Musings on Fritz Leiber

Oh wow—while I was putting the images together I realized I've been spelling his last name wrong for a looong time now!! I learned at one point it's pronounced Lie-ber (rhymes with eye-burr), which was totally different from how I always pronounced it (Lee-ber). So, it's spelled one way and pronounced the other. Complicated. Lol, seems about right for the rather complicated author.

Apologies to those of you who saw this earlier today, but I'm dropping it here to keep this all collected together. Just skip this post if you already saw it:

The book I've been waiting impatiently for just came in today (after a crazy post office kerfuffle I wrote about on the Not Happy thread)—Witches of the Mind by Bruce Byfield. It's a critical appraisal of the works of Fritz Lieber, famous mainly for his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series plus some more fantasy and some very highly acclaimed science fiction. The print is unbelievably small, I had to bust out my lighted magnifying glass to read it at all. I didn't mention this book in here until it came in, because this was the only copy available on Amazon (for $100.00! )—I wanted to make sure I had it in my hot little hands before I let anybody know about it. Apparently eBay has one for $75, wish I had checked there first.

The book is an expansion of a university thesis Byfield wrote, focusing on Lieber's four literary phases—

• Lovecraftian
• Gravesian
• Early Jungian
• Late Jungian

I wasn't aware of it, but apparently Lieber's writing (in the later periods anyway) was rife with archetypes—women representing Anima figures; wizards, opponents or monsters as Shadow figures, and the like. Very intriguing.

The title of the book comes from Shakespeare, which is very fitting, as he(?) was one of Lieber's most foundational influences.

And now, through the book, I've just discovered an essay Lieber wrote for the Riverside Quarterly—Vol 4, No. 3, June 1970. The essay is called A Utopia for Poets and Witches, and is his own critial appraisal of the Robert Graves book Watch the North Wind Rise:

For nearly sixty years Robert Graves has thought of himself as primarily a poet; for nearly thirty years, he has publicly identified himself as a poet-servant of the eternal Muse, the White Goddess worshipped under many names in antiquity. But Graves is more familiar to the reading public as the author of historical novels like I, Claudius (1934) and of the classic autobiography of World War I, Good-bye to All That (1929). Some critics have argued that Graves' prose works deserve as much serious consideration as his poetry, but little has been done; especially surprising is the general neglect of Watch the North Wind Rise (1949), a utopian novel about a future society which has returned to the worship of the Goddess.1 I would like to suggest that the framework of this novel exhibits a duality characteristic of the genre of the "fantastic," that it provides an example of the way in which similar dualities may be found in utopian works, and that it is the very existence of such dualities which makes this novel a satisfactory vehicle for Graves's reflections on the nature of poetry, the Muse, and the women in whom she is seen incarnate.
Source​

I have now ordered a copy of the Quarterly containing this essay—awaiting its arrival.

"The state of Leiber criticism seems inconsistent with his reputation. For over half of his five decade career, Leiber has been a major figure in modern American fantasy. Harlan Ellison, writing in "A Few Too Few Words" that "I have no hesitation ranking him with Poe and Kafka and Borges," speaks for many fantasists with an interst in style when he insists that "None of us working in the genre of the fantastic today are free of the lessons taught by Leiber." "Writers' writer" is how many science fiction writers describe Leiber, and they praise him even when they find fault. When Ursula K Leguin, for instance, deplores shifts from archaic to colloquial dialogue in the comic scenes of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, one of her reasons is that the shift is unnecessary, because Leiber could maintain any tone with eloquence and grace."

From page 5, Introduction​

I don't plan to keep posting chunks lifted straight from the book like that ^ much. No need to court copyright infringement lawsuits. But I'm running into all kinds of resources I never knew about, and I'll post some of them here as a repository, so I can seek them out later without having to keep peering at the incredibly tiny print in that book through my magnifying glass. Just a big session or two of it now (and whenever I run across more good resources) and be done with it. Here's one I'm currently listening to (on pause for the moment as I write this):

• Hourglass Productions – An Hour With Fritz Leiber: The Author And His Works

It's an audio file, an interview.

Leiber and Me

There are certain deep similarities of working process between Leiber and myself, and I can't tell to what extent they're just intrinsic to both of us, or because I was somehow able to divine certain ideas from his writing and apply them to my own. I think it must be some level of both, becuase people don't change their basic tendencies and predilections, or if they try to it doesn't stick. So I suppose it's more a matter of my intuiting in Leiber the same tendencies and traits that already existed in myself. Lol, should I call this entry Leiber and Me?

