Other reviews:1
Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p 43-44. (Beccon Publications, 2002)
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 142-144, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991)
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Editors, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Kay Tarrant
Fiction:
Conjure Wife • novel by Fritz Leiber ∗∗∗∗
The Golden Bridle • novelette by Jane Rice ∗∗
The Giftie Gien • short story by Malcolm Jameson ∗∗
No Greater Love • novelette by Henry Kuttner ∗
Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by Frank Kramer (x9), Alfred (x2), Paul Orban (x4)
New Order • editorial by John W. Campbell Jr.
Book Review • by Anthony Boucher and A. Langley Searles
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Fritz Leiber’s first published novel Conjure Wife, which appears entire in this issue, starts with this:
“I keep wondering if she knows about Us,” said the woman with black button eyes. She played the queen of spades.
The queen of hearts trumped the queen of spades. “You can put your mind at rest,” said the silver-haired woman sweetly, gathering in the trick. “She doesn’t. Tansy Saylor plays a lone hand. Like most women, she thinks she’s the Only One. Co-operation such as ours is rare.”
“But I’m afraid of her. Oh, I know she hasn’t upset the Balance, and uses only Protective Procedures. But she isn’t our kind. Neither is her husband. They don’t belong.”
The silver-haired woman nodded primly, peering through her thick glasses at the dummy with the empty chair behind it. “I agree. The Saylors are a disgrace to the Hempnell faculty. Modern. No sense of the traditional decencies.”
“Yes, and she wants to make him president of Hempnell. She wants him to dictate to our husbands. She wants to condescend to us.”
“This talk gets nowhere,” broke in the stout, red-haired woman gruffly. “The point is that her Protective Procedures are effective—many things would have happened to the Saylors during the last ten years if they weren’t. And she hasn’t made the mistake of upsetting the Balance. So what can we three do about it?”
“Oh, the Balance!” said the woman with black button eyes, throwing down her last two cards. “Sometimes I think we ought to upset it ourselves.” She evaded the shocked glance of the silver-haired woman. “We’ve our Sounds, and our Pictures, and our Numbers, and our Cards. We could finish the Saylors in a whiff. There’s such a neat trick with cards I’ve just learned. Here, let me show you—” She slipped a dozen shiny pasteboard oblongs out of her purse. They had the conventional backs, but their faces bore representations of a cryptic sort.
“Stop that!” The silver-haired woman stretched out fluttering hands.
“Put them away!” ordered the stout woman harshly. She glanced at the door. “Quickly!”
But the eyes of the little man who ambled in were not inquisitive. With white beard and amiable smile, he looked almost benign, in an absent-minded sort of way. “I don’t suppose you played much bridge while I was gone,” he observed with mild joviality.
The silver-haired woman’s laughter trilled sweetly. “It’s his little joke. He always pretends that all women are fearful gossips. Well, at least I made the contract, dear. Four hearts.”
His eyes twinkled. “Very commendable.”
He settled himself in the empty chair. “Still. I imagine the three of you managed to find time for some very dark and devious plotting—” He chuckled innocently. p. 9-10
In this short opening,2 which is missing in the book version of the novel,3 you have most of the story in an eggshell. The main conflict is between the three woman above and the oblivious Tansy Taylor, the wife of a member of the Hempnell faculty, Professor Norman Saylor. The three women are wives of other members of the academic staff and, more importantly, are witches. The wider conceit of the book is that all women are witches, gaining the knowledge from their mothers or discovering it themselves. Married women use their power to advance and/or control and/or protect their (amiable but doltish) husbands. This isn’t an idea that is entirely convincing but it works on the relatively small canvas that Leiber uses for his story, and should perhaps been seen more as a metaphor for spousal influence on faculty politics. Leiber obviously developed a caustic view of this and other petty politicking during his own time in a college environment.4
The rest of the novel is told from Norman Saylor’s point of view and we quickly find ourselves in the middle of events—he is rummaging in his wife’s dresser when he finds some unexpected items:
The dry, dark-brown granules shifted smoothly, like sand in an hourglass, as he rotated the glass cylinder. The label appeared, in Tansy’s clear script. “Julia Trock, Roseland.” A cosmetician? Was Roseland a part of the name, or a place? And why should the idea that it might be a place seem distasteful? His hand knocked aside the cardboard cover as he reached for a second bottle, identical with the first, except that the contents had a somewhat reddish tinge, and the label read, “Philip Lassiter, Hill.” A third, contents same color as the first: “J. P. Thorndyke, Roseland.” Then a handful, quickly snatched up, of three: “Emelyn Scatterday, Roseland.” “Mortimer Pope, Hill.” “The Rev. Bufort Ames, Roseland.”
