JE: Did the success of “Shambleau” generate numerous requests for additional stories?
CLM: No, not really. The editor of Weird Tales, Farnsworth Wright, simply told me that he would like to see more of my work. No other editors, at the time, wrote to me requesting additional stories. My success in the science-fiction field came gradually and only after the publication of several other stories. […] I didn’t want it to be known at the bank that I had an extra source of income. I wrote “Shambleau” in the midst of the Depression. The bank was a very paternalistic organization. It was already firing those people whose services weren’t really needed. I had the feeling that they might have fired me had they known that I was earning extra income. So I kept it a deadly secret. Using my initials was simply a means of obscuring my identity. —“C. L. Moore: POET OF FAR-DISTANT FUTURES” by Jeffrey M. Elliot in Pulp Voices(1983) 46-47
“Shambleau” (WT Nov 1933) struck like a lightning bolt—boldly original, and meeting almost universal acclaim. Yet the pages of Weird Tales are littered with one-hit wonders, authors who sold a single story and never made another sale, or who did sell again but could never recapture the power and promise of that first story. With C. L. Moore’s second tale, readers would find out whether “Shambleau” was a lucky accident or not. Within a few months, they found out.
BLACK THIRST by C. L. Moore
Another weird and thrilling tale about Northwest Smith, by the author of “Shambleau”—an astounding story of ultimate horror. —”Coming Next Month,” Weird Tales Mar 1934
Between November 1933 and March 1934, C. L. Moore had not been idle. The Great Depression was still raging, she was still working in her secretarial position in Indianapolis, and she now had a new, unexpected source of income if she could continue to sell stories. According to a 1976 interview with Chacal, her second story, “Werewoman,” was rejected; whether or not this was quite the order of events is unclear as some of her later interviews are contradictory on this matter, but it seems clear that she was emboldened to write several new stories and submit them to Weird Tales; editor Farnsworth Wright bought some of them and relatively quickly brought them to press.
“Black Thirst” appeared in the April 1934 issue of Weird Tales. It is the second published tale of Northwest Smith; the one-off space outlaw was now officially a series character. Set on Venus rather than Mars, with Earth as no more than a green star in the sky, it follows a similar mix of beauty mingled with horror, ray-gun action, and alienation—not repeating the plot of “Shambleau,” but strongly evocative of the elements that had made that story work, somewhat remixed. From some subsequent comments, it is apparent that Moore was at this point more likely to write by the seat of her pants than plot, and take advantage of sudden bursts of inspiration:
You ask for manuscripts. If what you mean is the original draft, all scribbled over, the only one I have now is the medieval-lady opus. I’ll enclose it when I return your magazines. It’s not a very accurate original, tho, for when I typed it for publication I made a good many changes as I went along. And as I remember, I changed my mind in the middle a couple of times, and deflected the course of the story. You see, I never know until I’m half-way through how it’s going to end, and usually have to go back and alter the first a little to hitch up with the last. I was nearly thru with SHAMBLEAU before I had the remotest idea how I was going to rescue Smith from her clutches. And in BLACK THIRST the Alendar’s relapse into primeval ooze was as much of a shock to me as to any of the characters in the sotry. I didn’t know until I had actually begun that scene on the edge of the underground sea how I was going to overcome the Alendar. Smith’s hairbreadth escapes were quite literally harbreadth, for I’m usually breathless with apprehension as I snatch him just in time from the awful dangers that beset him. Tho that’s all past tense now, I suppose. —C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 1 Jun 1934, MSS Brown Digital Repository
By the way, speaking of the Alendar, I wonder how other people find the odd names they want for characters. I usually glance around ind esperation and seize on the first hting I see. Alendar is simply Calendar with the C left off. And N. W.’s friend Yarol is a transpostion of the name on the Royal typewriter I wrote the story on. —C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 10 Sep-9 Oct 1934, MSS Brown Digital Repository
There is also a suggestion that Farnsworth Wright, following his editorial habits (see “Bat’s Belfry” by August Derleth), was revising Moore’s manuscripts as they came in. The exact nature of these revisions is unclear, though typically he asked writers to tighten up overwordy passages or would silently remove references to sex.
I trust your revisions may make Mrs. Moore’s second story as striking and interesting as this one. —H. P. Lovecraft to Farnsworth Wright, 21 Nov 1933, Letters to Woodburn Harris 86
The story is slightly more daring than typical Weird Tales entries. The third paragraph includes a bald reference to “Venusian street-walkers,” and the story deals with human-trafficking and eunuch-guarded harems in a way strongly reminiscent of Yellow Peril stories of white slavery and seraglios, an alien eugenics that treats the breeding of human beings like humans breeds cows or cats, and an almost homosexual element when the Alendar considers Northwest Smith:
“I realized how long it had been since I tasted the beauty of a man. It is rare, so different from female beauty, that I had all but forgotten it existed. And you have it, very subtly, in a raw, harsh way…” —C. L. Moore, “Black Thirst”
More than “Shambleau,” the expanding Interplanetary setting that C. L. Moore sketches echoes fantasy as much or more than science fiction. She speaks of the three planets (Mars, Venus, and Earth), but there are kings, castles, courts, and courtesans; payment is expected in gold coins; and Smith looks for swords and daggers as much as rayguns. If “Shambleau” was drawing heavily on Westerns, then “Black Thirst” seems to draw as much from her quasi-medieval fantasy setting in her pre-pulp writing. If there is a criticism to the story, it might be that it hews a little too close to the plot of “Shambleau.” Once again, Northwest Smith finds himself facing an almost spiritual as well as physical peril from a vampiric alien. While not quite formulaic, readers could definitely see how strongly it echoed some of the notes of Moore’s first tale.
Yet they loved it.
Donald Allgeier, of Springfield, Missouri, writes: “This letter is written primarily because of Black Thirst. I have a thirst (black or not) for more like it. I hope the next story by Moore is as good as this. . . . Who is C. L. Moore, anyway? Surely he’s not a brand-new author—not when he can write as he does. Could he perhaps be a new pseudonym for some famous writer? I thought he had just about reached the ultimate in his first story, but the second proved my mistake. Most authors would carefully avoid description of all those beautiful girls, but Moore handles it beautifully, delicately, and marvelously. The Alendar, too, is a worthy creation. I’d like to see a novel by Moore. —”The Eyrie,” Weird Tales June 1934
There were many more fan-comments in that vein, and Wright had already seen the promise of his new discovery and bought more stories from Moore–and Wright was careful at this point to follow her wishes and not reveal her gender, though that bit of gossip would soon make the rounds in fan-circles. Even her pulp peers were impressed by Moore’s sophomore effort; Lovecraft praised it to many of his friends. Though most of Lovecraft’s comments are brief, a few are fuller:
The present issue, I think, is far above the average—with your tale, the splendid Bruks reprint, the powerful Smith yarn with self-drawn illustration, and the strikingly potent, original, and distinctive “Black Thirst”. —H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, 3 Apr 1934, A Means to Freedom 2.727
The recent WT is distinctly above average—“Black Thirst” perhaps leading because of the utter originality of its conception, the vividness of its unfolding, & the ever-brooding air of hidden, transcendent horror just beyond one’s sight. A little less conventionality of the popular-romance setting & mood would increase the power of the tale. —H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 10 Apr 1934, O Fortunate Floridian 129
“Black Thirst” has a lot of conventional stuff, but the atmosphere of utterly unknown evil & menace is extremely distinctive. —H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [13 Apr 1934], Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 552
In 1935 when R. H. Barlow was thinking of re-printing the story for Moore through his small press, he apparently considered revising the tale—which Lovecraft disagreed with:
As for revision—some of the tales would take careful thought indeed. “Black Thirst” couldn’t be revised except by striking at its very core—cutting out the vapid idea of human-looking beauties on another planet (unless descent from a remote terrestrial source is suggested, &c.), &c. It might be wisest to let some of the tales alone, & hope that later specimens will avoid the flaws which they possess. But all that is for later consideration. —H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, [25 Mar 1935], O Fortunate Floridian 229
As a young man, Lovecraft had grown up on adventurous “planetary romances” like Edgar Rice Burrough’s A Princess of Mars, which featured lots of action and improbably human-looking aliens with princesses that could procreate quite readily with Earth-born heroes. Biologically, this is as bunk as Star Wars and Star Trek‘s rubber-forehead aliens, and as an adult Lovecraft was very critical of the idea of Earth-like worlds that evolved Earth-like humanoids, as expressed in Lovecraft’s “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction.” So Lovecraft was not strongly drawn to the Burroughs-esque elements that may have appealed to Weird Tales fans; for him, it was the sheer alien weirdness and horror that was the true appeal of Moore’s first couple stories.
There is every indication that Wright knew he had another hit on his hands with “Black Thirst,” because he had already bought other stories that was destined to appear in subsequent issues of Weird Tales. Yet the Unique Magazine brought with it more than acceptances and (eventually) welcome checks; Moore also made new friends, as fan-letters from Weird Tales turned into correspondences with folk like R. H. Barlow.
I hope you will not be too much disappointed in the stories that follow. Perhaps, when you have read those appearing in the April and May issues, you will write again to tell me what you thought of them. —C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 8 Mar 1934, MSS Brown Digital Repository
Through Barlow, Moore would come to correspond with Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, among others. It connected her to a wider community of writers, whom she would both influence and be influenced by. If “Shambleau” marked C. L. Moore’s arrival on the scene, “Black Thirst” helped her swiftly gain acceptance into the world of weird and science fiction pulp writers.
C. L. Moore’s “Black Thirst” can be read for free online here.
Well. . . when I was in my early adolescence, I had a series of fairly serious illnesses and I had to be taken out of school. I spent a great deal o f time in bed, entertaining myself by reading everything 1 could get my hands on. It’s strange, but I don’t know how I ever got my hands on Weird Tales because it was strictly frowned on in my family—it was trash! But somehow, I did and I was thoroughly delighted with them. They were a brand new marvelous world. I’m sure I must have been thinking about those things for some years after I recovered. . . after I had finally gone through school and college. I had to stop college after three semesters and was very fortunate in finding a job. Still, I hadn’t done a lot of writing in this field, although I had written a bit for my own amusement at various times-melodramatic stuff, very adolescent and fun to do. —C. L. Moore, “Interview: C. L. Moore Talks To Chacal” in Chacal #1 (26)
Catherine Lucille Moore’s first professional publication in pulp magazines was “Shambleau” (1933), in the pages of Weird Tales. The immense acclaim of her initial spate of stories from 1933-1940, when she married Henry Kuttner, has become part of the legendry of pulp fiction. Yet while C. L. Moore seems to have emerged full-grown like Aphrodite upon the waves, what this really means is that a great deal of what she wrote before she began her professional pulp career has sadly been lost—either never published, or published and largely forgotten.
The earliest such work is technically juvenilia, though it extended into adulthood:
Ever since we were about nine a friend and I have been evolving a romantic island kingdom and populating it with a race which, inevitably, is a remnant of Atlanteans. We’ve a very detailed theology and mythology, maps all water-colored and scroll-bordered and everything, a ruling house whose geneology and family tree and so forth has been worked out in tbales and charts from the year minus—oh, just about everything that two imaginative girls could think of over the space of fifteen years. (Heavens, has it been that long?) We have songs and long sagas of heroes, and a literature full of tradition and legends, and we even made and colored a series of paper dolls to illustrate the different types and their costumes, and then there were wars and plans of battle, and we have the maps of all our favorite cities, and we’ve written a good deal of history. And that history is what I take seriously.
