Fantastic Metropolis

There was a time when the kind of science fantasy Brackett made her own was looked down upon as a kind of bastard progeny of science fiction (which was about scientific speculation) and fantasy (which was about magic). Critics of the 50s hated it because it was very uncool to be as blatantly, gorgeously romantic as Brackett, to combine the natural and the supernatural so effortlessly. Maybe that was why, too, she deliberately obscured her gender in the early days. It was a pretty unladylike form. Her friend Catherine Moore had to appear as C.L.Moore, just so that the reader shouldn’t be any further upset. Unless it came in the debased form of a bodice-ripper or wore a stetson, romanticism in the 40s and 50s had to chainsmoke and wear a fedora and a trenchcoat or it had better not come at all. An unsuitable job for a woman. It was a tribute to Howard Hawks that he wasn’t phased by the famous revelation that the guy he had hired for The Big Sleep was actually a gal in a gingham dress. Hawks was as famous for his regard for strong women as he was for his exploitation of weaker ones. And Leigh’s steady integrity impressed him. She stayed on the picture. There are many who believe she materially helped make it the classic it became. She worked with Hawks and Wayne on movies like Hatari! (about which she had some hilarious stories) and Rio Lobo, as well as the classic Rio Bravo and she also wrote for television. The western, like her Martian stories, depends chiefly on reflective landscape for its constant appeal and she was a great painter of reflective landscapes.

To some extent the post-war rejection of gorgeous fantasy, of full-blooded romanticism was the result of our sudden growing up as cultures, recognising the results of Hitler’s over-the-top use of romantic propaganda. Even Errol Flynn had to get out of his tights and into that trenchcoat. Tony Curtis in The Black Shield of Falworth became the benchmark for ludicrously miscast low budget historicals. Robert Taylor was a severely miscast Ivanhoe, though Elizabeth Taylor remains the best Rebecca ever. Nobody with any serious ambition wanted to work on such travesties. There were only a few restricted areas where a certain kind of romanticism was acceptable. The ruling literary caste was prepared to take The Third Man, and Philip Marlowe but not Gormenghast and Titus Groan or Queen of the Martian Catacombs and Eric John Stark. Yet Brackett has less in common with Mervyn Peake than she has with Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler and other superior writers of popular fiction. Yet common to all these writers is the sense of yearning loss, as of innocence, a nobler, irredeemable past and an uncertain future. Her heroes are often deeply aware of some moral transgression which everyone forgives them for except themselves. At the time these stories were written we had seen our sense of our history, of our progress towards real civilisation, blasted to bits before our eyes. By the time these stories were appearing in the pulps, Germany’s Nazi armies seemed unchallenged in their conquest of Europe. All those idealistic aspirations for world peace and the rule of civil law had collapsed before the cheap rhetoric of a bad journalist like Mussolini or a mediocre painter of postcards like Hitler. Bogart made more than one speech about how we felt, most famously in Casablanca. Yet the dominant sf of the day did not reflect the mood of the times, unless it was the militaristic, xenophobic elements. John W. Campbell was so busy being upbeat and celebrating crackpots who created perpetual motion machines and cults like early scientology which offered personal empowerment and an alternative to atomic war, he didn’t notice that the world had changed profoundly. We were beginning to realise that controlling it might not produce the effects we desired. I was never entirely sure whether he was disappointed by the failure of the Hitler experiment. Campbell marched on to his own simple, stirring tunes, convinced he had a handle on the future. Ironically, it was the humanistic writers, like Sheckley, Bester and Dick, who most closely predicted our present. As a result, much of what Campbell published dated badly and became quickly unreadable. But Leigh, like so many of her peers, captured the mood of her time which translates so easily to the mood of our present and appears in writers like William Gibson or the graphic novel work of Moore and Gaiman. Martian Quest, good as it was, wasn’t the work of a typical Astounding contributor.

Like so many of her heroes, Leigh preferred the outlaw life. She always said her first love was science fantasy. She said it defiantly, when it generally paid less than other pulp fiction. When it paid less, indeed, than other kinds of science fiction. If she had chosen, in her fiction, to hang out more with the scum of the LA streets rather than the dregs of the spacelanes she could have made a lot more money. Here’s one of her heroes, Mike Vickers, more used to steering a 1940 Ford than an interplanetary tramp:

There was a street. It was narrow and crooked. It had no lights and no paving. There were little mud-walled houses. There was garbage and the odor of it, heavy and rank, and filth, and a dead rat lying in the dust, and a subtle breath of heat. Vickers drew back. He was afraid. He willed his feet to move, to go away, but the floor slid under them like a running stream. He cried out, loud enough for God to hear, and all that came from his mouth was a whisper: Angie! Angie.

There was someone behind him, and he knew that there was no escape.

Find a copy of Stranger at Home, as by George Sanders, which is where that appeared, and you’ll see what I mean. Her name is actually in the book. Published in 1946, it’s dedicated ‘To Leigh Brackett, Whom I Have Never Met.’ I like to think this was George Sanders’s way of giving her a credit. I’d love to see that one back in print. We probably have various Hollywood strikes to thank for a lot of the stories she wrote around that time, because when she couldn’t work for the movies, she wrote fiction. Later, she would come to write science fiction in favour of writing for the movies. Only once, with The Empire Strikes Back, did she ever script a science fantasy tale. In a sense she had the privilege of self-imitation, just as she had when doing Eldorado, which she knew was a rehash of Rio Bravo. At one point she had suggested to Hawks that he simply change the names of her previous script and save himself some money.