The Soul Should Not Be Handled

Part one of a new column on trash art and speculative fiction

This is the first column in a four-part series by B.D. McClay on speculative fiction, out from the paywall for our Substack readers. Find it—and future installments—on the website here, and read

BDM

’s own intro post to the column here.

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A proposition: though “trash art” remains with us, the trash artist is a dying species. Trash art is focus-grouped these days, high-gloss. Trash art is a direct-to-streaming show full of people who are slightly too attractive that’s meant to be played in the background while you play Candy Crush on your phone. Even our truly lowbrow cultural productions, like The Bachelor, are not the product of particular people; they’re crafted through a system. Without romanticizing the old days of pulp magazines and Brill Building song writers, we can—ah hell! Let’s romanticize them. Why not? They certainly put out lots of garbage, but it was honest human garbage. Look at an old issue of Weird Tales—in terms of nostalgic reverence, the Partisan Review of pulp fiction—with its now charmingly dated pinup girls on the cover, and its promise of many stupid adventures within, and try not to romanticize it.

In terms of its social standing, all trash is genre, but not all genre is trash. Science fiction and horror have both long had seats held open for them at the adults’ table, and fantasy gets past the bouncer sometimes. (Romance is still standing out in the cold.) Its status as trash is probably why genre fiction survives and even, sometimes, thrives in a moment when we’re repeatedly assured people do not read. It has to look out for itself, because no patron is coming to pluck it out of the bin. In truth, as anybody who’s spent a summer without air conditioning knows, there’s trash and there’s trash. There is the kind of trash that, in rotting, provides fertile soil for new things to grow—and then there’s plastic, which sticks around forever without giving life to anything and can only be remixed into endless, slightly worse versions of itself. One stinks up your apartment, but only because it’s alive.

I like genre fiction for the same reason I like black-and-white film, stylized dialogue, animation, the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake. If somebody asked me whether I preferred literary fiction to genre fiction (or vice versa) I would say, I hope, that I prefer good fiction to bad fiction. I think that this is a good response to a silly question, but there’s another one we could ask that’s a little more interesting: Is what makes a genre story good the same thing that makes realistic fiction good? Part of what makes genre genre is its place in a certain tradition with certain conventions and stock elements. If we are reading a detective story, we have certain figures and moments we come to expect: the amateur detective, the hapless sidekick, the suspicious woman, a second crime, a red herring, a solution. Part of what makes a detective story good or bad is its use of these expectations—a use that can (and often does) include subverting them. When it comes to speculative fiction, another dimension is that the boundaries between a fan, a professional and an amateur are never very clear. The landscape is more horizontal. You could, if you wanted, start a fanzine and get important writers to contribute; you could publish your first story ever in a magazine and get a letter from one of your most famous peers. Within genre, work can be wildly experimental, but this experiment takes place in a context of shared touchstones and trust in the audience. Writers of speculative fiction want to be read, and they have a good idea of who is out there reading their work.

So if we already know what we lose when we depart from realism (verisimilitude), what is it that we gain? To investigate this question, The Point has given me the opportunity to write about four works of what I’ll broadly call “speculative fiction.” The four stories I’m going to discuss have a few things in common. First, and most importantly, I like them. Second, they all use their genre well—they need to be the sorts of stories they are. And, finally, I’ve placed on myself the following restriction: no crossover writers. No Philip K. Dick, no Samuel Delany, no Ursula K. Le Guin, no Octavia Butler, no Harlan Ellison, no Joanna Russ, no James Tiptree. Those writers are all amazing, but you know that (even if you don’t know it personally). My interest in these columns is not in writers who can be said to transcend their genre, either by being adopted by broader readerships or through their own hybrid practice, but rather writers who realize their genre.

Instead, we are going to read, in chronological order, these four stories: C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau” (1933), a “weird tale” set on Mars; Fritz Leiber’s “A Deskful of Girls” (1958), a science fiction-horror hybrid; Craig Strete’s “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock” (1975), a monologue from the perspective of a lab animal; and Vonda N. McIntyre’s “Aztecs” (1977), a science fiction novella about a woman who undergoes a procedures that makes her either slightly more or slightly less than human. The first two of these stories both appeared in big genre magazines; the second two made their initial appearances in anthologies.

