Weird Tales was not the only pulp that C. L. Moore read, nor the only one she submitted stories to. While it might seem that she was selling everything that she wrote (and Moore would say as much in some later interviews), her letters in 1934 show that Farnsworth Wright, editor at Weird Tales, wasn’t accepting everything that came off of C. L. Moore’s typewriter—and so Moore splashed the science fiction pulps, selling “The Bright Illusion” to Astounding for its October 1934 issue—and that story has an interesting origin:
Yes, I do much more revising that I care about. Have to, tho it simply sickens me, and I hate everybody in sight while laboring away at the disgusting job. A story of mine which I’ve just sold to ASTOUNDING and which will appear in Oct. is really a third of one original N.W.Smith tale. I had that almost finished when I saw that it was two stories, and split it apart. Then the half I got to work on began to show amoeba-like tendencies toward division, and the third attempt resulted in THE BRIGHT ILLUSION, which I’ve sold, to Astounding. The other two nuclei are still simmering gently in the back of my mind, and may emerge some day.
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 5 Jul 1934, MSS Brown Digital Repository
“The Bright Illusion” starting out as a Northwest Smith story makes sense; the protagonist Dixon is broadly similar to Smith in Moore’s previous stories, although not as well developed. As to the original story, Moore would expand on that:
I wrote a story once, which I don’t believe you ever saw—starting out as my story “Greater Glories” started with a man lost in the interior of a giant body, being swept into its brain-chamber and finding himself in the presence of a god whose people have almost completed their race-goal. The people are of peculiar physical structure which permits their amalgamation into one immense and rather horrid-looking mass, like a great vine budded with individuals who by now have sunk their individuality into the whole, being drawn together by a common race-love which through the millennials [sic] of life has grown out of and taken the place of all other forms of attraction between individuals. The race has become a unit, but incomplete as the god is incomplete, because each lacks the essential attributes of the other. They are reaching their ultimate goal, which is the union of god and united people, into a perfect whole which is to go on, perhaps, as no more than an atom at the bottom of some tremendous scale of unknown evolution—somewhere. I didn’t sell the story, and finally cut it up into “Greater Glories” and “Bright Illusion” and another mass which I haven’t tried to recast.
—C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 7 Dec 1935, LCM 87-88
Elements of this plot are clearly seen in “The Bright Illusion”: especially the emphasis on love, the god that knows nothing of love, and the way the god absorbs the energy of its worshippers into its flame. Where it differs is the narrower scope: instead of an entire race embodied in an individual, a human and nonhuman, pawns of cosmic deities (or deity and would-be-deity) meet and feel an attraction that is outside the experience of either.
So a smaller story, more personal, and maybe a little less weird, although very much outside the normal product of Astounding, which still tended to more traditional interplanetary stories, gadget fiction, etc. However, in December 1933 editor F. Orlin Tremaine had allowed that he was expanding the magazine to include “thought variant” stories that pursued ideas that maybe weren’t strictly scientific. Perhaps this openness to slightly weirder fare made Astounding a tempting potential market.
What’s most notable at the story for the time is the somewhat unusual emphasis on sex. Dixon, a human, is presented as a representative of a species with two sexes (and, implicitly, genders, although Moore does not make this distinction explicit); the high priestess of IL is from a species that has many more sexes as part of their reproduction, and ignorant of romantic love. They two meet, wreathed in illusion so each sees the other translated as a member of their own species, and attraction is immediate, mutual, and confusing:
And she was not even female!
He narrowed his eyes and strove to pierce the mirage for a moment; to convince himself that here knelt a colored horror of sinuousity and sexlessness. And verything within him cried out protestingly. She was human—she was lovely—she was everything desirable and sweet. And she did not even exist save as a crawling horror upon whom in her normal guise he could never dare to look.