My friend and I (the one I call Eric in the Beastseekers) have known each other since we were 9 years old. We met in the fourth grade, on a school bus. We didn't live far from one another, so he got on just about a half mile past where I did. Very shortly after meeting and becoming fast friends, we started writing stories. It was at his urging, and for the first few years it was he who came up with the ideas. The stories were about us, only in them we weren't kids, we were some indeterminate level of 'youth', and we always had something like super powers and fought the bad guys. Basically the characters just had our names. It was an extension of that thing children do—that we did in fact when watching a movie one day in his basement room. The movie was an old (well, new at the time) swords and sandals one about the founding of Rome, with the brothers Romulus and Remus. My friend immediately stated "I'm Romulus," so I gave the only acceptable response, which was "I'm Remus." Apparently he already knew the story, or the outcome anyway, so he had deliberately picked the one he knew would go on to found Rome, leaving me stuck with the other one. I was unfamiliar with who the characters were. But my point is simply that this is a thing children have done and I'm sure will continue to do into perpetuity. Having established that pattern of 'being' characters in fictional (or historical) stories, it was a natural next step to begin writing about ourselves as characters.

First we were The Anchors, a team of deep sea divers who wore bulky suits with heavy boots and those big metal helmets with portholes all around, because he really liked those suits. We would be trudging along across the sea floor and discover bad guys plotting to overthrow the world or something, and we'd wallop them good. Then, over the next year or two, we became The Comets. We now wore space suits. His interests were evolving, and moving upward. He always came up with the characters, they were always us (in name only), and I would dutifully write my own stories in the series. Honestly I don't remember any of those stories except the first one where he dictated and I wrote it on an unlined piece of paper. I wrote it exactly the way he said it, and it was all one long run-on sentence conjoined with a lot of 'and thens.' The only reason I can remember it is because I still have it in a box, if the brown paper hasn't completely crumbled away yet. The rest of the stories have disappeared.

Things continued in this vein until around the beginning of high school, when suddenly I had an idea and wrote a story of my own. I called it The Beastseekers. It was again about us, only I decided to make them actually us—two 16 year old boys who had taken a paper route and split it between them, each taking half of it (the route by some near miracle happened to run from very near my house to very near his). I had become bothered by the vagueness in our earlier stories, and had hit upon the idea to 'write what you know.' Since we were sixteen, and I think I discovered Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser around 13, I was probably already influenced by Leiber's powerful gravitational pull. Actually I need to rethink that—the mall wasn't there yet when I was 13, and I know that's where I first disvoered Fahrd and the Mouser. It wasn't built until much closer to 1980, the year we graduated. I'm guessing around 77 or 78. I penned the first Beastseekers story as a freshman. So it seems most likely I decided to make the Beastseekers extremely autobiographical some time before encountering Leiber.

Wow, this is getting lengthy. I'd better see if it will post, and pick it up in followups.

My tendency toward autobiography was so strong that I wrote what year it was and that we were 16, as well as describing us both the way we actually looked. And another change I made—we no longer had anything like super powers. In my stories anyway, as soon as he started writing Beastseeker stories we did in his. But my stories were a form of journaling, where I recorded my own thoughts and ideas as well as setting them in our town and having us live in the houses we actually lived in. He rebelled hardcore against all of that. It became very clear to me that he wrote as an escape from reality, which he seemed to despise, while to me writing gets better the more it borrows from reality (up to a certain point).

Whenever I did discover Fritz Leiber and his wonderful creations, I must have immediatley felt a powerful connection. Somehow I intuited that he was a writer after my own heart, though it wasn't clear at the time how much. At some point, and this wasn't until the internet had come along—so many decades later—I found a transcription of a speech Leiber had deliverd at the Chicon III—a sci-fi/fantasy convention held in Chicago in 1962 (the year my friend and I were born). The speech was called Fafhrd and Me, and the main thrust of it was that the characters of Fafhrd and the Mouser were based on Leiber and his friend Harry Otto Fischer. To set the stage, they had moved to different parts of the US and were writing letters to each other in wich they frquently included story ideas and fragments, poems, songs, and little sketches. Typical stuff for creative people.

Here's an excerpt from the speech:

In the summer of 1934 (middle of the Great Depression) my friend Harry Fischer had written to me from Louisville, Kentucky:

“For all do fear the one known as the Gray Mouser. He walks with swagger ’mongst the bravos, though he’s but the stature of a child. His costume is all of gray, from gauntlets to boots and spurs of steel.”