We centered on a favorite period, around 1200-1250, and the history gradually became the biography of the outstanding man of that generation, and for the past ten years at least I have been writing, off and on, about this rather picaresque hero and his adventures. If I think of it I’ll send you a sample or two. It mostly comes in short snatches, just as the mood seized me. And of course a lot of it is romantically school-girlish, and a lot full of undergraduate tragics, because it’s grown up with me and has a long way to grow yet.
Odear, now you have me started—I hadn’t thought of this for nearly a year, since my friend moved out of town and I took up the fantasy writing. Gee, it was fun. The hero’s name was Dalmar j’Penyra, and he had red hair and black eyes and was a priate and a duke and a mighty lover and quite invincible in anything he chose to undertake. How we used to thrill over his escapades. He died in 1256, at the age of 35 (that seemed to use the absolute ultimate at which a man might remain even remotely interesting) and we almost wept whenever we thought of it. Bless him, he does seem awfully real. We used to make sad little songs about it—The girls who died for Dalmar, tonight they sleep a chill—the honey lips are dust now, the throbbing throats are still, and peace is on the high hearts that beat for him so warm, and peace is on the black heads that lay on Dalmar’s arm. Their hearts have ceased from sorrowing, their tears no longer fall—the narrow bed, the cold bed, the grave enfolds them all. Oh, girls who died for Dalmar, and lie tonight so low— —C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 10 Sep 1934, MSS. Brown Digital Repository
In a later interview, Moore specified this friend was her cousin:
What happened was that I had a cousin with whom I was very close, and we used to make up romantic tales of mythical kingdoms. We would take, long, long walks in the neighborhood under the trees—it was a lovely time in the world to be alive—and we each worked out or own fantasy kingdom with dashing young heroes and lots of swashbuckling adventure. Then we began separately to write it out. It was not anything that either of us considered offering for publication; it never occurred to us. I found some of it not too long ago, some writing from back in my early teens. The writing style has not changed very much except for one thing: I never said anything once when I could say it five times. It was intolerably dull to read. The writing is all right, but the repetition is hideous!
[…]
I think my cousin with whom I developed the mythical kingdom and I would have gone on in that Vein if she hadn’t had to move away and if I hadn’t had the job. But it was there, and it would have to have come out one way or another. —”CA Interview,” Contemporary Authors vol. 104 (1982), 326-327
Bits and pieces of these poems about Dalmar j’Penyra are included in some of Moore’s letters to R. H. Barlow and H. P. Lovecraft in the period, and those fragments to Lovecraft in Letters to C. L. Moore and Othersare the only ones published. Moore did not publish much poetry during her pulp career, but like many other Weird Talers she had a knack for it. One poem believed to have come from Moore’s typewriter made it into newsprint:
The Spirit of St. Louis with pilot Charles Lindbergh had completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight in 1927; pilots could be heroes in the 1920s, and there is more than a hint of fantasy in this verse.
At age 18, C. L. Moore enrolled at the local Indiana University and took classes for three semesters (Fall 1929, Spring 1930, and Fall 1930). However, Black Tuesday struck in October 1929, signalling the beginning of the Great Depression, and her family’s finances required her to leave school and gain employment, which she did. While associated with the university, however, Moore contributed to its school magazine The Vagabond, publishing three short stories: “Happily Ever After” (The Vagabond Nov 1930), “Semira” (The Vagabond Mar 1931), and “Two Fantasies” (The Vagabond Apr 1931). The University has since made these public domain materials available online.
In 2013, these three stories saw print commercially in the Galaxy’s Edge magazine, issues #2 (May 2013, “Happily Ever After”), #3 (July 2013, “Two Fantasies”), and #6 (January 2014, “Semira”), as well as best-of and omnibus editions.
None of these fragments and short works—the Dalmar stories, “The Spirit of St. Louis” poem, or the three amateur fantasies during her brief university period—have any obvious direct connection with C. L. Moore’s pulp fiction. That is, Northwest Smith does not appear to be Dalmar j’Penyra with a raygun, and if there was a prototype of the flame-haired Jirel of Joiry, she isn’t obvious. (There are certain interesting parallels between Dalmar and Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis, but Moore is not known to have had a hand in those stories and the parallels might well be coincidental.) Yet what these works make clear is that before C. L. Moore made her pulp debut she had already done years of prep work, reading and writing fantasy and adventure stories, developing her poetic sense, crafting the skills that would serve her well in her pulp career.
Such insight into developing writers is rare; readers today might be a bit spoiled with how much of the early and private work, even the juvenilia, of pulp writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith is available for the right price. Most pulpsters, however, are blanks before their professional debut. We are fortunate to have these early examples of C. L. Moore’s work, which give us a glimpse at her process and development. For while she would polish her prose and improve her style and speed during her legendary career, it is evident that she was building on a foundation that went right back to childhood fantasy worlds, drawing on her love of fantasy, mythology, and adventure until—at last—she took the chance to submit something for publication.
C. L. Moore (1911-1987) made her debut in Weird Tales with “Shambleau” (1933); and her stories were immediately lauded for their vivid language and distinctive imagination. With her marriage to Henry Kuttner in 1940, Moore would appear to vanish from the scene—she and her husband formed a prolific writing team, with most of their shared output published under his name or one of their joint pseudonyms. Yet during that period when Moore was on her own, she also collaborated on a round robin titled “The Challenge From Beyond” (1935) with A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long, Jr.; “Quest of the Starstone” (1937) with Henry Kuttner; and two stories with Forrest J Ackerman: “Nymph of Darkness” (1935) and “Yvala” (1936).
Forrest J Ackerman (1916-2008) was the early archfan of science fiction; he became heavily involved in organized science fiction fandom (notably engaging in a brief flame war with Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft in the pages of The Fantasy Fan), a cornerstone of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, and closely involved with science fiction and fantasy filmmaking and reporting in Hollywood—notably as editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland (1958-1983). He also co-created the character of Vampirella and was very briefly editor of a revamped Weird Tales in 1984.
Forry had the advantage over Moore in that he lived longer, and had more opportunities to weigh in on their collaborations in the 1930s. Yet from what has emerged, we can see that it was an interesting—if brief—partnership, which Ackerman continued to capitalize on for decades.
“Nymph of Darkness” (1935)
I’ll send you a drawing I’ve just made for FANTASY MAGAZINE. In collaboration with Forrest J. Ackerman, who’s been writing to me for some time, I’ve written a story for them, and Mrs. Schwartz, who edits the magazine, is going to fix things up so he can publish the illustration for it to. All this gratis, of course, for the WT issue of FANTASY. Mr. Ackerman’s idea was so good I just had to write the story. He seems to be bulging with good ideas, and wants to team up with me for WT, but I won’t be able to. Have so little time to write I have to cash in on every minute of it, and as long as I have ideas of my own can’t afford to use someone else’s and split the profits.
Let’s see now. That’s the JULHI drawing, BRIGHT ILLUSION and NYMPH OF DARKNESS I’ve promised. If I can find them. You can keep them all if you want. All three will be the original trial drawing, so I shan’t have any copy of my own, and I suppose you’ll return them if by any remote chance I need them again. I’m far too lazy to make copies of them, and anyhow will be glad to get rid of the things. They just clutter up my already unspeakably cluttered files (what I need is a nice, neat-minded secretary) and [. . .]
C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 31 Dec 1934 – 11 Feb 1935, MSS. John Hay Library
“Nymph of Darkness” by C. L. Moore and Forrest J Ackerman first appeared in Fantasy Magazine April 1935, the Weird Tales special issue. Fantasy Magazine was a neatly-published semiprozine put together by Julius Schwartz (who would go on to become Lovecraft’s agent, and later an editor of DC comics), the same that would publish “The Challenge from Beyond.” It isn’t clear when exactly Moore and Ackerman came into correspondence, although it was probably 1934, possibly through The Fantasy Fan or another fanzines, possibly through Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales, who sometimes forwarded fan mail to authors.
It was probably Ackerman that had the idea for a collaboration; while he was an avid fan of science fiction and wrote considerable prose, he wasn’t particularly noted as a fiction writer, and he had managed to collaborate with other writers by providing an initial idea and criticism on the work—while the writer did all the writing. Ackerman confirmed this as the general process in a letter:
Thank you for your complimentary remarks about NYMPH OF DARKNESS, which was from my plot. I contrived Nyusa, and her pursuer, and Dolf, et.c, and sent suggestions as Catherine while she was working on the story. After it was all finished and in New York and I had an autographed copy, I thot of the part at the conclusion about Nyusa giving NW a kiss, and C. was so enthusiastic about it and said it gave the story just the proper punch, etc., that she typed an extra page-insert about it and rusht off to FM.
Forrest J Ackerman to Mrs. Burnhill, 7 May 1935
In a 1948 issue of Ackerman’s fanzines Shangri-LA #4, he published “The ‘Nymph’ o’ Maniack,” which reprints some of Ackerman and Moore’s correspondence involved in the process. While labeled as being from 1936, these letters were probably from early 1935:
“Dear Forrie: Happy New Year. And by the way, if you heard a new year’s horn blowing extra loudly just at midnight, your time, and couldn’t locate it—that was me. I blew a special blast for you at about 2:00 a.m. or thereabouts, as nearly as I can remember now—of New Year’s morning just as the radio announced that it was at that moment midnight in Los Angeles. I never quite believe things like that—different times, I mean. Of course, know that you lose a day going round the world, and all that—but somehow can’t quite [268] believe it anyway. I read a story somewhere once in which someone in New York phoned someone in London, and over the wire ‘the late afternoon New York traffic vibrated weirdly in the stillness of the London night.’ It seems impossible, if you see what I mean.
[. . .]
Here is the outline I sent to Catherine when she was living in Indianapolis and working in a bank vault:
THE NYUSA NYMPH—One short and exciting experience in the adventure-filled life of Northwest Smith . . . Of a fleeing figure in the nite that bumped into NW at the Venusian waterfront—an unseen form—that of Nyusa, the girl who was born invisible! Further details: The business of the squat creature who came swiftly slinking thru the street, short on the heels of the figure in NW’s arms, with the strange lite-tube in its hands flashing from side to side (it would have caused Nyusa to become visible, you know—the lite from the tube) . . . and of Nyusa, whose abnormally high body-temperature kept her comfortable free from clothing; so that invisible she remained, as born—And from what she fled, and how NW was of service to her, etc.—I will leave to you.
