Seekers of Tomorrow (38 page)

"If you can't lick 'em, join 'em" has been his motto, and he demonstrated the techniques in
Gather,
Darkness!
a novel serialized in the May, June, and July, 1943, issues of astound-ing science-fiction, in which the devil's advocates are the good guys and the priests and angels the bad guys in the fallen world of some postwar future.

What, if anything, the novel did for the declining prestige of the minions of blackness is open to discussion, but that Leiber's adroit and resourceful manipulation of these ele-ments created his first major reputation is not open to de-bate.

Fritz Leiber, Jr.'s, very Germanic name, his fair hair, and his soaring height (in excess of 6 feet, 4 inches) frequently lead people meeting him for the first time to expect an accent. Actually, his father was born in Chicago and his grandfather, who left Germany after the revolutions of 1848, was a captain for the Union during the American Civil War and worked as a civil servant for the state of Illinois thereaf-ter. The years from Fritz Leiber, Jr.'s, birth, December 24, 1910, in Chicago, until he was old enough to enter school, were by no means normal ones. His father was an actor, destined to gain a national reputation as an interpreter of Shakespeare. His mother, Virginia Bronson, of British par-entage, had studied acting and met the elder Fritz Leiber during a summer tour with Robert B. Mantell's Shakespear-ean Company, of which he was the leading man. His early years the child spent traveling with his mother and father, living at hotels and boarding houses, with "memories redolent of grease-paint, spirit gum, curling colored gelatins of floodand spot-lights; and of actors and actresses; wonder-world in remi-niscence." Fritz Leiber, Sr., set quite a reputation for Fritz, Jr., to live up to. A publicized athlete in high school, he won a citywide oratorical contest, which prompted him to try act-ing. He gained a local reputation with the People's Stock Company on Chicago's West Side and played Shakespeare for the first time with Britain's Ben Greet's Company when it toured the United States and Canada. Then he shifted to Mantell's for ten years. The boards were not his only medi-um, for he played Caesar opposite Theda Bara in the 1917 silent film production of
Cleopatra
and Solomon in
Queen of Sheba
starring Betty Blythe. He organized his own Shake-spearean Repertory in 1920 and toured the country with it until 1935. From then until his death in 1949 he freelanced in motion pictures.

The closest thing to a permanent home that young Fritz enjoyed during his youthful years was the house his father built in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey (because Robert Mantell lived there), where the family spent the three sum-mer months together (providing there was no hot-months tour). During the school year, until the third grade, he lived with his maternal grandmother in Pontiac, Michigan, but then the death of her husband caused her to move to Chicago. There Fritz lived with his father's two sisters, Dora and Marie. Quiet and reserved, Fritz made few friends in school and those he did make were as lonely and introverted as himself. Though carefully protected during the school year by his aunts, Fritz was given carte blanche during the three months he spent with his parents. Discipline was actually unnecessary, since the boy rarely stepped out of line, and when he did a hurt look was all the admonishment re-quired. A literary leaning was induced in Fritz by his father, who, in addition to copious Shakespeare, read aloud liberally from Dickens and Conrad, as well as exercising his predilection for detective stories. Extraordinarily sensitive, Fritz was at times scared of his own shadow. A stage production of
The Cat and
the Canary
shook him up badly: "I saw green hands coming out of the walls for months afterward." He was fearfully afraid of the dark and, during the formative years, the supernatural was a very real thing to him, a possible explana-tion of his late attempts to rationalize it in his fiction. Taught chess by actor Alexander Andre of his father's company, Fritz became extremely proficient at it in high school, but engaged in no general sports except tennis. Even-tually he was to win the Santa Monica open chess champion-ship in 1958 and would use the game as the basis of at least three stories, most notable being
The 64-Square Madhouse
(if, May, 1964), dealing with a computer entering a grand-master tournament. Leiber considers chess a "dangerous game" because a preoccupation with it distinctly interfered with his literary creativity, and he regards it as a vice to be indulged in only with moderation. His initial writing efforts in the weird and fantasy line were the result of a lack of confidence. He did not feel he could really fabricate a strong science-fiction effort and surmised that the fantasy field would be an easier area for the begin-ner, though he liked science fiction at least as much. Beyond the classics of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and most especially Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fritz Leiber, Jr., was religiously devoted to amazing stories, which he began reading with its first (April, 1926) number, and stayed with for the next four years. He never read weird tales regular-ly, despite his admiration for a good supernatural story, rationalization always interfering. During the years he was reading amazing stories, he entered the University of Chicago, majoring in psychology. He graduated in 1932 with honors, with the degree of Ph.B. (Bachelor of Philosophy). At the back of his mind had always been the notion of continuing in the footsteps of his father as Fritz Leiber II. He had participated in dramatics in high school, and he both acted in and directed several plays for The University of Chicago Dramatic Association, including Ibsen's
Rosmersholm.
He also became a skillful fencer. More important, through a mutual friend he met Harry Otto Fisch-er of Louisville, who had aspirations as a writer, puppeteer, and ballet dancer, as well as a common interest in chess and fencing, science fiction and fantasy. Fischer would ultimately settle for the practical if unromantic job of designing corru-gated cartons, but not until he had implanted the kernel of an idea which would eventually burgeon in Leiber's literary career.

