Musings on Fritz Leiber

I forgot to mention in that last post that after discovering Campbell Leiber was able to separate his Anima from his Shadow, which was a huge step in the right direction. Their being fused was what made the Anima figures so threatening, and probably also made it very difficult to work out any Shadow problems.

Very happy to report that in the final chapter—Leiber's second Jungian period—things seem to take a turn for the (much) better. It all seems to have been sparked by Joseph Campbell, who was a follower of Jung. Byfield mentions the multi-part TV show where one of the famous news reporters (Dan Rather or somebody, I forget) interviewed him. I've seen that, and it was profoundly inspiring. It happened some time in the Seventies, and possibly was where George Lucas first discovered Campbell's ideas, which he incorporated into the first Star Wars movie. It seems Lieber must have discovered Campbell earlier, through books I assume, because by 73 he was beginning to emerge from his lengthy guilt-funk. He reached his lowest point when he found he could hardly walk more than a block without needing to rest, and it was because of the alcohloism. He started to write again, and these stories would comprise the last two Fafhrd/ Mouser books The Knight and Knave of Swords and Swords and Ice Magic, in which the Twain have relocated from Lankhmar to Rime Isle at the northermost tip of Nehwon, which resembles Scandinavia, and where the inhabitants are refreshingly atheist, as opposed to everywhere else (though their atheism is a denial, because supernatural forces are everywhere in Nehwon). This is also when Leiber wrote several of his most famous and best horror/sci-fi works, and won all the big awards for his carreer.

It seems what he learned from Campbell that he had somehow missed in Jung was the idea that the Shadow and the Anima are preliminary archetypes, not ends in themselves—you work your way through them and emerge in a union with the archetype Jung named the Self, or the Archetype of Wholeness.​

It takes a lot of sojourning through the darkness confronting your inner fears and shame and guilt etc before this happens, but when it does you emerge a much stronger and healthier person psychologically. This is Individuation. At this point Fafhrd and the Mouser both became more grounded and mature (as Leiber undoubtedly had too). For the most part their dark Anima/Shadow figures are left behind (though there was the mysterious fish-woman who emerged onto dry land to steal back Symorgia's ancient trove of magical artifacts that the Rime Islers had stolen from them centuries ago—the one where she tried to bite off Fafhrd's hook-hand). And apparently some of their Anima figures become helpful rather than angry and condemning. Chief among them would be their two new loves—Rime Isle women who are the equals of their men, if not in strength or physical prowess, in many other ways. By contrast the earlier women they've met seem—I don't know—insubstantial or incomplete? Somehow lesser-than anyway. I've never thought much about it, but I suppose I'm about to be reading about it. Maybe it's fair to say their earlier women were juvenile fantasies, and the Rime Isle ones (Cif and... somebody) feel much more like real flesh-and-blood women.

Holy crap!! Leiber had a pretty shitty life in some ways. Partly he brought it on himself, I think he carried a lot of guilt. I just finished reading the chapter on the early Jungian period. I'll just summarize here.

Shortly after writing the death of Vlana in Ill-Met in Lankhmar his wife Jonquil (on whom she was based) died of alcoholism and a pill addiction. In one of his autobiographical pieces he seemed to blame her addictions on himself—he said she "caught it from him." Then shortly after that his mother (on which he had based Fafhrd's mother Mor) also died. Apparently at that point he blamed himself, or rather felt really bad about the way he had portrayed them in his writing. It seems he spent a good chunk of the late Sixties and early Seventies in an alcoholic stupor, not writing at all. And when he did dry out a little and manage to write, his Anima-Shadow figures had become darker, nastier, and far more condemning of the male protagonists (always based on himself). Byfield says at this point the Anima-Shadow figures became like the Greek Furies.

It was through this dark period he wrote the stories included in the second Fafhrd/Mouser book, Swords Against Death, in which the Twain are utterly stricken by the deaths of their beloveds. They leave Lankhmar and travel into the Shadowlands to see them once again, riding silently some distance apart, never acknowledging each other's presence. They manage to speak with Death (a rather minor Death, only of Nehwon, not all of the worlds) and he lays a geas on them—He'll let them each speak to their beloved briefly one more time if they accomplish some almost impossible task. They do it, and rather than the happy reunion they expected they each got berated and condemned, and warned that they need to stop thinking obsessively about them (the women) and start living life again, or they'll become like wandering ghosts themselves, haunted by endless grief (which they sort of already were). This was based on a dream Leiber had of seeing his own dead wife. If I understand right, Leiber spent more years after this still grieving before he emerged from it in the mid Seventies and launched into his second Jungian period. At this point I'm almost sorry I delved into this. The guy had a seriously messed-up life, and seemed to hold himself responsible for everything bad about it. His Anima-Shadow figures, when they were fiercely condemning, were reflections of his deep sense of guilt and self-condemnation over what he percieved as his own failures.

