Conjure Wife

Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife is a strange little book.It is expertly written, and it is also utterly misogynist. Conjure Wife, written in 1943, is generally well-regarded and pointed to as an early and promising example of horror and urban fantasy. Some go so far as to call it a classic. Three films have been made using it as a starting point.

But, were anyone to ask me (and obviously no one did as this book review, like all of my book reviews, is unsolicited and will likely disappear, unread, into the great, all-consuming maw of the internet), it's got more than a few problems. It has strengths, for sure...but for me personally the flaws outweigh the strengths in the grand scheme of things. We'll get to my analysis of it in a second. Before we can analyze anything, however, we have to know what we're working with, yes? So, let's plunge ahead into HUGELY SPOILER LADEN plot territory.

SPOILERS BELOW!

Conjure Wife goes a little something like this:

There's a youngish professor of sociology named Norman Saylor currently working at a small liberal arts college somewhere. He doesn't fit well at this college -- he's the sort of irrepressible and brilliant young scholar that is always causing trouble (like threatening to give lectures about the glories of premarital sex to the Off-Campus Mothers League or having wild parties with his actor friends from New York City) that his students love but his colleagues are less thrilled with. Somehow, in psite of this lack of fit, he is ding well for himself in the academic world. He's got a nice comfortable life with his wife Tansy, and their little cat, Totem. He's even up for the chairmanship of his department.

But then, for literally no reason (in fact, Leiber goes out of his way to mention that this specific act is largely out of character for Norman Saylor), good Professor Saylor goes snooping through his wife's dressing room. In it, he finds strange little things -- vials of graveyard dirt, fingernail clippings, mysterious flannel packets* -- that he recognizes from his research as the odds and ends used in conjure magic. Perplexed, he confronts her about it and she tearfully confesses that yes, she has been practicing magic right under his nose all these years. He tells her to stop, she agrees, and they set about ridding their house of her protective charms. And then, the s*** hits the fan. One thing after another after another goes wrong for Saylor. A deranged student tries to shoot him. An equally deranged student accuses him of coming on to her. Their beloved cat Totem is killed by a mysterious force that may or may not be a stone dragon that is sometimes perched watchfully outside his office window. He not only fails to get the chairmanship of the sociology department, but his career is jeopardized when his colleagues start taking a closer look at his behaviors.

He starts to wonder, in spite of his highly prized rationality, if maybe there was something to Tansy's charms after all. Of course, he still thinks deep down that there isn't, and as if she's some sort of recovering addict, he refuses to tell her everything that's going down for fear she'll fall off the wagon. But it becomes clear soon enough that things are going badly, and after a raucous night of drinking and cavorting (of a chaste 1943 variety), Tansy pulls off one last piece of magic -- she has him unwittingly transfer all the harmful spells targeted on him to her.

That's when the going really gets rough. It turns out that the people behind all this are the other faculty wives, women who are jockeying for position amongst each other and using their husbands' careers as pawn pieces. It's not entirely clear at this point why Norman Saylor is being targeted so malevolently, but it's clear that the other wives are behind it. They work together to make the finishing blow against the Saylors, which leads Tansy to run off in the dead of night leaving only an unfinished set of scribbled instructions for her husband. He follows a trail of broken notes and tries to perform a spell to pull her out of danger (though what the danger is, precisely, he doesn't know), only to complete the spell one single minute too late. The husk of his wife -- his wife in body only -- is returned to him and tells him the faculty wives have stolen her soul.

From there, the book follows Norman Saylor as he desperately tries to learn as much about magic from the soulless (but still quite communicative) husk of his wife so he can rescue her soul and return it to her body. He finds out that the vast majority of women practice magic in secret, and that because of the secrecy most spells are worked out laboriously, in isolation, through trial-and-error. Saylor tricks an old math professor friend of his (whose wife happens to be one of the three faculty wives terrorizing him for not yet clear reasons) into working out the underlying essential elements of various magic spells that will help him get Tansy's soul back, and does so by using magic himself to steal the soul of one of the faculty wives. He forces a trade: the faculty wife's soul can go back to her body if she returns his wife's soul to his wife's body. The faculty wife concedes and all looks like it'll turn out well after all.

