MICHAEL MOORCOCK
THE BIGGEST BEARD IN LITERARY SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY TELLS JONATHAN WRIGHT ABOUT THE FORMATIVE INFLUENCES ON HIS WRITING
The grand master of British SF shares the heroes and inspirations that shaped him.
The creator of Elric and Jerry Cornelius, sometime rock’n’roll musician, and the editor and publisher of New Worlds, Michael Moorcock is the eternal hipster, a figure whose influence can be felt in all kinds of corners of the collective culture. But who influenced Moorcock? Which writers does the man himself rate? What inspires him to continue working even as he approaches his 80th birthday?
There’s nobody better to ask than the man himself. Which is precisely what
SFX did recently, heading out to the comfortable Paris apartment where Moorcock and his wife Linda, whose gloriously laconic comments pepper any conversation with her husband, spend half the year. He’s in good spirits, seemingly pleased with the way The Woods Of Arcady, the sequel to his autobiographical fantasy
The Whispering Storm, is proceeding – even if Linda joshes with him over the idea of sections of it being “lightly fictionalised”. LM: “You’re incapable of telling the truth.” MM: “That may be true, of course…”
He’s also pleased the BBC is adapting his “Runestaff” stories, although not sure how much he’s allowed to share about the project. “If you see somebody in a bowler hat getting on your train, you’ll know somebody from the BBC is after you and you’ve probably had it…”
Books left Behind
“My father left my mother when I was four, and I could read fluently by the time I was five. He left three or four books behind. One was The Master Mind Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs; the second was The Son Of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs; [the third was] The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw (I don’t know why he would’ve had that because it’s not my father’s normal choice of reading, the Tarzan book was more like him). And a book called The Constable of St Nicholas, which was by the same bloke [Edwin Lester Arnold] who wrote The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician, about a bloke who keeps being reincarnated through the ages, which is obviously where I got the idea of The Eternal Champion from. So those had to count as a main inspiration, because they were the first books I read, apart from Tuffy The Tree Elf. Those Burroughs books in particular were a huge inspiration. Essentially, my dad left me with a career. By leaving those particular books behind, he set me on my path.”
ERNST JELLINEK
“He was the guy that I tend to call my guardian, although he was never officially my guardian. He was an Austrian refugee, a businessman who ran a timber firm. He was my mother’s boss, and he took a keen interest in me. He pretty much filled in as a father in many ways, although he never intruded.
“He went in and out of Germany and Austria ‘buying’ Jews from the Nazis, essentially paying ransom fees. He never talked about this to me. I learnt most of this from my mother. And I met people he’d actually saved. I knew a couple, he was a Jamaican sculptor and she was a poet, Jewish, and they had been in Paris when the Nazis came in, so they had to get out fast. They said, ‘This guy, Jellinek, if it hadn’t been for him we’d never have got out of France.’ He got them out via the Pyrenees. He was a disciple of Rudolf Steiner, and although I never got deep into Steiner’s thinking, it was a very gentle philosophy. Just knowing what he did and the kind of quiet, very, very private courage that he had was a real inspiration to me. He’s always been my model for the best way to live: looking after the practical side of life, but at the same time having a welldeveloped philosophy.”
THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS BY JOHN BUNYAN
“It was the first book I ever bought with my own money, and I didn’t buy it because I was religious, we were a very unreligious family. I don’t think there was anyone in the entire family who had anything to do with religion
apart from my Aunt Ivy who was a Seventh Day Adventist. We didn’t talk about her – but what I liked about it were the pictures – the pictures were of dragons and stuff like that. What I learnt from Bunyan was essentially that a book had to be read on at least two levels, or rather to be written on two levels.
“So you’re writing the fantasy adventure, which with Bunyan was pretty obvious, and underneath that is a moral theme or whatever, a political theme. So I’ve always done that. I just thought that’s how you had to write books. That was my model for writing. I never like to make the subtext dominant. If you’re not going to entertain the reader, they’re not going to read you, so you make sure that works all right. [The cash for the book] was a birthday present of a shilling from Mrs Whitmarsh, a next-door neighbour. It was a lot of money in those days. You could buy 500 cigarettes and a pub and go to the pictures 50 times!”
