new writing: on fritz leiber's "a deskful of girls"

at the point

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I’m back with my next installment of my genre column at The Point! The first one was about C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau,” which you can read here (or here if you’re paywalled out), and this one is about Fritz Leiber’s “A Deskful of Girls.” Check it out:

People don’t really understand each other: that’s at least half of what makes stories run at all. Fritz Leiber, who grew up with a traveling Shakespeare troupe, might have absorbed this fact before most people. By the age of four (the family legend had it), he knew most of Hamlet’s lines by heart. Embedded as he was in these plays, watching Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies of crossed communications, mistaken twins, misplaced mistrust and disguised selves, he learned that lesson early. As a professional writer of speculative fiction, Leiber would go back to Shakespeare often, setting stories backstage at Shakespeare productions or lifting a line to title a book. The greatest tribute he would pay to Shakespeare, though, was his interest in human doubleness: double agents, double crossings, double hearts.

I think this piece and the Northanger Abbey piece are some of the better things I’ve written lately. So… read it!¹

Fritz Leiber is somebody whose current reputation I don’t quite know. If I mention reading his books or writing about him to somebody who reads him, they light up. It is a level of enthusiasm about a writer I have not encountered with anybody else, except for Ursula K. Le Guin. The people who know him really, really love him. You basically can’t throw a rock without finding an affectionate tribute to his work somewhere. But the same people often follow their excitement up with a lament he’s fallen out of fashion and is no longer read much. That could be true. It could also be that he’s fallen out of fashion, but is very much still read. I just don’t know.²

When he was alive, however, Leiber was a very big deal in the world of SFF writing. Unlike the next author in the series (Craig Strete), he wasn’t an obscure writer. In terms of readership, he was huge. A whole issue of the magazine Fantastic was just dedicated to Fritz Leiber, something the editor thought might never have happened before with any author:

Furthermore, he never exactly had a decline, where he peaked in terms of notability and never really mattered afterward. In 1959, he’s referred to as “a veteran” because he’d been publishing since 1934. The Ghost Light, the anthology that contains “Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex” (an autobiographical essay) and a mix of new and old work, comes out in 1984. Leiber’s life had a lot of ups and downs of its own, particularly because of his alcoholism, but he had the kind of career that I think just about anybody would want. He wrote a lot, he was read with care, and he was respected and loved.³

I first read “A Deskful of Girls” in this collection of Leiber stories, and coming as it did after “The Girl With The Hungry Eyes” and “Coming Attraction”—which are both circling around these sexual dynamics but, in my opinion, less successfully—my first thought was something like “Fritz Leiber has a problem with women, but he knows it.” That is not quite true, or at least it makes his work sound sort of misogynist, which it isn’t. It is more accurate to say that Fritz Leiber had a problem with his problem with women, and he wasn’t really willing to let it go. It’s not in every story, but it is in the stories where his women characters are at their most interesting.⁴

When drafting this piece I found myself edging up to the position Joanna Russ takes various places, which is basically that speculative fiction is more suited to writing about women, and whenever I am writing I’m sort of convinced and then when I’m not writing I ask myself “is that true, McClay?” and decide no, it’s not true. Then when I start writing again I’m like… 😈 no 😈 it’s true 😈 it’s all true 😈

A small disclaimer about this article: in addition to his many other virtues, Fritz Leiber was prolific. From his first publication in 1934 to the end of 1958—the year “A Deskful of Girls” was published—he published over eighty stories, including four novels. To attempt to synthesize all of those stories in a brief column would be very foolish, and so I’m not even going to try. I have read a lot of Fritz Leiber, but I have not read all of Fritz Leiber. Other than Fritz Leiber himself, I’m not sure anyone has.

ETA: Also, many thanks to Becca Rothfeld and Julia Aizuss for their work on this.

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One thing I did not really discuss in the piece at all, because it would have been redundant with the C.L. Moore article, is that Leiber too was a Lovecraft protege and they corresponded a little before Lovecraft’s sudden death. (His wife, Jonquil, knowing Leiber didn’t quite have the guts to reach out, wrote to Lovecraft herself to set up the connection.) Leiber—and, later, Joanna Russ,⁵ who will not be featuring in the column but can show up here as much as she wants—are two writers who take a lot from Lovecraft but move in a different direction with it.⁶

For Leiber, a big part of it is that he introduces into the cage of human experience how we relate to other people, and, more particularly, how men relate to women. You are not simply trapped by the human requirement to perceive the world in terms of space and time but by the limitations of your own viewpoint. In a mostly light-hearted story about a kitten, “Space-Time for Springers,” the kitten is very much convinced he will turn into a human being. And the odd thing is, he might be right, or rather, he might have been right, had things in the story happened slightly differently. But before they do resolve, and he is in this window when perhaps he could become a person but is currently a cat, the kitten is impervious to the laws of space-time as people understand and experience them. It’s only when he’s decisively forced into one state rather than the other that he loses this ability.⁷

Lovecraft was, I think it’s fair to say, not terribly interested in human intersubjectivity, and he was even less compelled by romance⁸ or sex as a dramatic subject.⁹ But it’s not that he thought sex was evil so much as he didn’t seem to think it was worth discussing at all.¹⁰ For Leiber, sex is part of the cage. Except it’s also good. Most people don’t want a world without sex, whereas they might want to see what it would be like to have perceptions that didn’t require time. Nevertheless, sex is still a kind of distortion field between what you can see and what you could see. Or… it’s a little bit more nuanced than that, but that’s what the essay is fleshing out.¹¹

Finally: somebody needs to make a fourth movie of Conjure Wife with the tagline “women be hexin’.” Thank you. It doesn’t even need to be a good movie. It just needs to exist. For me. Sarah Paulson should be in it but I’m not picky. Just don’t let Anna Biller direct it. She will not get it and anyway she did witches already. I dunno who should direct it. Greta Gerwig? Hideaki Anno? Martin Scorsese? Catherine Breillat?