Tentative solution—it can be CPTSD, but of course that wasn't a diagnosis at the time. Future-Cody would know about it, but not past-Cody, the character in the story-within-the-story. I could have future Cody explain it all (as I did in the freewrite), but I don't want to do that. It would feel weird and preachy or something, I don't quite know how to put it in words now (I could explore it in a few more paragraphs, but not now and not here). I think what I should do is have writer-Cody lay out the way past-Cody experienced things, with the shock and the freezing-up intact but not elaborated on at any length. Present the symptoms without explaining the diagnosis. Astute readers familiar with the condition would be able to recognize it. And that way it doesn't stand out from the rest of the story as some modern DSM diagnosis inserted into what should be a 70s story. And drifting somewhere beneath the shock and the stunned sense of being close to passing out, some extremely vague unrecognizable emotions that defy his ability to define beyond a few words like dread, fear, and panicky desire to comply with what the bully of the moment is demanding of him so they'll leave him alone. Oh, other emotions that were far stronger and obscured the rest—shame and humiliation as the original wounds are ripped open and the original feelings burst out afresh. Yeah, actually that's a pretty good way to describe it. And that keeps it about the way I actually exprienced things, which is the point of all this. I can't write in detail about emotions I was unable to feel at the time.

In our early stories (The Anchors, The Comets, the original run of The Beastseekers, and even up through Tony and Kurt, our stoner-dude pairing from mid high-school) we never revealed any inner workings, vulnerabilities, or feelings of a sensitive nature. Undoubtedly that's because we were portraying 'ourselves' as tough guys, divorced from any reality and sanitized of anything that would make them less than masculine. You have to be careful in hero stories of undermining the characters' masculinity too much. Of course my most recent version of the Beastseekers had an arc from timidity to courage, but it's still important to reveal it only in certain ways. If you make your character too much of a wimp it kills the whole thing. I think this is largely what I've been dealing with—what exactly are the limits in such a situation? Not only had I never written any interior feelings of a main character before, I was also running up against cultural and personal limits I had never encountered. How to reveal vulnerability in a male character destined to become a hero without making him a whiny little bitch? There's no redeeming him once he's sunk too low. You can't have your readership feeling revulsion toward him. This last is new to me, I only thought of it here and now.

But Cody isn't set to become some kind of swaggering Marlboro Man or Clint Eastwood type—more of a vulnerable dude who just hadn't found his courage yet. He always had it (the capacity anyway). Sort of like the Cowardly Lion, but I can't make him a blubbering buffoon like that. Oz was a comedy in many ways, and certain things were blown out of proportion. Keep in mind, the characters were transformed versions of the people she lived with every day, with certain traits wildly exaggerated for effect. So what I need to meditate on now is how to portray him in his pre-trasnformed state, before he discovered his courage. I can rememeber how it felt to be me in those days, when I was pretty intimdated by some people, but I wasn't deeply in touch with those emotions. They were pretty mute. I could feel them restricting my behavior and my words, and there was a sort of shock that would wash over me, and I certainy couldn't have named the emotions specifically. It was more like a formless dread that I couldn't pin down. I would also freeze up at times, due to my CPTSD, but I'm not going into that in the Beastseekers. I tried it in a freewrite some time ago and it complicates things too much. If I were going to include that it would become the main focus of the story, and that isn't what I want. But since the whole thing is framed through the device of the older, wiser Cody journaling his memories, I have a pretty wide range of possibilites for how to present things.

It's good to explore ideas like this in writing now and then, it really helps to get things laid out so you can explore them further. Digging into the problem, trying to see it in new ways, from new angles. This is how you find solutions.

An Observation (Fafhrd was Too Much Leiber?):

The Mouser is very clearly defined (if also a bit complex), but Fafhrd is somewhat of a blank. I think it's partly that the Mouser has a lot of Bad-Guy characteristics, while Fafhrd is the Good Guy (the Knight and Knave of Swords). Actors always say the bad guys are a lot more fun to play than the good guys, and it's got a lot to do with the fact that the good guys are so bound by morality. The bad guys can revel in evil or in just wickedness and all kinds of states the good guy has to avoid, especially in times prior to the Sixties/Seventies when the roles weren't so clear-cut anymore (semi-antiheroes and the like)—when the lines became more ambiguous. Of course Leiber continued writing the Twain well into the Eighties, but their characters were defined back in the Thirties and Forties. I also think Fafhrd got a bit short-changed by simple contrast, since the Mouser was complex and had a lot of bad boy in him. At least Fafhrd was never as Goody-Two-Shoes as Hercules portrayed by Kevin Sorbo. That show had a pairing much like Faf and the Mouser, as did Conan the Barbarian, with the big-guy barbarian and the little-guy thief. Which is also, in modifed form, the Batman/Robin pairing (though neither is a barbarian or a thief, I'm just referring to size relationship).



