Vagueness In Motion

Margaret Brundage, October 1934.

Along with Clark Ashton Smith, C. L. Moore is, for me, by far the best writer to contribute to Weird Tales. Even if the standards of that magazine were not painfully low, I believe her stories would match the work of fantasy writers anywhere. "Black God's Kiss," for example, can justify belief.

Although I could argue that her prose is better than much of the writing found in Weird Tales, I can still see limitations. It is very much a pulp style, without nuance, and often without grace. It offers the vividness of primary colours, with no room for subtlety:

"Many little hatreds she had known in her life, but no such blaze as this. Before her eyes in the night she could see Guillaume’s scornful, scarred face laughing, the little jutting beard split with the whiteness of his mirth. Upon her mouth she felt the remembered weight of his, about her the strength of his arms. And such a blast of hot fury came over her that she reeled a little and clutched at the wall for support. She went on in a haze of red anger and something like madness burning in her brain as a resolve slowly took shape out of the chaos of her hate. When that thought came to her, she paused again, midstep upon the stairs, and was conscious of a little coldness blowing over her. Then it was gone, and she shivered a little, shook her shoulders and grinned wolfishly, and went on."

What Moore's writing offered, instead, was economy of presentation. She begins the story in media res:

"They brought in Joiry’s tall commander, struggling between two men-at-arms who tightly gripped the ropes which bound their captive’s mailed arms. They picked their way between mounds of dead as they crossed the great hall toward the dais where the conqueror sat, and twice they slipped a little in the blood that spattered the flags. When they came to a halt before the mailed figure on the dais, Joiry’s commander was breathing hard, and the voice that echoed hollowly under the helmet’s confines was hoarse with fury and despair."

Her transitions come rapidly:

"Jirel opened her yellow eyes upon darkness. She lay quiet for a while, collecting her scattered thoughts. By degrees it came back to her, and she muffled upon her arm a sound that was half curse and half sob. Joiry had fallen. For a time she lay rigid in the dark, forcing herself to the realization.

"The sound of feet shifting on stone near by brought her out of that particular misery. She sat up cautiously, feeling about her to determine in what part of Joiry its liege lady was imprisoned. She knew that the sound she had heard must be a sentry and by the dank smell of the darkness that she was underground. In one of the little dungeon cells, of course. With careful quietness she got to her feet, muttering a curse as her head reeled for an instant and then began to throb. In the utter dark she felt around the cell. Presently she came to a little wooden stool in a corner and was satisfied. She gripped one leg of it with firm fingers and made her soundless way around the wall until she had located the door.

"The sentry remembered, afterward, that he had heard the wildest shriek for help which had ever rung in his ears, and he remembered unbolting the door. Afterward, until they found him lying inside the locked cell with a cracked skull, he remembered nothing.

"Jirel crept up the dark stairs of the north turret, murder in her heart."

She also has a narrative technique similar to Clark Ashton Smith's, in which the descriptive details are never static, but are presented as actions in which the reader participates:

"Presently in the distance she caught a glimmer of something bright. The ground dipped after that and she lost it and skimmed through a hollow where pale things wavered away from her into the deeper dark. She never knew what they were and was glad. When she came up onto higher ground again, she saw it more clearly, an expanse of dim brilliance ahead. She hoped it was a lake and ran more swiftly.

"It was a lake -- a lake that could never have existed outside some obscure hell like this. She stood on the brink doubtfully, wondering if this could be the place the light-devil had meant. Black, shining water stretched out before her, heaving gently with a motion unlike that of any water she had ever seen before. And in the depths of it, like fireflies caught in ice, gleamed myriad small lights. They were fixed there immovably, not stirring with the motion of the water. As she watched, something hissed above her and a streak of light split the dark air. She looked up in time to see something bright curving across the sky to fall without a splash into the water, and small ripples of phosphorescence spread sluggishly toward the shore, where they broke at her feet with the queerest whispering sound, as if each succeeding ripple spoke the syllable of a word."

This method allows the reader to experience events with Jirel, to discover new details at the same time that she does.

Unlike Smith's, Moore's details are often more abstract than concrete. In this, her technique resembles A. Merritt's, but unlike Merritt, she had the verbal skill to combine abstraction with movement:

"Now she could see the temple more closely, though scarcely more clearly than from the shore. It looked to be not more than an outlined emptiness against the star-crowded brilliance behind it, etching its arches and columns of blankness upon the twinkling waters. The bridge came down in a long dim swoop to its doorway. Jirel took the last few yards at a reckless run and stopped breathless under the arch that made the temple’s vague doorway. She stood there panting and staring about narrow-eyed, sword poised in her hand. For though the place was empty and very still, she felt a presence even as she set her foot upon the floor of it.

"She was staring about a little space of blankness in the starry lake. It seemed to be no more than that. She could see the walls and columns where they were outlined against the water and where they made darknesses in the star-flecked sky, but where there was only dark behind them she could see nothing. It was a tiny place, no more than a few square yards of emptiness upon the face of the twinkling waters. And in its center an image stood.

"She stared at it in silence, feeling a curious compulsion growing within her, like a vague command from something outside herself. The image was of some substance of nameless black, unlike the material which composed the building, for even in the dark she could see it clearly. It was a semihuman figure, crouching forward with outthrust head, sexless and strange. Its one central eye was closed as if in rapture, and its mouth was pursed for a kiss. And though it was but an image and without even the semblance of life, she felt unmistakably the presence of something alive in the temple, something so alien and innominate that instinctively she drew away."

I find this prose dangerously vague, but at the same time, I respect the self-discipline that keeps the vagueness active, and keeps Jirel at the forefront of perception. Moore is constantly aware of how Jirel thinks and feels; this gives focus to environments that rely less on imagery than on moods.

Given that fantasy can rely on mood as much as it relies on imagery, writers can be tempted to avoid the hard work of making strangeness vivid; they can litter their clauses with adjectives and adverbs in the hope that readers might mistake assertion for description. Moore avoided this while remaining true to her concepts of alien experience, of events or perceptions beyond the realm of human understanding. Too many writers have toppled from this wobbling tightrope, but Moore was able to walk with confidence. Her achievement might not be repeatable, but it does fascinate me.