Catherine Lucille Moore with Henry Kuttner. Leigh Brackett with Edmond Hamilton. Two couples. Four SF-writers. They travel east together in the summer of 1949, ‘that was a trip we still treasure in memory’ recalls Hamilton. A lot of their conversation probably consisted of arguing about navigation, whether to take the next left or right turn, or who is to make the coffee. But oh, to be a robo-fly on the ceiling of their mobile-home! Surely there must have been moments of ‘what story are you working on at the moment?’, or a ‘I loved your tale in ‘Planet Stories’, how did that one come about?’ They must have talked shop… at least for a while, they must have traded technical secrets and publishing anecdotes?
Jirel of Joiry starts out with the fantasy ‘Black God’s Kiss’ as featured in the October 1934 issue of ‘Weird Tales’ (vol.24 no.4), under Farnsworth Wright’s editorial hand. That the story, and its sequels, have Robert E Howard elements has been frequently pointed out, but Jirel is no Red Sonya of Rogatino. She is located way outside of the Hyborian Era, so that Joiry seems to be a part of medieval France – ‘The Quest For The Starstone’ specifies the year 1500, and perhaps the name is pronounced in the French way ‘Jwary’?, with fiction’s supernatural aspects viewed through an early Christian lens. The crucifix has powers. And when Jirel travels through ‘poly-dimensional space’ to emerge in a surreal parallel world, she interprets it as part of the Christian doctrine of hades where ‘nature’s laws were warped by strange magic.’
She’s a female warrior of formidable powers, ‘the yellow blaze of her eyes held fury as a crucible holds fire,’ conjured at a time when such an idea was novel in itself. ‘She was a creature of the wildest paradox, this warrior lady of Joiry, hot as a red coal, chill as steel, satiny of body and iron of soul. The set of her chin was firm, but her mouth betrayed a tenderness she would have died before admitting.’ And there are complicated gender games at play just beneath the surface. Guillaume is the conqueror with blood on his beard. He has brought Joiry to its knees. Jirel is brought into his presence as a defeated foe. The cruel and forceful kiss – ‘the scornful press of his mouth over hers,’ uninvited, is the soft movie metaphor for rape. When Guillaume presses his kiss upon her, her disgusted reaction is as if to rape. And she commits herself to wreaking a terrible vengeance.
Escaping her cell, assisted by Father Gervase, she returns through a subterranean labyrinth beneath the fortress, and enters an alien passage into what she perceives as hell itself, in order to locate a weapon sufficiently terrible to exact her revenge. Yet the realm she finds herself within, with its own moons and low-gravitation, more resembles the skewed strangeness of Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The City Of The Singing Flame’ (1931) than it does any idea of Dante’s Inferno. CL Moore lacks Leigh Brackett’s poetry, but effectively conveys a fractured surrealism of timeless moments where streams chatter a ‘murmurous language’ that resembles human speech and columns of shadowless light fall in a place ‘impossible beyond nightmare.’
The weapon she steals is not a sword, but a kiss. Again, a universal cipher from fairytale rifted with multiple levels of meaning. It transfigures into a dark kiss that she carries within her, which – upon her return to Joiry, she transfers to Guillaume, which kills him and steals his soul.
Stranger yet, in the sequel – ‘Black Gods Shadow’ from ‘Weird Tales’ (vol.24 no.6, November 1934), she’s haunted by visions of his lost wailing soul, only to realise that she loves him – ‘a curious raging fever which was both hate and love,’ and she vows to undo the curse she’s inflicted upon him. As the text constantly reminds the reader, Jirel is a strong independent woman, yet is betrayed by a heart that wilts to the strong dominant male presence, in ‘a flash of violence that might have been hate or love.’ The story is a virtual retelling, with variations, of the previous tale. She retraces her steps and returns to the weird otherworldly realm, a reverse flip of Orpheus’ trip into the underworld to rescue Eurydice, where – as in Greek mythology, souls are fused into writhing trees.
The issue in which the story appears includes the Margaret Brundage cover-illustrated Robert E Howard Conan story ‘A Witch Shall Be Born’, as well as Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique fantasy ‘Xeethra’, to which he adds his own artwork. Yet CL Moore’s story stands as unique and distinctive as either, already confident in its own powers of invention. How does Jirel triumph against the Black God? Not with her blade, but in a flood of tears, and a dance of multiple self-figures. An assertion of her very human emotions, to maintain a cosmic equilibrium where dark cannot exist without light, and light cannot exist without its opposite. Guillaume is freed from the curse and allowed to die a natural death.