The silence in the house grew thunderous; even the sunlight seemed to sizzle and fry, as his mind rose to a sudden pitch of concentration on the puzzle. “Roseland and Hill, Roseland and Hill, Roseland and Hill,” like a nursery rhyme somehow turned nasty, making the glass cylinders repugnant to his fingers.
“Roseland Hill—”
Abruptly the answer came.
The two local cemeteries.
Graveyard dirt.
Soil specimens all right. Graveyard dirt from particular graves. A chief ingredient of Negro conjure magic. p. 10-11
There are some lovely phrases in that passage: “The silence in the house grew thunderous”; “like a nursery rhyme somehow turned nasty”.
Saylor finds many more strange items before his wife arrives home. He starts interrogating her, and quickly finds that her activities sprang out of his research years before into witchcraft and folk magic, and that she has experimented since then on a small but systematic scale. Eventually, after a long discussion, he pressures her to stop conjuring: she quickly agrees, and they clear the house of a multitude of charms, etc. When she goes to bed, and Saylor is sitting alone by the fire, he finds one last protective charm hidden behind a photo in a locket he wears. He burns it and, unknown to him, the protection it provided stops, and his life starts unravelling—he has exposed himself to the powers of the three women in the introduction. Almost immediately there is a phone call from an angry male student who complains about being treated unfairly, and who tells Saylor he is “not going to get away with it”.
Saylor’s next day at the college brings more bad news as he learns about an accusation of sexual abuse from a female student (this happens after various hassles from a number of colleagues and wives). The angry man phones again too. Saylor realises it all started going wrong last night, after he burnt the charm, but he shrugs off the connection as ludicrous.
The plot develops over the next few chapters: Saylor thinks that the stone dragon on the rooftop is moving down the roof towards his office; there is a bridge match that involves the three witches and Tansy and their husbands, during which Tansy’s diary (with notes of all her incantations and formulae) is stolen.
Saylor has a bad night’s sleep after the match. The next day, after again crossing swords with a couple of the other staff members, he gives a provocative lecture to his class that involves ribald comments about “premarital relations”. Saylor then learns he has lost the chairmanship position to another colleague (and husband of one of the three witches).
This is all developed in an engrossing and atmospheric way, and we get a good feel for the life and politics of campus life in this section. The novel is also gripping in places, and this is at its most intense in an excellent scene where Saylor is at home with Tansy, and he senses a large ‘presence’ behind him. Their cat Totem is missing as well, and (spoiler) they later find it outside with its “head mashed flat against the concrete”. Saylor buries the body and notices there is a large dog-shaped creature prowling around in the undergrowth. The climax of this scene takes place inside the house in the middle of a huge storm, with Tansy almost unconsciously stringing twine between her hands to produce a protective charm to ward off whatever creature is about to break in. There is an equally top-notch section later in the book when Saylor has to track down his wife and then gather the requirements to free her from the presence that had previously been shadowing him (but which she had managed to transfer to herself). He is not entirely successful, and she is left in a zombie-like condition. The rest of the book is an account of how Saylor confronts the three witches and retrieves her soul.
Overall the novel is a little uneven: the start is too compressed, essentially a data dump,2 and the ending has a soul transfer switcheroo that didn’t convince me, and that I didn’t completely understand. There is also the odd longeur in the middle of the piece, such as the house-keeping chapter on the train back to Hempnell after Saylor’s wife loses her soul. On the other side of the ledger you have the aforementioned scenes that are among the best horror/dark fantasy I’ve ever read. The superior characterisation, the relationship between Saylor and Tansy, and the hints of adult sexuality are an added bonus.
A very good novel, and probably the best thing I’ve read in Unknown so far.
The Golden Bridle by Jane Rice has as its narrator the jockey ‘Jinx’ Jackson, who tells the story in a colloquial, conversational style:
Say, that is mighty white. I do not mind if I do, though I remembers the day when I would not of touched beer with a ten-foot pole. Weight. Jockeys has got to watch their weight like it is tombstones they is putting on instead of pounds.
Well, here’s luck, mister. May all your double parlays give the bookies fits.
