Musings on Fritz Leiber

I was reading The Sunken Land last night (working my way through the second book, Swords Against Death) and I was struck again and again by his power, economy and—I don't know what to call it—panache? Sparkle? There's something I can't quite put into words yet that he can do. So instead I'll just drop a few of his phrases in here.

He sniffed the raw, salt air​

He smiled and made a wide gesture that meant "No."

he was content to drink in the awesome, age-old scene, swaying to keep balance, feeling each movement of the boat and at the same time sensing, almost as if it were something akin to himself, the godless force of the elements. ​

Feeling, sensing—there's a lot I would mark as telling here, but then this was written long ago (40s, 50s? Not sure), and in omniscient, so the rules are a bit different. I like that the godless force of the elements is inside him as well as outside.

It was then the thing happened that took away his power to react and held him, as it were, in a spell. Out of the surging wall of darkness emerged the dragon-headed prow of a galley. He saw the black wood of the sides, the light wood of the oars, the glint of wet metal. It was so like the ship of his imaginings that he was struck dumb with wonder as to whether it was only another vision, or whether he had had a foreglimpse of it by second sight, or whether he had actually summoned it across the deeps by his thoughts. ​

This is the moment reality becomes infected with dream. This happens a lot in the stories. He's held in a spell, and then he sees a ship just like one he had imagined a little while ago while thinking about Simorgya, the sunken land. He goes through three possibilites—either he's imagining it again (but there were three nice juicy details making it feel pretty real), or the earlier vision was a foreglimpse, or perhaps he summoned it with his imagination. It's a progression toward beginning to believe it's magical in nature, and perhaps he made it happen. I like that he thought about a couple more mundane but still strange possibilities first, rather than jumping straight to the magical one.

The Mouser cried out and pushed over the tiller, his body arched with the mighty effort. Almost too late the sloop came out of the path of the dragon-headed prow. And still Fafhrd stared as at an apparition. He did not hear the Mouser's warning shout as the sloop's sail filled from the other side and slammed across with a rush. The boom caught him in the back of the knees and hurtled him outward.
​

I like the details of Fafhrd standing like one trapped in a dream or a spell, unable to move, and staring as if at an apparition. Another suggestion of what the viking boat might be, and more supernatural than the last. I like that we've now seen Fafhrd's trance state both from his perspective and from the Mouser's. I like the detail of the Mouser's body arching with the effort of pushing the tiller. It's another catlike trait he has.

The spray-wet weapons sparkled as they clashed.​

Extreme economy. This sounds like it hails from Shakespeare to me, with invented terms like spray-wet. He means wet as a verb, not an adjective. The swords have been wet by sea spray. It brings in several images of motion at once—makes you think about the vastness and motion of the sea, spray coming off the waves (wind as well as wave action), and combines those with the clashing of weapons. Also the term sparkling invokes the sun overhead and its light. And it's all one of those very small but brilliant details that give a story life. So powerfully visual. I'd say this does double or triple duty, to connect back to my recent studies of Sail and The Man Who Liked Dogs.

Sputtering tarry torch​

Another minute detail but a brilliant moment. Sputtering and tarry. For me that invokes a sense of smell (at mention of tar) as well as flickering light and maybe sound with the sputtering. Maybe even a sense of the stickiness and weird texture/feel of tar.

It was borne in on him that quick death would be his lot if he renewed the fight at such a disadvantage, slow death if he leaped overboard in the mad hope of finding the sloop in the howling, heaving darkness. ​

Howling heaving darkness. Many images, all in motion, combined in that one. Visual and auditory combined. A lesser writer might have said heaving sea or water or waves. He said darkness. And howling. Like a living thing—a monster or something.

More thoughts occurred to me after writing that.

The howling, heaving darkness that the sea has become is the same as the wall of darkness from which the strange mysterious Viking ship emerged. It's the unconscious, mystery, magic. It's the strange spell (a sort of mental darkness) that overtook Fafhrd. It's the magic/dream infecting reality. They're all different words for the same thing.

He frequently uses light/darkness symbolically, in the same way he uses mist/smoke etc. Light seems to represent clear-headed thinking, reality/ logic, daytime etc (conscious thought), while darkness is the haunted mysterious void where night, magic, mystery and dream hold thrall. AKA the unconscious.

Many of his details seem to involve various types or states of light. Sputtering, brilliant, steady, in danger of being extiguished momentarily, etc. Sometimes there's just a faint glimmer or sparkling light in the darkness, sometimes a crackling lightning flash or a massive explosion that lights every crevice and gap in stark blinding whiteness before fading rapidly. I now think it's frequently symbolic of whatever magic or dream is threatening their reality. Wait, reverse that. The darkness of course is the magic or dream, and the light is lucid, conscious awareness and reality.

