FOREWORD: FLETCHER AND I

My late friend and collaborator Fletcher Pratt (1897–1956) was a connoisseur of heroic fantasy before that term was ever invented. He read Norse sagas in the original and extravagantly admired E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ourobouros. Curiously, be despised Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories — next to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings three-decker, the most successful books in the genre — because their occasional crudities and lapses of logic exasperated him. He had no use for heroes who merely battered their way out of traps by their bulging thews, without using their brains.

(Murray) Fletcher Pratt, the son of an upstate New York farmer, was born on the Indian reservation near Buffalo. He claimed that this gave him the right to hunt and fish in New York State without a licence, but he never availed himself of the privilege.

As a youth, five foot three but wiry and muscular, Pratt undertook two careers in Buffalo. One was that of librarian; the other that of prizefighter in the flyweight (112-pound) class. He fought several times, lost a couple of teeth, and knocked one opponent cold. When the story appeared in the Buffalo papers, the head librarian told him that it simply would not do to have one of their employees knocking people arsy-versy. Forced to choose between the two careers, Pratt chose the library.

Soon afterward, Pratt entered Hobart College at Geneva, New York, on Lake Seneca. When the coach learned that Pratt had been in the ring, he tapped him for an assistant in his boxing class. Word got around that this funny-looking little freshman who was showing the boys in the gym how to do rights over lefts was the real thing. Hence, somewhat to his disappointment, Pratt was never hazed.

At the end of Pratt’s freshman year, his father fell on hard times. Pratt had to leave college. In the early 1920’s, he worked as a reporter on the Buffalo Courier-Express and on a Staten Island paper. Later, he settled in New York with his second wife, the artist Inga Stephens Pratt.

For several years, Pratt held a succession of fringe literary jobs, such as editing a ‘mug book’ (a biographical encyclopedia), in which people of small importance were persuaded to pay money to have their pictures and biographies included. He also worked for one of those writers’ institutes that promise to turn every would-be scribbler into a Tolstoy and that keep the money coming in by fulsome flattery of the veriest bilge submitted to them. Later, as an established author, Pratt drew on these experiences in lecturing to writers’ groups on literary rackets.

In the late 1920’s, Pratt got a foothold as a freelance writer. From 1929 to 1935 he sold a number of science-fiction stories to Amazing, Wonder, and other science-fiction pulps of the time. He also worked for Hugo Gernsback, then publishing Wonder Stories. Pratt translated European science-fiction novels from the French and the German. Gernsback had a habit of not paying his authors what he had promised, but Pratt got around him. He would translate the first instalment or two of a European novel and then, when the material was already in print, say:

«I’m sorry, Mr. Gernsback, but if you don’t pay me what you owe, I don’t see how I can complete this translation.»

He had Gernsback over a barrel. He also took off more than a year to live in Paris on the insurance money that he collected after a fire gutted the Pratts’ apartment. He studied at the Sorbonne and did research for his book on codes and ciphers, Secret and Urgent.

Pratt learned Danish among other languages, spoke French with a terrible accent, and became friends with the curator of arms and armour at the Louvre, who once let him try on the armour of King Franзois I. In his day, the king had been deemed a large, stout man. The flyweight Pratt found all the armour too small except the shoulder pieces; Franзois had tremendous shoulders from working out with sword and battle-axe in the tilt yard.

Back in New York, Pratt — now a self-made scholar of respectable attainments — attacked more serious writing. After an abortive history of Alexander’s successors, he hit his stride with books like The Heroic Years, about the war of 1812, and Ordeal by Fire, a popular history of the American Civil War.

The Pratt menage in New York attracted a wide circle of friends, drawn by Pratt’s lavish hospitality and extraordinary sense of fun. One room of the apartment was cluttered with cages full of squeaking marmosets, which Pratt successfully raised by feeding them on vitamin tablets and squirming yellow larvae.

