Volume 3, Issue 6 – December, 2000

Michael Moorcock: Populist Intellectual

Multi-award winning writer, rock musician, editor, essayist and occasional actor, Michael Moorcock stands at the crossroads of a number of earthly universes. Small wonder then that he should set his fiction in the Multiverse, a multitude of intersecting alternative universes which provide an infinite number of slightly differing realities.

Moorcock’s references range even more widely than all the adventures of his characters Elric, Von Bek, Pyat and Jerry Cornelius combined. When Moorcock takes the mic, a World Fantasy Con panel on reading modern fantasy takes a sharp detour to Spectator editors who can’t read comics on the way to the tortures of modern jazz. Crescent Blues invited Moorcock to treat our interview questions in the same way — as just a starting point. Happily, he took us at our word.

Thanks. Here’s some casual answers to be going on with!

…People are always asking me how I “broke in” to publishing and music. The simple answer is that I didn’t. I was invited in. For some reason people used to see potential in me. I was smart and no doubt personable. I had no teenage traumas as I recall because I didn’t go through all that shit teenagers seem to go through and maybe that’s why I have no interest in “rites of passage” movies.

I was playing guitar in a whorehouse at the age of 15 not because I was that good on the guitar or that sexy, but because I got on well with the girls and they liked me. I was a sort of mascot. Sex, drugs and rock and roll have, as it were, never been something I had to yearn for. I had probably enjoyed most of life’s sweetest pleasures for quite a lot of the time by the age of 22 when I got married and settled down. I have been invited in to the English Literature world, too, but haven’t been very comfortable in their churches.

— — —

It was the same with rock and roll. [While still actively touring with the durable British space rock band Hawkwind in the 1970s] I went to lunch with the A&R; man at United Artists. When do you plan to deliver the album to us, he asked. I didn’t know he wanted one. So I did him one[New World’s Fair]. And we took a band out and I went out with Hawkwind when [Robert] Calvert was in the loony bin and there’s nothing sweeter than going in front of an audience of several thousand people who are really, really glad to see you!

— — —

I like doing rock and roll songs but there are limitations. [Bassist] Pete Pavli and I did more interesting stuff, but just getting it engineered was sometimes different. If you use cello, for instance, for certain rhythms or tensions, rather than bass and drums, the engineers are often thrown badly! It gets boring. I wish I could have worked more with Eno. There is, however, a lot of fun in walking on stage to be greeted by an audience that has paid to see you and really wants you to be there!

Dave Brock [one of Hawkwind’s founding members] wants me to go over for the [Hawkwind] revival get-together for the millennium at the end of December, but my old rule was that I would only do a gig if I could walk to it. It used to be handy when I lived near the Hammersmith Odeon, but now the gig would have to be in Lost Pines [Texas, Moorcock’s current home]!

— — —

I think [British writer and filmmaker] Iain Sinclair likes using me because I don’t try to control anything. My job is to control the page and to make sure I’m somewhere secure when I have to work, otherwise I’m inclined to drift with whatever comes along. Jobs and projects rather than public appearances, of course.

I backed out of Edinburgh, Brighton and Hay-on-Wye festivals last year because I don’t think too much attention to myself is good for me or good for writing. I have to do a bit of public stuff, because it goes with the job and is necessary sometimes for promotion, but I’m talking about interesting ideas that come up… In that sense I’m far more like a film director or an actor than most writers. Which might explain the breadth of my work!

So if more film stuff came up, I’d do some. I’m even beginning to get the urge to work on the script of [Moorcock’s 1967 Nebula Award-winning novella] Behold the Man myself. I’m engaging a bit more with the world of film at present. Doing a book on Heaven’s Gate [Michael Cimino’s notorious Western] for the British Film Institute. I should be interviewing some of the main participants next year when I plan to spend a bit of time in LA. I’m rarely interested in a project for the money, though sometimes I get paid very handsomely almost incidentally!

— — —

Don’t let anyone tell you it’s hard being a prodigy. That’s just people who don’t know how to enjoy themselves or believe they have to take the whole package. My advice to my own kids regarding school was — take the education, but you don’t have to take the attitudes. For some reason, obnoxious as this may be, I knew this from an early age.

I was an amiable child. Most people remarked on how “good” I was. But I went my own way. If a teacher failed to teach me decently, I would complain, usually after they had complained that I had seemed such a good pupil originally. Originally, as I pointed out, they had information I needed. I don’t know why I was like this. I really was a very sunny child, but I was also very self-confident.

— — —

Maybe coming from a family that set high store by independence and freedom, in an old fashioned working class London way. Maybe because my mother’s lunatic genius focused on me and helped me in ways I don’t completely understand. Maybe because I was smart. I realize now that I must have been very smart. It didn’t seem remarkable to me that I was reading [G. B.] Shaw as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs at the age of five, and it didn’t seem remarkable to my family, who hadn’t read either!

School was frustrating because I “got” the essence of what was being taught and then got very bored and then behaved fairly badly — though mostly it was what the teachers saw as “cheek.” It was still clear that they liked me, because they couldn’t help laughing at my jokes. So I didn’t get much harsh treatment (I was tied to the banisters once for some reason at a primary school).

