"

"Yvala"

"Lost Paradise"

"The Tree of Life" (1936)

The tenth Northwest Smith story made its debut in Weird Tales, alongside stories we have already read by Robert Bloch and by Moore's husband, Henry Kuttner.  This October 1936 issue also includes a letter from Donald Wollheim praising Robert Bloch, and a letter from Bloch himself suggesting that Robert E. Howard's Kull stories are much better than his Conan tales.  The letters column also rings with praise for Virgil Finlay, who provides a female nude as an illustration to "The Tree of Life."

Northwest Smith is on the run from the law, hiding in the million-year-old ruins of the Martian city near which his flying craft was shot down.  The aircraft of the authorities circle overhead, hunting him.  Smith finds a surprisingly intact work of art adorning an ancient well, a grill in the shape of a tree.  Then he encounters a mysterious weeping woman--his eyes cannot focus upon her, so she appears to him as a vague blur, only her milky white eyes sharp and clear in his vision.  

Via telepathy and body language, the woman begs Smith to help her find "The Tree of Life."  So he leads her to that grill, which casts a crisp shadow on the ground.  When she enters the shadow she vanishes, and Smith is unable to resist the urge to follow her through that portal into another world, a world where the ground is not dry broken stone but covered in grass and flowers reminiscent of those in a Botticelli.  This gray world appears to Smith's eyes entirely dim and blurry, though he can now see the girl more clearly; she is naked and has ankle-length black hair.

Smith comes to learn that this young woman is the priestess of an alien god, Thag, and has tricked him into this gray world to offer him to Thag in sacrifice.  Smith tries to escape and finds himself lost in this monotonous universe where the sky is a starless black and the ground offers few landmarks.  He eventually comes to the edge of this little artificial universe, purportedly created by a wizard a million or more years ago when he summoned Thag, and meets the shy and diminutive locals, the shrunken and degenerate descendants of the heroic Martians of those days a thousand millennia ago when Mars was green; these poor bastards live in impotent trembling fear of Thag, and the only advice they can offer Smith is to avoid Thag, advice they cannot follow themselves. 

Eventually we get the showdown with Thag and the priestess.  Thag appears as a hideous tree with tentacle-like branches and he calls his victims to him via an irresistible song.  Smith, like the little men, is drawn into Thag's clutches by the song, but when the monster god is about to devour him Smith proves to be one of the one in a billion people strong enough to overcome Thag's psychic powers and he whips out his ray gun and blasts the monster, causing the artificial universe to collapse, wiping out Thag, the priestess, and the little degenerates, but depositing Smith safe and sound back in the ruins on Mars in our own universe.  (Enough time has passed that the police have stopped looking for him.)  

"The Tree of Life" is like a lot of Moore's Jirel and Smith stories--a moody thing that moves at a slow pace and is long on description and in which the protagonist finds herself or himself in a mysterious alien world and survives a long climactic psychic battle of wills.  The story is too long and too repetitive; for example, Moore gives us multiple paragraphs describing the music of Thag when one would have been enough--she even uses the same words to describe the song again and again.  Another example: Smith goes to Thag after meeting the degenerate little people, looks at Thag, and we get a description of the monster god, and then Smith, scared, runs back to the little people.  Then Thag starts voicing his siren song and Smith and the little people march to Thag to get sacrificed.  Why does Moore have Smith go to Thag two times?  Just once would have been fine.

We might also argue that Smith doesn't actually do much in the story--every step of the way he is controlled by aliens until the very end, when it is some inherent factor of his genetics that saves him, not any decision he makes or idea he comes up with.  Now, this may be an accurate allegory of life (external forces drive everybody and those who are successful owe their destiny to having born smart or healthy or good-looking or whatever) but it doesn't make for a particularly good plot.  The secondary characters also add little to the story; the little people don't actually do anything to alter the narrative, don't tell Smith anything he couldn't have figured out himself, and even the priestess becomes little more than an extra after she tricks Smith into the little pocket universe.  In theory, Smith could have been the impetus for the little people finding courage or the priestess rebelling against Thag or whatever--instead of filling up her pages of Weird Tales with repetitive descriptions, Moore could have depicted people evolving; if she had done so their deaths may have had some emotional power.

Merely acceptable.

"The Tree of Life" appears in many Moore collections, including Gollancz's Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams, which I myself own (I read the story in Weird Tales, however, not feeling like digging through my shelves for the book.)  Even though I have been pretty hard on the story, Peter Haining seems to have thought it a notably representative specimen of its genre, including "The Tree of Life" in his 1975 anthology The Fantastic Pulps.

