Sword and Sorcery: Fritz Leiber

Asked to provide the introduction to a 1995 reprint anthology of Leiber’s Lanhkmar stories, Michael Moorcock recalled the commercial climate of ‘sword and sorcery’ Fantasy writing in the early 1960s, when he himself first began publishing. He credits Cele Goldsmith Lalli (1933–2002) — editor of Amazing Stories from 1959 to 1965, and Fantastic Stories from 1958 to 1965 — with midwifing the mode.

Cele Goldsmith (later Lalli) is one of the great editors of science fantasy and, with Judith Merril, godmother to the American sf New Wave of the 1960s. She published all the Young Turks, most of them for the first time, in the magazines she edited … Lalli had a liking for what one of her contributors had christened ‘Sword and Sorcery’ and she commissioned a young John Jakes to write her a series of Conan-like adventures, Brak the Barabarian. She published an early fantasy of mine called ‘Earl Aubec and the Golem’, which she retitled ‘Master of Chaos’. She published the first Roger Zelazny story — and published many more. She published Thomas M. Disch and J. G. Ballard and Samuel R. Delany and all the exciting talents which helped create that wonderful sea-change of the 1960s. She also liked Philip K. Dick and Keith Laumer, but I think her favourite writer, whose talent stood so far above the majority of his more financially successful peers, was Fritz Leiber. [Moorcock, ‘Introduction’, Ill Met In Lanhkmar (Orion Books 1995)]

The ‘one of her contributors’ who coined the phrase ‘sword and sorcery’ was Leiber himself, of course. Indeed, for some, Leiber’s importance as a writer of twentieth-century ‘Fantasy’ rivals Tolkien’s. Moorcock certainly thinks so: for where (in his words) J. R. R. Tolkien was ‘an obscure academic’ who ‘published a peculiar trilogy with a William Morris/Anglo-Saxon ring to it [that] became the core of a somewhat unhealthy cult’, Leiber was, simply, ‘the best living Fantasy writer’.

Lalli brought Leiber out of a writer’s-block-induced semi-retirement, and in doing so brought him to a new, larger audience. In 1959 she devoted an entire issue of Fantastic to his earlier work, and commissioned new work from him, going forward.

Leiber, son of a famous actor and sometime actor himself, wrote a good deal of Fantasy and SF for various genre magazines through the 1940s. But after he serialised his 1943 novel Conjure Wife! (a contemporary-set fantasia in which witchcraft is revealed as a secret art known to all women) he began to dry up, although ‘dry’ is perhaps the wrong word, since much of his trouble related to his increasing alcoholism. ‘I began to run into difficulties,’ he later recalled, a ‘period of indecision and anxiety’ about writing, exacerbated by and in turn further exacerbating what he called his ‘heavier drinking’. ‘In the end’ he said he ‘“surrendered” … and went for a war job as a precision inspector at Douglas Aircraft, their Santa Monica plant.’ [‘Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex’, in The Ghost Light (1984), 350–51]. Leiber continued writing, but the magazine market was less hospitable to his preferred mode of serialised novels, with editors wanting more standalone, shorter stories, and his career largely languished until Goldsmith-Lalli resurrected it in 1959. Here’s Moorcock again:

Few recognised the tradition in which we wrote and the public for our work numbered a few thousand throughout the world. The works of most of our predecessors — whether commercial writers like Howard, Burroughs and Merritt or literary writers like Dunsany and Cabell — were largely out of print and hard to find. In those days the kind of supernatural romance which dominates today’s best-seller lists had virtually no commercial market. Leiber had done no better with his first Gray Mouser book [this is 1957’s Two Sought Adventure, a fix-up volume of earlier short stories] than I had done with my first Elric book … So Cele Goldsmith, when she commissioned Fritz Leiber to write a new series of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories for Fantastic, was taking a big gamble with her circulation figures.

Leiber published no Fantasy at all between 1953 and 1959, but the new commissions for ‘Gray Mouser’ stories, and a period in Alcoholics Anonymous, led to a new period of productivity and a good quantity of highly regarded new work emerged. He himself named the mode in which he was now mostly working, in a letter he wrote to the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society fanzine Ancalagon (#2 April March 1961), weighing-in on a discussion of the best way to describe Robert E Howard and Howard-inspired fiction

Howardian fantasy-adventure is … a field which I feel more certain that ever should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story — and (quite incidentally) from the cloak-and-dagger (international espionage) story, too! The word sorcery implies something more and other than historical human witchcraft, so even the element of an alien-yet-human world background is hinted at. … At any rate, I’ll use sword-and-sorcery as a good popular catchphrase for the field. [quoted in Don Herron, ‘Three Sought Adventure’]

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Despite the fact that Leiber’s first ‘Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’ story was published all the way back in the 1930s (‘Two Sought Adventure’ just squeaks into that decade, appearing in Unknown in August 1939) it makes sense to consider his work — and sword and sorcery itself — in the context of the 1960s and 1970s. The novelette ‘Ill Met in Lankhmar’ (1970), one of the most famous of the ‘Gray Mouser’ tales, won both Hugo and Nebula Awards, was a high-point in Leiber’s reception. It was collected along with two other stories detailing the early adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, as Swords and Deviltry (1970); and other stories, either earlier magazine pieces reprinted or new tales specifically written, were collected as Swords in the Mist (1968), Swords Against Wizardry (1968), The Swords of Lankhmar (1968), Swords Against Death (1970), Rime Isle (1977), Swords & Ice Magic (1977), The Knight and Knave of Swords (1988) and the series wrapper-upper Farewell to Lankhmar (1990).