But the plot thickens! Just then, the wife of the old math professor comes by the house as Tansy is explaining that the wife of the old math professor, in fact, masterminded this whole soul-switching thing. And that Norman really should shoot the wife of the old math professor because she's definitely up to no good. But he doesn't. Instead, he winds up playing bridge with the three evil faculty wives while the terrible spouse of the old math professor goes on about how much fun she's about to have in Tansy Saylor's body (specifically how much fun she'll have with Norman Saylor in Tansy Saylor's body) and explains that she's brought them all there for her coup de grace: switching bodies with Tansy Saylor permanently. And then, with Norman's help, she does it.

But wait! Remember how our Norman Saylor is clever and brilliant? Yes, he outsmarts them all. Turns out the old hag had already switched bodies with Tansy Saylor (seriously, trying to keep up with who was in who's body and who had who's soul was a little like watching the shell game) and that he'd realized this when what looked like his wife was trying to get him to shoot the old lady. He saw right through that and engineered the fateful bridge game himself to get his wife's body and his wife's soul reunited for real this time. And he did. And he and Tansy (presumably) lived happily ever after.

As you can see from the detailed plot synopsis above, tons of stuff happens. Really, it's a very quick and satisfying read. But towards the end of it, I found myself plagued by questions. The biggest issue for me was how gender was treated throughout the book. Now, again, I recognize that this was written in 1943, but I don't think its age excuses the outright sexism strewn throughout the book. It seemed like Leiber was, through much of the book, trying to say something about the restrictiveness of gender roles during that time period. The way he writes women as these shadowed puppeteers of men's lives, the way they enact power by subtly manipulating men who have societally recognized power, is a clever if often-used example of the trope about how behind every powerful man, there's a powerful woman. It didn't even really bother me that most of these powerful women lurking in the shadows were of the Lady MacBeth type. It is, after all, a horror story. What bothered me was that the meager amounts of agency this construction of men and women's roles give women is demolished when Norman Saylor runs in and saves the day.

Think about it: he's hyper-masculine in his rationality. It takes him basically the entire book before he's willing to admit that maybe magic actually works. He routinely derides women for their inherent irrationality -- hell, his first big academic break was some tome about how the fairer sex is suspicious and riddled with neuroses -- and ties the practice of magic to their intuitiveness and said irrationality. The underlying essentialism of this, not to mention this whole idea of men are rational/women are magical is inherently binarist, really rubbed me (a genderqueer person who's had a s*** ton of misogyny heaped on them throughout their life) the wrong way. That would be enough for me to want to throw the book out the window. Then, though, everything got upended. Turns out Norman Saylor is so damned rational that he rationally finds a way (via that aforementioned old math professor, who incidentally also a totally manfully rational man) to practice magic, and of course this masculinized, rational form of magic is much more powerful than the magic of witches who have been practicing their arts for decades. He's more or less a prodigy. So, not only do we have a book in which a man swoops in to save the damsel in distress, but we have one in which a man co-opts the only sort of power the women around him have, perfects it, and then uses it to save the damsel. A damsel, it should be noted, he himself earlier dismissed as neurotic for protecting him with said feminine power earlier in the book. So, while this starts as an interesting look at male paranoia and male privilege, it certainly doesn't end that way.

I also had problems with the villain. Mrs. Carr, the wife of the old math professor, is apparently a revolutionary and brilliant witch. Tansy Saylor says as much when she tells Norman that before Mrs. Carr, women had never used their magic in tandem (really? never, really?). Mrs. Carr orchestrated the first group plot, worked out magic with other women willingly and openly, and basically found a whole new way to get s*** done. Now, that's kind of cool, isn't it? I think so. Imagine if the book had been about the women and how revolutionary it could have been if they learned how much more complex and far-reaching their spells could be in groups. Imagine, if you will, if the women's lib movement was actually a mass movement of magic-based table turning helmed by a seemingly benign old lady. That could've been a hell of a book done right.

