Leigh Brackett Strikes Back!

Citadel of Lost Ships follow up by Deej

Following up from Friday’s post of Citadel of Lost Ships…

Planet Stories was published on a quarterly basis in 1943, and the letters column, “The Vizigraph”, frequently got rowdy. Readers would rate stories from each issue, and views on which were good and which were garbage differed strongly.

Citadel of Lost Ships was published in the Spring issue, and letters about it were printed in the Summer and Fall issues.

From the Summer issue:

Second place goes to “Citadel of Lost Ships.” The whole yarn was quite well-written, with the first part being exceptionally vivid. The plot was good, too. Miss Brackett is going places. — 9.7 [out of 10].

That was from Chad Oliver, “The Looney Lad of Ledgewood”.

Larry Shaw thought a bit less of it:

Then: “Citadel of Lost Ships.” This started out beautifully, and I found myself intrigued by the idea of “Romany,” but Leigh let the possibilities in it escape, and ran off into a hacky jumble.

S.T. Brown was rather left-handed in his compliment:

Now in an attempt to show you which stories are good and which bad, I shall grade them. 1st. Citadel of Lost Ships; a good novelet, however not outstanding due to its old, wornout plot.

In the Fall number of Planet Stories, a gent named Wilms Herbert got rather… pointed.

Fourth, for the sake of charity (and it is charity!):

Leigh Brackett’s CITADEL OF LOST SHIPS.

There is a length and breadth and height to literature, just as there is to everything in life, but it just happens that something occurs to a writer which makes him or her depict life in only TWO DIMENSIONS — and this is just what seems to have happened to Brackett. Her story lacks perspective. Her treatment of the Kraylens is so unlike her mastery of SF writing that I for one didn’t give a… continental what happened to them. As for the motif of the decadent, anti-social, unassimilable castaways of the ROMANY world, one felt the place should have been fumigated! As for the ending… arrgh! There was one simple, microscopic bit, sandwiched between a plethora of bathos and pathos and flat slow-moving action tliat failed to act, and descriptions that failed to describe, and that was there the “Little Fathers,” (Saturnian Quarter,) give them shelter in the name of Freedom — and that was all. I was astounded, disgusted and flabbergasted. Please, just because of the name, for no other reason would that story be purchased!

Less tendentiously, Vaughan Ralf Heiner (The Zwilnik) says merely:

CITADEL OF LOST SHIPS : The same ol’ gal in a new dress. Not bad, but not good.

Then we get:

2. Miss Brackett’s “Citadel of Lost Ships” is an example that certain hacks ought to take to heart. She manages to cram in enough action to delight a pulpster’s heart, and still create a hero who isn’t as noble as Abe Lincoln and a heroine who isn’t all sweetness and light. The hero is on the way to jail at the end of the story; that’s a good touch, as the average hero in fiction breaks the law and gets away with it, and a pat on the back from Commander So-and-So because he’s really been a space dick all the time, under cover. And the alien allies are neither helpless nor irresistible. That’s good. The net effect is that the reader wants Miss Brackett’s characters to come out on top; tragedy has punch to it, and so does triumph. Some authors, on the other hand… well, need I go into detail?

That was from Paul Carter.

Not related to “Citadel”, but Jay Chidsey makes an aside about Leigh Brackett that’s… interesting given the other letters reprinted here:

I imagine Brackett reads le Viz, and she must feel pretty good over the attention she evokes. Look at the comments on her — every one good. Whether she could take the sour with the sweet like CUMMINGS (Answer to all small letters) does is something else.

The Cummings referenced is Ray Cummings, and you’ll see what he means in a bit.

Though Brackett did, indeed, get some unabashed praise, from M. J. Nuttall:

Best story in the ish was, shame, you he-writers, Leigh Brackett’s “Citadel of Lost Ships.” Her writing did it, not her plot. Whatta plush-penner she is!

But then comes the very-likely-named Gonzalo Elosegul, who lets fire all cannon:

Either of the two [stories he praised] surpasses any of your well-padded novelettes especially Cummings’ FLAME BREATHERS and Leigh Brackett’s utterly unimaginative, ultra-padded Hack of a story, CITADEL OF LOST SHIPS. Shades of the Sargasso Sea! Every single bit of action is brought in by the short hairs to fill in adventure and make the story MOVE, but so transparently done, that we never feel that there is any logical need of such welter of GORE, or, for that matter, we never feel any sympathy for the Kraylens, whose pitifully few numbers and decadent state invite LIQUIDATION. As for the final sacrificial offering of the hero, Phoeie! I am not a critic, but when an author cannot make up her mind to either write Adventure, Tragi-comedy, or HACK, I’m through! Well, if Brackett is going to descend to such depths of hackdom, and spoil her fine record of stories, and if you are going to accept such trash merely to feature her name, how in the name of all the Green Gods of Venus are YOU going to keep your promises to really better Planet Stories?