I will discuss what we get from these stories being written the way they are, and along the way, I hope to illuminate some of what we lose when “trash” culture is no longer the product of individual (if, perhaps, deranged) minds. Of course, it should probably be said that these writers didn’t think of themselves as writing trash—nor did they—but they did often consider themselves to be writing in trashy places, as, in fact, they were. But those trashy places were essential to producing what they did produce.

So let’s go back to that old issue of Weird Tales—it’s from November 1933—and to the first entry in the table of contents: “Shambleau,” “an utterly strange story” (the table of contents says) “about an alluring female creature that was neither beast nor human, neither ghost nor vampire.”

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Thanks to Quentin Tarantino, “pulp” now carries the connotation of sleaze and hyper-violence, but to be a “pulp” magazine really meant one thing: be printed on cheap paper. (That’s the pulp.) And for the writer in the 1930s whose imagination ran to the bizarre, the fantastic or the interplanetary, the preeminent pulp magazine was Weird Tales, which published writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. If we judge by the November 1933 issue, its readers and contributors are what you might expect—bookish types, mostly but not exclusively men, with certain firm prejudices (no more naked women on the cover, please, and anatomical accuracy in your tales of maniac surgeons, if you don’t mind) and a susceptibility to scams (one finds ads for: get-rich-quick gold mining, the Rosicrucian Brotherhood and, most intriguingly, quack medicine for the female libido).

“Shambleau” was C.L. Moore’s first professionally published story, and its presence in Weird Tales is another indication that women did really read it—the “C.L.” stands for “Catherine Lucille.” Her use of initials was not to conceal her gender (she’s not even the only woman in the November 1933 issue) but rather to make sure her day job didn’t figure out she was moonlighting as a writer. Presumably, Moore knew what kind of place she wanted to send her own “weird” story to because she was already a fan of this sort of writing.

Moore’s story introduces us to Northwest Smith, a space adventurer whose reputation has clearly spread far and wide. He’s hanging out in a little town in Mars when he realizes a group of people are about to murder a woman; appalled (and not a little flattered by her appeal for help), he intervenes. The woman, who is something called a “Shambleau,” follows him back to the inn where he’s staying. She is not human and is regarded by all the people in the town with fear and disgust, though Smith cannot figure out why. The physically distinctive thing about the Shambleau is her total lack of hair—she wears a turban but Smith assumes it covers only “baldness.” She refuses to eat his food, saying that her food is “better.”

This better food turns out to be Northwest Smith himself, whom she feeds on psychically (though not physically), a process that creates both great internal disgust and exquisite pleasure. Under her turban turn out to be thousands of snakes, which she uses to feed, and the sleeping Smith can feel them without understanding at first what they are:

It lay loose and light about his neck…and it was moving gently, very gently, with a soft, caressive pressure that sent little thrills of delight through every nerve and fiber of him, a perilous delight—beyond physical pleasure, deeper than joy of the mind. That warm softness was caressing the very roots of his soul with a terrible intimacy. The ecstasy of it left him weak, and yet he knew—in a flash of knowledge born of this impossible dream—that the soul should not be handled…

Smith is eventually rescued by a Venusian friend, who remembers the legend of Medusa and shoots the Shambleau while using a mirror to guide his aim. But though he is rescued, he understands that some aspect of himself has been changed forever; he will always miss the simultaneously ecstatic and degrading experience she offered him. When his friend demands that Smith promise to kill the next Shambleau he sees on sight, Smith loses himself in memory for a moment, then says, unevenly: “I’ll—try.”

That’s the plot. It feels familiar—not derivative, just familiar. As Moore herself characterized it, her story is a Western, just played in the key of space. Like a wandering cowboy, Northwest Smith is ambiguously good and ambiguously noble—he is no gentleman, but he might be something better. And it’s a story that seems easy to understand symbolically. The Shambleau is booze, or a bad love affair, or drugs. Yet to pursue this sort of reading is to court frustration. We can understand the strange and disturbing being at this story’s heart through analogy, but what makes it memorable is our sense that we can only flatten it out if we try to go further. What Moore aims to do—and succeeds in doing—is presenting us with something that is outside of the realm of possible experience. “Shambleau” draws its sense of reality from the ways it resembles ordinary situations, but it is not reducible to them.

