I'm going to get sentimental today. So if that's not for you, I understand.

I knew this guy in college named Matt Stevenson. My wife actually knew him a lot better than I did. Matt was Jewish and everyone knew that about him, partially because he wore a kippah daily. There were a lot of Matts at her college, so people would refer to him as "You know, Matt" and cup their hand on the back of the crown of their head.

This is relevant because it became clear during their college years that one of their acquaintances, a guy they'd had classes with and hung with occasionally, was a Nazi. I'm not using that just as a pejorative; his name was Derek Black and he was the son of Don Black, the founder of Stormfront, which was (and maybe still is) the largest white supremacist website in the world. His godfather was David Duke, Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

When the news on their college forum broke, Derek got  ostracized pretty much immediately. This was a very liberal south Florida college, so his social circle shrank to effectively nothing overnight. A car the same make and model as Derek's (but not actually Derek's) was vandalized, my wife remembers flipping him off from across the quad.

Matt was a unique thinker, though. He found it odd how Derek had made friends at their school, even without disclosing his beliefs, which he had gone from tacitly not-bringing-up to completely concealing during his time at school. He'd noticed that Derek had become close with international students, queer students, and, you know, a Jewish guy like him. He had an idea.

Matt hosted Shabbat dinners in his dorm frequently. He'd invite friends over, they would eat, play some board games, and have the kind of heady philosophy discussions you only want to have when you're in college. So one week, he invited Derek over. He wasn't sure he'd come, but Matt explicitly instructed everyone to not bring it up if he did, and just see how things went. Much to his surprise, Derek came, bearing a bottle of wine to share. 

To everyone's surprise, Derek came back the next week, and then the next. They weren't so sure what to think at first: was Derek cultivating a group of multicultural friends to use as a shield when people called him a racist? Was he trying to get dirt on them to use later? Surprisingly, no. After a while, Matt started bringing up Derek's beliefs to him and discussing. Over time, Derek not only softened his beliefs, but began to outright reject his upbringing. He told his dad he didn't want to call into his propaganda radio show anymore. He deleted his accounts on the white nationalist boards he was on. 

Matt became one of his closest friends and Derek has gone on to become an anti-racist speaker and activist. He changed his name and a whole lot else, too.

I teach a quarter-long Holocaust literature unit every school year to 8th graders, and one time we interviewed Matt as a part of it. Why did he take the time to show kindness and patience to Derek, who deserved it least of all? Matt told me that as part of his faith, he believes that everyone has a spark of pure goodness at their core, put there by there creator. This has stuck with me ever since, and I find a lot of truth in it even as an atheist who was raised Lutheran. I try to remember what Matt told me, and to keep that spark of pure goodness in mind when I talk to people.

I think C.L. Moore understood this concept and baked it into Jirel of Joiry, most specifically in her second story "Black God's Shadow," published in the December 1934 Weird Tales, just a few months after "The Black God's Kiss."

"Black God's Shadow" is a straight sequel to "The Black God's Kiss" and picks up in the immediate aftermath of the first story. Something within Jirel rumbles with something like regret for how she quite literally damned Guilluame's soul with the magic of the black god's kiss (I mean, Guilluame damned himself plenty, but it was Jirel who kind of cut the brakes on his one-way ride into to Hell).

Jirel returns to the underground dreamworld, which has morphed to maintain its creepy, off-putting nature. Even though we've been there once before, it doesn't feel like we can ever anticipate the next thing Jirel will encounter.

That brings me to where I started this blog post. When Jirel finds Guilluame, we get this passage:

Guilluame deserves his punishment: the text says that what he's writing in is nothing but his own sins. But Jirel fights this ugliness with all of her positive emotions and is clearly at times protected in the story by her very human dignity. She looks into evil periodically and knows intuitively that it cannot touch her because of her goodness. 