What’s that? Yeah, sure I am a jockey. Was. There is not no point in giving you the old three and five. You look like a right guy. Why should I kid you? I have not been up on a horse for four years. Six months cold for a jock is a wide turn, but four years—say, four years is—what the devil, I am washed up cleaner than a choirboy’s ears. p. 79
The story Jackson relates starts in Tijuana where he and his friend Winkie are riding in a race meet. While they are in town they come across a group of men harassing a strangely dressed woman and intervene. After the group of men are diapersed, she tells Jackson and Winkie that she has lost her horse and, when she hears it nearby, hands Winnie a golden bridle before disappearing up a dead-end alley.
It later becomes apparent that the woman was a Muse and the horse Pegasus. Winnie uses the bridle on his horse during the evening races, and wins that and every other race afterwards. Over the month and years that follow, Winkie becomes incredibly rich, but it does not bring him or his disabled sister happiness. Eventually he decides to ride one last race without the bridle to rid himself of the obligations and drawbacks of his wealth.
The ending that this final section produces is unclear, unconvincing and doesn’t entirely work (spoiler: the sister receives the bridle from Winnie, which somehow connects her to the race, and results in her death). The story is also longer than necessary. There is some compensation to be found in Rice’s entertaining storytelling and lively turn of phrase however, e.g. this description of Winkie’s disabled sister:
When I first sees Ditsy I also thinks it is true that she has turned into a red-hot momma. She has done something to her mouth so it looks like it has been swatted by a ripe plum, and she is wearing one of them “creations” that does not leave but very little to the imagination, and she is walking with two silver-headed canes, and her fingernails looks like they has been dipped in calves’ liver while it is still in the calf. p. 89
The Giftie Gien by Malcolm Jameson is based on lines from Robert Burns’ poem To a Louse,5 “Ah, wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us—” It opens with a scene where an unpleasant sales manager bullies his salesmen and one of the secretaries. He then leaves the office to meet and important client and is robbed and killed in the park.
After his death he finds himself in the afterlife marching alongside many others:
Chisholm found himself on a vast gray plain under a dull leaden sky, marching, marching, marching. It was odd that it tired him so, for it was effortless and timeless and the distances, though interminable, seemed meaningless. It must have been the monotony of it.
And then, also, he found those marching with him strangely disturbing. Some were healthy looking men like himself, except that most of them were gashed or mangled in some way, as if hurled through plate glass or smashed by bombs. Others were haggard and pallid, as if coming from sickbeds. But it was the soldiers that got him most. He had forgotten about the war. It had touched him but slightly, though his impressions of it had been irritating, but not in a flesh and blood way. The silly business of priorities, price controls and sales taxes had annoyed him exceedingly, and the outrageous income-tax boosts had infuriated him. Now he was getting another slant on the conflict, for hordes—armies—of soldiers were marching along with him. They were of every kind—Russians, Japs, Tommies, Nazis, even American bluejackets and soldiers—and mingled with them were miserable-looking civilians of every race. A pair of wretched looking Polish Jews walking near him had obviously been hanged but a short time before.
Chisholm edged away from them in horrified disgust. p. 98-99
Chisholm is eventually dealt with by a demon who forces him to experience others’ impressions of him:
The greatest shocks were to follow. He steeled himself for whatever opinions those first two wives held, but the current one had done a devastating job of analysis. Even the demon whistled. Interspersed between the major blows were minor ones, and not always shadowy. Bootblacks, waiters, taxi drivers—on almost every casual contact he had left a mark. Out of the lot there was only one that was glowingly heroic. He could not refrain from asking the demon about it. The demon bent his insight onto the wraith and pronounced:
“A girl you met once—a pick-up. You kissed her on the Drive that night, and then lost her phone number, you lucky dog.”
“Lucky?”
“Yes. She never had a chance to know you better.” p. 102
This story has a neat idea, and the marching scene provides a memorable image, but overall it doesn’t amount to much of a story.
No Greater Love by Henry Kuttner starts with a lazy infodump beginning that tells us about the narrator Denworth’s spendthrift ways and his unsuccessful business ventures—the latter are funded by an unloved but shrewd wife (if she dies he gets virtually nothing). We also learn that Denworth has his eyes on another woman called Myra.
The fantasy element of the story is introduced when Denworth takes shelter from the rain in a shop. Although the proprietor tells him there is nothing for sale he steals a charm bracelet when unobserved. Later, while having a drink in a bar (given gratis by the bartender), Denworth hears a disembodied voice. We later find this is a pixie called “Turzee the Brawler”, and he tells Denworth about pixies, and Oberon, and that he should return the bracelet to its owner. When Denworth later discovers that one of the charms on the bracelet has the power to make everyone love him (the free drinks), he refuses, and hatches a plan to get rid of his wife so he will be free to be with Myra.