Of Fafhrd, he wrote that he laughed merrily and was “full seven feet in height. His eyes, wide-set, were proud and of fearless mien. His wrist between gauntlet and mail was white as milk and thick as a hero’s ankle.”
​

This set Leiber's mind in motion. He was the real writer, while Fischer was mostly an avid reader of all forms of fantasy, Weird fiction, mythology and history and the like (he also staged puppet shows featuring Punch and Judy, danced semi-professional ballet, and had married an artist). Leiber responded with a longer fragment, though his was not a little chunk of fiction, but visions of the characters he had while sitting on the docks staring out at the black water. He said his unconscious had to simmer on the material for a long time, maybe a year or more, before he started getting ideas for a story about them. That first sotry was set, not in the fictional land of Lankhmer. in the world of Nehwon, but in a historical era of our own world, which he researched meticulously. I believe this was during the period when he was also corresponding regularly and very excitedly with H P. Lovecraft, at the beginning of Leiber's career and the end of Lovecraft's. Leiber's wife Jonquil had somehow discovered Lovecraft's home address and wrote to him that her husband was a writer and a huge Lovecraft fan, and was currently struggling to get his first stories published. Much to her surprise Lovecraft responded quite warmly and said to ask her husband to write him. Soon Harry Fischer also joined in.

In those days there was a primitive form of internet whereby writers would correspond through letters and send each other unpublished manuscripts. Lovecraft was part of such a group of mostly Weird fiction authors. One of them would send a typed manuscript (carbon copies maybe) to the first name in the group, who would read it, add some pages of his comments, and send it on to the next. It was something like what we're doing here. Lovecraft brought Leiber into the group. In fact Lovecraft was partially responsible for Lieber getting published in the first place—he sort of lobbied for him to various publishers of weird fiction until one of them gave him a shot.

There's a book of Lovecraft's letters to Lieber called Writers in the Dark. The original intent was to publish both of their letters, but there was a problem with getting permission to use Lieber's letters, which are in Lovecraft's estate. Lovecraft went to great lengths about the importance of knowing history accurately, and praised Lieber for his knowledge of it. In fact the first of the Fafhrd and Mouser stories to get published (Adept's Gambit) was not set in the world of Nehwon (No-when spelled backwards), but on Earth in ancient Tyre. Later, when the stories were being collected into a series of paperbacks in the early seventies, Lieber added a very short story right before it explaining that the Twain had wandered into a labyrinth of caverns that connect up different worlds, and had found their way to the strange world known as Earth for only the one adventure.

In fact for the paperbacks he added a number of connecting stories that created more of a sense of an overarching narrative. He also wrote origin stories for both heroes, and one detailing their first meeting (these three stories form the entire first book, Swords and Deviltry).

It took me a while, but I've located Justin Leiber's essay Fritz Leiber and Eyes. I thought it was included in a book, but it turns out it's in Starship Magazine #35, Summer 1979—

• Fritz Leiber and Eyes

Which fortunately is on Archive.org.

It's quite long and, as expected, Justin is as articulate and intelligent as his father (and HIS father, and so on...). Justin is a professional philosopher and seems extremely knowledgeable about many areas of science and psychology (about many of which he has written books). I'm very glad to have found this. It reveals things I've always been curious about, and that I'm sure many of Leiber's fans are. Unfortunatley though, parts of it are written in a very convoluted way that makes their meaning completely opaque (to me anyway). But still it's a real humdinger.

Google Books has Writers of the Dark, the book of Lovecraft's letters to Leiber:

• Writers of the Dark @ Google Books

That link opens the contents page, and many of the links are live. I had forgotten the book includes many of Leiber's stories and essays, including several about Lovecraft's work.

EDIT—only the letters by Lovecraft and the first three of Leiber's stories are actually readable, despite many other things looking like links. Well hey, it's something anyway.

I'm reading The Sunken Land from that link. It's a really nice tale of the Twain, and is very definitely Lovecraft-inspired. In fact it seems to me sunken (and occasionally rising) Simorgya is suspiciously similar to the island in Lovecraft's short story Dagon (which I believe rose from the sea?).

I've been searching far and wide for an article that used to be all over the internet called Fafhrd and Me by Leiber, which is the transcript of the ChiConIII speech I wrote about a few entires back. It seems to have disappeared entirely, and now I see why. Apparently there was a book published with that name, which includes the article as well as several other essays by Leiber. One of them is My Life and Writings, an autobiographical essay he wrote later in life I believe. Another intriguing essay included is called The Anima Archetype in Science Fiction. You KNOW I need to get ahold of that one!

This was a hard book to track down, but I managed to locate a copy on AbeBooks. Soon to be winging its way to me.

When I first read the Lankhmar stories I had no idea the protags were based on the author and his friend, but it was immediately clear that he puts his life philosopy into the writing, and somehow shares his thoughts and ideas more than many writers do. I did start to suspect Faf and his little companion were based on actual people, probably on a second or third reading of the series, just because they're so—I don't know what to call it. Not complex really (maybe the Mouser).*

No, I just realized what it probably was—I could feel that he was writing in large part from life experience and knowledge. Of course to an extent (a large one) it was also a response to Robert E Howard's Conan novels. Rather than grim hard determination, naked aggression, and flexing muscles, he substituted wit, whimsey, and humor, along with doses of wisdom, philosophy, and some delightful invented mythology.