Fafhrd is a huge, muscular barbarian from the northern lands: seven foot tall, skilled at swordsmanship, fond of hearty singing, quaffing, carousing — and fighting. The ‘Mouser’ is much smaller: five foot, slender, equally talented with the rapier and the dagger, a romantic, mercurial thief and a former wizard’s apprentice. ‘The Unholy Grail’ (1962) relates how his former wizard-master, Glavas Rho, was murdered by the magic-hating autocrat Duke Janarrl, and how Mouser took his revenge upon the Duke, before running-off with his toothsome daughter. The Gray Mouser retains some, though small, skill at magic.

Both Fafhrd and the Mouser are charming rogues, turning their hand to whatever scheme, robbery or adventure comes their way, running the kind of gamut you’d expect — Wikipedia suggests they ‘spend a lot of time drinking, feasting, wenching, brawling, stealing, and gambling, while are seldom fussy about who hires their swords’ whilst also being ‘humane and — most of all — relishing true adventure.’

The mainline of Leiberian storytelling is a peripatetic Walter-Scottian adventure/romance mode, something out of Quentin Durward or The Talisman with added supernatural (magic, wizardly, monstrous) elements, though Leiber’s approach is more knowing. Some of Fafhrd and the Mouser’s many adventures lean into the absurdist or comic; others embody a more Jacobean grand guignol. Sometimes the tales switch from one to the other — in ‘Ill Met’, for instance, a ‘what-larks!’ night-time jaunt infiltrating the Lankhmarian Thieves Guild in disguise turns dark, when, on returning home, Fafhrd and the Mouser discover the Guild has had their two girlfriends garrotted and their corpses half-eaten by rats — such that they return to exact a furious revenge with their swords.

If we wanted to play the game of ‘who is the most important 20th-century writer of Fantasy?’ it might well come down to a choice between Tolkien and Leiber, with Robert E Howard, perhaps Burroughs and maybe Gary Gygax (though he was a terrible ‘writer’; but you see what I mean) coming up close behind. A bunch of men, but I’m talking influence: Le Guin was a better writer than any of them, but I don’t know if we can peg her influence on the same scale as these others. Tolkien’s influence is obvious, but Leiber’s runs in large and important ways — including through Gygax’s work — into Moorcock, Scott Lynch, Joe Abercrombie and perhaps most notably into Terry Pratchett, himself arguably the major writer of Fantasy of the 1990s and early noughties.

Comparing Tolkien and Leiber is really not a like-for-like business. Reading him you can very much tell that Leiber typed-out his many many stories in a hurry at a typewriter on a board propped over his sink in a rented room and was out at a bar as soon as the cheque arrived, where Tolkien wrote twenty drafts of every paragraph, collated everything against his slowly expanding comprehensive worldbuilding and moral vision, and spent basically his whole life writing one big book.

That’s not in itself to prefer Tolkien, of course. I mean, speaking personally, I do prefer Tolkien. But this is me, not a larger judgment. I last read Leiber as a teenager, and going back him, and reading through him rather more widely recently, I’m struck by a sense of limitation — however playful, and inventive and diverting the stories are, there’s a sameness there too. I think it’s a question of tone as much as anything, an archness, a kind of performative mischievousness that figures a falseness, an immaturity, in its rendering. I’m not talking about humour, or wit, as such: Pratchett is very funny without ever seeming as brittle or undermature as Leiber sometimes does. What follows is not from a Fafhrd/Mouser story, but I’ve never quite got past this passage from one of Leiber’s autobiographical pieces, talking about his lifelong erotic interest in female breasts:

All my later life it’s been an unending amazement to me how much of my thought and feeling has been wrapped up in so limited an area of the female body. Why so much of the exquisite, the poignant gently folded into that crucial area? Why that particular concatenation of shapes? I can go at it geometrically and say, ‘Two conoids embedded in a flattened cylinder” or, somewhat more aptly, “Adjacent twin conoids of a height about one third their diameter, their apices small hemispheres, smoothly set their own diameter apart and slightly divergent in the broader face of a somewhat flattened cylinder,” and yet geometry can be at best only a part of the explanation; the whole thing’s maddening.’ [Fritz Leiber, ‘Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex’, in The Ghost Light (1984), 304–5]

I don’t mean to be an altogether cheerless puritan when I say: this is bad. This is wincing. An objectifying, clumsy, miss-as-good-as-a-mile rough-cast at ‘humour’, the gesture of someone proud of his autodidact education using it as a cover to, in effect, point and snigger ‘BOOBS!’ (Earlier in this autobiographical account Leiber complains that the West Coast, where he preferred to live, was too expensive — ‘the rents were too high’ — whilst congratulating himself that he and his wife had ‘been lucky to get in cheap during the Big Japanese Scare’ [354] — which is to say, when large numbers of Japanese-Americans were moved out of their homes and into internment camps, with the agreeable-for-Leiber consequence of collapsing the rental market. Leiber also mentions that he had a gay friend, congratulating himself, ‘this didn’t shock me — you get to know about homosexuals in the theater’ — whilst being sure to include the detail that his gay friend was ‘not one of the ones who go screaming and swishing down Michigan Boulevard’ [330]. But I don’t mean to go on.)