Part of the power of Moore’s story comes from its sense of happening in both the far future and the distant past. “Man has conquered Space before. You may be sure of that,” she declares, imperiously, in her opening lines:

Somewhere beyond the Egyptians, in that dimness out of which come echoes of half-mythical names—Atlantis, Mu—somewhere back of history’s first beginnings there must have been an age when mankind, like us today, built cities of steel to house its star-roving ships and knew the names of the planets in their own native tongues—heard Venus’ people call their wet world “Sha-ardol” in that soft, sweet, slurring speech and mimicked Mars’ guttural “Lakkdiz” from the harsh tongues of Mars’ dryland dwellers. You may be sure of it. Man has conquered Space before, and out of that conquest faint, faint echoes run still through a world that has forgotten the very fact of a civilization which must have been as mighty as our own.

This precise feeling of temporal ambiguity would be exploited forty-something years later by Star Wars, which situates itself long ago and far away (while also feeling fully like the future). In 1933, man was not even slightly close to “conquering space”—the first contact with the moon wouldn’t come along until 1959—nor, not to put too fine a point on it, is man even all that close now (my Mars timeshare’s value depreciates daily). By positioning her tale and her hero in a cycle of progress and loss, Moore not only gives him a mythic quality but bestows on our time a little of the same quality: this story is where we’re going, but also where we’ve come from. Given that whether or not he ever encounters another Shambleau is out of his control, it also represents this for Northwest Smith himself—this is certainly where he’s coming from, and it might be where he’s going, too.

Ambiguity of time, slipperiness of subject—these are the basic tools of this “weird” story. The situation is a Western—almost. It’s a metaphor for addiction—almost. It is the firm future—almost. The damsel in distress—well, she is in distress, that part is real, but Smith’s intervention turns out to be heroically stupid. The Shambleau calls Smith her beloved, which is perhaps the most disturbing thing she does, as it implies that she may not regard Smith merely as prey but that she thinks she is granting him something, a gift of extraordinary experience, even though it will kill him. Smith’s Venusian friend speculates that Shambleaus are not in fact very intelligent, just psychic predators, but there is no way to know, because no human being can be around them for very long without losing their mind.

Thus Moore uses the “weird” to reveal and to disguise, to make her subject familiar and strange. She achieves her effects through a careful manipulation of what we expect and think we know (and therefore what we think we know to expect). And in this use of expectation, genre is crucial, because you only can expect an outcome if you think you know what sort of a story you’re already in. But her particular genre is also important because its essential quality involves introducing something that cannot, will not and in some ways should not exist, but which we nevertheless desire. That “something” is not life on Mars, but the Shambleau. Moore’s repetition of the phrase “the soul should not be handled” is effectively ominous, but her singular achievement is giving you a sense of what that might mean and why it might be alluring enough to need a prohibition. Indeed we might think the true height of intimacy would be to find someone who could perceive and handle our soul. And maybe it is, but, should we ever be offered the chance to have this experience, we will not survive.

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About a year and half after the publication of “Shambleau,” Moore received a letter from an admirer—Lovecraft himself (who had also written to Weird Tales when the story was published to commend “Shambleau” as “great stuff”). Though Lovecraft is notorious now for his extreme racism (and rightly so), to those he included in his circle, he was also a generous and lively correspondent. (Reading his letters to Moore is to be charmed by his friendly erudition, surprised by what seems to have been an intense conversion to socialism and then, sometimes, on turning the page, to experience resigned disgust at some depressingly human and non-eldritch horrors.)

You might have an idea that the people who wrote for the pulps had an attitude of screw the critics, I write for the people, and no doubt many of them did feel that way. But Lovecraft’s early letters to Moore are, by and large, exhortations not to commercialize her work. (In his letter to Weird Tales, he dings her for setting her story on Mars.) It’s clear, in fact, that he regards weird fiction as the forefront of the narrative arts. He tells her that he’s seen too many talents squandered either because they end up writing to please their pulp audience or because they switch up their style to write more palatable, Saturday Evening Post-like stories. In fact, his anxiety that she will succumb to the “underworld” of “low-grade popular psychology & mechanically following the pitifully few & childishly unreal & oversimplified formulae which suit that psychology in such matters as plot, incidents, atmosphere, assumed values, & characters” is part of why he’s reached out to her in the first place. The weird writer, he tells her, has to think differently:

For the object of weird fiction is purely & simply emotional release—a highly specialised form of emotional release for the very small group of people whose active & restless imaginations revolt against the relentless tyranny of time, space, & natural law. … All real art must somehow be connected with truth, & in the case of weird art the emphasis must fall upon the one factor representing truth—certainly not the events (!!!) but the mood of intense & fruitless human aspiration typified by the pretended overturning of cosmic laws & the pretended transcending of possible human experience.