But in this book, Mrs. Carr is not exploring and amplifying the strength of her magic because she finds her lifelong role as a supportive companion to a bumbling math professor confining, or even to just better understand the nature of the magic she uses itself. No, she uses it because she's obsessed with youth and has the hots for Norman Saylor. It seemed strange to me, when her ultimate motivations were revealed, that that's all she wanted. A woman with that much potential, that much ambition, and all she wanted was a man who clearly couldn't stand her and body upgrade? It just read as so reductionistic, and patronizing, that nothing else could motivate her. And that's when the book really lost me. In the last chapter, during the climactic bridge game, I found myself wondering more about Mrs. Carr and what kind of live she must have lived that she would use such awe-inspiring power (because honestly, soul stealing is heavy duty stuff) just to get a chance to live out the rest of her years pretending to be another woman, to live with a man she know actually despises who she really is. I didn't care much about whether things worked out for the Saylors, frankly.

In sum, this was a well-constructed book but also an incredibly anti-feminist one. I wanted to cut it some slack because of when it was written, but I can't -- I mean, Virginia Woolf had already strutted her stuff by then; it wasn't like no one was working in critiques of gender socialization into literary works. Conjure Wife, ultimately, feels like a long-winded bit of benevolent sexism: well-meaning and unintentionally condescending, but condescending nonetheless.

*The magic used throughout clearly owes a whole lot to voodoo, but all the practitioners in the book were middle class white women. So really this book needs a much more intersectional critique highlighting the racial elements of the text as well, but I am not qualified to provide said race critique on account that (a) I am white and I'd rather center a woman of color's voice on this, and (b) I don't know enough about the racialized contexts of voodoo to make that critique myself.

** spoiler alert ** I choose to describe Conjure Wife as a cautionary tale and parable about how closed mindedness, sexism and arrogance (in this case in 1950's academia) can damage those that we love. Norman, a sociology professor at a small, second tier university, is quite full of himself. He describes his wife as "his most prized possession" and, for reasons that are unclear, has chosen to snoop on her and look through her closet and private possessions. As a result, he discovers that his wife is in actuality a practicing witch, and a good one at that. Being the modern scientist and responsible for his wife's well-being (as he sees it) he immediately must sit her down and didactically enlighten his wife, who he clearly considers to be child-like and in need of his guidance. The extended scene in which he describes his patient attempts to help her make the logical steps to "realize" that witchcraft is just a delusion of less advanced societies is nauseating in its paternalism and condescension. She finally agrees to throw it all away. He is finally convinced that he has helped his wife Tansy mature and that this dabbling in primitive customs is behind them. The problem is that the witchcraft is very real and so is the danger created by the sudden removal of all the spells that were protecting him for years. He is about to learn that there are more witches out there and that some can be pretty nasty.

I think that the use of the first person narrative voice was brilliant, even necessary for this novel to have the proper effect. We are able to hear Norman tell the story from his point of view and in his own words and roll our eyes wondering if this pig-headed snob is EVER going to open his eyes to what is happening around him. Ultimately, just as he would accuse primitive societies of being trapped by their ignorance, he is likewise trapped by his own self-imposed rigid mindset. In his world view, men are cognitively and emotionally superior to women and all "reality" is merely a reflection of science and mathematics. Anything not "scientific" or at least scientific in is definition, is not reality. It is amusing and sometimes horrifying to watch him rationalize the supernatural events occurring around him.

Finally, with his wife's help (who actually would have been MUCH better off without his meddling in the first place) he is able to right what was wrong and get everything back the way it was before he intervened. You can't help but smirk when you read how he slants the action so that it always looks like he is the hero that saves the day. The real brilliance of the novel is that Norman's narration is transparent. Even while he tells you about his application of scientific principles and logical solutions to the horror confronting them, you can see the terrified Norman cowering behind it all. This Norman knows that he has left himself and Tansy naked to an evil onslaught and that he is completely out of his depth. He retreats into depression and alcohol and lashes out in frustration at those around him. It is pathetic to watch him, even though he believes in the reality of the magic, attempt to sell himself on the idea that everything that is going on is explainable by scientific, psychological, or medical causes.