—C. L. Moore, “The Bright Illusion”
While this is not a direct address to any LGBTQ+ issues of Moore’s day, there are definite parallels as Dixon and the priestess strive to understand their attraction and overcome their cultural preconceptions:
Could his own new love for her endure the sight of her real self? And what would happen to this strange flowering of an emotion nameless and unknown to her—her love for him? Could it bear the look of his human shape, unmasked? And yet, he asked himself desperately, could a love as deep and sincere as the love he bore her be so transient a thing that he could not endure the sight of her in another guise?
—C. L. Moore, “The Bright Illusion”
Compare this internal monologue to The Crying Game (1992); and Dixon’s overcoming of his preconceptions and acceptance of his lover for who she is (Dixon is still filtering his relationship through his human understanding)—and this immediately turns to the rather significant obstacles for them to get together, being biologically incompatible and not even destined for the same afterlife. Even the sexless god IL realizes there are some fundamental issues to their union:
[“]Love is a thing between the two sexes of your own race. This priestess of mine of of another sex than those you understand. There can be no such thing as this love between you.”
“Yet I saw her first in the form of a woman,” said Dixon. “And I love her.”
“You love the image.”
“At first it may be that I did. but now—no; there’s much more of it than that. We may be alien to the very atoms. Our minds may be alien, and all our thoughts, and even our souls. But, after all, alien though we are, that alienage is of superficial things. Stripped down to the barest elemental beginning, we have on kinship—we share life. We are individually alive, animate, free-willed. Somewhere at the very core of our beings is the one vital spark of life, which in the last analysis is self, and with that one spark we love each other.”
—C. L. Moore, “The Bright Illusion”
It’s not quite “the love that dare not speak it’s name,” but Moore is definitely trying to find the language and put it into Dixon’s mouth to describe an attraction that goes beyond the physical.
It has to be added that any view of the story that reads LGBTQ+ parallels in the story is a reflection of the prevelance of such issues in contemporary society. It’s notable that in the 1970s, when the magazine Chacal interviewed Moore, they had a different perspective on the story based on the prominent issues of the day:
Chacal: Upon reading “The Bright Illusion,” I got the distinct impression that it was a parable about racial tolerance. Am I correct, or am I reading something into it?
Moore: It just came off my typewriter, but it probably was. Not consciously, but the idea was probably lurking somewhere in my mind.
–“Interview: C. L. Moore Talks To Chacal” in Chacal #1 (1976), 30
Like many pulp stories that emphasize the power of love, such connections are often unrealistically sudden and powerful, which prevents the pace from dragging. So it was in A. Merritt’s “The Conquest of the Moon Pool” (1919) and “The Metal Monster” (1920), which share some elements with “The Bright Illusion,” particularly in “Moon Pool” the ultimately tragic nature of the love. Moore was aware of the pacing issue and not trying to drag the story out too long:
I suppose you know I’ve a story, THE BRIGHT ILLUSION, in the October AS[T]OUNDING. That’s one idea which must surely be absolutely original—or am I flattering myself? Anyhow it’s really a different story, tho I’m rather ashamed of the way it’s written. T[h]e idea needed more space to develop than the plot warranted, if you follow me! You’ll understand when you read it. I had either to make it abrupt or dragged-out and boring, and by the time I’m halfway through with a story I usually hate it anyhow and want to get the whole thing over with.
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 21 Aug [1934], MSS Brown Digital Repository
Considering “The Bright Illusion” is 17 pages, I think Moore drew the story out as far as the plot would sustain it. Some notes in another letter suggest that the story was otherwise written much like her previous Northwest Smith yarns, taking inspiration as it came to her, and worried that the result was too weird for Astounding.