I haven't read much Conan, but in one I did read I noticed frequent use of blackness. I'm sure anybody familair with Howard can confirm it's one of his favorite metaphors/symbols. I remember something like black rain pouring down from a black sky onto a black land. It's powerfully imagistic/symbolic.

I think jewels and gemstones and skulls are probably as important in Conan and other Swords and Sorcery tales as they are in the world of Nehwon. There are frequently old brown skulls with jewels for eyes, and the jewels can be seen even in pure blackness, if faintly. Often the jewels (or perhaps a huge jewel inside the skull) are seen as the brain of the skull, as if their glittering or glimmering are its thoughts or dreams made visual.

When Fafhrd and the Mouser climbed Stardock they got a sack of jewels at the pinnacle, which turned out to be invisible in daylight but to glimmer in many colors by night, so they had to find two blind jewelers to sell them to.

I'm starting to think invisibility might also be symbolic. It's related to darkness and light in a way. There are a strange race of people in Nehwon called Ghouls who have transparent skin and flesh—they seem to be walking skeletons with a pink lacing or frothing of dimly-seen latticework around the joints (I think it's supposed to be something like tendons or connecting tissue). They breed horses that have the same strange genetic quirk, so they seem to be Death itself riding on its bony steed.

There's also a thing about body hair. There's a certain extremely decadent city where nobody has any hair anywhere, including eyelashes, and neither do their dogs or cats. It seems to represent an extreme development into over-civilization, a stage that happens just before disaster strikes a civilization that's grown too far away from its roots in nature and tradition and tried to substitute cognition for intuition. Leiber seems not to like organized religion or spirituality as a governing system, but he also seems to believe science and purely conscious thinking is incapable of replacing our natural awareness and traditions and instincts. He sees scientific/social planning systems of governance as dangerous and by nature tyrannical, a sort of usurping of natural forces inside of us (collectively as well as individually) that should hold sway.

The technical meaning of the word occult is unseen or hidden. So it makes sense that darkness, mist, and invisibility are all symbols of the occult (which stands in for the unconscious and its nightmare realm of Shadow). And therefore that light is its opposing force.

Oh, and really occult is a perfect name for the unconscious, since it's the part that exists literally 'below the level of conscious awareness'—the part we can't observe in action ('see'). It operates quite literally invisibly in our lives, except when we get glimpses of its products in dreams or in some of the many ways they show up for us in waking life (such as Freudian slips, sudden flash visisons or images, or persistent ideas that seem to be coming from 'somewhere else' etc).

Ideally symbols in a story should function the way they do in dreams, where often any meaning you could assign to it turns out to be one of the many things it's pointing toward. For last night's dream I came up with several possible meanings for one very strange but perfectly succinct image and it turns out all of them are true. The power and economy of dreams and their symbols is astonishing. You do need to be humble though, and willing to accept what sometimes feel like harsh or brutal criticisms. Often what dreams are telling you are the very things you already know but have been ignoring. That's why the unconscious starts trying to make you see them—because they're important and are calling out for your attention but you're ignoring them.

In fact it just struck me that

most likely dreams are the original prototype for stories.​

These little strange surreal narratives filled with powerful symbolism that unscroll for us every night of our lives, and that when we examine them are telling us important things we need to accept about our lives, but that we've been resisting. These little stories play out for us every time we sleep, and they may have been where we first came up with the idea of inventing narratives and loading them down with meaning that can be extracted with a little work on the part of the readers (symbolism). In fact now that the idea has occurred it seems pretty obviously true.

Last night I was reading The Seven Black Priests and once again there's a gigantic landscape form that has human features. Several of them in fact. The twain are walking through a region where there's snow and ice everywhere except for an area heated from underneath by volcanic action, where several strange deformed-looking hills resemble malformed attempts at becoming gigantic human bodies. One of them has 'eyes', which are gigantic clear jewels (spherical diamonds) partially emerging from eye-shaped sockets in the hillside. The Mouser climbs up onto Fafhrd's shoulders and pries one of them loose with his dagger Cat's Claw. They start to argue about who should be carrying it (this seems to be inspired My Precious in a certain well-known foundational text that created the Fantasy genre as we know it). Fafhrd predictably wins that argument by sheer brute force (though if he wanted to the Mouser could have cleverly swiped it away from him). It usually seems to be Fafhrd who, though he distrusts gods and religion and spiritual systems etc, gets caught up in their spell. He finds himself staring absently into the eye (as he did recently at a magically-appearing Viking longboat), which closely resembles a crystal ball, and apparently seeing things happening in there, and after a while he starts muttering in a strange thin voice that seems not to be his own about how once long before the coming of Man the land was alive and parts of it strove to take form and break free from their anchoring in solid bedrock to stride about on the earth's surface and accomplish mighty tasks. This is one such area where that attempt was very nearly successful, and one of the attempted forms was almost viable. But the coming of man put the earth into a deep slumber and those forms now lie immobile and dreaming vaguely of taking man-like form and breaking the hold of gravity and adhesion to Mother Earth. And now that they've taken its eye it's understandably pissed off.