Well, good triumphs over evil and at the end Tansy asks him if he has changed his mindset or if he is already rationalizing the whole chain of events into a scientific explanation. We don't get the answer, but clearly we hope that Norman has learned a bit from his wife, who has shown a tremendous amount of patience with her stubborn and close-minded husband.

I began Leiber's novel by prickling and obsessing over its dated qualities. I took offense to every little sexist thought or remark made by the narrator; I thought it was slow-paced and the characters were boring (yet another story about college professors with perfect lives); I thought, why am I reading this dated crap? (It was originally published in 1943... interesting year). I thought this, that is, until the dragon statue came to life and came a-knocking on the door one rainy night. After that, I was hooked, and read the rest of the novel eagerly.

The story itself is engaging and has a lot of twists. Leiber's language is simple and flows easily from page to page. Although Leiber is said to have been inspired by H. P. Lovecraft into his early writing career (which includes "Conjure Wife" as his first novel), he does not concern himself with intricate descriptions of setting or internal soliloquy, as Lovecraft does. He writes simple and convincing dialogue and leaves his description to only the details that stick with you, even after you have put the book down: "A thick lock crossed one eye socket, like a curtain, and curled down towards the throat. One eye stared at him, without recognition. And no hand moved to brush the lock of hair away from the other."

At the beginning of the novel, the tale of Bluebeard and what happens to his wife when she snoops around is mentioned (he cuts her head off, in case you didn't know); a perfect foreshadowing of events to come. The message seems to be that sometimes it is best to live in blissful ignorance of the dark forces around us. As Professor Norman Saylor, our protagonist, learns more and more about the sorceress practices of the woman around him (and perhaps all woman), he learns a great deal about the consequences of actions that may appear insignificant, but are anything but.

I highly recommend "Conjure Wife," written by the guy who wrote the classic Sword and Sorcery series "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser," which was a main influence for TSR's Dungeons and Dragons game (nerd trivia! had to put it in there). This is a great novel of the macabre. The HWA is right about this one; "Conjure Wife" is a horror classic.

Beg to disagree with B R.
Fascinating deconstruction of a typical fantasy novel that reflects the predominant cultural biases of its day. With the benefit of Saussure, Peirce, Barthes, Derrida, et al, and the other semioticians in one's academic shirt pocket or degreed portfolio, it's easy to slam poor, deceased Leiber--a typical Depression era product who wrote this magnificent study of male paranoia in the middle of WW2!
Historical footnote: from 1941 to 1947, Leiber taught at Occidental "Oxy" College (though a Pacific coast private college, doubtless, the model for Hempnell, an East coast private college; I have actually visited the Oxy campus on several occasions, back in the late 1960's and mid-1970's; Barrack Obama, a Kenyan-American, who rose to the presidency despite "pedigree" credentials attended Oxy as an undergrad. Witchcraft? You tell me...).
I won't comment much about the story-line as enough spoilers have been thrown in by other reviewers.
In retrospect, I suspect, this novel did to the, then, "battle of the sexes" what the horror, male fantasy film, "Fatal Attraction" did to one-night-stands. Leiber intended this novel's primary function to induce horror, if not abject fear and paranoia in so-called, "rational" men, and to get them to defer and show a new respect for women. Hey, after all, women really could be witches watching out for us, much like guardian angels(!). "Women as witches" is a trope Leiber uses. He wants the battle of the sexes to end in a loving truce, for heaven's sake! So treat women as equals, as partners in this hostile universe. One never knows who or what the well-springs of that hostility are. A Tansy by one's side may help one navigate life with a bit more ease... For love, Tansy gave up her craft. When after repeated, nearly mind-splitting introspection ("No, I am 'rational," Tandy's is 'superstition' and _yet it moves_, etc.") he comes to understand the error of his "rational" ways, Norman realizes he has to become a wizard of sorts to retrieve Tansy from the hell, Norman, in his ignorance, helped throw her into.
Leiber's intent: Accept our wives as equals and for who they are. Respect their preferences (they respect ours). Be they witches, Catholic, republican, atheist, democrat, yoga-lovers, zumbaists, vegans, or what-not. Marriage is a pairing of equals. Perhaps women may be superior and/or better at it. Yes, I may actually be married to a sorceress. I wouldn't have it any other way...
Now as to the novel's merits. Does it induce horror and paranoia in so-called "rational" men? I have no doubt it does. For a chapter or two, Leiber's Lovecraftian-inspired prose opens that mental Pandora's Box for a chilling moment or two. Any male who denies it is a liar. So this novel works at that level. It induces male paranoia! The abrupt Hollywood ending in three pages after such a loving 150 page build-up is another matter. Yet, overall, "it works!"
Oh, yeah, from the vantage of the 21st century, in 2015, we can condescend. It's our privilege. But let's contextualize this novel, give it its due. It's a novel of its time. But a novel one can still enjoy today if one reads it for the sheer joy of the emotions it will conjure... He, he.
Be well.