MOORE to Ackerman: I think I know why the pursuer’s flash made Nyusa visible. Did you ever notice the peculiar colors one’s skin turns under different lights? A violet-ray machine turns lips and nails—as I remember—a sickly green, adn the blue lights they use in photographers shops, sometimes, make you purple. I once figured out why, but can’t remember and haven’t time now to go into it. Something about complementary colors and mixing yellow and blue, and whatnot. Well, you remember in Bierce’s The Damned Thing his invisible monster was a color outside our range of perception. Coudln’t this flash-light be of some shade which, combined with Nyusa’s peculiar skin-tone, produce a visible color? * And Venus is the Hot Planet anyhow, so no need to increase her body temperate above normal tomake it possible fo there to run about in the altogether. * Smith had met her in the absolute black dark of the starless Venusian night. She came tearing down the street and bumped into him, and, tho considerably astonished to find his arms full of scared and quite unadorned girl, he of course didn’t realize her invisibility then. Afterward came this squat, dark pursuer, flashing his greenish glowing ray to and fro. When he’d gone by she heard another sound—origin yet unknown, to me or anyone else—which [269] so alarmed her that she pulled Smith into a run and guided him at top speed thru [the spellings “thru” & “tho” are Catherine’s] devious byways and into an unlighted room. “Lift me up,” said she, “so I can reach the light.” ANd when it goes on he realizes that he is holding in midair a beautifully muscular, firmly curved armful of nothingness. He had just dropped her onto the floor and staggered back, doubting his sanity. What happens next I don’t know. * If you have any more ideas, they’ll be welcome. This is the stage of a story when I usually sweat blood for several days, racking an absolutely sterile brain for ideas. Thens something takes fire and the whole story just gallops, with me flying along behind trying to keep up with it. Very strenuous. & Think hard and see if you can find any possible reasons, sane or insane, as to what the noise was she had heard, why it alarmed her so, whether she is invisible just by a freak of nature or whether by some mysterious mastermind’s intent. I suspect she is in the power of some insiduous villain, but I don’t know yet. * All thru the preface of the story I’ve made some veiled hint about the nameless horrors which stalk by night along the waterfront of Ednes, that said villain might be almost anything—some horror out of the ages before man, or some super-brain of the far advanced races we know nothing of, or an unhappy medium like the Alendar. (That reminds me—Vaudir is the infinitive of–as I remember my college days—the French verb wish. I presume Nyusa is purely original with you, so you deserve more credit than I, for it’s a grand name.) [“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” said the 18-year-old lad. “There is no truth to the rumor that I made it up from the initials of our major metropolis, N.Y. U.S.A.”]
[…]
MOORE to Ackerman: Thanks for the further suggestions. I had already gone on past my stopping point when I wrote you, so can’t use all your ideas, but have incorporated Dolf and the dancing-girl idea. It seems Nyusa is—sorry—really innately invisible, being the daughter of a Venusian woman and a Darkness which is worshipped by a queer race of slug-like, half-human beings which dwell under the Venusian city of Ednes. (Incidentally, Ednes, the city where in the Minga stood, is simply lifted bodily out of the middle of Wednesday.) Anyhow, Nyusa is forced by the preists to dance in their ritual worship under a peculiar light which renders her visible in a dim, translucent way. And because of her mixed breed she has access into other worlds from which her masters bar her out by their own strange mental powers because she’d never return to dance for them if she once got away. Dolf guards her for the same reason. I think now that Nyusa’s captors drive her too far sometime, and she realizes that after all she is half divine, and calls upon the strain of Darkness within her to burst [270] the bonds they have imposed. Smith, attacked by Dolf as he hides in their temple watching the ritual dance, fights with the worshippers and kills the high priest, whereupon their power over Nyusa is weakened and she exerts her demi-divinity to escape. Thus, tho Smith doesn’t get the fortune you suggested, he at least is spared the expense of buying her any clothes, which was a very practical idea on your part.
ACKERMAN to Moore: I have a suggestion about the ending. Shambleau stunned Smith; to this day he had probably not forgotten “it.” Sweet, was the girl of the Scarlet Dream. While in the Black Thirst, he gazed upon beauty incredible. But Shambleau was to be shunned; and the girl of the Dream . . . Vaudir dissolved. So, let the Nymph—Nyusa—just before she escapes . . . couldn’t she—kiss Smith? A kiss never to be forgotten: a kiss . . . so cool, with a depth drawn out of Darkness. And yet, a kiss of fire—from her Venusian strain—hot, alive, searing Northwest’s lips. A kiss, of delicious semi-divinity . . . a fond caress of frozen flame. Making it, under your care, Catherine, a kiss smothering with extra-mundane emotion, leaving the readers gasping. Smith’s reward, the kiss becomes famous and concludes the story.
MOORE to Ackerman: I do wish I had had your suggestion about the parting kiss before I finished. I wasn’t able to expand the idea as fully as I’d have liked to, both because of the space-saving necessity and because to give it the attention it deserved I’d have had to write the story toward it from the beginning. It was a grand idea and would have given the story just the punch it needed at the end. Oh well, no story of mine is complete unless I leave out some major point until too late. I meant to make Shambleau’s eyes shine in the dark, and to play up the idea of the Guardians in Black Thirst.
Conceived and plotted in my den of scientifiction in San Francisco, the actual writing was done by Catherine Moore 3000 miles away at lunchtime in the vault of the bank where she worked as a clerk. (76)
It is not too much to say that Forry’s version of events has essentially been the only one put forward…but there is a bit more to the story. The initial reaction to “Nymph of Darkness” in Fantasy Magazine wasn’t entirely positive:
I read “Nymph of Darkness” in Leedle Shoolie’s mag, & wonder how much Price had to to with it. Full of hokum, & inclined to repeat parts of “Black Thirst”, yet not without a touch of the vividness & originality which one may regard as typically Mooresque.
“Price” is E. Hoffmann Price, a fellow-pulpster, friend, and correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft, C. L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and others. Unlike Lovecraft, who was an auteur, Price in the 1930s dedicated himself to becoming ap professional pulp author who could make a living off of his fiction writing—reasoning that you cannot eat artistic sensibilities. While that commercial mindset served him for a while, it came at the detriment to his fiction; Lovecraft worried about Price’s influence on the young and impressionable Moore, who showed tremendous promise as a writer.
After Lovecraft’s death in 1937, Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright arranged with August Derleth to publish some of Lovecraft’s fiction that had appeared in fan magazines. Due to copyright law at the time, this work was technically in the public domain, but the modest sum would go toward Lovecraft’s surviving aunt. Seeing these stories published gave Ackerman the idea that maybe there was an opportunity to earn a few bucks on his own:
How’s about submitting Nymph of Darkness to Weird Tales? I’ll supply U a copy, if U’r in accord; I suggest the title b changed to Nyusa (like Yvala), I want my name to appear without the period after “j”, & I’d recommend, in order to enhance the value of the original, that U do not include Ur illustration for Nod’s first public appearance. Now . . . as for the check (if any): Accurately as I can recall U were responsible for about 4/5ths the story—so simply a proportionate 20% to me?
Forrest J Ackerman to C. L. Moore, 2 August 1938 (draft letter)
“4e” had a fondness for simplified spelling.
What kind of arrangement Moore and Ackerman came to is not clear, but Wright apparently accepted it by September 1938, and “Nymph of Darkness” was published in slightly expurgated form over a year later in Weird Tales December 1939—one of Wright’s final issues. While there are a few changes in formatting, punctuation, and spelling between the Fantasy Magazine and Weird Tales versions, the most notable difference between the two texts is a handful of changes to remove reference to Nyusa’s nudity:
Fantasy Magazine
Weird Tales
His startled arms closed about a woman—a girl—a young girl, beautifully made, muscular and firmly curved under his startled hands—and quite naked.
His startled arms closed about a woman—a girl—a young girl, beautifully made, muscular and firmly curved under his startled hands.
I did not know you, save that I think you are of Earth, and perhaps—trustworthy.
I did not know you, save that I think you are of Earth, and perhaps trustworthy.
“No. But a Martian, or one of my own countrymen, would not so quickly have released a girl who dashed into his arms by night—as I am.”
In the dark Smith grinned. It had been purely reflexive, that release of her when his hand realized her nudity. But he might as well take credit for it.
“No. But a Martian, or one of my own countrymen, would not so quickly have released a girl who dashed into his arms by night.”
In the dark Smith grinned.
It was a blasphemy and an outrage against the eyes, against all that man hopes and believes and is. The darkness of the incredible, the utterly alien and opposed.
It was a blasphemy and an outrage against the eyes, against all that man hopes and believes and is; the darkness of the incredible, the utterly alien.
The readers of Weird Tales received this new Northwest Smith story more positively, but possibly Moore sided more with Lovecraft—or simply didn’t care for the collaboration. It is notable that “Nymph of Darkness” was not included in any of the English-language collections of Moore’s Northwest Smith stories during her lifetime, and really only reprinted near the end, in the Denvention II program book, where Moore was scheduled as a guest of honor.
After Moore died in 1987, Ackerman and others published the story (which was in the public domain) more widely; and in most instances the text used was the unexpurgated version from Fantasy Magazine, with afterword and explanatory essay by Forry. In Sci-Fi Womanthology(2002) and Expanded Science Fiction Worlds of Forrest J Ackerman and Friends, Ackerman even managed to finally give it the title he wanted: “Nyusa, Nymph of Darkness.”
As far as the story itself…to say that the idea of a lithe, naked, invisible young woman that falls into the hero’s arms is a very Ackerman conceit would be an understatement. Forry would revisit the idea several times in other stories, most notably in “The Girl Who Wasn’t There” (1953) by Tigrina & Ackerman, and “The Naughty Venusienne” (1956) by Morgan Ives (Marion Zimmer Bradley) and “Spencer Strong” or “Otis Kaye” (Ackerman), depending on the publication. The idea is fairly fannish, forcing a slightly antiheroic sci fi series character into close quarters with a naked young woman.
The prose, however, is all Moore’s, and Moore takes the idea and runs with it. While not as original as many of her other stories from the 30s, “Nyusa” falls firmly into the science-fantasy field, where a rogue of the space ways might well encounter the cult of an obscure god and the hybrid child. While it isn’t quite “Northwest Smith goes to Dunwich,” there are broadly similar ideas that are being repurposed into a space opera concept, and Moore does her best with the bare bones of a plot that Forry provided.
“Yvala” (1936)
Unlike “Nymph of Darkness,” C. L. Moore’s Northwest Smith story “Yvala” was first published in Weird Tales February 1936 issue—and under her own byline, with no mention of Ackerman’s involvement. Unlike “Nymph of Darkness,” “Yvala” made the cut for the 1954 collection Northwest of Earth that collected most of Moore’s other non-collaboration Smith stories, and it was reprinted several times during her lifetime. We get a hint of Ackerman’s involvement in “Yvala” from his 1938 letter to Moore above (“suggest the title b changed to Nyusa (like Yvala)”). After Moore died in 1987, Ackerman wrote:
En passant, it is a virtually forgotten fact—except by Sharane Yvala Dewey, a woman I knew as a little girl, who was so named by her science fiction author father G. Gordon Dewey, who was captivated by the name of A. Merritt’s heroine in The Ship of Ishtar and the Yvala of Catherine Moore’s Northwest Smith adventure of the same name—it is a practically unknown fact that I created the character (pronounced Ee-vah-lah). I hope it’s not unchivalrous to suggest it, with dear Catherine so mentally decimated by Alzheimer’s disease that she has not known me or herself of what she wrote for two years or more (1987), but reflecting on the origin of the story it occurs to me I might retroactively be entitled to a byline on “Yvala” because in retrospect I feel I contributed about as much inspiration and plot gimmick to it as I did to “Nymph.” I will not belabor the point, however, since Catherine’s memory is a blank book and she is in no position to agree or disagree with my observation.