In The Sea of Stars the companions debate about the prevailing theory among Nehwon's intelligentsia that their world is a bubble forever rising in a vast endless ocean, with all the continents floating on the inner surface. One maintains this is why at night you can see the lights of villages and cities in the sky on the other side. In one story an emperor has had a submarine constructed, which sits angled down on a ramp, ready to be dropped into the sea with him in it in case of some disaster, so he can escape through the endless water and try to make his way to some other world-bubble.

But you can tell, if you're paying attention, when a writer's ideas are coming from other stories or movies, and when they're from his or her own experiences and knowledge. You can tell when characters are based on stock conventions and when they're built from the personalities and quirks of real people, or at least created by a writer who thinks about real life and real people—either particular ones or in general.

* I'd say it's partly that the characters feel very vividly-drawn and compelling.​

This time I'll paraphrase. This is coming from the book Witches of the Mind.

Many people who knew him say his fiction is essentially the same as his speech, his essays, his columns, and his letters. It's the man himself, his personality, that comes through all of it. Having heard the interview the other night, I can see the truth of this. He does speak much like he writes—very properly, very articulately, and with a heart the size of Houston. If you've ever heard Ray Bradbury or Ray Harryhausen speak, he sounds much the same. A lot of people from the depression era do. He wrote three autobiographies—anecdotally in Fafhrd and Me, more seriously in Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex (a satirical take on Thomas Mann and a bit of self-mockery), and in My Life and Writings—an eight part article for Fantasy Review. And apparently he used his non-fiction writing (and often fiction) to clarify his thoughts on subjects that obsess him, and has included autobiographical fragments in much of his work. His reviews for Fantastic became increasingly personal through the seventies, and his On Fantasy column for Fantasy Review and his Moon, Stars and Stuff column for Locus have mixed reviews with opinion and anecdote. The autobiographies focus on his career, since he believed that "It's part of my whole adjustment to life, to be a writer and look at experience from the point of view of hunting for story material."

Still from the intro, and only about 2 pages into it. I did say the print is tiny, didn't I? This book is practically a pamphlet, but densely packed with info, at least so far.

One way in which he includes life experience in his stories is by writing about his hobbies. He was a fencer, mountain climber and loved to sail, and each of these interests was featured extensively in at least one of the Fafhrd and Mouser stories. There wasn't a lot of sword fighting, but when there was he would describe it in some detail. I remember in the story Bazaar of the Bizarre (on which perhaps Stephen King based his own Needful Things?) A strange fantasic marketplace appeared suddenly one night where none had existed before, and it was brimful of every manner of wonderful device and contraption, to the point that it lured people in and made them obsessed with buying things (that on later examination turned out to be broken pieces of perfectly ordinary junk), the Mouser found a manual that showed the most amazing fencing moves, guaranteed to overhelm your opponent and make you unbeatable. Fafhrd, with the protection of a magical veil over his eyes that prevented him from seeing illusions, wasn't so impressed (I forget what he actually saw—maybe an old blank notebook?). The Mouser paged through it and pored in some detail over the various thrusts, counterthrusts, parries and ripostes, and kept pointing them out to his friend. There was also a story (might be the same one?) where they talk at length about the various foot positions (first, second, fourth, etc) in fencing, which are the same as in ballet (one of Harry Fischer's—aka the Mouser's—hobbies).

A few of the stories feature sailing, always with great detail about the boats and the experience of sailing. Fafhrd is the hardy seaferer (coming from practically Viking stock), and, befitting of one named for a cat, the Mouser is ill-at-ease on the sea.

And then there's Stardock—name of a story and a mountain in the Trollstep range near Fafhrd's beloved village Cold Corner. The twain have prepared and trained for the challenge of climbing to its peak, something never accomplished though many, including Fafhrd's father, have tried. They've got special gear—the Mouser had a fancy retractable pole custom-built, with a hook at the end, that's flexible enough to arch out when extended with each end jammed against an outcropping, and strong enough for either of them to climb on, and Faf brought an ice climbing axe and a set of pitons. Fafhrd is the experienced climber, having spent his youth apparently climbing mountains before breakfast most days (according to his own self-mythologizing, which is probably about half true), while the Mouser is more experienced in scaling the stone walls of cities in order to break in and pilfer trinkets and baubles. The story is essentially a near-vertical travelogue, and all the detail about various apsects of climbing make it delightful. It's one of my favorites for that reason.