Born in Indiana, 24 January 1911 (died 4 April 1987), CL Moore’s fiction was celebrated by HP Lovecraft himself who praised the ‘indefinable atmosphere of vague outsiderness and cosmic dread which marks weird work of the best sort’ (in a letter to William F Anger dated 28 January 1935). Robert Silverberg celebrates the way her writing ‘succeeds magnificently by achieving extraordinary richness of vision and emotion, conveyed through supple, beautifully modulated prose’ (in ‘Robert Silverberg’s Worlds Of Wonder’, Victor Gollancz, 1988). Although Jirel’s is a world of knightly chivalry, the battles are violent and bloody. While the details are well-observed, fully-armoured and riding her mighty war-horse, the weight is such that she’s unable to dismount without assistance. The gender agenda is unobtrusive, except that ‘feminine vengeance’ is ‘more terrible than anything iron or steel could inflict.’ While the language is fresh and inventive, are ‘glitteringly’ or ‘skyey’ even words?
Jirel continues into fresh strangeness with ‘Jirel Meets Magic’ in ‘Weird Tales’ (July 1935, Vol.26 no.1), illustrated by Jack Binder. Later gathered into her 1953 ‘Shambleau’ (Gnome Press) collection and then included in the Pamela Sargent edited ‘More Women Of Wonder’ (1976, Vintage Books). Freed of her nuanced bond to Guillaume, she leads a retaliatory raid against the Guischard fortress in order to hunt down and kill the wizard Giraud, the ‘foul spell-brewer’ responsible for the murder of ten Joiry men in an attack at Massy Ford. Searching through the defeated corpse-strewn castle for her quarry leads her to a high turret, where she steps through a high window… into an enchanted fairyland world of hallucinogenic blossoms and wild imagination.
She’s hunting Giraud, but comes into immediate conflict with sorceress Jarisme who is granting him sanctuary, Jirel first sees Jarisme torturing a naked dying Dryad-girl. In a contest between the two women, Jirel has no magical powers, just the strength of her blade pitted against her adversary’s control of a series of dazzling illusions. The lushness of the images CL Moore conjures are as ornately decorative as a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Behind a corridor of doors, one gives a glimpse of deep galactic space with the silver flash of a shapeship, behind another is a vision of the Earth’s last days beneath a pale red sun, and there’s a vision of Mars in a ‘chaos of blaze and confusion’. There is circularity in that it is the intensity of Jirel’s re-experiencing the agony of Guillaume’s death that breaks Jarisme’s spell, and that it is the green-haired Dryad girl’s crystal talisman that destroys the sorceress and her dread retinue.
Leaping ahead to the January 1936 issue of ‘Weird Tales’ (vol.27 no.1), CL Moore illustrates her own ‘The Dark Land’ – blurbed ‘an amazing tale of a red-headed warrior maid, and a leprously white skull-faced woman, and a flame that was quenched,’ in which Jirel is mortally wounded by a pikestaff in battle. But before Father Gervase can administer last rights, she’s snatched away ‘over the spacecurve that parts this land from yours’ to become the unwilling bride of ‘black hell-dweller’ Pav, and to rule as Queen of Romne. Again, there are elements of sexual threat to which she’d rather die than yield. ‘Pav’s body was the body of a man, but it was not – she sensed it intuitively – as a man alone that he desired her, and from surrender to the dark intensity of what lay beyond the flesh her whole soul shuddered away.’ Jirel forms an uneasy alliance with the white skull-faced rival for Pav’s affection, which destroys him, unaware that the entire realm of Romne is the creation of his will, and that without Pav it returns to a state of formless chaos. In a final gesture he returns her, healed, to Joiry.
CL Moore was married to Henry Kuttner, and they wrote together, frequently on the same typewriter – it’s said that when one of them finished, the other took over. Inevitably there were crossovers and mash-ups, with collaborative novels such as ‘Earth’s Last Citadel’ (1943), ‘The Mask Of Circe’ (1948) and the short-story collection ‘No Boundaries’ (1955). And she’d already created her own freebooting Space Opera hero in ‘Northwest Smith’ – starting out with the classic ‘Shambleau’ (in ‘Weird Tales’ Vol.22 no.5, November 1933). His exploits were running in parallel magazine editions to those of Jirel. Perhaps it was also inevitable that the two fictional characters would meet, although ‘Quest Of The Starstone’ co-written with Kuttner and published in ‘Weird Tales’ (November 1937, vol.30 no.5) with Virgil Finlay art, is not always included in the Jirel canon. It’s an uneasy balance that lacks her usual fluency, her deft descriptions of the interplay of light and dark, the internalised struggles of will and motivation that are the usual hallmark of the Jirel tales.