A decade and change later, Ackerman published the story as by “C. L. Moore and Amaryllis Ackerman,” and slightly expanded on this explanation:
Amaryllis? I confess: ’tis I, FJA. Had I been born a girl, that is the name my parents had selected for me. So what is my byline doing on this strange interplanetary story from the pages of Weird Tales in 1936? Because I have just walked up to the realization, 66 years later, that I was as much a collaborator on this story as on “Nyusa, Nymph of Darkness”! I contacted Catherine, under the spell of the Russian screen siren Anna Sten, and outlined the plot and named the character. Some years later when I met a Mr. & Mrs. G. Gordon Dewey, I recognized the name of one of their daughters, Julhi, as being a CLMoore name, but the middle name of Sharane (Merritt’s The Ship of Ishtar heroine) beffled me. “Eve-uh-lah? How do you spell that?” “Y-v-a-l-a.” “Ee-vah-la!” I exclaimed. “Why, I made up that name!” Today Sharane Yvala Dewey is nicknamed Syd and is a grandmother living in the Hawaiian islands. Yvala’s inspiratory, glamorous Anna Sterm (whose first husband was an Esperanto korespondanto of mine in Kiev)—ascended to anglehood several years ago—but not before being on all-fours in my living room playing with out cat Meetzi.
No details on the inspiration or writing of “Yvala” have appeared in any of Moore’s surviving correspondence that I have seen, so we really have only Forry’s word on it. Reading the story, it is difficult to pick out Ackerman’s influence, except possibly by the seediness—Smith and Yarol are hired to go to an alien planet to kidnap women into sex slavery. That slavery exists in the Northwest Smith series was firmly established in “Black Thirst,” so that’s not necessarily unusual; but where that was something like an Oriental harem out of the Thousand and One Nights set, this one is closer to a sex trafficking tale of the more unpleasant pulp variety. There is something of “Black Thirst” too in the character of Yvala, a kind of embodiment of the inhuman beauty sought by the Alendar in that tale.
What saves “Yvala” is pure description and characterization; Moore throws herself into the description of Smith, the spaceport, and the strange alien world they land on. The climactic battle of wills echoes similar contests in “Shambleau,” “Werewoman,” and other stories. If it isn’t one of Moore’s better stories of the period, it is only because it is a little too derivative in the nature of the threat and the final conflict, which Northwest Smith once again barely survives.
We do not know why the “collaborations” did not continue, although the date “Yvala” was published might give a clue: February 1936 was when C. L. Moore’s fiance died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, and she was depressed and unable to write for some months afterward—and then she came into correspondence with Henry Kuttner.
A Word on Forrest J Ackerman & #MeToo
In 2018 during the #MeToo movement, allegations surfaced of Forrest J Ackerman sexually harassing female fans, at least some of whom were underage. Given some of Ackerman’s proclivities over the decades, including his preference for young and scantily-clad or unclad women, this doesn’t really come as a huge surprise in hindsight. At the time it came as a shock to many that “Uncle Forry,” who had long been a public face for fandom of science fiction and monsters in general, subjected women and girls to unwanted sexual touching and other forms of harassment.
Does this knowledge change how we read “Nymph of Darkness,” “Yvala,” and the whole relationship of collaboration between a young Forrest J Ackerman and C. L. Moore? Is there a certain additional skeeviness to the depiction of Nyusa, whose age is never given, as being naked all the time…or is that a more garden-variety bit of taboo-daring sensuality that Moore was happy to roll with? Given that Ackerman had several more decades to put forth his narrative on these stories, we may never know the full details of their collaboration, whether Ackerman’s account is accurate, or what other interactions they had when they met in person or through continued correspondence.
[“C. L. Moore.” Perret, Patti. The Faces of Science Fiction: Intimate Portraits of the Men and Women Who Spahe the Way We Look at the Future. New York: Bluejay Books, 1984.] (Ackerman ghosted this piece for the then-ailing Moore.)
The page in question can be viewed online. I don’t know O’Brien’s source for this claim, though it is believable. Moore suffered terribly from Alzheimer’s in her last few years, with failing memory; Ackerman also has a piece in the book; and Moore’s piece itself seems to be stitched together from bits and pieces of what she had written elsewhere about herself over the years, not really adding anything new. Yet even if written with the best of intentions, it showcases the way in which Forry was still shaping the narrative, and it adds a layer of distrust.
We know so little of Moore’s later life, that we have no idea what her actual relationship with Forry was like after the 1930s. Whether they had a falling-out or drifting-apart, if they remained friends, if he did something inappropriate…we don’t have Moore’s side of the story. Lacking that, and with Ackerman’s own known proclivities to emphasize his part, and even to put words in Moore’s mouth—how much do we really know about these stories and their collaboration at all?
This may seem a little weird, considering how immensely popular C. L. Moore and her fiction were during the heyday of Weird Tales. After her marriage to fellow writer Henry Kuttner in 1940, Moore’s profile dips—not because she was writing less, but because much of their shared output was published either under Kuttner’s name, or one of their shared pseudonyms such as Lewis Padgett. Her writing career shifted as she began to write for television in the 50s. After Henry Kuttner’s death in 1958, she remarried again to Thomas Reggie, and her writing career largely ceased, though publications of her previous work, and the occasional foreword or introduction, continued.
The last years of her life are a bit murky. Biographical focus has always been on her working years, and the fiction she wrote, the romance of her first marriage. Awareness of her work, and the degree of her collaboration with Kuttner, grew by leaps and bounds among fans, and in 1981 she won the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement, and was nominated for the Gandalf Grand Master award (the only woman to ever be so nominated). Yet Catherine withdrew from conventions and meetings; her interactions with friends and fandom dwindled, ceased giving interviews. Alzheimer’s disease was the diagnosis. She died in 1987.
This is not to say that no biographical materials exist for C. L. Moore. “An Autobiographical Sketch of C. L. Moore” was published in the May 1936 issue of Fantasy Magazine. Various reference works have given the raw data of at least a part of her life, including:
“Genius to Order” by Damon Knight in In Search of Wonder (1956)
“C. L. Moore: Catherine the Great” by Sam Moskowitz in Amazing (Aug 1962), which was reworked into a chapter of Seekers of Tomorrow (1966)
“Modern Masters of Science Fiction: 12: Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore” by William Gillings in Science Fiction Monthly (Jun 1975)
“Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Lewis Padgett et al.” by J. Gunn in Voices for the Future: Essays on major science fiction writers, vol. 1 (1976)
Moore’s entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, M-Z (1978)
“C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner” by Frederick Shoyer in Science Fiction Writers (1982)
Moore’s entry in Contemporary Writers vol. 104(1982), which includes a long interview by Jean W. Ross
“C. L. Moore” by Russell Letson in Supernatural Fiction Writers Fantasy and Horror vol. 2 (1985)
Moore’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Pulp Writers (2002) by Lee Server
Moore’s entry in Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction (2009) by Brian Attebery
Among many other entries. Most of these are very outdated; some get facts wrong, most don’t cite their sources as well as they might be hoped to. A full picture of C. L. Moore’s life and work simply hasn’t been put together at this time. Other secondary sources tend to be scattered; works like C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner: A Working Bibliography(1989) by Virgil Utter are convenient, but a good deal of bibliographical work has shifted to online sources like ISFDB.org and philsp.com…and while those sites may be useful, they are rarely complete or completely accurate. Critical literature about Moore’s fiction is more robust, especially that focused on her position as a woman science fiction writer, though her work is so mixed with Kuttner that no truly comprehensive assessment has ever been attempted.
Which isn’t to say there isn’t ample material for a fuller biography.
A handful of interviews conducted during Moore’s lifetime have seen print; there are some biographical snippets in her introductions and afterwords to various books; letters to and from H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard have been published, and among the unpublished letters known to survive a cache of correspondence from C. L. Moore at Brown University. Memoirs lurk in odd places; E. Hoffmann Price included reminiscences of C. L. Moore in his chapter on Henry Kuttner in his Book of the Dead. Fanzines [PDF], newspapers, and genealogical databases all contain useful and interesting information, including never-republished interviews [PDF] and letters to records of her marriages, details of her workplace, family data, etc. Letters to and from friends, editors, fans, and literary agents may yet linger in some archive, waiting to be re-discovered.
There is also the open question of what files or papers may yet survive, either in the possession of C. L. Moore’s heirs or collectors. When Frederick Shoyer wrote the entry on Moore and Kuttner for Science Fiction Writers, he quotes both from Henry Kuttner’s diary and from the “manuscript of [an] unfinished autobiography of Moore”:
Hank and I were hooked on the glorious feeling of having a story take the typewriter in its teeth and tearing off into the distance, we panting along trying to keep up—pages rolling up out of the typewriter and falling to the floor before we knew it was down to the bottom of the page. To be panting along behind a headstrong story like that is one of life’s major glories—a high better than drugs or drink. You summon it like a God to his altar, and He descends in his glory and inhabits the brain until the mind ceases to be a thing in itself and becomes part of a tremendous on-rushing stream. your only contribution being to hang in there and type fast enough to keep up.
Probably you have to train your mind to function this way, unconsciously of course, but it does trian itself because the reward is so glorious. When Hank finished a story, he felt at the time that it was not only the best he had ever written, but probably the best anyone had ever written. Re-reading usually brought second thoughts, but not always, sometimes it really was!
The glow of triumphant complacence can last for days. You have to let the story get cold before you re-read it critically, to catch the small errors which infest every rough first draft, the repetition, the unclear sentences, the spots that need cutting or expanding. As if the words which had come white hot from the crucivile were too hot from the creator to defile with one’s own crassly human alterations until the heavenly glow and heat had died out of them.
When was this written? Henry Kuttner is spoken of in the past tense, so sometime after his death in 1958, and probably before the decline of Alzheimer’s set in completely. Given the date, Shoyer may have gotten the materials from Moore herself; whether they still survive as part of her estate, or were lost with the passage of years, is unknown. All that was ever published was this fragment.
How nice it would be, to have more of C. L. Moore’s story in her own words.
For those involved with pulp studies, the fans and scholars of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard are spoiled for choice when it comes to biographies and the raw materials. Many writers have assayed to capture their life, several publishers have worked hard to catalogue their writing, print and re-print their every word. Few other writers of the 1930s received anything like that attention; the full letters of Dashiell Hammet have never been published, for instance, and while you might find a biography of Walter B. Gibson (creator of The Shadow), there has never been a full biography of Seabury Quinn (creator of Jules de Grandin).
Most pulp authors linger in semi-obscurity; some are lost for good, remembered only by a few stories and bylines in crumbling pulp magazines. C. L. Moore has not suffered that fate—if anything, her star has been on the rise lately, with the Black God’s Kiss RPG and a new, authorized Jirel of Joiry story by Molly Tanzer for New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine.
Perhaps someone will finally put all the pieces together and give a full biography of C. L. Moore. All the pieces are there.
Chacal: Rumor has it that you didn’t particularly care for the story in which Jirel met Northwest [Smith], “Quest for the Star Stone.” Could you give us a little background on the tale; the how and why of it?