I've seen it said in one of the many books/articles I've been consulting that Leiber possibly felt too much similarity with Fafhrd, as his closest self-analogue, and wasn't comfortable really exposing his own inner workings, which I think is the problem I was running into with The Beastseekers in its most recent form. I think it was never a problem with showing emotions, more one of revealing the deep vulnerabilities of a character who feels too much like me.

Byfield picked up on a few things I missed at the end of The Snow Women and in Ill-Met in Lankhmar. In the big fight that closed out The Snow Women, all the men Fafhrd killed were rivals of his in some way. That includes the father figure who was Vlana's age (his mother's age as well), and who was his rival for Vlana's affections. Symbolically killing his father and winning his mother figure (Vlana), onto whom he now transfers his Anima. But Vlana turns out to be as cold and manipulative as Mor and Mara both were, and then she conveniently dies in Ill-Met in Lankhmar. I suppose that's when his Anima gets transferred to Lankhmar.

I now want to go back and read The Unholy Grail—the Mouser's origin story, though I don't care for it much. It also includes a good deal of Anima symbolism, and he transfers his Anima onto his doll-like lover Ivrian. She doesn't resemble a mother figure, but an innocent and naive young girl instead. Throughout the series the Mouser has a thing for what Fafhrd calls 'chits of girls'—tiny waifs with big puppydog eyes who apparently (according to Byfield) remind him of his last happy days when he was an innocent boy. He also likes to surround himself with people shorter than himself when possible, and to dominate them through head games. Ivrian dies along with Vlana when the fire-trap apartment the Mouser put together for her goes up in flames, set by Lankhmar's infamous Thieves' Guild. I noticed on this read-through that the description of that apartment (which I went into some detail about a few posts back) included a lot of references to fire—wooden steps, lots of fabric hangings, rugs drapes and tapestreies, candleholders (dozens of them holding lit candles), braziers, a fireplace, and a stove (lit). And beside the fireplace, a neat stack of little torches for lighting fires with. Loads of foreshadowing of their imminent deaths while the boys are off on the mission set them by their women to make a raid on the Thieves' Guild, against which Vlana has a simmering hatred because they killed several of her friends. Sorry, I seem to have fallen into reflexive summarizing mode for no reason.

Back on Witches of the Mind

Oh shit! It just got up to talking about the Anima figures in the Fafhrd and the Mouser series. I'm finding confirmation of some of what I've already discovered, but I missed the Oedipal aspect in Stardock. I saw the elements of it but failed to connect them up. Fafhrd wants to climb Stardock in order to beat out his father, who was a climber himself but never made it up the Queen of Nehwon's mountains. And at the most difficult part, when they're talking about the possibility of just quitting and climbing back down, Fafhrd says he couldn't stop the climb "any more than you could stop after touching half a woman." I'm not sure that in itself is Oedipal—yes, the mountain is a gigantic goddesslike Anima figure, but does it in any way represent his mother Mor? Well, it's a cold stern goddess, covered with snow and ice, with long white hair (the Tresses, snow blowing constantly off its top, looking like hair cascading down). And it's the gigantic ruling mountain right near Cold Corner. And I did say earlier that he might have come back to Cold Corner to challenge his mother. The Snow Women, written some years later, definitely was Oedipal, in ways I've already covered.

There's confirmation of my ideas about Mor's and Mara's names* (well Mor's anyway)—apparently Mor means Mother in Danish, and Mara means Nightmare in several Germanic languages (!!). I had forgotten, but Fritz's son Justin, in his essay Fritz Leiber and Eyes, said that Mor was literally a portrait of Fritz's mother, and Mara of his wife Jonquil.