I ran away from boarding school. I played truant at school. I did badly at exams (and still do). But had had the advantage of going to a Steiner school for a while where they teach algebra before they teach other math — reasoning that a child is very receptive to symbolic logic (and it’s true) and best taught algebra from seven years on. I ran away from there. The next school I remember putting up my hand and asking when we could do some algebra. I was laughed at and told we didn’t do that for years yet. So there you go. A largely untrained or erratically trained mind. Ideal for a writer, probably.

[In the 1960s, Moorcock created Elric of Melnibone, an albino prince who remains his most famous fantasy character. Doomed by honor and a cursed sword to destroy all that which he holds most dear, Elric embodies Moorcock’s notion of the Eternal Champion — a heroic anti-hero reborn into an endless number of lives throughout the Multiverse to maintain the balance of Law and Chaos.]

Elric is Pierrot. Under every tragedy sneaks a farce. It all goes back to the 19th century — the French and English romantics. Pierrot first became the romantic tragi-comic figure he is in [the classic French film] Les Enfants du Paradis (as it were) thanks to [George] Sand, [Theophile] Gautier and then, in the second wave, the likes of [Luc] Willette in [the turn-of-the-20th century Parisian cabaret] Chat Noir. Melmoth and The Monk. Melmoth as Ivanhoe… Melmoth/Ivanhoe/Pierrot… The Marx Brothers reinventing Commedia dell’ Arte — the sums of our culture.

[After a long hiatus, Moorcock decided to revive the character of Elric in The Dreamthief’s Daughter, scheduled for release this spring.]

Two reasons [Editor’s note: think Monty Python and the number of reasons why no one expects the Spanish Inquisition] for doing Elric:

1. I was surprised that many readers found the Blood Trilogy [Blood, Fabulous Harbors, War Amongst the Angels] baffling and the Multiverse comic that goes with it even more baffling. (Probably the best description of the Multiverse is in the introduction to that comic, by the way.) When this happens I feel I have to redeem myself with those readers who were disappointed without disappointing those readers who liked the more experimental stuff. You can see this pattern pretty much through my work. Behold the Man and The Ice Schooner followed The Final Programme [the first Jerry Cornelius adventure]. This is the dilemma of the populist intellectual!
   
2. I learned that a young woman had been raped by a young man calling himself Elric and saying that Elric compelled him, etc., etc. The young woman did not blame me. But of course it coloured her feelings about my work. This made me once again consider the aggressive anti-intellectual elements in sword and sorcery (S&S) fiction which some describe as “fascist.” I had discussed the idea of Hitler being a sword and sorcery writer with Norman Spinrad and out of that had come Norman’s wonderful The Iron Dream (S&S as if written by a nerdy Hitler in the U.S.) But I wanted to examine the romanticism, especially in imagery, that they have in common. Anyway, because I was troubled, I tried to produce an Elric sequence which would somehow try to address some of those troubling issues. That’s why the story opens in Nazi Germany.
   
3. Nobody would buy King of the City unless I agreed to do a more commercial fantasy as well. So Elric pays for Denny Dover, hero of King of the City. Happily King of the City is now paying for himself very nicely. But it had been such a long time since I had done a “straight” novel and this one [King of the City] was so edgy, that publishers were wary. Happily, only a few fashion-conscious critics failed to enjoy it. The best response to the book (and one which might augment this) is currently in Iain Sinclair’s review in the current London Review of Books. It’s also the featured essay on the electronic Guardian site.

Writing generic fantasy means that you are writing a strict form. Admittedly a form to which you contributed rather a lot of the rules (or refined them, anyway). The reader has certain expectations, which it is your duty to fulfil. But once you have done that, you can take all sorts of quiet risks. They only show up as risks if the reader finds them disagreeable.

Writing non-generic fantasy is as demanding as writing “mainstream” — essentially you develop a form to suit the material — not suit the material to fit the form (which is a lot easier, of course). That’s why generic modernist fiction (“realistic”) is as interesting or uninteresting as any other genre, depending on the skills of the writer and what new colour the writer can put on the old riffs.

I have always chosen the form to suit the subject. Some subjects are best suited by “realistic” fiction. Some are best served by some form of imaginative fiction. By moving my characters through all these different forms, I keep a connection.

My fiction is notably character based — almost always described in terms of its characters. Those characters are who allow me to move between the universes. The characters are just like me. They are as at home with Chaos as they are with Law… They are happiest with a bit of both.

— — —

I don’t find much difference between ordinary smart American readers and ordinary smart British readers. Readers read. They have information and know how to get more. They read British as well as American books. Soon they learn all the salient references and those they don’t know they know how to find…

Publishers have contempt for readers, thus Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone becomes Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone. This is the bane of America. It is a contempt most elitist republics hold their populations in (compared to the Soviet Union). The failure is of culture-mongers to respect the vast millions of smart people out there.