I am wondering what you thought of my BRIGHT ILLUSION in this month’s ASTOUNDING. Was it bad? I can never tell if they’re going to be masterpieces or utter flops. The drawing was nice, tho. The first I’ve had that really satisfied me—it looked just like that. […] The great god IL in THE BRIGHT ILLUSION was snatched out of the April on the calendar that stared me int he face when I looked round for a good name, and the girl Apri in my new story has the same derivative. […] I did a drawing for THE BRIGHT ILLUSION which was pretty good too, tho was rejected as being too weird and too much of a contrast with ASTOUNDING’s usual type of drawing. The figures were simply heavily outlined a la McClelland Barclay, no background. They were afraid that the story itself was almost too weird for their rag, and thought the drawing would push it over the borderline. I’d like you to see it, tho don’t want to load you up there with my things.
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 10 Sep-9 Oct 1934, MSS Brown Digital Repository
Irrespective of her worries, Moore retained a fondness for the story, and sent a copy to Barlow, who had proposed publishing a collection of her weird fiction.
Despite your preference, I find I like it better than BLACK GOD’S KISS. It’s so nice and sentimental, and really ingenuous. I think. It took such an awful lot of struggle to figure out some way of solution that I’m very fond of the thing. I’ll send you my illustration for it, and the draft for the JULHI illustration, which is all I have of the drawing now—that is, if I can find it. (Heavens how involved my paragraphs do get.)
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 31 Dec 1934, MSS Brown Digital Repository
Barlow thought enough of the story to mention it to Lovecraft, who did not usually buy Astounding:
Oct. W.T. about average, on the whole. The Moore item is really very notable—full of intensity & atmospheric suggestion of encroaching dream-worlds which none of the other authors seem able to achieve. I’ll try to look up the item in Astounding, even though it be less free from the hackneyed & conventional.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, [26 Oct 1934], O Fortunate Floridian 187
Ultimately, Barlow had to send the copy of “The Bright Illusion” to Lovecraft:
Thanks very much for “The Bright Illusion”, which I had not seen before. There is splendid atmosphere in it, & the conception of a whole alien world with a hypnotic false front is really masterful. On the other hand, the mawkish, sticky, 1900-period sentimentality I’d hardly nominate this effusion for use in your select volume—assuming that your plans stops short of complete works.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, [16 Mar 1935], O Fortunate Floridian 217-218
Lovecraft’s dislike of the “mawkish” bits is typical—he also disliked when Merritt did something similar in “The Conquest of the Moon Pool”—but his praise for her handling of the alien world is genuine, since it was very different from the typical idea of a human landing on an Earth-like world with human-like aliens.
Astounding had its own letters column, called “Brass Tacks,” as with Weird Tales and the “Eyrie,” this was a forum where readers could weigh in on the stories in previous issues, sometimes getting into technical matters of science and mechanics. The story was well-received:
And last, but far from least, there is C. L. Moore. I read five of her stories without being impelled to rave. Good jobs they all were, and done in workmanlike fashion; but nothing calling for repeated reading. Then The Bright Illusion! Man, there is a job of work—adult fare, that; no fooling! I have read it three times so far, and haven’t got it all yet. I have no idea whether Miss (or Mrs.) Moore is a young girl with an unusually powerful mind and a full store of unsullied idealism, or whether she is a woman whose long and eventful life has shown her that real love is man’s supreme dower. But whoever or whatever she may be, I perceive in her Bright Illusion a flame of sublimity brighter, whiter, fiercer, and more intense even than the eternal fire of IL’s great temple.
—Edward E. Smith, Astounding Stories Jan 1935
E. E. “Doc” Smith was well-known as the author of the Lensman series, and his occasional letters in the ‘Eyrie’ (and reference to this as her sixth story) showed him to be a regular reader of Weird Tales—and curiously enough, he knew what many WT readers did not, which was that Moore was female. It would seem as if she had landed another successful market.
“The Bright Illusion” was published in the October 1934 issue of Astounding Stories. Scans of this issue are available to download from Pulp and Old Magazines and Words Envisioned.
For readers who want to read more about the origin of “The Bright Illusion” and its origins, Marcos Legaria has a detailed article: “C. L. Moore’s “To What Dim Goal” and Its Progeny” in Penumbra: A Journal of Weird Fiction and Criticism, 2023.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
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