Greetings, O Best Beloved. Today we celebrate Swan River Press’s release of The Pale Brown Thing by renowned weird fiction writer Fritz Leiber. But wait! Because this is greydogtales, we also provide you with a lot about the 19th century origins of Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness, a little about Leiber and the cinema, and the connection with that lithe siren Sandahl Bergman, of Conan the Barbarian fame.

Fritz Leiber (1910 – 1992) was a damned fine writer. We’re sure we should post something about books like Swords of Lankhmar one day, because his fantasy tales were great. He’s even cited as the originator of the term sword and sorcery. His science fiction and alternate takes on the future are excellent. Many greydogtales listeners will, however, be familiar with his weirder stories, which included post-Lovecraftian before we even had such a word, and some very original horror.

Leiber’s work first appeared in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, and he even corresponded briefly with HP Lovecraft. To give you a timeframe, Lovecraft died in 1937 and Leiber launched his fantasy characters Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in 1939. A multiple award winner, his short stories such as Smoke Ghost and The Sinful Ones are well-known, and he was one of those writers who moved forward rather than harked back. Ramsey Campbell has said that Leiber was his greatest influence, and in a few days, quite by chance, we’ll be talking about Ramsey’s latest work. Nice how these things happen.

But on to our main topic. A while back we interviewed Brian Showers of Swan River Press in Dublin, (see swan river secrets)and as we talked he mentioned their plans for The Pale Brown Thing. Let’s cheat for a moment and use Swan River’s summary:

“Serialised in 1977, The Pale Brown Thing is a shorter version of Fritz Leiber’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel of the supernatural, Our Lady of Darkness. Leiber maintained that the two texts “should be regarded as the same story told at different times”; thus this volume reprints The Pale Brown Thing for the first time in nearly forty years, with an introduction by the author’s friend, Californian poet Donald Sidney-Fryer.

“The novella stands as Leiber’s vision of 1970s San Francisco: a city imbued with an eccentric vibe and nefarious entities, in which pulp writer Franz Westen uncovers an alternate portrait of the city’s fin de siecle literary set — Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Clark Ashton Smith — as well as the darker invocations of occultist Thibaut de Castries and a pale brown inhabitant of Corona Heights.”

This new, high quality edition contains the following:

“Thibaut de Castries, Revenant” by Donald Sidney-Fryer

“The Pale Brown Thing” by Fritz Leiber

“Story-telling Wonder-questing, Mortal Me: The Transformation of The Pale Brown Thing into Our Lady of Darkness” by John Howard

And much of the matter we’re covering today relates to Leiber’s novel Our Lady of Darkness. It’s a peculiar beast, often cited as having Lovecraftian elements, but it’s also its own thing. It blends psychological theory, particularly Jungian elements, with early urban fantasy and an invented occult science, megapolisomancy, whose creator and prime agent is one Thibaut De Castries. Megapolisomancy is, in short, the art of seeing and changing the future by gaining an understanding of cities.

“The ancient Egyptians only buried people in their pyramids. We are living in ours.” — Thibaut de Castries

Leiber indicates that De Castries, while living in San Francisco, became acquainted with Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Dashiell Hammett and later Clark Ashton Smith, as well as poet George Sterling. For a while De Castries amassed a minor cult following among the bohemians of the city, including London and Bierce, but his practices apparently were too esoteric to maintain interest for long, and his occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk, collapsed.

In the book, Leiber introduces the idea of paramentals, elemental spirits which manifest through inanimate materials such as glass, concrete and steel, hence the city connection. A brown, vaguely man-like paramental with an eyeless triangular face and long chin that taper to a snout, is the Pale Brown Thing of the earlier version. Paramentals are not friendly, and to become aware of them is not a good thing. They are described as “about midway in nature between the atomic bomb and the archetypes of the collective unconscious.” Franz Westen, the protagonist, is one who starts to have glimpses of megapolisomancy and the nature of the city.

As we’ve suggested, Our Lady of Darkness is a sort of horror novel, but an odd one.

“Rather than the grand confrontations with the supernatural at the heart of Lovecraft’s stories, Westen has little brushes that are more ontologically rattling than viscerally horrifying. Instead of witnessing living nightmares that he can only try desperately to suppress, the things he sees come off as unreal, as if they might turn out to be optical illusions and other misapprehensions. Just as Lovecraft tended to be vague about such matters as the contents of the storied Necronomicon, the reader is treated to very little of the contents of Megalopolisomancy.”

Nader Elhefnawy, Tangent 2010

Anyway, if you fancy picking up a copy of The Pale Brown Thing, dash over to Swan River Press and check it out. They do some very nice, collectable books, we have to admit.

the pale brown thing link

Right. That title, Our Lady of Darkness, has a specific and interesting source, and that’s where we’re going next. It’s drawn from Thomas de Quincey’s collection of prose-poems linked together under the name Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs from the Depths). De Quincey (1785 – 1859) is probably best known for his book Confessions of an Opium Eater. He was an English critic and essayist, addicted to opium and constantly in debt. The prose-poems of Suspiria are supposed to be developments of various opium-inspired dreams.

Suspiria de Profundis was first published in fragmentary form in Blackwood’s Magazine in the Spring and Summer of 1845. It was never finished as such – de Quincey had planned to add more sections and release it as a sort of sequel to Confessions. The section relevant to today is this one:

“Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow — beginning with a discussion of Levana, the ancient Roman goddess of childbirth, De Quincey imagines three companions for her: Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears; Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs; and Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness.”

Note for Tired Listeners: If you want to read about the Three Ladies in depth, we give the relevant passages below. If not, skip to later for a roundup of Fritz Leiber movie trivia, horror film mentions and other such inconsequential stuff.