Moore: I’d forgotten that I maybe like “Quest of the Star Stone” least—that doesn’t mean I dislike. If I said so, I expect it’s true. And if true, my guess would be that in this first Kuttner/Moore collaboration the machinery of working together had to be refined and worked over more before it functioned well. Hank and I had met, I think, a short time before this. Or had we met at all? Or only corresponded? Anyhow, he was urging me to do another Jirel and sent on a kind of opening situation to see if I would feel any interest. I did and we sent the Ms. back and forth to the best of my very dim recollection until we were ready to submit it. remember this was all 40 years ago and a lot has happened since.
“Interview: C. L. Moore Talks To Chacal” in Chacal #1 (1976), 28
They were not yet married. Catherine Lucille Moore had broken into Weird Tales with “Shambleau,” the first story of Northwest Smith, interstellar outlaw, in 1933; her fantasy heroine Jirel of Joiry followed in “Black God’s Kiss” in 1934. Henry Kuttner broke into Weird Tales with “The Graveyard Rats” in 1936. Both Moore and Kuttner were correspondents of H. P. Lovecraft. After C. L. Moore’s fiance died in February 1936, through Lovecraft she and Kuttner came into correspondence…and not immediately, but over time, that grew into something more. They married in 1940, and would go on to become one of the most famous writing teams in science fiction. Yet their first collaboration was one of their weirdest, and has arguably the oddest legacy.
“Quest of the Starstone” was published in the November 1937 issue of Weird Tales; the two characters Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry had heretofore occupied completely separate settings with no connective elements, but there was a precedent for an author bringing two disparate characters together. Robert E. Howard had brought the Pictish king Bran Mak Morn and King Kull of Atlantis together in “Kings of the Night” (Weird Tales November 1930). Howard had a habit of developing common themes, backgrounds, and connective elements between many of his stories, so that such a chance meeting was less incongruous than it might have been.
Weird Tales Oct 1937 advert
Moore was nowhere near as devoted to building a consistent setting, but she had one advantage. Her stories of Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry never drew a hard line between science fiction and fantasy. It was not uncommon for Jirel to end up in some other dimensional, dealing with an alien entity; nor was it strange for Northwest Smith to turn his raygun against alien gods or sorcerers. In both stories, science and sorcery were part of the same spectrum, and either worked well as an explanation. Henry Kuttner, especially early in his career, was adept at pastiche and able to turn his hand to nearly anything. While that did mean he sometimes struggled to find his own voice, when it came to collaboration, his prose often flowed seamlessly with his partner’s.
As their first collaboration, “Quest of the Starstone” is a bit stiff. While the prose is competent, neither Kuttner or Moore is at their best, and the sensual, often dreamlike prose that characterized Moore’s solo efforts at both characters is often missing in a rather straightforward plot to get the two heroes to meet, team-up, and overcome a mutual for in a way that would become familiar to generations of superhero comics fans. Yet there is one passage in particular that had a longer and odder life.
Homesickness he would not have admitted to anyone alive, but as he sat there alone, morosely facing his dim reflection in the steel wall, he found himself humming that old sweet song of all Earth’s exiled people, The Green Hills of Earth:
Across the seas of darkness The good green Earth is bright— Oh, star that was my homeland Shine down on me tonight. . . .
Words and tune were banal, but somehow about them had gathered such a halo of association that the voices which sang them were sweeter and softer as they lingered over the well-remembered phrases, the well-remembered scenes of home. Smith’s surprizingly good baritone took on undernotes of a homesick sweetness which he would have died rather than admit:
My heart turns home in longing Across the voids between, To know beyond the spaceways The hills of Earth are green. . . .
What wouldn’t he give just now, to be free to go home again? Home without a price on his head, freedom to rove the blue seas of Earth, the warm garden continents of the Sun’s loveliest planet? He hummed very softly to himself,
—and count the losses worth To see across the darkness The green hills of Earth. . . .
C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner, “Quest of the Starstone”
Who wrote this bit? Moore was the poet of the pair, but Kuttner was no slouch, and the title itself is a callback to two previous tales. In “Shambleau” Moore wrote: “[…] he hummed The Green Hills of Earth to himself in a surprisingly good baritone”; and in “The Cold Gray God” (1935):
No one sang Starless Night any more, and it was the Earth-born Rose Robertson’s voice which rang through the solar system in lilting praise of The Green Hills of Earth.
That could be the kind of detail that a good pasticheur like Kuttner would pick up and expand upon. Yet it wouldn’t be surprising if they both had a hand in the final version of this scene.
“Quest” was also almost the final appearance for both characters. Northwest Smith’s final appearance would be in “Song in a Minor Key” (1940), where Moore alludes to his exile and spoke of Earth as “a green star high in alien skies.” When Jirel of Joiry returned in “Hellsgarde” (1939), she does not mention Northwest Smith…but then, chronological continuity was seldom the strong point in either the Northwest Smith or Jirel of Joiry stories, except that “Black God’s Shadow” followed “Black God’s Kiss.” Like oil and water, the two characters drew apart.
For many years thereafter the story was quite scarce—Moore did not collect it in any her Northwest Smith or Jirel of Joiry collections in the 1950s or 60s. However, Sam Moskowitz claims:
When Robert Heinlein read the story, he never forgot the phrase which became the title of one of his most famous short stories and of a collection, The Green Hills of Earth.
Two weeks after the sale was made, Vida Jameson was in bed with a cold, and Heinlein dug out some of his old Weird Tales pulps so she could read his favorite Northwest Smith stories by C. L. Moore. In the middle of reading, she sat up in bed, startled: she had discovered the title of Heinlein’s Post story in a passage in “Shambleau” where Northwest Smith is humming “The Green Hills of Earth” to himself.
Heinlein immediately apologized to Catherine Kuttner for unconsciously appropriating her intellectual property and asked for a formal release to use the song title.
The Kuttners, too, were delighted to learn about the sale to the Post and happy to make the release. They wrote him gloating congratulations.
Subsequent publications would include the acknowledgment:
The phrase The Green Hills of Earth derives froma story by C. L. Moore (Mrs. Henry Kuttner), and is used here by her gracious permission
Heinlein did not reiterate Moore & Kuttner’s verses, but came up with his own—and attributed it to an author, the blind poet Rhysling. Both “The Green Hills of Earth” (song) and Rhysling would be mentioned in some of Heinlein’s other works, such as Farmer in the Sky(1950) and Time Enough for Love(1973). Heinlein’s work gained much more recognition than Moore and Kuttner’s, and his fictional poet Rhysling would in 1978 lend their name to the Rhysling Awards, an annual award for the best science fiction, fantasy, or horror poem—and in an unknown number of poems and filk music devoted to that enigmatic but evocative song, “The Green Hills of Earth.”
This is where Quest of the Green Hills of Earth (1995) comes in. Edited by Ned Brooks and illustrated by Alan Hunter, this is the kind of standalone chapbook that is a hallmark of science fiction and fantasy fandom. It reprints “Quest of the Starstone” in its entirety, Heinlein’s verses from “The Green Hills of Earth,” and three fan-made versions—one by Chuck Rein, George Heap, “and other fans of the 1960s”; one by Don Markstein (“late 60s”), and one by Steve Sneyd (Oct 1992). There is a brief article by Brooks tracing various recensions of the song to various tunes, both original and familiar—it has been sung to everything from “Greensleeves” to “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” and various dramatic presentations of “The Green Hills of Earth” or its song have been made and even marketed commercially. Brooks ends the booklet with sheet music for two versions, one composed by George Heap and the other by Joseph Kaye.
Why does it work? Why do just a few simple words strung together resonate with the hardboiled Northwest Smith, who could never go home again; and the blind poet Rhysling burned by radiation; and for all those generations of fans? I like to think it works because Moore, Kuttner, and Heinlein recognized a key aspect of science fiction: more than the hard science, the human emotion, the narrative of what it feels like to a person to go out to that distant frontier, matters.
I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.
William Shatner, “William Shatner: My Trip To Space Filled Me With Sadness,” Variety 6 Oct 2022
As it turns out, before we ever had an astronaut in orbit, a few poets did launch themselves into the great dark…for a little while, anyway…and captured something of that longing for home.
In 1933, C. L. Moore burst into the pages of Weird Tales with “Shambleau,” to immediate acclaim. The story was reprinted a couple of times over the ensuing decades, and formed the headline of Shambleau and Others (1953, Gnome Press), Moore’s first hardcover collection of her early Weird Tales fiction. The first foreign translation was in France in 1954, when it was translated for the anthology Escales dans l’infini (“Stopovers in Infinity”), translated by editor Georges H. Gallet.
The next year, Gallet’s translation was reprinted in V Sélections Été (Summer) 1955 issue.
V began publication as a weekly magazine in France in 1944 and went through several different names and editorial regimes, including V, V magazine, Voir magazine, Voir, MLN illustrated magazine, and L’Hebdomadaire du reportage. V also spun-off several sister-titles, including V Cocktail, V Sélections, and V Spécial. All of the magazines in the V family seem to have shared the prominent feature of the female form, usually as a pin-up on the cover and as black-and-white photographs, illustrations, and cartoons throughout. G. H. Gallet was the editor-in-chief of the magazines.
The overall tone and audience is often hard to judge at this remove, like American men’s magazines of about a decade later, they appear to be a mix of general interest articles, fiction, slightly racy featurettes with nudes, and the kind of mildly risque cartoons that seem a bit innocent today. These were not, by any stretch of the imagination, pornography: each issue featured tasteful nudes, pin-ups, and bawdy jokes intermixed with a great deal of other articles, interviews, and features…and they had an eye for talent, sometimes featuring artists who would go on to a bit of fame and notoriety.
Jean-Claude Forest was born in 1930, and began working as an illustrator in the early 1950s. Like Gallet, Forest had a deep love of science fiction, and would become a renowned cover artist for the French sci-fi paperback series Le Rayon Fantastique, and achieve international fame for his sexy sci-fi epic Barbarella, created for V in 1962—his list of works, achievements, projects, and accolades is too long to go into here. Yet before Barbarella, he illustrated “Shambleau.”
Forest’s illustrations are a classic example of raygun gothic sensibility, and the same clear, sparse line work, framing, and figure-work will be familiar to fans of his comic strips. Yet he also took the opportunity to emphasize the sensuality and horror that is Shambleau, the scattered layout adds a certain dynamism to the blocks of justified text—and when Shambleau stands revealed, the text almost seems to give way before the tentacle-writhed woman who stands bold and stark on the page, eyes shadowed, rough as a crayon-sketch in places.
Forest seems to have taken relatively little inspiration from previous illustrations in Weird Tales—may not even have seen them—but appears to have at least been aware of the 1953 Gnome Press cover. Compare, for example, the characteristic shape of the “S” in the title at the opening of the story, and the “S” on the cover of the 1953 Gnome Press collection by Ric Binkley:
There is a certain irony to the fact that while non-English-reading audiences sometimes have to wait longer to get classic works of English-language weird fiction (and vice versa), sometimes when those works are finally made available, they are graced with the creative energies of more skilled artists and dedicated designers and editors. The original audience rarely gets a chance to appreciate this kind of art, since it is rarely translated back into English-language products.