The rest of the story unpacks this plot: he goes home to a wife who is now willing to change her will; he hears again from Turzee the Brawler (this time he has Oberon with him too) and they try to take Denworth “under the hill”, but he is protected by the charm. Later, his wife attempts suicide, and at this point a cop called Fennel suspects something untoward is afoot.
When Denworth later goes to see Myra he finds that Turzee has used her as a way of getting to him. This is an effectively creepy scene:
“Myra!” he called.
Then, in a corner, something stirred. With a sense of abysmal shock Denworth saw that Myra had been crouching on the floor, on hands and knees. She stood up, with a slow, timeless motion. Shadows veiled her face. She did not speak.
And, behind Denworth, something tittered shrilly. The low whisper of Turzee said:
“So there is nothing you love, Denworth? Nothing?”
“Myra,” the man snapped, his voice harsh with fear. “Myra!”
“We cannot harm you, Denworth. But we have taken her Under the Hill.”
Denworth reached the girl in a stride, his fingers clamping cruelly on her arm. He dragged her into the light from the window.
She made no resistance, following him uncomplainingly.
The red glow of sunset fell on her face. In the horrible silence the eager, satiated sniggering of Turzee fell like the goblin laughter of a brooklet.
It was Myra’s eyes, mostly, that—
It was the look in her eyes.
It was the memory, in her eyes, of what she had seen.
And Turzee tittered. “Under the Hill. She has been Under the Hill. She has seen the splendors there. She has seen the hall where we toasted Eve on the night of wrath. Tell your lover what you have seen, Myra Valentine.”
Myra’s lips parted. She began to speak, softly and distinctly. Denworth said, “Don’t!”
She stopped, but he could still look into her eyes. Something quite horrible had happened to Myra.
The red sunlight flashed on the Love sigil. Myra saw it. She walked straight toward Denworth, her arms extended.
And that was unsupportable. Denworth felt that he knew something of the horror that had touched Eve, the ultimate blasphemy. There are changes too subtle and illogical to be more than sensed; Myra had suffered such a change.
Denworth stumbled back. Myra followed.
The Love sigil drew her.
Turzee, invisible above them, tittered maliciously. p. 126-127
The final scene plays out back in the shop and involves a three-wish ring. Fennel the cop arrives at the shop to kill Denworth, and the latter (spoiler) uses his last wish from the ring to change into a spider and hide in the corner of the cellar—at which point a female spider, drawn by the love charm, comes for a deadly mating.
This story would have been okay if it hadn’t been for the padding, the clichéd selfishness and greed of Denworth, and the terribly contrived and silly ending. It is the latter that really drags it down. A pity, some of the fantasy stuff is quite good: it seems that when Kuttner gets away from contemporary settings the better his stories are (e.g. last issue’s Wet Magic).
The Interior artwork in this issue is mostly by Frank Kramer, who illustrates the Leiber novel, although there are also illustrations by Paul Orban, and another artist I haven’t heard of before, Alfred—nearly all of the artwork is lacklustre at best and poor at worst. Kramer does one decent illustration for Leiber’s novel (the beast behind the woman)—I would have added the double page illustration on p. 19-20, except that it is a completely inappropriate and inaccurate piece. Alfred provides a decent enough illustration for Jameson’s story. God only knows what Orban was doing this issue—these are the worst drawings I think I have seen him produce.
New Order seems to be the same editorial that appeared in the April issue of Astounding (except that any references to “Astounding” are replaced by “Unknown”), and which gives notice of a change of format from bedsheet to digest size (due to wartime rationing).
Book Review by Anthony Boucher and A. Langley Searles contains two separate book reviews. Boucher covers Out of Space and Time by Clark Ashton Smith, and produces a review that has an interesting fact or observation in just about every paragraph:
The Lovecraft influence is perhaps fading now, with the rise of the newer, school of fantasy exemplified by de Camp or Sturgeon or Rice; but the best of the Lovecraft school remains incomparable for the creation of the dire extremities of horror. And Smith, because he is a poet and a craftsman, has produced by far the best work in the Lovecraft tradition.
How much Smith himself has added to the field of fantasy is more difficult to estimate. In most of his work the echoes of Lovecraft and Dunsany drown out his own voice. Possibly two features, aside from the sometimes self-conscious, sometimes macabrely evocative poetic prose, are distinctively Smith.