This is another gigantic landscape feature that isn't an Anima figure or a Shadow figure for either of the Twain but more like a literal personification of some massive landscape element. This is becoming a repeating motif, and it's good to see they aren't always used for heavy psychological reasons but sometimes for much more fun adventure stuff like this.

And once again this motif is present on the book covers. Many of the gigantic forms are emerging from mist, but in the last one—Swords and Ice Magic—there's a mountain dimly visible behind them that, if you look closely, has human features in places, as if it's one of those vast, unfinished attempts of the earth to produce free-roaming avatars to do its bidding. I'm sorry—Nehwon, not the Earth. My bad.

I also notice on the cover for Swords in the Mist Fafhrd's entire body is arched. It's a gesture Leiber uses frequently, not just for the Mouser, but any time one of them is straining powerfully against something nearly immovable. It's one of those great descriptive words that gets so much across in a very compact package—an entire body arching with massive effort to change its circumstances through pure physical force. It's clear the artists who painted these covers (most of them were done by Jeffrey Jones) actually read the stories and noticed these things.

Looking at the construction of The Sinking Land

This one has stuck with me and I want to examine how it's put together. It's what I want to call a really tight little unit of a story, where everything that happens contributes to a sense of foredoomedness, of fate unscrolling in a very particular way that was unavoidable, and dragging the twain into these events. Fafhrd in particular, but his little buddy to some extent with him, apparently just because of their proximity to each other.

It starts innocently and nicely enough. It's one of the sailing stories. I always enjoy those because of Leiber's knowledge and firsthand experience of sailing apparently in various kinds of vessels, or at least he knows about several types and can describe them well. And when he writes about sailing there's always a bracing sense of power and vitality in being on the surging sea, especially in Fafhrd (his self-avatar). While the Mouser is no lubber, he wasn't raised on the sea as Fafhrd apparently was, and in this story we learn that he's built and repaired many boats in his youth (Fafhrd I mean—bad sentence!). For this story he's bought a sturdy but bulky and poorly balanced sloop that he then lovingly outfitted and upgraded with his own hands. He cut away some wood that looked past its prime, replaced it, did a lot of caulking and tarring to repair some leaks, replaced the square sail with a triangular one, raised the foredeck (hope I've got the name right) several inches, and carefully selected some choice lengths of wood that he steamed in a steam-house he built for the purpose in order to make outriggers to offset the boat's tendency to capsize. Here we get the full sense of a man immersed in a hobby or an avocation he really loves, that brings him alive like nothing else can. The Mouser seems caught up in Fafhrd's enthusiasm and happy to join him in this pastime that brings him so glowingly to life. This is one of the stories of their gradual return to the continent that's home to Lankhmar.

At the beginning of Swords Against Death, the second book, they've sworn to leave Lankhmar and never to return because they've both lost the loves of their young lives there, and they can no longer stomach the ratty, stench-y, corrupt sight of the place. So they set out to explore the rest of the world of Nehwon, and in an early story they were ensorcelled to get into a too-small craft and sail way out across the Outer Sea (the Atlantic) to that fabled land-mass that's said to exist on the other side of the world, that unspoiled wilderness continent that's only whispered about in legends and far-flung tales. I might also take a look at the structure of that tale soon, it's similar to The Sunken Land in certain ways, particularly the foredoomed sense of being caught up in something bigger than them that forces their course as if they're trapped in a spell or a curse.

At the beginning of the story Fafhrd is poised, standing brace-legged with one foot on a pontoon and one on the edge of the boat's deck, rocking with it on the waves, and holding his bow at full draw aimed down into the water, trying to catch some dinner for them. He's using a special fishing bow with front-weighted barbed arrows attached with light waxed line to a small reel on the bow. I love all these details, of how he refurbished the boat and that he's using a special fishing bow. You tend to get things like this at the beginning of the stories before the action really kicks off, and these kinds of details really bring life and vivacity to the story and the characters. After holding with a hunter's patience in this position, he sights a flash of movement below the surface and lets loose, then reels a fish in. He cuts it open, and in its belly discovers a massive gold ring, carved with what he recognizes as the hieroglyphics of ancient sunken Simorgya, a land he's familiar with only from his people's fables and legends. It's sort of Nehwon's Atlantis—once a gleaming land-based civilization of advanced technology where the people played too fast and loose with the laws of nature, tried to take on powers that belong by rights only to the gods, and was struck down under the sea where the fishes now swim in and out of the square windows of its squat towers. As they're frying up some dinner Fafhrd says he feels he caught that fish for a reason, that the ring found its way to him specifically, and the Mouser denies fate exists or holds any sway in people's lives.