Fortunately, in 2023, the original art by Forest was combined with Moore’s English-language text and an introduction by Jean-Marc Lofficier, and published by Hexagon Comics and Black Coat Press as The Illustrated Shambleau. While this lacks the dynamic swatches of grey and the distinct layout of the original, English-language readers who want to appreciate Forest’s art and Moore’s prose together can finally do so.
Better scans of the original pages can be seen at Cool French Comics, and those curious about the full magazine that “Shambleau” first appeared in can download it from here.
Catherine Lucille Moore was a contemporary and correspondent of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft; she was published in the same pulp magazine, Weird Tales, even collaborated with them on the round robin “The Challenge From Beyond” (1935). Her first story, “Shambleau” (1933), was an immediate hit with readers and weird fiction writers alike, and introduced the world to Northwest Smith, who would go on to star in a series of tales from Moore’s typewriter. Her next creation for Weird Tales, the flame-tressed swordswoman Jirel of Joiry in “Black God’s Kiss” (1934), was hailed as a female Conan.
In general outline, the Conan and Jirel publishing timeline largely lines up as well. Conan’s last original story in Weird Tales was in 1936; Jirel’s in 1939. Gnome Press published the first Conan hardcover in 1950, and the Jirel hardcover collection in 1954; paperback reprints for both appeared for both characters in the 60s as part of the general paperback Sword & Sorcery/fantasy boom. Sure, there were more Conan stories and they were more popular—is that the only reason why Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian got the big break into comics when Jirel didn’t?
The boring, practical answer is probably “money.” Licensing a character, even an old pulp character, costs money, and anyone who did want to license Jirel for comics would have gone through C. L. Moore’s agent. Even relatively big publishers like Marvel had to balance cost versus popularity; according to Roy Thomas in Barbarian Life vol. 3, Marvel first approached Lin Carter’s agent about licensing Thongor of Lemuria because they thought Conan would be too expensive. Demographics might also have played a role; women warriors in fantasy have a long history, but in print and in comics, male characters dominated, as Nancy Collins noted when a very different red-haired swordswoman hit the page:
I was thirteen years old when I first saw Red Sonja. It was her debut appearance in the Conan the Barbarian comic book written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Barry Windsor-Smith, back in 1973, and she was wearing a slightly more practical scale-mail tunic and leather hot-pants ensemble, but all the elements of her basic personality were there: bravery, skill with a sword, and the brashness necessary to go make a name for herself in the savage, male-dominated world of Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age.
She immediately grabbed my attention because there were so few strong female heroic characters back then, not just in comics but popular culture in general. (Moreover, the fact this outspoken and capable woman of action and I shared the same hair color did not hurt.) [I]t may be hard for today’s audience to understand, but in the 1960s and 1970s, with the notable exception of Wonder Woman and the Black Widow, most of the female characters in comics were either the girlfriends/wives whose role was to be menaced and/or kidnapped by the arch-nemesis of their heroic Significant Other (Lois Lane, Iris Allen, Gwen Stacy), young and far less seasoned distaff versions of well-established male heroes (Supergirl, Batgirl, Hawkgirl, Mary Marvel), superheroines with powers that precluded physical strength (Saturn Girl, Marvel Girl, Sue Storm, Dream Girl), or were symbolically devaluing (Shrinking Violet, The Wasp.)
Red Sonja as a property has enjoyed on-again/off-again success; the audience for a strong female character-led fantasy comic has been there since she first debuted, but the will and ability to keep her published in her own ongoing series hasn’t always been. Other swordswoman characters spun off from Conan like Age of Conan: Bêlit (2019, Marvel), Age of Conan: Valeria(2020, Marvel), and Bêlit & Valeria: Swords vs. Sorcery (2022, Ablaze) have enjoyed much less success in standalone miniseries—and maybe Jirel of Joiry would suffer the same fate, not quite clicking with audiences. It has to be remembered that of the thousands of characters created for pulp and magazine fiction, only a rare few like Doc Savage, Tarzan, The Shadow, Conan the Cimmerian, and Elric of Melniboné enjoy long-term popular and economic success.
So where does that leave Jirel? In the hands of the fans.
Jirel of Joiry: Into The Violet World (1987)
JIREL OF JOIRY: INTO THE VIOLET WORLD
Panel 1: Over Guiisard’s [sic] fallen drawbridge had thundered Joiry’s warrior lady, sword swinging, voice shouting hoarsely inside her helmet. For a while there was umult unspeakable. There under the archway, the yellow of fighting men and the clang of mail on mail and the screams of stricken men.
Jirel’s swinging sword and her stallion’s tramping feet had cleared a path for Joiry’s men to follow and at last into Guisard’s court poured the steel-clad hordes of Guisard’s conquerors.
Panel 2: She had waited impatiently in the courtyard until she had finally dismounted. Throwing her helmet away from her and her eager angry voice echoing hoarsely in the courtyard.
Jirel: Giraud! Make haste, you varlets! Bring me Giraud!
Panel 3: There was such bloodthirsty impatience in that hollowly booming voice that the men who were returning from searching the castle hung back as they crossed the court toward the lady in reluctant twos and threes, failure eloquent on their faces,
Below: Based on a story ‘Jirel Meets Magic’ by C. L. Moore
This piece came to me via eBay, the only comic art of Jirel I’d ever seen, and illustrating a bit of her third adventure “Jirel Meets Magic” (Weird Tales July 1935). For a couple years I’ve just enjoyed it, but eventually I decided to look up the artist—easy enough as it’s signed and dated—and was surprised to find out that it is author C. L. Bevill. Even better, she was willing to answer a few questions about this piece, how it came to be, and how I ended up with it:
When my sister and I were kids in the 70s we loved, loved, loved all things sword and sorcery. Conan, Robert Howard, Lord of the Rings, you name it. Both of us were artists and we did our own comics. So one of our favorite authors was C.L. Moore, who was a pulp writer in the 30s. Her most famous work is the Jirel of Joiry stories. I think she did those as a serial. (Forgive me if you’ve already looked up the information.)
I believe I did the piece for my sister as a birthday gift, but I don’t recall exactly. I don’t think she liked it but she was too nice to say anything. She died in March 2020 and I found the piece in her stuff, hidden away with a few other things she didn’t like from me. (I don’t hold it against her.) So I cleaned out her stuff after she died and was completely overwhelmed. (If you noticed the date, it was right at the beginning of Covid and she probably died from that.) Her landlord offered to take care of all the stuff and subsequently either sold it in a yard sale or gave it to charity. So if you got it from Washington state that’s likely how it ended up on ebay.
[…] if it’s still in a silver frame, there’s some comic artwork on the inside of the back there that I stuck in there for my sister. It was stuff we did as kids. I’m curious if it’s still there. […] Oh, we were incurable romantics as kids so the comic art in the back is something from a movie we liked as kids. Grayeagle. Terrible movie but we were very young.
C. L. Bevill, personal communication
That last note made me curious as well, so I popped open the frame:
Note: “Sure can tell where your artwork stopped & mine began. Love you, C”
On the back of the piece is a faint inscription:
To Cat, with Love your sister Caren Dec 25th 1987 —one year too late Sorry Dec 25th 1988 Still Love you Cackie!
Close-up detail.
It is a lovely piece of fan-art, and I’m glad to finally have the story behind it—and the secret it has been hiding all these years.
“Werewoman” (1994)
By a quirk of publishing, “Werewoman” (1938) by C. L. Moore was first published in a fan-magazine, and fell into the public domain. This fact was not immediately recognized for some decades, but the ever-enterprising fan/scholar/anthologist Sam Moskowitz took advantage of this lapse to to republish it (without Moore’s permission or compensation) in his anthology Horrors Unknown (1971). While this has widely been considered as somewhat uncouth, it was technically legal—and if Moskowitz could do it, so could anyone else.
So it was in 1994 “Werewoman” was adapted to graphic format for Savage Sword of Conan #121 (May 1994). Roy Thomas provided the script, Robert Brown, pencils; Rey Garcia, inks; and Susan Crespi, lettering. Originally a story of Northwest Smith and set on Mars, the revamped story was adapted to feature Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian in place of Smith, and the setting changed to a rather generic fantasy corner of the Hyborian Age.
Roy Thomas was at this point a veteran hand at such adaptations. When he had started out writing Conan the Barbarian for Marvel, it had been adapting Howard’s original stories and filling in the gaps on his own; later the series would adapt works by other authors, either non-Howard Conan stories like Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp’s novel Conan of the Isles (1968), which became a graphic novel of the same name, or non-Conan fantasy stories such as Gardner F. Fox’s Kothar and the Conjurer’s Curse (1970), which became Conan the Barbarian #46-51.
So why do C. L. Moore?
1994 was well into the Dark Age of Comics, and Robert Brown’s artwork is strongly reminiscent of Rob Liefeld’s work on X-Force and Youngblood, but aggressively 90s as it is, and lacking the more somber depth of shadow or evocative linework that characterized many of the better stories in Savage Sword, it kind of works, especially with Rey Garcia’s inks adding some real depth and definition to the lines.
While it may seem odd to adapt a Northwest Smith story as a Conan tale—imagine replacing Harrison Ford with Jason Mamoa in Star Wars—the hazy, dreamlike atmosphere of the story lends itself well to a kind of fever-dream episode in the adventures of everyone’s favorite Cimmerian, while the inherent wildness of running with the pack is almost more suitable to Conan than to Smith. As a Conan story, it’s middling; as a C. L. Moore adaptation, it’s better than nothing—which is, by an large, what readers have lived with.
Aside from these two works, there is little else to say about C. L. Moore in the comics. A few early horror comics may be unofficial adaptations of or inspired by her works, though this is based on similarity of plot more than anything else. There is another notable graphic adaptation of C. L. Moore’s “Shambleau” that was published in France in 1955, but that is worthy of a longer and more in-depth look on its own.
There is no volume of The Selected Letters of C. L. Moore, and perhaps there never will be. Like many pulp authors that achieved more lasting and commercial success during her life than peers like H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Moore’s longevity has been coupled with a relative paucity of critical interest in her life and letters. Lovecraft and Howard both benefited from scholarly attention, if mostly by fans, while they remained within living memory…but Moore died in 1987, and if any concerted effort was made to interview her relatives, friends, and peers or otherwise document her life, it has not yet come to light.
Which makes Moore difficult to research. While her surviving letters with H. P. Lovecraft have been published by Hippocampus Press as Letters to C. L. Moore and Others (2017), this is almost all of her correspondence that has been published. More letters remain in university archives, and possibly in private hands, but the lack of easy access to these letters limits critical and biographical research into Moore’s life and work. Information on her life is thus slow to emerge into the popular consciousness, and to answer even simple questions often requires collating data from different sources.
For example: did C. L. Moore correspond with Clark Ashton Smith?
While there is nothing direct in Smith’s letters about correspondence with Moore, we can infer a few things:
First, Moore and Smith had mutual friends and correspondents in H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert H. Barlow, Henry Kuttner, and probably others. This is evident by their surviving letters to or references to correspondence to these mutuals.
Two, the lack of any mention of a correspondence in Smith’s surviving letters suggests that if there was a correspondence between Smith and Moore, it probably wasn’t extensive or involved. This is not a great surprise: both Smith and Moore were known to sometimes have long gaps between answering letters in the 1930s, and if they didn’t hit it off right away one or the other might easily have dropped a correspondence, even one who was friends with other friends. While a short correspondence could be easily lost (as not all letters from Smith, Lovecraft, etc. survive), a longer correspondence is more likely to have been mentioned in letters to their friends.