In a lengthy correspondence, Fischer exchanged with Leiber essays, poems, and short stretches of fiction. The two vied with one another to present the most imaginative and original literary fare and one day Fritz received a letter con-taining a fragment which opened: "For all do fear the one known as the Grey Mouser. He walks with swagger 'mongst the bravos, though he's but the stature of a child...." There, too, was the Grey Mouser's meeting with Fafhrd, the seven-foot giant from the north, as well as the background of a never-never era that somehow reminded the reader of famil-iar periods in medieval history. Of this, of course, more later.

Graduating from college in the depth of the Depression, Leiber was persuaded by the Rev. Ernest W. Mandeville, Episcopal minister of Middleton, New Jersey, that his orator-ical and acting gifts might prove effective in saving souls. The Rev. Mandeville, who edited
The Churchman,
also ran an employment office for clergymen in New York. He enrolled Leiber in the General Theological Seminary, located between Greenwich Village and Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan, got him quickly christened and confirmed, and sent him out as lay reader and minister to churches in Atlantic Highlands and Highlands, New Jersey, which had no resident religious leader.

Lacking any deep conviction, Leiber thought he could rationalize his performance as "social service," but after five months found out that it didn't jibe with his conscience or temperament. He ended the experiment, but the experience was to shape his cynical attitude as well as provide back-ground for
Gather, Darkness!

Financed partly by a scholarship he had won during his last year at the University of Chicago, Leiber returned to that school for a graduate course in philosophy in the fall of 1933. He majored in speculative metaphysics and comparative religion. At the same time he took to hobnobbing with radicals, testing his capacity for drink, and generally unbot-tling his long-held repressions.

He joined his father's road company in 1934. From his mother's side of the family he assumed Francis Lathrop as a stage name and played Edgar in
King Lear
and Malcom in
Macbeth.
"This was depression nadir," Leiber recalls. "We played theaters that hadn't had their marquees lit up for years—there were bats in one, fine for
Macbeth,
not so hot for
The Merchant of Venice."
The tour closed for good in Tucson. Fritz Leiber, Sr.'s, days as a leading man were over. He took his wife to Los Angeles and reestablished himself, with moderate success, as a character actor in Hollywood.

While on tour Fritz, Jr., had sold some children's stories to the churchman, but he had not completely given up his idea of an acting career. Subsidized by his father, he half-heartedly attempted to make his way through the Hollywood jungle, obtaining one small part in
Camille,
which starred Robert Taylor and Greta Garbo, and a tiny bit in Errol Flynn's
The Great Garrick,
which "ended on the cutting room floor." Disillusioned, he made an extended trip back to Chicago and found among his former associates a strange assortment of party-line Communists, Trotskyites, and one lone Nazi. The manner in which these seemingly disparate extremists feuded in public and socialized in private made a lasting impression on him, causing him to look upon the motives of those who attempted to promulgate political ideologies with as jaun-diced an eye as he turned on the "idealism" of clergymen.

While at the University of Chicago he had made the ac-quaintance of Jonquil Stephens, and English-born coed who possessed a common interest in weird and supernatural fiction, poetry, and English literature. There similarity ended, for Jonquil Stephens was under five feet in height and the contrast with the lofty elevation of Leiber verged on absurdi-ty. But opposites, so the old saw goes, attract, and the two were married on January 16, 1936.

One more try at Hollywood, then they both returned despairingly to Chicago, where Fritz managed to obtain an editorial job with Consolidated Book Publishers, revising mate-rial for
The Standard American
Encyclopedia
and
The Uni-versity of Knowledge.
One son, Justin, born July 8, 1938, was eventually to achieve his father's initial objective of obtaining a Ph.D. and teaching philosophy. Before his brief move to Hollywood, Leiber had made a do-or-die attempt at professional writing. A couple of short stories proved unsalable at the time (one of these may have been
Psychosis from Space,
published in "Department of Lost Stories," satellite science fiction, April, 1959, based on Leiber's psychology courses). A "lost race" novel of Yucatan petered out before it had worked up a good head of steam. Finally, running across the first 10,000 words of a Grey Mouser and Fafhrd novel sent to him by Henry Otto Fischer in 1936 (which he completed as
Lords of Quarmall
in 1963, 34,000 words in all, with Fischer's portion intact, for publication in fantastic, January and February, 1964), he decided to use those characters himself in a story titled
Adept's Gambit.