Now, Jirel's not perfect (that's what makes her interesting!) but she has lots of goodness within her. I was talking to current Jirel author Molly Tanzer recently and she brought up that some people dismiss Jirel as being just a "girl who fell in love with her rapist." I think that's far too simplistic of a reading. In this story, Jirel is seeing the humanity of someone who didn't deserve it. She does this not because Guilluame isn't bad, but because she is good. I have a hard time imagining any other pulp hero doing that. I also find it hard to believe that with morally-moving stories like this (Is it just me? Could be.) that people can dismiss all of pulp as a format or S&S as a genre out of hand. Philosophically, this reminds me of David Foster Wallace, Superman, or certain scripture.

"Black God's Shadow" reads as a story about finding peace within yourself by moving on and forgiving those who've hurt you in the past, completely disconnected from whether or not that person deserves it, since it's not about them at all. If you're just referring to the plot events of the story, "Black God's Shadow" is has the least going on out of any Jirel story, but the character work within it and many of the lines (the black god was "coldly inimical to all things human") more than make up for any sort of lack of sword & sorcery romping. 

Please don't get me wrong or take me too literally here; I'm not saying that the way to defeat the Nazis is to befriend them. I'm not saying that if someone traumatizes you that you need to forgive them. Far from it, in fact. But I am pointing out that there is a higher ideal towards which we can strive. It's probably unrealistic in most situations in life, but it does cause me to get a little worked up and feel connected to a 92 year-old pulp story, which speaks to C.L. Moore's skill as a writer. She puts a lot of heart into Jirel, which still beats nearly a century later.

Cora Buhlert, the writer whose work introduced me to C.L. Moore, has a tremendous piece about this story that is far more eloquent than mine. Read it here.

Jirel of Joiry, one of the most stunningly original sword & sorcery characters I've ever read, seems to have come about by a series of accidents.

Accident the first: author Catherine Lucille Moore, eventually known under her pen name C.L. Moore, was sick a lot as a kid. Without really knowing how she came into contact with them, the magazine Weird Tales became her hospital reading companion. Moore remembers that, like most literate people of her day, her family thought Weird Tales was trash, the absolute bottom of the barrel when it came to literary quality. But she loved them. And as she got older, she continued to read in that vein, if not WT itself, as her father would sneak her Barsoom and Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, away from her mother's disapproving eye.

Accident the second: Moore was working on her typing speed at work one day when a proto-Jirel came dashing out of her imagination to her. After having to quit college after three semesters and find a job, most likely due to the Great Depression, Moore was lucky to find work at a bank, for jobs were hard to come by. One afternoon, when she had nothing to do but desperately wanted to look busy, she began practicing some typing exercises. She quickly grew bored with quick brown foxes jumping over lazy dogs, so she started to type up fragments of poetry she remembered from class. And then, she typed a few sentences about a "red, running woman," imagining a figure from 13th century France. It amused her. Why's she running?, she asked herself.

Accident the third is more of just an unintentional product. Moore began typing up a couple of stories, stating with one about Northwest Smith, a Han Solo-type (or wouldn't it be more appropriate to say that Han Solo is a Northwest Smith-type?) of space ranger she began like this:

That's the dorkiest shit ever and I'm so here for it. But, back to the accident.

Moore shopped around her first Northwest Smith story, "Shambleau," and a story called "Were-Woman." "Were-Woman" was flatly rejected by Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales, but "Shambleau" was accepted. In her kitchen in Indiana, she opened a letter from Wright, complete with the information that the story had been accepted and she would be paid $100 for it. Moore screamed her head off, causing her dad to rush into the kitchen, thinking that his daughter might be the victim of some attack. But no, just $100 dollars richer, which Moore says felt like ten thousand dollars to her.

The accident here is that "Shambleau" was accepted because it was so different than the rest of what Weird Tales was printing. It pulses with sexual tension between Smith and then gorgon he comes into contact with. A lot of pulp stories are sexual or salacious, but "Shambleau" approaches the erotic, which Moore wasn't trying to do. She always maintained that she wasn't really trying to imbue theme or specific philosophy into her stories, nor did she seem them as pure escapism, but that she just wrote what she wanted to read.