Third, when Henry Kuttner died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1958, Smith wrote to Derleth for details—and neither Smith or Derleth ever mention C. L. Moore, who had married Kuttner in 1940 and was still his wife. This suggests that Smith was probably not then corresponding with or closely associated with Moore; if he was, he would either have written to her directly (no need to ask Derleth) or asked after her. Since Smith did not mention Moore at all, it suggests he was unaware of the connection, or at least not in contact with Moore and Kuttner.
As it happens, there is evidence that Moore and Smith corresponded briefly in the 1930s. For this we have to look at the only readily available source of her letters, her correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft:
Also have just written Clark Ashton Smith for a copy of his “Double Shadow, etc.” the advertisement for which you enclosed in your last letter. He is another fantasy writer whose work it is such a pleasure to read, and for almost opposite reasons from those that make R. E. Howard’s writing so good. Exquisite and fantastic enough to lift one clear out of the present. I’m awfully flad of the opportunity to get more of his work to read.
The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (1933, Auburn Journal) was a privately-printed chapbook that was one of Smith’s efforts at remunerative self-publication, with copies to Robert E. Howard, R. H. Barlow, and others sold by mail—Lovecraft helped distribute the advertising flyers among his group of correspondents. This would be a natural start to their brief correspondence, and we know Smith wrote her back:
I am expecting the CAS “Double Shadow, etc.” any day now. I had a note from him Saturday saying it was on the way. Yes, Barlow has lent me “Ebony and Crystal” and the “Hashish-Eater” is haunting me still. I am so sorry for people who don’t like that sort of thing—they miss such an awful lot! There must be very few people who can produce prose, poetry and drawings of such superlative quality.
Ebony and Crystal (1922, Auburn Journal) was an early collection of Smith’s fantastic poetry, which included the epic poem “The Hashish Eater -or- the Apocalypse of Evil,” whose opening line gave Smith one of his epithets: “Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;” according to further letters to Lovecraft, Moore received her copy of The Double Shadow in May, and finished it before the 27th (Letters to C. L. Moore and Others 41-42).
Moore does not mention anything further about correspondence with Smith for some months, and it may be the two fantasists did not continue to write one another after the sale was complete. Smith, for his part, was increasingly occupied with his mother’s failing health during this period and went weeks or months without answering letters. This would seem to be supported by the final reference in her letters to Lovecraft, written when he informed Moore of the death of Fanny Gaylord Smith, Clark’s mother, on 9 September 1935:
I was sorry to hear about Mr. Smith’s mother. I had a debate with myself whether to write, since we have exchanged a note or two, but decided not to both because our correspondence has been so brief and formal, and because in his place I think I’d rather not hear from anyone or be reminded at all of such a bereavement.
Which is, as far as can be ascertained at this point, the end of it. We might conjecture whys and wherefores Smith and Moore did not renew their correspondence—with Robert E. Howard’s death in 1936 and H. P. Lovecraft’s death in 1937 their major correspondent in common would probably have been R. H. Barlow, and after Lovecraft’s death Smith and Barlow would have a falling-out—but we don’t know. Perhaps they did write to one another sometime in the 40s or 50s, and the letters simply haven’t come to light yet; but for the most part, even though Moore’s marriage with Kuttner would bring her to California where Smith was, the orbits of their careers seem to have shifted.
As far as we know, all of their correspondence was limited to a couple of notes in 1935, and we are fortunate to be able to say that much, given the limited materials on C. L. Moore currently available.
To your boundless amazement I shall now take typewriter in hand and write you a letter. Still further to shock you, I am enclosing the story you so kindly inquired about, and also—did I or didn’t I send you WEREWOMAN? This burning question has haunted me all day, ever since I delved industriously into the stack of boxes and bales which I laughingly term my files and produced every story I ever wrote with the exception of the famous WW. I am probably being even more hen-brained than usual, but will enclos the carbon of WW which I have somewhere around, tho lurking in the back of my subconscious is a suspicion that I have already sent you the original. If so, pay no attention. Surely you have sufficient aplomb to withstand a sudden deluge of werewomen.
—C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft and R. H. Barlow, 20 Aug 1935, LCM 56
In the summer of 1935, H. P. Lovecraft was staying with R. H. Barlow and his family in DeLand, Florida. At Barlow’s urging, Lovecraft and C. L. Moore had begun their correspondence (Her Letters To Lovecraft: Catherine Lucille Moore), with Lovecraft full of praise for stories like “Shambleau” (1933) and “Black God’s Kiss” (1934). Barlow, as was typical, asked her for manuscripts and drawings…and in 1934 received an unusual reply:
I’m having rather a set-back in my attempts to illustrate my own stories. The one Mr. Wright liked so well was a drawing for the story, which, as you know, he returned. WERE-WOMAN. The drawing was pretty good, but the story, I must admit, rather terrible. It’s heartening to know that the more established writers get things back too, but I can’t pretend that the fault was anybody’s but my own in this case, and I really expected it back when I sent it. It was a grand idea, I still think, but somehow it just wouldn’t jell. Mr. Wright has inquired about it several times and has asked me to re-write it, but my mind is a perfect vacuum whenever I try.
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 1 Jun 1934, MSS. John Hay Library
It isn’t clear when exactly Moore wrote “Werewoman” (sometimes spelled “Were-Woman”)—in later interviews, she claimed it was her second Northwest Smith story after “Shambleau,” and the first to be rejected by Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, but her memory issues later in life make such claims somewhat questionable; the 1934 date of this letter suggests “Werewoman” may have been written and submitted somewhat later. At some point, Moore sent the “Werewoman” typescript to Barlow, who presumably showed it to Lovecraft during his visit…along with another rejected story:
Well, have just received my first flat rejection from Wright. A harmless little tale about a sorcerer king of antediluvian time, his mysterious witch-queen and a time-traveler with a startling resemblance to a certain Mr. Smith whom I may have mentioned once or twice before, tho no names were named in the story. Ah well, life is full of disappointments. —C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, 31 May 1935, MSS. John Hay Library
This story appears to be lost, but Moore apparently also sent this story to Barlow, who forwarded it to Lovecraft, who had finally taken his leave of Florida. We know this because of Lovecraft’s answering letter:
Well—anyhow, I’ve read the enclosed story, & think it distinctly good in places—though the rather conventional dialogue & general layout put it below “The Were Woman”. I presume the interepid [sic] & leather-clad time-traveller is none other than our old friend Northwest Smith. The other-wordly suggestion & description of vague, non-human forms are excellently managed—despite a slight sense of disappointment in the climax. It beats most recent Mooreiana, though scarcely attaining the “Shambleau”-”Black Thirst”-”Were-Woman” level. Most distinctly does it bear the impress of pulp influence. However—both stories are good, & I can unhesitatingly praise them in writing the author. —H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 24 Aug 1935, OFF 286
In another letter, we find out where and when Lovecraft must have read “Werewoman”: shortly after leaving the Barlows, in St. Augustine:
Aunt just forwarded “Werewoman”, for which abundant thanks. Glad you’re getting the decent text before the thing is pulpised. I recall reading it on a bench in San Agustin—in the Plaza de la Constitutción. —H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 2 Jan 1936, OFF 313
R. H. Barlow had convinced C. L. Moore to allow him to publish “Werewoman,” which he eventually did in his amateur journal Leaves #2 (Winter 1938). He also separately printed and bound a small edition, one copy of which is listed in The Book Sail 16th Anniversary Catalogue:
493. MOORE, C[athereine] L[ucille]. Werewoman. 1934. Privately prepared, typewritten ribbon copy on the rectors of [iii] 29 [ii] pages, 8 ½” x 11″. Inscribed by Moore and bound in half morocco and heavy paper-covered boards, with an additional inscription on an adhesive label affixed to the front fly. A notation appears on the final leaf, indicating that this is one of three copies.
The literary afterlife of “Werewoman” after its initial printing is a messy affair; pulp scholar Sam Moskowitz had noted that the story was in the public domain and republished it without seeking Moore’s permission, which rather soured Moore on Moskowitz (and in turn, Moskowitz on Moore) in a dispute that went on for decades, with Moskowitz getting the final word after Moore’s death. Dave Goudsward tracks the accusations and animosity in his article “A Tale of Two Stories” in Pulp Adventures #36 (2020), which also reprints “Werewoman.”
Lovecraft never wrote anything more about the story; he might have written about it to Moore and his letter lost, but as the story had not seen print during his lifetime he could scarcely write about it to anyone else. Despite Moore’s own low opinion of the tale, he ranked it among her better ones…and while “Werewoman” might not be the best of the Northwest Smith tales, it is undoubtedly among the weirdest.
C. L. Moore never spoke of the inspiration for this story; though the term “were-woman” or “werewoman” had cropped up rarely in Weird Tales before then, notably in Robert E. Howard’s “Worms of the Earth” (WT Nov 1932), and the werewoman inviting Northwest Smith as her mate recalls the interaction Bêlit and Conan in “The Queen of the Black Coast” (WT May 1934). It eschews any direct connection to the other Northwest Smith stories, and is hard to place in any kind of chronology. Ironically, that probably made it easier when Roy Thomas adapted the story for Conan the Barbarian in Savage Sword of Conan #221 (1994).
While space opera had few absolute conventions in the early 1930s, “Werewoman” defies most of them: on an unknown planet, Northwest Smith encounters werewolves and ancient alien sorcery. It wouldn’t be the first or last time that Moore mixed superscience with the supernatural, but there is absolutely no hesitancy or winking at the audience. The division between fantasy and science fiction as distinct sub-genres was already beginning to be established, but weird tales could and did mix and mingle both.
Lovecraft no doubt loved the rich description, the absolute weirdness of the conception and execution of the story. If a reader can suspend their disbelief about the incongruence of settings, there is much to enjoy in the story. Once again, outer space outlaw Northwest Smith has stumbled into an ancient mystery, one that involves a beautiful woman and a danger to body and soul alike. In terms of tone, the presentation of Smith as an “adventurer,” the story is closer to the kind of sword & sorcery tales of Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber, Jr. than the space operas of E. E. “Doc” Smith or Edmond Hamilton.
Moore’s werewoman is different than that of most of the other werewolves Lovecraft had encountered written by women. She is not solitary, but the leader of a pack; more than a killer, she shows admiration and acceptance for Northwest Smith. Like White Fell in The Were-Wolf (1896) by Clemence Housman, she seems to embrace her nature, but rather than defy gender roles she seems to embrace and embody her position as the leader of the pack. No wailing or gnashing of teeth over her fate, no men fighting over her: she likes being a wolf, and chooses whom to love. The result is a sympathetic portrayal of a strong woman that goes for what she wants—not unlike Moore’s heroine Jirel of Joiry.
“Werewoman” has been reprinted many times over the decades, but the confusion about its copyright status appears to have largely prevented the text from being widely available online. The text in Pulp Adventures #36 is a true and accurate copy of the original 1938 printing from Leaves. Being a mimeographed publication, Leaves does not scan well, but anyone that wants to strain their eyes can attempt to make their way through this scan. A full reprint of Leaves and Barlow’s other amateur journal The Dragon-Fly was published by S. T. Joshi and can be found here.
