Friday, July 21, 2017

Witchy Women, Tenure Battles

Longtime readers will know that I am a big fan of Fritz Leiber, a criminally unsung author whose influence is as pervasive as it is unacknowledged. Such stories as 1941's The Smoke Ghost and 1949's The Girl with the Hungry Eyes are foundational documents in the 'dark urban fantasy' genre which is so popular these days.

One of the lacunae in my Leiber reading was the 1943 novel Conjure Wife, a tale of witchcraft set in a small university. The protagonist of the novel is John Saylor, a sociologist who has recently completed a survey of folk-magic practices with the assistance of his wife Tansy, culminating in an upcoming monograph, The Social Background of the Modern Voodoo Cult. Saylor and his wife are nonconformists stuck in a conservative institution, yet are thriving despite not being quite as staid as the administration would wish them to be.

One day, on a whim which he acknowledges as being childish and perhaps illicit, Saylor decides to go through his wife's dressing room and discovers that she has drawers full of the trappings of witchcraft- graveyard dirt, hair-and-nail clippings, horseshoe nails, and flannel mojo hands. A social scientist, he is appalled by this evidence of superstition on the part of his wife. On her return home, he confronts her with his discovery and makes her promise not to engage in these practices, and combs through the house finding flannel mojo bags and other talismans everywhere.

After he destroys the items, bad things start to happen- he is accused of sexual harassment by a student-employee, he starts lecturing about controversial topics, he puts his path to a department chairmanship in jeopardy. Being a rational person, which is never a plus in a dark fantasy, he chalks these things up to coincidence. The reader, of course, susses out what's going on pretty quickly.

The threats that accumulate against Saylor culminate in a supernatural attack on his house by an architectural grotesque that adorns one of the campus buildings, and hints of a fatal curse placed on him by an unknown antagonist. Tansy, unknown to her husband, takes the curse upon herself in order to save him, and receives a compulsion to flee the university. In one particularly creepy scene, John tracks down Tansy and, finally realizing that his rational worldview is not up to the task of saving his wife, decides to use supernatural means to save her... too late. Having largely failed to save his wife from a soul-stealing enchantment, he has to find a means to return her trapped soul to her and discover the source of the supernatural attacks on them.

The weird thing about this novel is that it portrays every woman on the planet as being a witch. Tansy, the other university wives, a young hotel maid... all of them use magic to one extent or other. The rudiments of the practice are handed down mother-to-daughter (uh, no explanation for how orphans learn it), but each individual woman continues to the extent of her abilities, using trial-and-error to achieve more mastery of the craft.

The novel then shifts into a spiritual battle between Saylor, who uses his analytical skills to approach the supernatural arts, and the witches who have tormented him and his wife. His struggle is reminiscent of a video game, in which he has to face a succession of increasingly powerful 'level bosses', until he finally finds the authoress of the couple's misfortunes.

The book was a fun read, if dated. There is the typical mid-century sexism, of the 'women being conscious of the moon-pulls and earth-tides' variety, and African-American conjure-men working their mojo, but it's not as toxic as a lot of other mid-century pulp fiction. The book also had me looking up the folk-practices that it describes, and I found a great Lightnin' Hopkins song about a mojo hand as a result:





One mark of my enjoyment of a book, movie, or television series is the series of internet searches that the work inspires... I love works which set off a cascade of queries.

3 comments:

Li'l Innocent said...

Excellent! Conjure Wife is one of my favorites, though I haven't read it in a long time - but well I remember the cold creep up my back reading it in my teens. Have you seen the good movie rendition "Burn Witch Burn"? There was also a very well-done b&w TV version done, I think, in the mid-late 60s, about which I can't find anything online at the moment.

It's one of the hidden classics of Golden Age sf/fantasy that could do with a thoughtfully updated but essentially faithful modern version. The current political climate would suit it well IMO.

If you appreciate smart, evocative urban fantasy and enjoy looking stuff up, and if you have even a trace of mild Anglophilia in your veins, I recommend the "Rivers of London" novels by Ben Aaronovitch. The sequence encompasses books, graphic novels of superb quality (I'm an illustrator and very picky, snotty even, about sequential art), ebooks and audiobooks and has been optioned for Brit TV, though with no concrete action on that front that's been publicized. Aaronovitch is an experienced TV writer, having written for Doctor Who among other British universes, but Rivers of London is its own unique environment.

Try it, I bet you'll like it. Very good for those quiet nights when the coyotes are yipping in the distance.

mikey said...

I never really 'got' Lieber. But from the period there were wonderful, important books I will always love, from Delaney's 'The Einstein Intersection' to Silverbergs 'Dying Inside' (if you've never read that one, run, don't walk - I promise you'll love it) to Pohl & Williamson's 'Starchild Trilogy' to Ursula Leguin's 'The Lathe of Heaven' to short stories by Clarke and Ellison (Paingod & Other Delusions etc), even the brilliant if terribly flawed 'Time Enough for Love' by Heinlein.

Those were magic days for readers - kind of to the SF genre what the 90s were to rock n roll...

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Excellent! Conjure Wife is one of my favorites, though I haven't read it in a long time - but well I remember the cold creep up my back reading it in my teens. Have you seen the good movie rendition "Burn Witch Burn"? There was also a very well-done b&w TV version done, I think, in the mid-late 60s, about which I can't find anything online at the moment.

For some reason, I thought that 'Bewitched' was a comic take on it, but I think that 'Bell Book and Candle' was a bigger influence.

I never really 'got' Lieber.

Have you read 'Our Lady of Darkness'? It's a love letter to the Bay Area, that might be of some interest to you.

I love Pohl and Kornbluth's 'The Space Merchants', scary how predictive that one is. I recently finished Keith Laumer's 'A Plague of Demons', which is a really weird espionage/alien abduction tale which takes a weird turn into something entirely unexpected. By far, my favorite SF writer is Jack Vance, even though his stuff is pure pulp escapism, it is some of the most gorgeous prose I've ever read- he's like a warmer version of Clark Ashton Smith.