That unique fingerprint of hers, found in "Shambleau" first, would be present for the rest of her career. That brings us to the lady of Joiry.

In the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, "The Black God's Kiss" appeared as the lead and cover story. It's the same issue featuring the second part of Robert E. Howard's "The People of the Black Circle" and Clark Ashton Smith's story "The Seven Geases." In this story, we meet Jirel, lady of Joiry, which is a fictional hegemon in France, some time in the 13th to 15th century.

Jirel is a capable leader and fighter, opening the story having been captured at the end of a battle, her helmet ripped off by the enemy to reveal her curly mop of red hair and her blazing yellow eyes. Joiry has been invaded, and it looks like they've lost.

Guilluame, the leader of the conquering force, has taken control of her throne room. After ripping off her helmet ("Unshell me this lobster" should be used more often), he kisses her right there in her own hall. As has been reported many times over the years, this was essentially as far as Weird Tales was willing to go with the salacious content, but that the kiss should essentially be read as a sexual assault. That's what it would be in real life, too.

Interestingly, the text of the story is somewhat infatuated with Guilluame and Jirel clearly thinks he's hot, but because of this violation, Jirel burns with a hatred for Guilluame and vows revenge. She goes to a priest friend of hers named Father Gervase to be blessed before essentially venturing down into Hell through the depths of her castle so that she can find an appropriate weapon with which to kill Guilluame.

This is one of my favorite "weird" elements of this story: the passage through which Jirel goes is a round tunnel that she and Father Gervase discovered some time ago. It winds deep into the earth, and whatever created it seems to have not done so for human feet. After an indeterminable amount of time in which gravity itself seems to flip-flop on her, Jirel appears in a dark land of horror and mystery shrouded in eternal night.

After a few jaunts this way and that, she finds a strange temple-like structure containing a black god statue. As Jirel kisses the statue, an upsetting evil seems to worm its way into her body. Both physically and spiritually uncomfortable, she hauls ass back up to the world of the living in order to get the toxin out of her.

As she clamors into her throne room, the story characterizes Guilluame as "magnificent" in his armor, on her throne. It repeats his name several times, unclear if it's done in an astounded or hateful way. Jirel then collapses into his arms in a way that isn't not intimate, while kissing him for a second time. This kiss passes the evil from her into Guilluame, who writhes and wretches for a moment before dying horrifyingly. The very thing that Guilluame sought from her- her sexuality- is the very weapon that she uses to turn on Guilluame to end his life. And after all of that, Jirel bows her head to hide her own tears.

The Jirel that Moore creates is such a human character that she stands head and shoulders above most other S&S protagonists. She's remarkably remorseful of some things, like Guilluame's death. There's this old Jack Stauber YouTube video where a kid asks his mom, "Why do I miss people who hurt me?" Jirel was blazing with hatred and revenge, but in the end doesn't find any satisfaction and even seems to think that she might've gone too far (when you read the sequel, "Black God's Shadow," Moore doubles down on this idea). It doesn't give you any easy themes like telling you Jirel absolutely was wrong for venturing into Hell to acquire a vile weapon and get revenge on her rapist. Instead, it lets you sit in her uncertainty with Jirel. 

I think this is what makes Jirel so compelling to me. She's powerful, brave, a sick fighter, but she's also frequently afraid, uncertain, confused, and very realistic. Jirel cries four different times in this story, each time having been moved to tears by something horrifically sad in Hell. And maybe Guilluame wasn't such a bad guy if we'd gotten to know him; maybe he was exactly the piece of shit he starts this story as. I'm not sure. Characters like Conan and Kane sometimes experience overwhelming, tough emotions (like Conan's loss of his lover Bêlit and Kane's overwhelming loneliness) but they're never nearly as realistic as Jirel. She's incredibly true-to-life and it makes her one of the best sword & sorcery characters I've ever read.