Fellow author Albert de Pina also had a less-than-stellar opinion of “Citadel”:

Once again I was disappointed in LEIGH BRACKETT. I have read her Circus stories in other magazines, and they suffer from a sameness that gives them the flavor of stale beer. On the other hand, to this day I remember one of the most beautiful stories she has ever written about the Martian Desert, published in another magazine, and so beautifully told, that it took top honors from the lead novel from one of today’s greatest STF writers. I hope LEIGH will give us one of her truly wrought stories instead of such hurried yarns as the above and CITADEL OF LOST SHIPS, which although with an exciting beginning soon lapsed into an amazing farrago of her best and worst. However, lack of genuine competition gives it second place.

I pause the quotations here to point out a few things.

Brackett’s being a female was no secret (despite her ambiguous name) to the regular readers. (There was one letter from a new reader who referred to “him” and was gently corrected by the editor.) This was in 1943, almost forty years before girls were supposedly even allowed to write SF, if you listen to ignorant wokies today.

And her being female did not keep her from being highly praised (nor roundly condemned, but not for being female) by readers.

The next issue, Miss Brackett had some thoughts:

Dear Editor:

I have just procured the new issue of Planet, and am still drooling over the cover. Rozen does beautiful work — even if, for some mystic reason, the picture seldom has anything to do with the text. Oh, well, who cares? His sense of form and color is right up there with the best, and for my money he does the best pulp covers on the stands.

As usual, I turned immediately to The Vizi-graph and devoured avidly all comment concerning one L. Brackett. And I am thereby impelled, if I may, to say a couple of things.

First of all, my heartfelt thanks to all you guys and gals who write in those nice comments. Whenever I hit a low spot in my work, I think of you and decide maybe I have a chance after all. There’s nothing like a little praise to make a writer work his head off, and believe me, I appreciate it. However, in reply to Jay Chidsey’s query as to whether I can take the sour with the sweet — maybe he doesn’t read the Vizigraph as carefully as I do! Some of the lads and lassies really give out with the brass knuckles, and on numerous occasions Brackett has been left flat on the pavement, spitting out teeth and wondering which way the truck went. Well, it’s all in the game, and I’d rather be panned than ignored. There’s always hope that maybe the next yarn will look better to them.

And now for the chief reason for this letter. I am somewhat astonished at the reaction to CITADEL OF LOST SHIPS. The literary merit of the yarn is beside the point, and I’d hardly be competent to argue that, anyhow. But the undemocratic thinking of at least two of the critics causes me to gape. “We never feel sympathy for the Kraylens, whose pitifully few numbers and decadent state invite LIQUIDATION.” “…the decadent, anti-social, unassimilable castaways… should have been fumigated.” F’cripe’s sake! If that isn’t totalitaian reasoning, I never saw it. Under democratic law, any and every minority, so long as it functions within legal limits, is guaranteed a right to live, think, and worship as it sees fit. You might as well say that we ought to LIQUIDATE the Mennonites, the Amish, or any other decent, peaceable group simply because they’re different Even that word LIQUIDATE is undemocratic. It implies the right of one man to decide whether other men are fit to encumber the earth, and is, I seem to remember, one of the reasons we’re fighting a war. The castaways of Romany were not anti-social. They didn’t hurt anybody. They just wanted to be let alone to die in peace, in their own fashion. And if they didn’t like the way of life being imposed on them by aliens — didn’t they have the inalienable right of free men to preserve their own way of life whether the aliens like it or not? The Kraylens, and Romany, are pure fiction. But the reaction to them shows a dangerous point of view. It’s well to remember one thing, when you’re planning the liquidation of minorities. Human society is a fluid and unstable tiling. And it’s frightfully embarrassing to wake up one morning and find that all of a sudden you have become — a minority.

Well, that’s off my chest, and now I shall get back to work.

Sincerely,

Leigh Brackett.

What class. She takes her lumps, mocks herself for it, and only takes to task the two letters that had morally reprehensible comments, not criticisms of her actual work. And to those two letters she shows no mercy, without ever making an argumentum ad hominem. It’s almost unbelievable that this level of discourse was ever possible at all, let alone in a lowly, disrespectable pulp.

The cover art she mentions at the top of the letter is this cover, illustrating Brackett’s own “Thralls of the Endless Night”. This is probably my favorite pulp cover of all time (it’s at the top of this post), illustrating possibly my least-favorite Brackett story (not because of the quality of the writing, but the premise is one I don’t care for).

But back to Brackett and the rowdiness of the Vizigraph. One of Planet’s early regular contributors was Ray Cummings, an author who had been publishing in the pulps since the 1910s, and who gained some early fame for his science fiction, getting The Girl in the Golden Atom published as a book in 1922 (something unheard of for SF that was not by Verne, Wells, or Burroughs).

While I personally enjoy Cummings’s work (in small doses), and have even republished some of it (with more coming at some point), there is a reason he is mostly unremembered. A few reasons, actually. And those reasons were apparent even to early Planet readers (though he did have a few defenders), and he was a frequent punching bag in the Vizigraph.

How much of a punching bag? Well, let’s put it this way: as brutal as the treatment of Brackett was above, she never got a response like the following. Barry “Termite” Rowles concluded a letter in the Fall issue by making two requests, and followed them with:

Pliz, Pliz, grant me these two extremely small boons. If you do not do this, I shall wreak upon you “The Curse of Cummings,” which is the worst form of punishment yet devised by man—i.e.,—I will send you a Cummings story every week, which the spirit of “Foo” will compel you to read. Now isn’t that horrible?