The ‘fiend-begotten runaway warlock’ Franga uses another of those space-time portals in order to reach Northwest Smith and his Venusian companion Yarol, in a low Martian dive, and recruit them to hunt down Jirel and retrieve the enchanted Starstone that she’d wrested from him. At first, it’s simply a paid assignment for the duo, but once they meet Jirel and when Franga uses yet another portal to steal them into a dark-land the three of them unite against the evil Franga. In the ensuing struggle the Starstone is shattered, releasing the ancient beings imprisoned within, who gratefully return the adventurers to their points of origin. Smith finds himself back in the Martian drinking-booth with Yarol, haunted by ‘the face of a girl two thousand years in time, light-years of space away, whose very dust was long lost upon the bright winds of Earth.’
The story has moments of power, and there have already been intimations that space-time windows open up into various futures, so the link with Northwest Smith is not entirely unfeasible within the context of the milieu. But – if it’s a disappointing entry into the Jirel canon, the next – and final story, delivers way above expectations, as simply the most fully-realised Jirel tale of them all. ‘Hellsgarde’ arrived in ‘Weird Tales’ (April 1939, Vol.33 no.4), again with art embellishments by Virgil Finlay. This time there is no slipping between worlds.
Guy of Garlot holds twenty Joiry soldiers in his dungeon, and to earn their freedom Jirel must travel to the fortress of Hellsgarde lost beyond quicksand and mist, to retrieve the casket of treasure that belonged to Andred, who was dismembered and thrown into the marshes two centuries earlier. She crosses the single causeway to find the supposedly abandoned castle occupied by disturbingly strange people marked out by a ‘deformity of the soul’ who ‘wore evil like a garment.’ The doom-laden atmosphere is well-conveyed, as ‘only in minstrels’ romances does a lone adventurer escape through a guarded courtyard and a guarded gate.’ The strangers are Aleric’s peripatetic Hunters of Undeath, who use Jirel as bait to attract Andred’s ghost and drink his wraith-essence, although within the terrifying confrontation with the powerful phantom she manages to seize the casket. As a parting gesture Aleric warns her not to open the casket, as it will unleash evil. So she barters it to handsome but evil Guy of Garlot in exchange for the freedom of her men, knowing it will visit terrible vengeance upon him.
The story is superb in its every detail, with tension and mystery that persists right through to the final paragraph. Writers such as HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard or Clark Ashton Smith created their own instantly identifiable worlds, with this tale CL Moore places Jirel in a kind of supernatural medievalism that is uniquely and unmistakably her own.
Although there was to be no more Jirel, CL Moore married Henry Kuttner in 1940 and they fruitfully collaborated through many guises, ranging from Lewis Padgett, (including ‘Mimsy Were The Borogoves’ in ‘Astounding SF’, February 1943), Lawrence O’Donnell and Keith Hammond to CH Liddell. One of the tales published under her own name – ‘No Woman Born’ (in ‘Astounding SF’, December 1944) concerns beautiful actress Deidre who was hideously disfigured in a theatre fire. Maltzer uses her brain but reconstructs her body in android form, with faint hints of Jirel in the paragraph ‘she looked, indeed, very much like a creature in armour, with her delicately plated limbs and her featureless head like a helmet with a visor of glass, and her robe of chainmail. But no knight in armour ever moved as Deidre moved, or wore his armour upon a body of such inhumanly fine proportions. Only a knight from another world, or a knight of Oberon’s court, might have shared that delicate likeness.’
John Clute – in his ‘Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia’ (Dorling Kindersley,1995), suggests that, together, Kuttner and Moore’s ‘work ran the gamut from Space Opera through tall tales to genuine epics of speculation, such as ‘Fury’ (1947). It is almost certainly the case, although nobody can be really sure, that Moore had the more powerful imagination; and it has been suggested that her subordination during Kuttner’s life reflected mid-century sexual morés in America.’ Whatever, CL Moore ceased to write genre fiction after Kuttner’s death in 1958, but concentrated her creative energies on script-writing for TV dramas such as ‘77 Sunset Strip’ and the Western series ‘Maverick’ and ‘Sugarfoot’. After a long battle with Alzheimer’s Disease, she died in her Hollywood home 4 April 1987. While – to Clute, ‘Kuttner died before SF began to look in upon itself, but in her last years, Moore was widely honoured,’ and over the space-curve and through a dark dimensional portal, Jirel of Joiry fights on.
‘JIREL OF JOIRY’ by C.L. MOORE
(2019, Gollancz Golden Age, 204pp
– ISBN 978-1-473-22252-6,
first published as a collection 1969)
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON
.