Hold on—I feel the need to re-read it now. I think I'm probably missing some important things. But maybe it's good to start with my own remembered impression and then get into the nitty gritty details. Ok, in fact, let me just do this from memory. I might re-read it afterwards.

The ring has a key-shaped extension that lays along the finger of its wearer, and there are a few etched drawings of what appear to be ships being sunk by monsters. See, here I feel like I should check. I might have some of the details wrong. But I'll check later and correct if necessary.

Does Fafhrd put the ring on? I believe he does. And that would be when he starts to get the foredoomed sense, as if things are progressing according to some fate that he's caught up in (like a fish in a net, or on a strung arrow perhaps?) He gets the staring-off-into-space thing again and starts to mutter in a strange voice or something, about Simorgya. He had told the Mouser earlier that his people used to load into a longboat every few years and sail way way out, past their usual stomping grounds, to where they believe Simorgya lay sunken beneath the waves, and there was always really good fishing there. But one year they had make the long trek and couldn't find the spot. Or something, this sounds a little off. But now, on their way back Lankhmar-wards, they've apparently crossed right over it, or are about to.

This is the point where Fafhrd has a rapid-fire series of flash visions of a strange Viking-style galley rowed by madmen, and maybe a few other things. Maybe visions of Simorgya as it may have appeared in its heyday, before it was sunken? Probably. The Mouser gets worried for his mental health (though it wasn't called that at the time of course) and is getting a bit spooked by all this strangeness. And then suddenly a wall of moving blackness appears on the sea, very close to them, and from it emerges the viking ship, on a crash course, about to ram them. The Mouser manages to turn the course of their boat just in time, but the sail knocks Fafhrd off and he lands right on an oar of the huge ship, from which he clambers aboard it to find it crewed by Northern berserkers very similar to his own people. None of them speak a single word, though they attack him. In the savage but small and very contained squall that the Viking ship emerged from the Mouser in the sloop gets turned away and loses all bearings. He follows the course he believed the ship was on, in hopes of picking up his friend again.

I feel like I'm missing some of the wording and structure that created a powerful sense of everything falling into place like dominoes, in a pattern that couldn't be altered until it had run its course. That's what really stuck with me from this story.

The strange galley is commanded by an even stranger madman named Lavas Laerk, some kind of visionary who feeds his crew only on strong wine and his own fervent drive to reach Simorgya and raid it of all its treasures. It's like a cult, they're entirely under his spell and driven to insane lengths by his mad visions, and are sworn to utter silence until their mission is complete. Fafhrd learns these facts from an old Mingol servant of Laerk's, who then dies because Laerk overheard him talking to Fafhrd. A short time later they put ashore on Simorgya, now risen magically from the depths.

The Sunken Land can be read online in its entirety as part of the preview of Fritz Leiber and H P Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark. Scroll down a bit to the Contents and you can click on the story's title to read it.

I've started re-reading it online and immediately discovered the story moves much faster than my description of it. In like a page and a half it's already covered most of what I said, far more succinctly. And I had forgotten the Mouser's forebodings of doom at the beginning, despite the fair weather and everything working out perhaps a little too well.

At the center of the story is the character of Lavas Laerk. He's a strange visionary genius, but apparently driven mad by his visions, or at least outcast from all human society because they made him really weird. All the men and his servant were in awe of him and spoke of him (when they did speak) in hushed whispers of admiration, but tinged with some sense that he was also a tragic figure. His full name is always used—never a pronoun or a part of the name. It's always Lavas Laerk. And according to a little poem that I think the servant related, Laerk seems to rhyme with dirk. I'm not sure what purpose he serves—perhaps he represents the mad ambitions of people driven entirely by material wealth and gain, and not aware (or perhaps arrogantly derisive) of the power of the spirit or of ghosts and magic, legend and fable. Those who hubristically try to live entirely through the logic and reason of the conscious mind, and turn a blind eye to the power of feelings, forebodings, and fate? Materialists who see things only in terms of their monetary value perhaps? I'm just guessing.

Lol—well, my interest in this thread seems to have petered out in the middle of trying to wirte about what makes The Sunken Land move forward at such a great clip. I suppose this means the Lieber Studies are at an end, at least in this tightly-focused and coherent mode. I'm still reading the series and I'm sure from time to time I'll make some discoveries and pop in here to report on them, but it will be more sporadic.