Byfield claims that The Snow Women shows Fafhrd's Snow Clan moving away from a purely matriarchal rule, and that this is why the women are so angry about The Show and all it's skinny, slinky showgirls that the men go to see. I didn't pick up on any of that, and I'm skeptical that it's there. But he goes on to say that Fafhrd leaving the Snow Clan and going to Lankhmar is an enactment of Jung's (and Neuman's) idea that when individuating from the mother a man often attaches his Anima to a city instead of a woman. Interesting. Well, that part does seem to fit, though I've never seen Jung say that, nor Neuman. But I haven't read all of Jung's books, and I don't doubt he did say it. Byfield has done his research, and I don't think he's just making stuff up. It's also possible I did read it and just don't remember it. Like ships and oceans, people often do refer to the city in feminine terms, in the same way countries are often called the Motherland. I'm really glad I got this book, though all this Oedipal stuff is pretty distasteful. And I must say, it really is amazing to now find all this deep symbolism packed into these familair stories I've read so many times and never once noticed it. I mean, I noticed some parts of it, but had no idea how deep it went. And how strange that I independently took it upon myself to obsess over study Jung several years ago.

* Lol—is it confirmation, or did I run across the idea in Justin's essay?

I noticed something intriguing in the clip from All that Jazz. When the camera first cuts to Jessica Lange the silver path he's advancing along is triangular (due to persepctive) and visually it seems to become an extension of her dress. Meaning the very path he's on is her (Death), and implying that it always has been. That's some excellent and very subtle visual symbolism folks. They don't make 'em like that anymore:

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It turns out Poe was not the author of the story, it was written by Leiber. Which makes perfect sense now, but hey, it was getting pretty late and I was almost deliriously tired. I should know better than to be posting like that.

I searched in vain to find a PDF or website with Baudelaire's essays on Poe, and, unable to locate any such, I hit up Amazon and bought a Kindle book called Baudelaire on Poe: Critical Papers. My hope is that the Bo-meister can bring Poe to life for me. I have a big book of Poe's works and I delve into it from time to time, but often he seems trite, old-fashioned, or even a bit silly. From a little investigation I did in my Poetry and Romanticism entry I discovered a few tantalizing tidbits that helped bring him to life—a few pages on the background of The Raven. And now that I've made the connection, All That Jazz helps bring him alive to some extent, since it's very close to the same story as the one detailed above under the false name Richmond, Late September, 1849. And of course (to tie it all in with this thread) they all connect to Leiber's story detailed at the top of the page—Midnight in the Mirror World.

I can't find any reference to a Poe story called Richmond, Late September, 1849. I think I misunderstood something from Witches of the Mind. I think there was such a story, but that isn't its name.

I want to catalog this here, mostly for my own reference:

• Symbolism, Aestheticism and Charles Baudelaire

Some very intriguing ideas relating to Poe and Romanticism. It seems he's at his best when writing about and connecting with Poe. He seems to have discovered a kindred spirit in him, as I have in Leiber.

"All That Jazz is a 1979 American musical drama film directed by Bob Fosse and starring Roy Scheider. The screenplay, by Robert Alan Aurthur and Fosse, is a semi-autobiographical fantasy based on aspects of Fosse's life and career as a dancer, choreographer and director. The film was inspired by Fosse's manic effort to edit his film Lenny while simultaneously staging the 1975 Broadway musical Chicago. It borrows its title from the Kander and Ebb tune "All That Jazz" in that production."
From Wikipedia​

So the movie is to his life what Richmand, Late September, 1849 was to Poe—his own autobiographical production, built from his former ones, about his own death, and on and on. Mysterious female death-angel. Like endless mirror reflections of each other. I'll bet he was familiar with the Poe story.

Edgar Allen Poe made the same choice in his story Richmond, Late September, 1849. Byfield says "the story is based on the fact that Poe left Richmond for New York on September 27, only to be found, drunk and delirious, on October 3 in Baltimore, where he died four days later." I don't quite understand how he could write a story involving his own actual death, but whatever. Maybe he wrote it in the intervening days before his death? No clue. But anyway, Lieber wrote his tale as a tribute to Poe, who was one of his earliest influences. Poe was alcoholic, melancholy, and more popular abroad than in his own country, and wrote poetry and supernatural horror. Leiber probably felt very much akin to him.

In Richmond, out on the streets, Poe meets a woman in black, whose eyes have a "strangely dispassionate distance to them." She claims to be the sister of Baudelaire, who was also Anima-obsessed and a well-known French poet of madness and the delirium of drugs and alcohol taken to excess. The woman knows Poe's poems about lost loves, like The Raven (is that what it was about?) and Annabel Lee. She claims no to know any of his stories, though she tells him her name is Berenice (the title of one of them). Apparently Poe had terrible premonitions about the coming Civil War,* and tried to distance himself from them by avoiding mirrors and remaining drunk. But it doesn't work. Discussing The Fall of the House of Usher, he notes that "The name Usher begins with the letters U and S and ends with the feminine accusative—"her," which suggests to him that his country will become one of his lost loves about which he writes.