The story, along with some poems, he submitted to H. P. Lovecraft for criticism, and the response was favorable. Lovecraft even sent the story on to Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner. When Bloch visited Los Angeles in 1937, Henry Kuttner introduced him to Fritz Leiber, Jr., in what was the beginning of a lasting friendship.

Adept's Gambit
did not sell then, yet this adult fairy tale, built around the characters of The Grey Mouser (personify-ing Harry Fischer) and the seven-foot sword-wielding giant Fafhrd (the romantic incarnation of Fritz Leiber, Jr.), is beyond question not only the first but the best of the entire series Leiber was to write about these characters. It can be said of
Adept's Gambit,
as C. S. Lewis said of J. R. R. Tolkien's
The Fellowship of the Ring,
that here is a story "... good beyond hope." From the moment that the spell is cast upon Fafhrd that temporarily changes every woman into a pig the instant he kisses her; on to the Grey Mouser's consultation with the seven-eyed Ningauble, gossiper with the Gods, about what to do about it; through the supernatu-ral sword battle with Anara; to the finale, in which the adept turned to a mouse contemplatively evaluates its chances of killing a bear cub, the story is a delight to read. Leiber's sense of pace, rich background detail, taut battle scenes, fine characterization, fascinating supernatural ele-ments, together with his extraordinary talent for weaving tasteful humor throughout the entire fabric of his story—a talent unsurpassed by any living fantasy writer today—make this a classic fantasy. Yet it did not see publication until Arkham House did a Fritz Leiber, Jr., collection,
Night's Black
Agents,
in 1947 nearly ten years after it was written.

A subsequent Grey Mouser and Fafhrd story written in 1939 broke the professional barriers for Leiber. It was
Two Sought Adventure
(the title story of a collection of Grey Mouser tales issued by Gnome Press in 1957) and John Campbell bought it for his new magazine unknown, publish-ing it in the August, 1939, issue. The emphasis is on the physical prowess of the two protagonists as they defeat a small army to obtain jewels from a tower; the jewels turn out to be a catalyst for an unearthly "brain," which is capable of making the tower lay about it with the swiftness of a striking snake and the impact of a crashing plane. This was followed by
Bleak Shore, The Howling Tower, The Sunken Land,
and
Thieves' House
in the same magazine. While each contains the popular heroic elements of the sword-and-sorcery fantasy made so popular by Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, leavened with the masterful interplay of humor characteristic of Leiber, none of them is of the literary magnitude of
Adept's Gambit.
Leiber had written all of the Grey Mouser stories for weird tales, which magazine had consistently rejected them. Campbell bought them for unknown, but always with the complaint: "These are better suited for weird tales."

Leiber had gotten into weird tales with
The Automatic Pistol
(May, 1940), about a gun that spontaneously did its own killing. A much more important story,
Smoke Ghost,
published in unknown for October, 1941, may well have been submitted to weird tales first. "Have you ever thought of what a ghost of our day would look like?" the main charac-ter asks. "I don't mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. ... It would grow out of the real world. It would reflect all the tangled, sordid, vicious things. All the loose ends. And it would be very grimy. I don't think it would seem white or wispy or favor graveyards. It wouldn't moan. But it would mutter unintelligibly, and twitch at your sleeve. Like a sick, surly ape." The same thought was pursued in
The Hound
(weird tales, November, 1942): "The supernatural beings of a mod-ern city? . . . Sure, they'd be different from the ghosts of yesterday. Each culture creates its own demons. Look, the Middle Ages built cathedrals, and pretty soon there were little gray shapes gliding around at night to talk with the gargoyles. Same thing ought to happen to us, with our skyscrapers and factories." Leiber tried to give his idea of what a modern ghost would be like in each of these stories. His concepts were prosaic. In
Smoke Ghost,
it was essentially demoniac possession in black face; in
The Hound,
he resurrected the werewolf with but little change. Nevertheless, the idea was a good one. Leiber abandoned this tack and, adopting traditional po-tions, spells, charms, incantations, attempted to show how they would be utilized in a modern setting. His background was drawn from the campus of Occidental College, Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, where his father had gotten him a job as instructor in speech, acting, and dramatics, beginning with the September, 1941, semester. Though moderately success-ful at teaching, he quit in the summer of 1942, got a house in Santa Monica Canyon, and sat down to freelance, first writing
Conjure Wife,
which appeared as a complete novel in April, 1943, unknown worlds. There was a much delayed reac-tion, but the novel would eventually prove a substantial success. Dealing with a young wife who
knows
there is witchcraft being practiced on a university campus and employs elabo-rate supernatural precautions to protect her doubting hus-band, the story is great fun. Leiber's skill at dialogue is notable, his humorous notes polished and clever without descending to farce. His story is effective without recourse to any of the stock gothic devices. Ten years later, the novel went into hard covers under the aegis of Twayne Publishers. A television adaptation on "Moment of Fear" over NBC