Fritz Leiber's "Conjure Wife" was suggested to me by a "top horror novel" list which I found online somewhere. And I'm also aware that Leiber is one of Stephen King's inspirations, so I gave it a chance. Now, CW is dated, but the writing style makes the story bearable. And the story itself is about how wives try to help out their husbands and their careers. In the story, women - many, many women, in fact - use witchcraft for to ensure their husbands successes, so in some aspects this novel feels very satirical, and it almost makes fun of how women put so much effort into their husbands. But ultimately this story never really takes off. The dialogue is clunky; the scene setups are awkward (sometimes there are characters in the scene which I didn't know were in the scene); and the story itself isn't anything spectacular. Unfortunately this book will just be a book which aspiring writers will pick up. It is what it is.

While the plot is tight, with twists and turns aplenty, the whole premise is a love it or hate it thing. Unfortunately, I didn't love it. Leiber's writing was enough to keep me reading to the end, but just barely. This is the second non-Lankhmar Leiber book I've tried and not liked.

It's a horror classic, so I wanted/needed to read it.

Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife is listed on every "Masterpieces of Classic Horror" list out there, so I was eager to experience it myself for the first time.

But this tale of witchcraft in the world of academia left me with some unsettling questions, like, "What woman in Fritz Leiber's life damaged him to the point he would write such a weird, misogynistic tale?"

Serialized in 1940 pulp magazines, and released as a novel in 1953, Conjure Wife`s premise that all women are witches, utilizing their charms to protect home and family (and maybe help hubby get a promotion at work) is as silly as a Dick Two episode of Bewitched.

But Leiber plays it straight, and builds an amazingly detailed study of the occult in the process. A protegé of H. P. Lovecraft, you can see Leiber blending "modern" science and weird fantasy to build his own mythos in Conjure Wife. Indeed, Leiber's crafted witchcraft undoubtedly influenced hundreds of other witchy projects. Is hard to believe John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick, or Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby could have existed without the literary trail Leiber blazed.

But sometimes the term "genre classic" is code for "dull," "dated," and "not very scary." Sadly, this is the case with Conjure Wife. Toss in "sexist," too.

Oh well. You have to expect some paranoid racism when you tackle H.P. Lovecraft, and swallow a lot of purple prose and sad, crappy poems when you take on Edgar Allan Poe. I guess Fritz Leiber is entitled to his woman issues.

Leiber's later work, specifically 1977′s Our Lady of Darkness, expanded his occult mythos and explored the author's personal demons. (Devastated by the death of his wife, Leiber spent several years in an alcoholic haze.)

It's a horror classic. I'll have to read it.