As a history, military, and naval buff, Pratt devised a naval war game, to which his friends were invited once a month. In odd moments, he had whittled out scale models (55 feet = inch) of the world’s warships, using balsa wood, wires, and pins, until there were hundreds of models crowding his shelves. The game called for the players to crawl around on the floor, moving their models the distances allowed on scales marked in knots; estimating ranges in inches to the ships on which they were firing; and writing down these estimates. Then the referees chased the players off and measured the actual ranges, penalizing ships hit so many points, according to the size of the shells, and depriving them of so many knots of speed, so many guns, and so on. When a ship had lost all its points, it was taken from the floor. There were special provisions for merchant ships, shore batteries, submarines, torpedoes, and airplanes.

For several years, the war garners met in the Pratts’ apartment. When this became too crowded, with fifty or more players at once, the games moved to a hall on East Fifty-ninth Street. After World War II, interest declined.

Pratt’s interests also included the reading of sagas and gourmet cookery. He wrote a cookbook, A Man and His Meals. He taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, was a Baker Street Irregular, and served for seven years as president of the New York Authors’ Club. In 1944, he founded a stag eating, drinking, and arguing society, the Trap Door Spiders, which still meets periodically in New York.

In 1939, my old friend and college roommate, John D. Clark, introduced me to Pratt. A naval buff of long standing myself, I was soon an enthusiastic war gamer and a regular attendant at the Pratts’ evenings, along with such colleagues as Laurence Manning, Malcolm Jameson, Ted Sturgeon, George O. Smith, and L. Ron Hubbard, who had not yet manifested himself as the pontiff of Scientology.

I had been free-lancing for a year and a half, having been fired as an economy measure from an editorial job on a trade journal. I was also in the midst of getting married. With the appearance of John W. Campbell’s fantasy magazine Unknown, Pratt conceived the idea of a series of novellas, in collaboration with me, about a hero who projects himself into the parallel worlds described in our world in myths and legends. We made our protagonist a brash, self-conceited young psychologist named Harold Shea.

First we sent Harold to the world of Scandinavian myth, in The Roaring Trumpet (Unknown, May 1940). Pratt furnished most of the background for this story, since at that time my knowledge of Norse myth was limited to popular digests and retellings. I had not yet read such splendid sources as the Heimskringla and the Prose Edda.

For the second episode, we transferred Harold to the world of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in The Mathematics of Magic (August 1940). I was never so enthusiastic about the Faerie Queene as Pratt was, finding it tedious for long stretches. Years later, however, when I took to writing verse, I composed a poem, The Dragon-Kings, using the Spenserian nine-line stanza, which is a most exacting verse form. Having sweated through three such stanzas, I was awed by the feat of Edmuud Spenser, whose Faerie Queene comprises over four thousand.

The first two novellas were followed by The Castle of Iron (April 1941), which took Harold to the world of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Also in that year, Holt brought out the first two novellas as the clothbound book The Incomplete Enchanter, which has since been through a number of editions. While Pratt proposed the basic themes for the first two stories, those for the later ones were worked out by discussion between us.

After World War II, Pratt and I rewrote and expanded The Castle of Iron to full-novel length, in which form it appeared in 1950. We also wrote two more novellas of the saga, placing Harold first in the world of the Finnish Kalevala (The Wall of Serpents) and then in the world of Irish myth (The Green Magician). After magazine publication, these two stories were combined in a cloth-bound volume, Wall of Serpents. It was not possible to include them in the present volume, first because of considerations of space and second because of contractual complications.

For obvious reasons I cannot assess the virtues and faults of these works. I will say only that they were certainly heroic fantasy, or swordplay-and-sorcery fiction, long before these terms were invented. While Robert E. Howard is justly hailed as the major American pioneer in this subgenre, neither Pratt nor I, when we started the Shea stories, had even read a Conan story or ever heard enough about Howard to recognize his name.

Our method of collaboration was to meet in Pratt’s apartment and hammer out the plot by long discussions during which I took shorthand notes. Observing the utility of Pratt’s knowledge of shorthand from his journalistic days, I soon taught myself Gregg and have found it valuable ever since. I took the notes home and wrote a rough draft. Pratt then wrote the final draft, which I edited. In a few cases — our later stories of Gavagan’s Bar, for example — we reversed the procedure, Pratt doing the rough draft and I the second. This did not work out so well. In such collaborations, it is generally better for the junior member to do the rough draft, since the senior member, as a result of experience, is likely to have more skill at polishing and condensation.