You hear in Lewis Lapham’s tone a deep raising of his and his readers’ self-esteem at the expense of a rather badly educated but not stupid public. That’s not gentlemanly behaviour, even if you are an elitist republican pretending to be a democrat. It is what Romans did a lot of as the Republic crumbled into autocracy — ungentlemanly behaviour and sneering at the bread and circuses public. Elitist republics slip easily back into taking the shape of what they actually have become (i.e., monarchies). Deregulation means the quest for the lowest possible common denominator. Liberal economics and orthodox politics produce a very dysfunctional voter.

I write for a reader like myself — who has read widely and has enjoyed a wide range of music and the other arts — but is part of a broad, common culture, not an isolated academic culture. There are, as I kept saying on that panel, more of us than there are of them. More of us who read (or watch) Shakespeare one day and [Theodore] Sturgeon the next.

Horses are said to fear people, because they believe we are bigger than them. Readers seem to have much the same impression of academics and critics. Who needs the approval of so few? Or, as ever, I return to Tom Paine — it is ludicrous that such a small country should determine the fate of such a large country. I write for a community of readers.

I have been fortunate enough to have been published in France, for instance, more or less since I was published in England. I have always had a very good presence in Germany, Spain, Italy and the other EU/Scandinavian countries. I am now being published in Estonian, Latvian, Finnish, Russian, Serbian, Romanian, Czech, Hungarian — in official editions whereas I once only appeared as samizdhat. My books have been best-sellers in Japan and in Poland. I find that all these readers have much in common. There is no fundamental difference (except in the cultural experience brought to the dialogue of course) between a French reader and an American reader.

I am very fortunate in my readership. Even the baffled and angry little boys who pick up Byzantium Endures thinking it’s Elric in the Empire of the East and then accuse me of attacking them or betraying them — even many of them eventually wind up enjoying Byzantium Endures for its own sake. My signing lines are sometimes made up of extremely disparate people — from seven-year-old infants to 50-year-old four star generals… This again is a source of pride and confirmation to me.

To my astonishment recently I was described as a “cult writer.” I have always seen myself as a writer addressing a very broad and interesting audience — as a popular intellectual in the old-fashioned sense — and wonder if “cult” has come to mean something different, like “pulp,” these days. In the real world “pulp” means vulgar and vital. Maybe cult means — not much mentioned in the same breath as [Kingsley] Amis, [Salman] Rushdie and [Grant] MacEwan?

Funny how certain little descriptions can throw you. The review was excellent. But all I noted was that baffling word. I think it was youthful headline writer’s ignorance, but I don’t like being marginalised. My whole effort, since [editing] New Worlds, was to do with insisting on not being marginalised and that’s why the magazine never addressed a “knowing” science fiction (SF) readership — it always addressed the common culture. Which was a crucial difference. And probably why people say it had more effect on the general literary world than on SF. I, of course, think it had both!

[On the secrets of a few universes and other closing remarks.]

I picked up a lot of structuring habits from music. Mozart is sublime. His secret was his understanding of structure. That’s any prolific prodigy’s secret, actually. You read it once and understand it. You hear it once and can repeat it. A gift. It takes you a while to realise not everyone has that gift. You keep thinking they just have to get the trick of it right, and everyone will be able to do it! So I tried to teach people a bit about structuring as an editor on New Worlds and in stuff like Death is No Obstacle, my book about writing.

And from show business I learned that “You’d better burn from the first bar,” (Oscar Peterson) — i.e., you give it all you have from page one and you don’t stop till you get to THE END. You know you have to find the energy and keep it directed and that that’s what the audience is paying for. If they’re buying anything less, it’s a habit they’ll eventually lose.

Familiarity and snobbery are powerful factors in any literary career, but they only hamper immediate profit, if that, and much of what arouses their contempt has, instead, longevity. [Thomas Love] Peacock or [Mervyn Laurence] Peake are still in print. Marie Corelli, the best seller of her own time, rarely gets reprinted these days.

The great thing about having a career as long as mine is that you can test all these ideas! Stay on the carousel long enough and you go in and out of fashion like black leather stage costumes. I knew I could change New Worlds radically, risk dumping most of the old readership and get a larger new readership, because I’d done it twice before on Tarzan Adventures [a British magazine that reprinted the U.S. comic strips] and, with Bill Howard Baker, on Sexton Blake Library. I’d learned that familiarity is what people mourn and that something new quickly becomes familiar…

Comic vision. Americans are taught not to trust themselves in strange ways — lots of self-esteem but little self-trust sometimes — and that means sometimes they don’t know if they should laugh. Once they know its okay, they laugh.

One point I’ve made recently is that while the American political system may be even more of a laughing stock than usual, America is not a laughing stock and neither are Americans. This is because the world can see America making the best jokes about itself. Which shows a very healthy population and a very sick governing system.

I’ve given this example many times — people at their best are brave and smart. They are rarely given a chance to be at their best because, happily, crisis doesn’t strike most of them. But put them in Oklahoma City or the Battle of Britain, and then you see nobility at every turn. I’ve witnessed people at their very best so I know the best is there. I try to play to that best. If an interested reader doesn’t know something, but you have earned their authority by giving them a good read, they will probably look it up. Your respect for the reader expects an ongoing relationship, a constant dialogue to which all contribute. In this respect, I find the Internet a familiar place.

Stephen John Smith and Jean Marie Ward