"Werewoman" (1938)

"Werewoman" is apparently a lesser known entry in the Northwest Smith catalog.  It debuted in the second issue of Leaves, a fanzine full of material by H. P. Lovecraft and members of the Lovecraft circle, among them Moore, Fritz Leiber, and Frank Belknap Long.  For some reason, many Northwest Smith collections, including Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams, don't include "Werewoman;" its first book publication appears to have been in 1971, in Sam Moskowitz's Horrors Unknown.  Since then a number of anthologists, including Robert Hoskins and Karl Edward Wagner, have reprinted the story.  I am reading it in the scan at the internet archive of Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski's 1978 Dark Imaginings.

Northwest Smith, injured, his weapons lost, staggers away from a battle; to foil pursuit, he makes his way into a gray and featureless wasteland that is shunned by all because it is said to be the site of city razed and cursed a bazillion years ago.  (Gray and featureless landscapes speak to Moore, I guess.)  In the waste an exhausted and delirious Smith encounters a pack of female werewolves!  They sense that Smith, underneath, is a fellow savage, and instead of devouring him the women fight over who will be his lover!  He joins the pack and soon is howling at the night sky and running with the naked women through ghost cities and proving themselves the masters of various ghost monsters.  When they meet some real live men armed with guns, hunters, Smith participates in the attack, panting to drink human blood!  The horrified hunters shoot at them without effect, but just before Smith gets a taste of human blood one of the hunters draws from his raiment a cross, the sight of which drives Smith and the other werewolves away.       

An invisible force or entity begins pursuing the werewolves, and Moore, as is her wont, describes Smith's fear of this invisible thing in great and repetitive detail as he and his new girlfriend flee from it.  The universe, or Smith's perception of it, is warped, so that Smith and the naked woman whose hand he is holding pass over the same ground again and again, as if running in a circle, flying time and time again through the phantom towers of the long leveled city. 

After the long chase comes the long battle of wills between Smith and the unnamable thing.  Smith finds the rune or glyph or whatever that is the key to the curse and shatters the stone into which it is carved, ending the curse and killing or banishing all the werewolves and other ghost creatures.  The hunters whom Smith almost murdered find our exhausted hero--they don't recognize him as their tormentor, as to them he and the hot girls looked like wolves, and Smith doesn't even remember his bizarre adventure.

Again too long and repetitive, but a little better than "The Tree of Life."  The idea of being swept up in the thrill of running like a wolf with a pack of hot naked girls is kind of exciting, and I like that Moore leans into the idea that Smith is a murderous criminal.

In a 1976 interview for the fanzine Chacal, which you can read at the internet archive, Moore says "I don't think that I ever wrote science fiction--hard science fiction.  Everything I did was fantasy..." and here in "Werewoman" she drops all pretense of writing science fiction, even including the scene in which the power of the cross drives off the monsters, an event which only makes sense if the story takes place in a universe in which Christianity is true.  One wonders if this story was originally set on Earth in North Africa or Afghanistan or some such place, with the protagonist a deserting British soldier or an unscrupulous American arms dealer or whatever, and Moore just changed the protagonist's name to Northwest Smith because she knew that would have more immediate appeal.   The text in Dark Imaginings doesn't directly refer to ray guns or other planets or anything like that.    

"Song in a Minor Key" (1940)

Here's another story that debuted in a fanzine, this time Scienti-Snaps, where Moore's "Song in a Minor Key" appeared alongside work by fellow weirdies Henry Kuttner, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, and an essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.  I am reading the brief piece in a 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe.

This short short depicts Smith back on Earth after twenty years of criminal adventures among the other planets.  He recalls the first crime he committed, the crime that forced him to leave Earth, and reflects that if he hadn't committed that crime he would have committed some other one because there was "a fatal flaw in him from the very first..." and his life would have been much the same.  The same strain of genetic determinism that was evident in "The Tree of Life," and I guess in "Werewoman," too, is thus evident here as well--there is something savage, even animal, inside Smith that makes him a dangerous outlaw but also gives him the strength to overcome obstacles no decent person could survive.

Short and to the point and with some real human feeling, instead of page after page of vague surreal visions, this is one of the better Northwest Smith stories.  It is perhaps a pity Moore didn't explore Smith's regrets and his life of crime a little more, instead of making every Smith story I can remember be about some alien vixen trying to seduce him with her psychic powers.  "Song in a Minor Key" would reappear in many collections of Smith stories.

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So now I have blogged about all the stories assigned to the Northwest Smith series by isfdb.  I am told that Smith also appears in a story Moore co-wrote with husband Kuttner, a story which isfdb assigns to the Jirel of Joiry series.  Stay tuned Northwest Smith fans, because we'll cover that tale that defies the Smith-Jirel binary, as well as other stories by famous members of the Lovecraft circle, in the next Weird Tales-centric episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.