Afficionados of fantasy fiction are usually familiar with the collaborative works of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt collectively known as the “Harold Shea stories,” written in the 1940s. Both these men were hard-nosed rationalists who enjoyed writing fantasy, with de Camp particularly keen on building worlds out of the logical implications of magical premises, and equally keen on the humour that ensues from such logic. De Camp lived until 2000, dying at the age of 92, writing during most of that time. He published a science book on primatology in 1995 and an autobiography in 1996. He remained well known and well loved in the Science Fiction / Fantasy community for all that time. Pratt, however, was born in 1897 and died in 1956, shortly after the publication of these famous collaborations. Without de Camp, he wrote four science fiction and two fantasy novels, as well as sixteen books on naval history and many others on a broad range of subject. He was also a pioneer “gamer,” creating a complex mathematics-based strategic naval war game in 1933 that is considered one of the best ever conceived. After the publication of the revised version of the game in 1940, he wrote that “wives and girlfriends of male participants dropped their roles of observers and soon became fearsome tacticians.” He was, like de Camp, a man of broad interests. He wrote mysteries, Civil War histories, culinary histories and cookbooks, and a considerable amount of well-regarded poetry. While looking for a photo to illustrate this post, I found one of him at his New Jersey home gamboling on its lawn with the poet John Ciardi and rocket scientist Willy Ley.
Fletcher Pratt
Of the two fantasy novels, I’ve just read The Well of the Unicorn, first published in 1948. Three things are striking about the book.
One is the style, which combines the clean and crisp sentence structure and imagery you would have found in the era’s Saturday Night or New Yorker with some of the purple conventions of pulp fantasy novelists, and a dash of Lord Dunsany. He delighted in inserting antique and anagogic words into this slick matrix, but unlike most of the pulp writers, he actually knew what they meant.
Another thing that struck me is the social, psychological, and political realism. The society depicted is actually plausible, resembling very closely what you would find reading the Twelfth Century Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus. The interplay of local kings and feudatories with pirate raiders and independent jarls on the fringes of a world previously dominated by an urban empire is pretty much what you would have found in early medieval Jutland. Unlike most fantasy novels, Pratt’s imaginary world is one where people have to eat and make a living, and people get hurt when they fight. The politics is realistic. Much of the text is concerned with the hero Airar struggling with competing ideologies, forced into unpleasant compromises, and finding no social arrangement that doesn’t create some injustice. By the end of the book, he comes across something like Duke Louis II de Bourbon.*
There is, of course, magic in Pratt’s world, but there is an underlying message: magic sucks. It doesn’t work very well, doesn’t produce the desired results, and at its best is rather lame. This is what allows the book to maintain its realistic feeling, and also cures the most irritating problem of fantasy fiction. Since at any second someone might pull out a spell or summon some power that makes whatever happen that the writer wants to happen, the magical element of fantasy fiction essentially inflates the currency. The reader just trudges through the set-pieces and battles, waiting for the magic ring or the cosmic woo-be-doo to do its stuff. Pratt could see this peril, and instead used magic more as a source of irritation and irony than a driving force in the narrative. The only other fantasy writer that I know of taking this approach is R. A. MacAvoy.
This is an enjoyable old fantasy, if you know the conventions of pre-WWII pulp fiction established by Robert E. Howard, and even more if you’ve read a bit of Dunsany or A. Merritt. A modern reader might not quite “get it” or see its charm.
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* whose life story has recently been translated by my friend Steven Muhlburger (primarily) and myself (assisting). [Chronicle of the Good Duke by Jean Cabaret d’Orville (fl. 1429), translated by Steven Muhlberger and Phil Paine]
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