Anyway: during my reread something else has struck me, although I don’t know how far to argue this — it could be something, or it could be me completely missing the point, both in terms of Leiber’s writing and the larger culture discourse.

So: the characters of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser were loosely modelled upon Leiber himself and his friend Harry Otto Fischer. Fischer initially created the characters in a letter to Leiber in September 1934, naming both them and their home city of Lankhmar, and sketching some story ideas (‘Lankhmar’ is a good, all-purpose name for a large coastal town: the ‘-mar’ part suggesting the sea, and the ‘lankh’ meaning ‘long’: cf the Dutch placename Lankhorst). Leiber began more substantial drafting of stories set in this world in the later 1930s, detailing the adventures of the two main characters — although the first sustained creation Leiber and Fischer undertook together was to make a board-game out of the premise. Then, after writing various Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories through the 1940s the stream dried up for Leiber, until Cele Goldsmith/Lalli reopened it in the later 1960s.

Fafhrd and Gray Mouser are contrasting figures. Fafhrd is the ‘barbarian’ — that is, a Germanic warrior type, a broadsword smiter, hearty carouser, big and blonde and muscular. The Mouser is more, as we might say, ‘Mediterranean’ or Oriental figure: smaller, darker, wilier, cleverer, though susceptible to romantic notions.

One of these two figures is, we might say, ‘Aryan’; the other is ‘Jewish’. But to say so is only to reflect the characters’ originators’ self-mythologising origins, for Leiber was the former and Fischer the latter. Leiber’s family roots were German/Christian — Baden-Baden and Mecklenburg (Leiber himself was an Episcopalian, and almost became a minister of the church). Fischer, out of Louisiana, was of German Jewish heritage. I wonder if the name Fafhrd was actually a version of the Yiddish פאדרי, fedhre, which is what Leiber’s son called his own father from the 40s onward (Fischer’s children called him ‘Greyson’: an interesting piece of inversion, that also plays through into the fiction).

What I’m interested in, here, is the popularity, the cultural resonance, of a particular twosome: the handsome ‘Aryan’ and handsome ‘Jew’ as a buddy pairing. It seems to me that this emerges, especially in the USA, through the 1960s and 1970s, such that — let’s say — Starsky and Hutch (a kind of contemporary cop-show Fafhrd and Gray Mouser) pairs David Soul, an American of Norwegian familial descent, with the Jewish Paul Michael Glaser. Or, let’s say, the timeless pairing of Paul Newman (a Jew: his ancestors, out of Poland and Hungary, were Feckovás and Cohns) and WASP Robert Redford, in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Or, on the darker side, Midnight Cowboy’s pairing of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. Or to bring it a little more up-to-date: the repeated movie-pairing of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. (There are lots of other examples: Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H; Cagney and Lacey; Mary & Rhoda. We might add Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock, for though William Shatner is Jewish he perhaps, to use the problematic term, ‘passes’ as gentile).

I should I suppose declare a personal interest. I am, whilst not the full Fafhrd-y 7ft, a big guy: a fairly hulking Aryan individual, 6’2”, pale as milk, blue-eyed, blonde-haired (or as was, back in the day when I had hair), a sample of solid and lumbering northern-European stock. My wife, however, is a five-foot-tall Jewess, dark, smart and quick-witted, and we have raised our kids as Jews. I mean, it’s perhaps hard to separate these things out altogether: I love my wife very much, because she is who she is: which is to say, I don’t love her because she is a Jew. On the other hand, I’m conscious of the way larger pressures determine and shape cultural value and desire. George Lucas (Methodist-raised: of German, Swiss and English heritage) wrote a SF epic which he spent literally billions of dollars to bring to the screen. It concerns a fresh-faced, blonde, blue-eyed lad raised by his Scandi mother — noted Swedish actor Pernilla August — who falls in love with beautiful Jewess Natalie Hershlag (Natalie Portman, to give the stage-name) and in so doing sets in motion the whole dramatic Star Wars story arc.

I suppose I’m wondering whether ‘Fafhrd and Gray Mouser’, coming to cultural prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, isn’t another example of this dynamic — and wondering, whilst I do so, what it might say about ‘Fantasy’ (or ‘Sword and Sorcery’) as a mode. The mix of default, whitebread ‘normalcy’ (racially, culturally) with something exotic — though not too exotic? The pairing of WASP and Jew. This in turn leads into the larger matter of ‘Jewish Fantasy’ as such, which is a bigger question than can be accomodated in this blogpost. [See also]