Our Ladies of Sorrow

What is it the sisters are? What is it that they do? Let me describe their form, and their presence: if form it were that still fluctuated in its outline, or presence it were that for ever advanced to the front, or for ever receded amongst shades.

The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of lamentation,—Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod’s sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened for ever, which, heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven.

Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy, by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard the sobbing of litanies or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds. This sister, the eldest, it is that carries keys more than papal at her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace.

She, to my knowledge, sat all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked with, whose pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the spring-time of the year, and whilst yet her own Spring was budding, he recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns for ever over her; still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is now within a second and a deeper darkness.

This Mater Lachrymarum has also been sitting all this winter of 1844–5 within the bed-chamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of the keys it is that Our Lady of tears glides a ghostly intruder into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honour with the title of “Madonna!”

The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum—Our Lady of Sighs. She never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops for ever, for ever fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals.

Her sister, Madonna, is oftentimes stormy and frantic, raging in the highest against heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs never clamours, never defies, dreams not of rebellious aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the twilight; Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary places that are desolate as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone down to his rest.

This sister is the visitor of the Pariah, of the Jew, of the bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galleys; and of the English criminal in Norfolk Island, blotted out from the books of remembrance in sweet far-off England; of the baffled penitent reverting his eyes for ever upon a solitary grave, which to him seems the altar overthrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which altar no oblations can now be availing, whether towards pardon that he might implore, or towards reparation that he might attempt.

Every slave that at noonday looks up to the tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points with one hand to the earth, our general mother, but for him a stepmother,—as he points with the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but against him sealed and sequestered;—every woman sitting in darkness, without love to shelter her head, or hope to illumine her solitude, because the heaven-born instincts kindling in her nature germs of holy affections which God implanted in her womanly bosom, having been stifled by social necessities, now burn sullenly to waste, like sepulchral lamps amongst the ancients; every nun defrauded of her unreturning May-time by wicked kinsman, whom God will judge; every captive in every dungeon; all that are betrayed and all that are rejected outcasts by traditionary law, and children of hereditary disgrace,—all these walk with Our Lady of Sighs.

She also carries a key; but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very highest walks of man she finds chapels of her own; and even in glorious England there are some that, to the world, carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have received her mark upon their foreheads. But the third sister, who is also the youngest——! Hush, whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight.

She droops not; and her eyes rising so high might be hidden by distance; but, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She is also the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles, and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within.

Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with tiger’s leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum—Our Lady of Darkness.

These were the Semnai Theai, or Sublime Goddesses, these were the Eumenides, or Gracious Ladies (so called by antiquity in shuddering propitiation), of my Oxford dreams.

As an aside, Our Lady (in the singular) of Sorrows is of course the Mater Dolorosa, a name by which Catholics know the Blessed Virgin Mary in relation to the sorrows in her life.

OK, you can open your eyes now. Let’s go to the movies to round off today’s article.

Leiber at the Movies

Firstly, did you know that the Italian horror director Dario Argento used De Quincey’s Suspiria, particularly Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, as an inspiration for his “Three Mothers” trilogy of films, which include Suspiria, Inferno, and The Mother of Tears? You did? Rats.

OK, we’ll try you on Leiber himself, then. Fritz Leiber can be seen in several movies – his father Fritz Senior was an actor by profession. They appeared together a couple of times, and Junior had a small uncredited speaking part in the The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) in which his father had a credited part. The two chaps sometimes get mixed up, but the father appeared in movies for some forty years. Junior had only a few small roles.

If you like weird and horror films, Leiber (we’re talking all Junior now) did have a cameo as the geologist in the cult horror film Equinox (1970) (also known as The Beast), directed by Jack Woods. The original version of the movie has a longer appearance by Leiber recounting the ancient book and a brief speaking role, all of which was cut from the re-release of the film. In the edited version of the movie Leiber has no spoken dialogue in the film but features in a few scenes. He also appeared in the The Bermuda Triangle documentary (1970), based on the book by Charles Berlitz.

As far as we know, he never appeared in any of the adaptations of his own work. Listeners may be familiar with Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife, which was turned into the movie Night of the Eagle (1962). It’s also confusingly known as Burn Witch Burn, which is the title of a 1932 novel by A Merritt. But whatever you call it, Night of the Eagle is definitely worth a look.

Not quite as effective is an earlier adaptation of Conjure Wife, released as Weird Woman (1944). This time the story is transplanted to the South Seas, starring Lon Chaney Jr as the academic who this time marries a native woman and gets dragged into a voodoo-like scenario.

Equinox, as mentioned above, is not as good as Night of the Eagle, but it’s weird enough to be here. Four friends are attacked by a demon while on a picnic, due to the fact that they possess a tome of mystic information (?) – and it goes downhill from there. Mark Thomas McGee was the writer, and he turned out scripts or screenplays for quite a few horror movies, from the curious to the ridiculous. Mind you, he was apparently only a teenager when he wrote Equinox. Here are some of his titles:

Sorority House Massacre II

Bad Girls from Mars

Inner Sanctum

Witch Academy

Possessed by the Night

Our favourite of his has to be Possessed by the Night (1994), an everyday story of a mutant embryo in a jar, the mutant being able to control people’s actions. It gets a whole 4.1 on IMDB – which is more than Bad Girls from Mars manages. We like it because the story makes little sense, the acting is quite dodgy, the ‘erotic’ bits are pointless and it co-stars Sandahl Bergman.

Sandahl can do no wrong since starring as Valeria, the “Queen of Thieves” in Conan The Barbarian (1982), and then the brain-boggling Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988). She’s not exactly at her best here in thespian terms, but what the heck.

And there you have it. Valeria has stolen all our time, and we must leave. See you in a couple of days…

Save

Save

Save

Related