While you’re working on getting the director, let me add that these old covers provide excellent vision board material. I think my favorite is the far right but it’s a hard call.

The next story is going to be Craig Strete’s “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock.” As I mentioned above, Strete is a little bit more obscure than the other three subjects, though he still fulfills my requirement of “not being a crossover writer.” You can, however, buy a DRM-free copy of the book that contains this story for $4.

1. This footnote assumes you did read it and thus its contents will be explicable but I rewatched Some Like It Hot and watched The Seven Year Itch and here are my capsule reviews.

Some Like It Hot

I used to not find this movie very funny. I felt like Monroe was luminous but the rest was so-so. On rewatch I asked myself… why did I think that? What exactly was wrong with me? The moment Tony Curtis busts out his faux Cary Grant accent when he’s pretending to be a millionaire is just one moment among many that made me crack up.

But I was right about one thing: Monroe is luminous. I know she was kind of nightmare behind the scenes of this movie, that she was in decline and had to retake scenes a million times, that Tony Curtis said kissing her was like kissing Hitler, whatever. She’s perfect in this movie and it would be dead in the water without her. Billy Wilder is a genius and must be protected at all costs.

The Seven-Year Itch

Never has a movie made me feel more like Andrea Dworkin. Billy Wilder is an idiot and must be destroyed. I wrote this ten minutes into the movie but subsequent minutes did not revise my opinion.

2. Recently, for reasons having nothing to do with Fritz Leiber, I was thinking to myself “there’s a kind of writer… not exactly canonical… but if you mention them people are like ‘oh, I love so and so’… but they don’t attract the fervor of a cult classic… what are they called…” anyway I think the answer is “normal.”

3. And while his life had its troubles, until his wife Jonquil’s early death in 1969, he had a very happy marriage. I really like this picture of him and Jonquil.

4. i.e. the girlfriends in every Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story I’ve read are very like… I’m A Girlfriend. (All characters in a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story that are not the two of them are ultimately not that important, in my limited experience.)

5. “In a perfect world I would not have to be a feminist and gay activist and I could spend my life discussing H. P. Lovecraft.… In a perfect world, there would be unlimited used-book stores of fantasy and wonderful libraries of it and a Lovecraft Cafe where folks could hang out from time to time and discuss H[oward] P[hillips] L[ovecraft]’s work when the mood struck them. And he would’ve lived twice as long and written much more.” (from her intro to her essay “On the Fascination of Horror Stories, Including Lovecraft’s”)

6. That is, their work is mostly not “Lovecraftian” in the way the term implies to most of us (i.e. no tenebrous eldritch monstrosities beyond the power of man to describe oh why did I seek the lure of forbidden lore and uncover what man was not meant to know now I’ve become a fish glug glug).

7. Russ, on the other hand, expresses the appeal Lovecraft holds for her like so (this is also from “On the Fascination of Horror Stories, Including Lovecraft’s”):

Horror fiction is a fiction of extreme states (Adrienne Rich uses the phrase “poetry of extreme states” to describe some of Emily Dickinson’s work) and the message is (as Rich notes): Someone has been here before. You’re not alone. That is a comforting and important message to receive in a culture that is bent on denying the destructive, the irrevocable, the terrifying, and the demonic.…

At its best, horror fiction does attempt to give the subjective, undiluted, raw, absolute, global experience-in-itself of these basic human issues.

I might write an eventual newsletter about this aspect of Lovecraft but, just to be honest, writing about Lovecraft feels like trying to write about David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick in that there’s a lot of conversation that’s already happened that it feels like you’d have to catch up on to say anything at all. So I need to figure out my own way of doing it.

8. Of course, there are always exceptions.

9. The relationship that Lovecraft is somewhat interested in is friendship, not romance.

10. I always feel like I have to mention that Lovecraft was really racist somewhere, just in case somehow the one time I don’t it’s also the one time somebody needed to be told that fact. Is this what it’s like to be a Heidegger scholar?

Anyway, though, just to add some bonus material down here, I was completely thrown in the recent-ish-when-I-am-writing-this-footnote interview Ross Douthat did with right wing something or another Jonathan Keeperman to find that Keeperman’s publishing house puts out Lovecraft and Robert Howard. Is there anybody, in the world, outside of God himself (with the Bible), who is more in print than H.P. Lovecraft? There are like a hundred guys out there devoted to tending the unholy flame of his work. Isn’t there some actually obscure racist writer guy you could rescue from oblivion? It’s not even as if Woke Lovecraft Fans are out there censoring “The Rats in the Walls.” Woke Lovecraft Fans are just writing footnotes like this one! That’s all they do!

11. I don’t really know what this says about me (well, I do) but the thing that always kind of gets me with Marilyn Monroe isn’t all the obvious bad stuff but just that she never got paid like she deserved. She only ever got $50 for that nude that ended up in Playboy.…