One, which is odd in a man experienced in so many workaday fields, is the absoluteness of his fantasy. Lovecraft wove his mythos into our everyday life until we were haunted by the suspicion that the world was a dark and uncertain place. Smith rather transports us to dark and uncertain worlds and relates their appalling histories. These are wonderful and horrible; but they happened long ago or are to happen long hence—they do not bring you up against the choking realization that it is darker than you think.
The other, Smith’s most important contribution, is a guignol irony—a gentle skill in telling that which is so inhumanly fabulous as to be neither horrible nor farcical, but balances on the razor edge between the shudder and the titter. Read “The Monster of the Prophecy,” my own favorite Smith story, or “The Testament of Athammaus,” and try to analyze your reaction. p. 103
A. Langley Searles’ review is of The Midnight Reader by Philip Van Doren Stern. Searles states that this volume is an excellent collection for new readers, but not so much for long time fantasy fans:
[While] I have no quarrel with the quality of “The Midnight Reader,” I could wish it did not rely so greatly upon the commonplace when such a wealth of good—even great—tales never before collected might be readily substituted. H. P. Lovecraft, the modern master; the practically unknown, yet almost as great William Hope Hodgson; the versatile E. F. Benson—these authors have never been adequately represented. And much classic material lies untouched amid the work of H. R. Wakefield, A. Merritt, Robert W. Chambers; M. P. Shiel, and others. But the editor either is not familiar with it, or shies away from its relative obscurity. It would be pleasant if a new anthology presented more of the less familiar. p. 104
There is no letter column this month.
A must read issue for the Leiber novel. ●
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1. Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 43-44 (Beccon Publications, 2002), says that Leiber’s Conjure Wife “must be considered one of the most outstanding pieces of work even by Unknown standards” and that it “is undoubtedly one of his best in a long career that lasted up to his death in 1992.” Smith adds that although there was not much room left for other material apart from the Leiber,* “we were given Henry Kuttner, Jane Rice and Malcolm Jameson, all in top form.”
Smith notes that Kuttner’s novelette, No Greater Love, has an ending that “is a strange and very unusual one which was probably dreamed up first, the rest of the story being built back from it.” He also notes that “the ending was revealed, unfortunately, by the ‘thumbnail’ drawing accompanying the blurb on the cover!”
Jane Rice’s The Golden Bridle is “a beautiful piece of writing” and is “definitely not one of this author’s more lighthearted efforts.”
[* Smith overestimates the length of the Leiber at 70,000 words—it is closer to 52,500 by my OCR count, and Dziemianowicz estimates its length at 55,000 words.]
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 142-144, The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991) says: “Leiber’s suggestion that all humans are natural practitioners of black magic is the same sort of idea Jack Williamson explored in Darker than You Think, with his suggestion that man’s psychological dark side is actually a vestigial remnant of the blood of another race. Like Williamson, Leiber proposes that the so-called rational sciences are only deviations from magic. This sets up an interesting, although dry dénouement, in which Leiber merges witchcraft and science.”
He adds that “the story as a whole is so well-written, though, that one forgives Leiber for an occasional rough spot” and that “Leiber’s achievement here is the subtlety with which events turn against Norman Saylor.” He concludes by saying that, “Essentially, this is a love story in a small town setting. The other characters portrayed in the book are exactly what the reader would expect people in a small college town, with small town interests, to be like. But Leiber takes the petty social climbing of these characters and the age old battle of the sexes and shows that they have a terrible and sinister foundation. This story typified the spirit of the magazine, which held that the unknown could occur anywhere, anytime, for any reason.”
Dziemianowicz says this of Henry Kuttner’s No Greater Love—: “The ending is good, but like several of Kuttner’s other stories, it requires the introduction of a late, extraneous element to bring it about.”
2. Given Leiber’s theatrical background I wondered if this ‘three witches’ opening scene is a nod towards Macbeth. . . .
3. From a cursory look at the book edition, not only is the introductory passage above omitted, but the beginning appears to have been rewritten and expanded. In the serial, the point from where Saylor starts looking in his wife’s dresser to where he and Tansy agree not to talk further about the subject of conjure magic is most of Chapter 1 and runs to 2,500 words. In the book this section is 7,000 words long and takes us to the end of Chapter 2.
The OCR word count of the book version is 61,300 words compared with the serial’s 52,500.
4. According to Wikipedia, “In 1941[. . .] Leiber served as a speech and drama instructor at Occidental College during the 1941–1942 academic year.”
5. Robert Burns’ poem To a Louse is here. ●