As to the work of C. L. Moore—I don’t agree with your low estimate. These tales have a peculiar quality of cosmic weirdness, hard to define but easy to recognise, which makrs them out as really unique. […] In these tales there is an indefinable atmosphere of vague outsidesness & cosmic dread which marks weird work of the best sort. How notably they contrast with the average pulp product—whose bizarre subject-matter is wholly neutralised by the brisk, almost cheerful manner of narration! Whether the Moore tales will keep their pristine quality or deterioriate as their author picks up the methods, formulae, & style of cheap magazine fiction, still remains to be seen.
—H. P. Lovecraft to William F. Anger, 28 Jan 1935, Letters to Robert Bloch & Others 227
C. L. Moore burst into the pages of Weird Tales in 1933 with “Shambleau”—a science fantasy that earned universal praise and introduced her character Northwest Smith. She followed that success with three more tales of Smith: “Black Thirst” (WT Apr 1934), “Scarlet Dream” (WT May 1934), and “Dust of the Gods” (WT Aug 1934). These stories were all self-contained, with a common setting and characters, but with no strong narrative continuity. These episodes all took place during Smith’s life as an interstellar outlaw, but there was no overarching plot between episodes, and few if any clues to put them in any order aside from order of publication.
Then in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, Moore introduced a new character—a fiery, red-headed warrior-woman in medieval France—Jirel of Joiry. In later years, recalling the character, Moore remembered:
Long, long ago I had thoughts of a belligerent dame who must have been her progenitor, and went so far as to begin a story which went something like this: “The noise of battle beating up around the walls of Arazon castle rang sweetly in the ears of Arazon’s warrior lady.” And I think it went no farther. So far as I know she stands ther eyet listening to the tumult of an eternal battle. Back to her Jirel of Joiry no doubt traces her ancestry.
Jirel’s Guillaume whom I so ruthlessly slew in the first of her stories, yet whom I can’t quite let die, was patterned after the drawing of Pav of Romne with which I illustrated her latest story, “The Dark Land” in Weird Tales. I made that drawing somewhere in the remote past, and have cherished it all these years in the confidence that someday it would come in handy. I meant to use it to illustrate “Black God’s Kiss,” first of the Jirel tales, but somehow the story got out of hand, and I’ve never since been able to introduce a situation it would fit until “The Dark Land.”
—C. L. Moore, “An Autobiographical Sketch of C. L. Moore,” Echoes of Valor 2, 37-38
Weird Tales Jan 1936
In later years, she would write of her two most famous redheads:
Shambleau and Jirel bear a close relationship to each other, and both, I believe, unconsciously reflect the woman I wish I could have been. I owe a great deal of my literary outpourings to Himself, My Unconscious.
—C. L. Moore, The Faces of Science Fiction
The basic plot, of a strange journey and a Faustian bargain, are familiar enough elements from a dozen weird fiction stories. Female protagonists, especially swordswomen, were rare. Robert E. Howard had included Bêlit in “Queen of the Black Coast” (WT May 1934), and long-time readers might recall R. T. M. Scott’s “Nimba, The Cave Girl” (WT Mar 1923), so it wasn’t as if Jirel was exactly the first to grace the pages of the Unique Magazine—but Moore brought her own unique style.
At least, H. P. Lovecraft thought so, and wasn’t shy to tell others about it:
Black God great stuff—real nightmare outsideness.
—H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 7 Oct 1934, O Fortunate Floridian 183
Oct. W.T. about average, on the whole. The Moore item is really very notable—full of a tensity & 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 les from the the hackneyed & conventional. —H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 26 Oct 1934, O Fortunate Floridian 187
“The Black God’s Kiss”, despite overtones of conventional romance, is great stuff. The other-world descriptions & suggestions are stupendous.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Duane W. Rimel, 22 Dec 1934, Letters to F. Lee Baldwin et al. 248
Nor was Lovecraft alone in his praise, as the story received praise in “The Eyrie,” Weird Tales‘ letters pages, such as:
I (and I’m sure many others) want to hear a great deal more of Jirel. She’s the kind of person I’d like to be myself. A sort of feminine version of Conan the Cimmerian. He, too, is one of my favorites. —Mary A. Conklin, Weird Tales Dec 1934
The creator of Cthulhu’s admiration for the tale can be easily understood; this is easily the most Lovecraftian of C. L. Moore’s early stories. Jirel’s descent into the tunnel recalls stories like Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Festival,” and her description is as pure an effort at non-Euclidean geometry as anything Lovecraft attempted:
There was something queer about the angles of those curves. She was no scholar in geometry or aught else, but she felt intuitively that the bend and slant of the way she went were somehow outside any other angles or bends she had ever known. —C. L. Moore, “Black God’s Kiss” in Weird Tales Oct 1934
The comparison of Jirel with Conan is one that would be made again, as Jirel and the Cimmerian’s adventures continued. They were contemporaries, and their creators thought a bit alike, as they would find out through correspondence, when Robert E. Howard let her read his own story about a flame-haired French swordswoman, Dark Agnes de Chastillon. Moore’s Jirel stories tend to lean more into the sorcery than the swordplay; while she has a sword and uses it in “Black God’s Kiss,” her quest is a very un-Conan-like one for a sorcerous weapon to aid her where force of arms has failed, and in many of her other stories she faces supernatural threats where her blade is useless.
If many of the readers liked “Black God’s Kiss,” at least one of them did not:
The Black God’s Kiss was by far the poorest C. L. Moore story yet. The first three of C. L. Moore’s tales were excellent, but the last two were rather pediculous. —Fred Anger, Weird Tales Dec 1934
William F. Anger’s sour note in “The Eyrie” might be forgotten, except for one coincidence: he had become a correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft. Though Lovecraft had not yet started to correspond with C. L. Moore, as he later would, he felt obliged to defend the merits of Moore’s fiction, including “Black God’s Kiss”:
Regarding the Moore stories—one has to separate the undeniably hackneyed & mechanical romance from the often remarkable background against which it is arrayed. “The Black God’s Kiss” had a vastly clever setting—the pre-human tunnel beneath the castle, the upsetting of gravitational & dimensional balance, the strange, ultra-dimensional world of unknown laws & shapes & phenomena, &c. &c. If that could be taken out of the sentimental plot & made the scene of events of really cosmically bizarre motivation, it would be tremendously powerful. The distinctive thing about Miss Moore is her ability to devise conditions & sights & phenomena of utter strangeness & originality, & to describe them in a language conveying something of their outre, phantasmagoric, & dread-filled quality. That in itself is an accomplishment possessed by very few of the contributors to the cheap pulp magazines. For the most part, allegedly “Weird” writers phrase their stories in such a brisk, cheerful, matter-of-fact, colloquial, dialogue-ridden sort of style that all genuine ene of shadow & menace is lost. So far, Miss M. has escaped this pitfall; though continued writing for miserable rags like the current pulps will probably spoil her as it has spoiled Quinn, Hamilton, & all the rest. The editors will encourage her worst tendencies—the sticky romance & cheap “Action”—& discourage everything of real merit (the macabre language, the original descriptive touches, the indefinite atmosphere, the brooding tension, &c.) which her present work possesses. Nothing will ever teach the asses who peddle cheap magazines that a weird story should not & cannot be an “action” or “character” story. The only justification for a weird tale is that it be an authentic & convincing picture of a certain human mood; & this means that vague impressions & atmosphere must predominate. Events must not be crowded, & human characters must not assume too great importance. The real protagonists of fantasy fiction are not people but phenomena. The logical climax is not a revelation of what somebody does, but a glimpse of the existence of some condition contrary to nature as commonly accepted. —H. P. Lovecraft to William F. Anger, 16 Feb 1935, LRBO 229
While Lovecraft never wrote these exact words to C. L. Moore, when they did get to corresponding she had her own response:
Also, since I’m disagreeing with everything today, I’ll have a shot at your dislike for romance contrasted with your love and understanding of fantasy. You don’t ahve to take Dumas any more literally than you do Dunsany. Of course lots of people probably do look persistently through rose-colored glasses, but then dear, sincere old Lumley believes implicitly in his phantasms. To me it’s just as pleasant to imagine during the duration of the story that there is a loely springtime world people exclusively by handsome heroes and exquisite heroines and life is one long romp of adventure with no unpleasant attribtues at all, as it is to believe for the length of the story that time, space and natural law can be elastic enough to permit the existence of a Shambleau or a Cthulhu (have I spelled him right?). Your point, of course, is that to be acceptable as release-literature the hapenings must be incredibly outside, not aganst the phenomena of nature. Does that mean that you can’t with self-respect, enjoy Howard’s gorgeous Conan sagas, which are surely pure romance for the most part? —C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 11 Dec 1935, Letters to C. L. Moore and Others 88-89
A large part of the charm in the early Moore stories, be they tales of Northwest Smith or Jirel of Joiry or science fiction tales like “The Bright Illusion” (Astounding Stories Oct 1934) is the imaginative and lush descriptions, often trying to capture in words some utterly alien emotion or experience above and beyond what anyone might imagine a young woman working as a secretary in an Indianapolis bank during the Great Depression might ever dream of. Yet she did dream them, and her early fantasies made a mark.
There are two interesting sequels to “Black God’s Kiss.” The first is quite literally a direct sequel: “Black God’s Shadow” was published only a couple months later in the December 1934 issue of Weird Tales. This would be the first direct sequel she had ever written, a step away from the disconnected adventures of Northwest Smith—and while she never developed the setting of Joiry with as much depth as Robert E. Howard did the Hyborian Age for Conan, it was still a step in the direction of the fantasy worlds that would follow in coming decades.
The second sequel is more complicated. In early 1934, Lovecraft’s young friend R. H. Barlow began to correspond with C. L. Moore. Barlow learned that Moore was in talks with William Crawford to try and publish some of her stories. Barlow was an amateur printer and bookbinder, and wanted to publish a small edition of her stories. The correspondence between C. L. Moore and Lovecraft actually began when Barlow enlisted Lovecraft’s aid to try and convince here to give Barlow the good stories:
I shall be glad to cooperate in any way possible, & will endeavour at the earliest opportunity to write the authoress such a letter as you suggest—pointing out sound as distinguished from commercial lines of development, yet avoiding any air of supercilious fault finding or lack of appreciativeness. There is no question but that her work possesses a strain of authentic cosmic alienage & extreme originality found in no other weirdist since Klarkash-Ton—a pervasive atmospheric tension, & a curious facility in evoking images of utter trangeness & suggesting monstrous gateways from the tri-dimensional world to other spheres of entity. —H. P. Lovecraft to R. H. Barlow, 16 Mar 1935, O Fortunate Floridian217
There was some finagling, but eventually Barlow and Lovecraft convinced Moore to allow Barlow to publish a small edition containing “Shambleau,” “Black Thirst,” and “Black God’s Kiss”—Lovecraft considered her best stories at the time. As it happened, neither Barlow or Crawford’s volumes ever came to press, although Barlow did print and bind some other works of Moore’s, notably a few copies of “Were-Woman.”
Without “Black God’s Kiss” and Jirel of Joiry, H. P. Lovecaft and C. L. Moore may never have begun to correspond—which would have changed the trajectory of both their lives.
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Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 