EDWY SEARLES BROOKS
“He wrote for Sexton Blake and also the ‘Norman Conquest’ books [as Berkeley Grey]. He lived just up the road from my Auntie Connie. He was probably the first fiction writer I met. He was one of my mother’s favourite writers too, so she had no problem with me going to see him for tea. I used to wonder why he didn’t have all his books around. Of course, nobody does that. He died in the 1960s, still writing, but that’s when I realised you didn’t necessarily get very rich being a writer. You could, but most were like him, with the income of a professional, but not yachts and villas and the stuff Somerset Maugham seemed to have. He was an inspiration in that he taught me not to expect too much!”
MERVYN PEAKE
“I met Mervyn when I was a teenager. He was already ill, he was in his 50s, he wasn’t that old but he looked 20 or 30 years older. His health had begun to deteriorate [probably because of dementia]. I became, I think it’s fair to say, pretty close to the family. It was the family that, as a writer of fantasy, I wish I’d had.
“I was outraged that Mervyn wasn’t better known. He was pretty much at the lowest ebb for his reputation, didn’t have much in print, nobody was buying anything. I became very much a publicist for Mervyn in my own small way, which was mostly writing in fanzines about how people had neglected him, and probably writing to the few people who hadn’t neglected him! His work was gritty, it actually dealt with the way life really was. I know it sounds strange to say that, but one of the reasons I liked Norse mythology was because at the end of it, everybody dies, everything dies, and because of that it seemed to me to reflect what really went on in the world.”
TH WHITE
“I corresponded with TH White, I never met him personally. He used to send me books and stuff, and his advice was always simple but good. I remember telling him I wanted to be a
I never make the subtext dominant. If you’re not going to entertain the reader, they won’t read you
writer and what advice could he give me? And it’s advice I’ve passed on. He said, ‘Just read everything, just read whatever you can find to read and that’s how you learn to become a writer, there’s nothing complicated about it.’”
THE AMERICAN PULPS
“If you bought pulp magazines secondhand, they’d be about thruppence or sixpence, and I had a very good shop in Streatham. Surprisingly, there were two shops that count as central to the lives of a number of people living in south London at that time, several of them rock’n’roll people. Everybody bought their R&B records at The Swing Shop and their books at Jenning’s, which was a big secondhand book shop.
“Later, I read my way through Astounding, which published all these great names I’d heard about, and most of them were just terrible. No offence to them, but they weren’t what I’d been expecting and I was sort of disappointed. What I really liked were the less respectable pulps, like Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, which now people are beginning to say contained a huge amount of good stuff. They were looked down upon at the time for being sensational – ray guns, busty blonde covers, bug-eyed monsters, the usual stuff. But in fact, inside they had an awful lot of good stuff, including Arthur C Clarke’s Against The Fall Of Night, which was probably the only novel of his I ever read. He became a friend of mine. He probably stayed a friend because I never read his work. I don’t think he ever read mine either, which is often the best way, you know?”
EXISTENTIALISM
“I got very enthusiastic about the existentialists when I was a teenager, and they certainly influenced me enormously. They influenced the first Elric stories. His worldview was very existentialist. I found Albert Camus very easy to read and enjoyed him. I read a lot of Jean-Paul Sartre in translation. It dawned on me after a while that the existentialists were just English people because this whole notion of if the rock’s going to fall on you, the rock’s going to fall on you. The French had made a huge philosophy out of that where English people think, ‘Well, if the rock falls on you, it’s going to fall on you.’ English existentialism in a nutshell – shit happens!”
ZENITH THE ALBINO FROM SEXTON BLAKE
“I was assistant editor on the Sexton Blake Library and I still love Sexton Blake. Monsieur Zenith: The Albino was written by Anthony Skene. He got his secretary (it’d probably be a scandal these days) to type up his Sexton Blake stories. He created Zenith The Albino, who of course was the major influence on Elric. I pretty much lifted him whole from Skene.
“The original character always wore perfect evening dress. He was a hero-villain, more outside the law than in. He smoked opiumdrenched cigarettes, except for one cigarette in his cigarette case, which if he was cornered he would take that cigarette and it was the one with cyanide in it. He says to Sexton Blake, ‘See how the white crow is treated by the other crows. They push the white crow outside and make him an outlaw, and that’s what happened to me because of the way I look.’ I’m not sure crows, who are very kind to their own and often appreciative of help from humans, actually do that, but it’s a great image.”