Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [3]
(I’m not the spiritual type, by the way. This is the only Revelation I’ve ever had.)
“Look at yourself,” a voice told me. I think it was my own voice, and I think it was just in my head, but it seemed really loud. “You’re in a cab going across London with your beautiful publisher wife. You write books for a living. You get up when you want to and dress the way you want to and take naps at any hour of the day and call it ‘plotting.’ But even more important, you idiot man, you are on your way to Michael Moorcock’s house! He called you up—he knows your first name! He invited you to come over just like you were another human being and not a slobbering fanboy. He even seems to like you.
“HELLO!” the inner voice thundered. “Michael Moorcock called you up and invited you over to dinner. Nobody paid him or put a gun to his head or anything. He just called you up and said, ‘Come over.’
“So why are you being such a @$%#head?”
And instantly, as if the sky truly had opened up and the top of the cab had popped off and the heavenly sunshine of wisdom had poured down on me, I ceased my @$%#headedness forever (or at least for the rest of the evening).
“Hosanna,” I cried, or something like that. “My own fifteen-year-old self would shake his head in awe and tell me that I am the luckiest human being in the world—and he would be right. I must never forget that.”
And I never have. And that’s why, above all the other reasons (and those reasons are plentiful—among them his writerly skill, his wit, imagination, fiery compassion and gloriously cracked poetic soul), above even the immense influence he’s had on my writing … that’s why Michael Moorcock is my religion.
He changed my life forever. Twice.
Hosanna!
Tad Williams
November 2008
INTRODUCTION
The unexpected death in late 2008 of Jim Cawthorn came as an enormous blow to his friends and admirers. Jim was the first artist to draw Elric and the first to illustrate The Lord of the Rings (after Tolkien himself). He was my close friend and collaborator for more than fifty years. I had known him since I was a teenager in the mid-1950s, when I produced a fanzine, Burroughsania, originally inspired by the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Jim and I came to the world of fanzines more or less through the same route. We had no contact, originally, with the world of SF fandom and didn’t know their publications existed until long after we had been working as amateurs, him as an illustrator and me as a writer. A chance meeting with a fellow fan of imaginative fiction, Don Allen, in his hometown of Gateshead–on–Tyne in northeast England, led Jim to illustrate Don’s fanzine Satellite. Through Satellite, Jim learned of two ERB fanzines which had been running for a while. One was mine and the other was Erbania, run by D. Peter Ogden. Jim wrote to us both. Soon our fanzines were transformed as he began to produce a wealth of illustrations, including all my front and back covers and interiors, featuring his versions of most of the great classic fantasy stories of the day (I had soon broadened the contents to include work on Howard, Bradbury and many others). He introduced me to many of the greatest fantasts, including Mervyn Peake, Fritz Leiber and William Hope Hodgson. Within a couple of months, his input had transformed not only Burroughsania but the book-collecting and music fanzines I was also producing, including Book Collectors’ News and Rambler. He could do portraits of characters from Leigh Brackett and Poul Anderson, mastheads, thumbnails and gloriously funny cartoons.
No matter how many fanzines I began to turn out (under the grandiose imprint of MJM Publications), Jim found time not only to enhance their appearance but to suggest content. Like Arthur Thomson, another artist who came to improve the look of my fanzines around the same time, he was an absolute master of the art of drawing directly onto the delicate wax stencils from which the fanzines were reproduced on what the Brits call duplicators and the Yanks