A fan magazine once asserted that in the Harold Shea stories de Camp furnished the imaginative element and Pratt the controlling logic. Actually, it was the other way around. Pratt had a livelier and more creative imagination than I, but I had a keener sense of critical logic. In any case, I earned much of what I think I know about the writer’s craft in the course of these collaborations. Pratt’s influence on me in this matter was second only to Campbell’s.

In 1941, L. Ron Hubbard wrote one of his several hilarious fantasy novels for Unknown: The Case of the Friendly Corpse (August 1941). This tale had some of Hubbard’s funniest passages, but let the reader down badly at the end. The hero, Jules Riley, had swapped souls with an apprentice magician on another plane, who up to then has been a student at the College of the Unholy Names. Another student tells Jules (now on this other plane) that Harold Shea appeared before him, claiming to be a magician from another world. The student challenged Harold to a sporting contest: the student would turn his wand into a super-serpent, and Harold could summon up his own monster, and they would see which creature won. But. the snake just grew up and then grabbed him and ate him up before I could do anything about it.

Some fans were indignant at Hubbard’s so brusquely bumping off a colleague’s hero. Pratt and I thought of writing a story to rescue Harold from the serpent’s maw and turn the tables, but after some floundering we gave up. Another writer’s mise en scиne, we found, so severely cramps the imagination that fancy plods when it should soar. In the end, we ignored Hubbard and sent Harold on to other milieux.

During 1941-42, Pratt and I wrote two fantasy novels, The Land of Unreason and The Carnelian Cube. Pearl Harbor came just as I was finishing my part of The Carnelian Cube. I volunteered for the Naval Reserve, was commissioned, and spent the war navigating a desk at the Philadelphia Naval Base. I did engineering on naval aircraft along with Heinlein and Asimov.

Pratt, a strong patriot and nationalist, described himself as a political conservative — although, when one discussed actual current issues with him one found in him a surprisingly objective, pragmatic, almost liberal attitude. Kept out of the armed forces by his physical limitations and age, he wrote a war column for the New York Post. This ended when his editor forced him to guess on the outcome of the battle of the Coral Sea, and he guessed wrong. He also wrote a number of books on the war, especially the part played in it by the U.S. Navy.

Then Pratt became a naval war correspondent assigned to Latin America. An old Brazilophile who spoke fluent Portuguese, Pratt visited Brazil. He had long worn a moustache and, in the early 1930s for a while, a goatee. Now he grew a straggly full beard, greying reddish in colour and of Babylonian cut. He hated razors, and the Navy forbade him to use his electric shaver on shipboard in the Caribbean. This was long before the revival of beards in the 1950s and ‘60s. His small size, whiskers, thick, tinted glasses, and loud shirts made an ensemble not easily forgotten.

After the war, Pratt resumed living in New York, while my family and I stayed on in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We continued our collaborations with the two later Harold Shea novellas and the Gavagan’s Bar stories — a series of barroom tall tales, comparable to (though conceived independently of) Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales of the White Hart. Pratt also wrote two first-class heroic-fantasy novels of his own: The Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star.

When he had finished The Blue Star, Pratt told his friends that he planned a third fantasy novel, about a modern woman who finds herself in the body of another woman of 1,800 years ago: With the approach of the Civil War centenary, however, Pratt became so busy with better-paying nonfiction that, during his last few years, he gave up fiction altogether. He had written over fifty books, including many science-fiction stories, books on Napoleon, biographies of Edwin M. Stanton and King Valdemar IV of Denmark, and a history of the U.S. Navy.

He and I had discussed possible future works of fiction, such as another Harold Shea story laid in the world of Persian myth, or a Gavagan’s Bar story about a vampire with a sweet tooth who attacked only diabetics. But they were never written. For, in 1956, when he was fifty-nine and had just begun to hit the best-seller lists, Pratt suddenly fell ill of cancer of the liver and soon died.

I have not tried to carry on any of our series alone, because I think that the combination of Pratt and de Camp produced a result visibly different from either of us alone. Besides. I have always had more ideas waiting to be actualized in writing than I could find time to get down. But some of those who have not read the tales of Harold Shea’s adventures may still, I trust, get some entertainment out of them.

— L. Sprague de Camp

June, 1975