Berenice says "You attribute your own morbid thoughts to the persons and scenes around you." He likens the part in her black hair to the wings of a raven, and he believes he is drunkenly identifying her with all the dead women he has written about (they were all real, with the names changed). He is also aware that Baudelaire has no sister, because they have written letters to each other. He seems to intuit the strange woman's nature when he alludes to The Masque of the Red Death and says "this chamber is the Red Palace and you its Queen." As she walked out, he crawled drunkenly after her, pleading with her to meet him in New York. At which "Her lips shaped themselves into an infinitely tender, utterly infatuated, truly loving smile and she called out clearly, 'Never fear, my dear, I will meet you again, sir, in Baltimore.' "

And suddenly I can't help but think about Jessica Lange as the Angel of Death in the movie All That Jazz, beckoning irresistibly to Joe Gideon as he lay dying in a hospital bed hallucinating her and remembering all the women in his life:

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Note he's smiling. She's the one woman who can possess him, that he won't be able to cheat on. Not the same situation, but it's an Anima figure standing in for Death. Is she an angel, or dressed for their wedding? And—is it just me, or right before the end of the clip, when his face is filling the screen, does he look a lot like Poe?

Here's the entire closing song number—a masterpiece: All That Jazz—Bye Bye Life—HD.
He seems rather happy about dying.

* Not in real life, it was added by Leiber, I believe in parallel to Jung's premonitions of WWII. He seems to have been just mixing people together willy-nilly, probably the ones he felt a close kinship or similarity with.

In 1964 Leiber published a supernatural horror story called Midnight in the Mirror World, a testament to his own deep nostalgia and regrets. Giles Nefandor believes himself to be a willing recluse. He was divorced from his wife some time ago, apparently by amicable mutual consent, and their children are grown and gone. Giles has the money to indulge in his hobbies—stargazing, playing chess, and playing classical piano music. I don't know if Leiber played piano, but the other listed hobbies are his own. And both lived solitary lives at the time it was written. This is going to get pretty detailed, but I don't see how else I can do justice to it. But it leads to some amazing things.

Giles has a telescope on the roof of his house (apparently a mansion). Each night, after his stargazing, he goes down the stairs back to his rooms, and one night he stops on the landing between two mirrors and under a chandelier. The chandelier is swinging gently from a breeze blowing in through a broken window, and he can see multiple reflections of himself in the two mirrors. Eight reflections to be exact. When the clock strikes midnight he sees the eighth reflection apparently strangled, and standing beside it a black figure, which vanishes on the final strike of the clock. He manages to be on the landing each night at midnight, and each night the figure moves one reflection closer to him. Byfeild claims that what raises this story above cliche is that Giles makes no effort to avoid his fate, instead the experience drives him to think through his past mistakes and issues, trying to understand what he might have done to inspire the intense hatred he senses in the shadow figure. He begins to suspect it's a woman.

The conclusion he reaches is that he's been too fainthearted—that he hasn't tried hard enough to find relationships or love. He wonders if "in his vanity he had dreaded failure, or merely the effort." He suspects "the Dark Lady was a generalized woman, emblematic of the entire sex, come to be revenged on him for his faintheartedness." He remembers the one woman he wronged—an actress named Nina Farinaera who had come to him for financial help and he had refused because her eagerness and desperation made him uneasy. Actually she reminded him too much of himself, a "brave and gallant fake," trying to hide from knowledge of her own failure. Her trouble was that she lacked the protection of wealth. She seemed to have wanted an affair, but he rebuked her, denying his interest and taking the easy way out by deciding to stay with his wife. After going back home from her failed request, she had dressed all in black and hung herself between two mirrors.

He realizes the dark figure is Nina on the sixth night, and the figure smiles at him. And suddenly he knows how lonely he's been, and that he's been deluding himself. He now believes he's been waiting for her to return since her death, or at least that he missed the sense of involvement she represented. His anticipation grows over the final three nights. He imagines it will be a glorious reunion and bring the happiness he's missed in life. He starts dressing for her appearances each night. On the second-to-last night she puts her hand on his shoulder, and he sees it as a lover's gesture.

On the final night the wind is fierce—so fierce it slammed the chandelier against the wall and broke all its bulbs. This time the dark figure leaves the mirror and embraces him. With one finger she hooks his collar and hoists him up into the air. Days later he's found dead, hanging from an arm of the chandelier by his collar and necktie. But his death is revealed as a liberation rather than a horror. The police officer who finds the body happens to be on the landing at midnight, and in a mirror he sees Giles, looking rejuvenated and happy, standing beside Nina. As Leiber decided the risks of drinking were preferable to boredom, Giles finds death preferable to the melancholy and self-recriminations of his solitary life.

Cont.