Moore objects (reasonably enough) that she really does need the money. (Her deliberate attempts to write trashy romance tales for money, however, which she occasionally mentions in their subsequent correspondence, don’t seem to go anywhere.) Lovecraft, who values atmosphere above all other qualities in a “weird tale,” also makes an interesting claim here that the weird tale is fulfilling a very deep wish for there to be something about the world that we cannot understand, something that could overturn all our assumptions, even if it was something horrible. Something so out of our realm of experience would almost have to be something horrible, in fact; we wouldn’t have another way to understand it.

To behold impossible geometries, even if they make you stab out your eyes—that was the dream weird fiction represented, as far as Lovecraft was concerned. It is “escapist” fiction where the escape is costly. Yet that isn’t what we get in “Shambleau.” It is a more approachable story than your average Lovecraft horror show, and not just because it’s on Mars. A scene where Northwest Smith, trying to puzzle his strange guest out, sits at his table watching her while biting into an apple—this is the sort of mundanely realized life that does not exist in a Lovecraft story. Even his own particular mixture of gallantry and vanity, or the lust and disgust the Shambleau awakens in him, don’t have Lovecraftian equivalents. The Shambleau is horrible, but not cosmically so. Moore is in search of something more individual than an atmosphere—to know what it would be like to be a specific person in an imagined world. Lovecraft was interested in the human experience only insofar as it was a cage, protesting in one essay against “the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law.” His landscapes and his ancient cities were uninhabitable by anything we could understand.

Moore’s approach was different. If we got to Mars, she seemed to reason, there would be some kind of life there for us. We would figure out how to inhabit it. We would come into contact with things we couldn’t understand, but we could survive. In one of her letters, she speculates about life on the moon, writing, “imagine how magnificent the eclipse must have looked from there. Wouldn’t it have been a vision of a black Earth ringed with rainbowy haloes of atmosphere? I hope so.” Her intense curiosity, to know not what could be but what it would be like, is what makes her story stand apart. When a mutual friend sends her some suggested books to read, she tells Lovecraft that she is interested in the work of Montague Summers but is “extremely suggestible”:

I had some wisdom teeth pulled a month or so ago and went about for a couple of weeks, all together, with the taste of blood so constantly in my mouth that I almost—well, every time I looked in a mirror I didn’t expect to see anything there at all. And whenever a bat went by I wondered if it was me.

Similarly, if Moore did already know what something was like, she had little interest in it. She tells Lovecraft that she, for instance, does not enjoy reading Poe because, having spent most her childhood seriously ill, she’s too familiar with the experiences he conjured up already. “I know what it’s like to experience that horrible, dank, miasmic atmosphere for hours together,” she writes, “and don’t like to be reminded of it.” Of course part of her objection here is clearly that these memories are unpleasant. But Moore was reading and writing unpleasant stories already—that couldn’t have been her entire objection. It was that it was unpleasant and had nothing new to show her.

If you want to see what happens when somebody attempts a similar kind of grounded story but completely fails, instead stapling a vague “human interest” story to a vague “science fiction” concept and calling it a day, you have only to read the next story in Weird Tales. “The War of the Sexes” by Edmond Hamilton tells of a brain that is sent forward into the future, awakening into a new body in a world of artificial reproduction and sex segregation. The newly awakened man manages to seduce the leader of the women by kissing her. Then it turns out to have all just been a dream—except the cute girl who helped wake our hero up looks the same as the leader of the women. Ho ho ho. Nothing in this story is interested in what such a future would be like; forget social commentary, it’s not even a thought experiment, or a story.

Two years after contacting Moore, Lovecraft died. She would go on to marry another Lovecraft correspondent, Henry Kuttner, and largely cease writing as herself. Instead, she and Kuttner would co-write stories, often under the name “Lewis Padgett.” As Padgett, they would go on to write for the magazines that supplanted the pulps—such as the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which would publish one of their last stories in 1956, and which, in 1958, would publish the next story we’ll discuss: Fritz Leiber’s “A Deskful of Girls.”