Elric_ The Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock [201]
Ted Carnell, who handles my other work as well, said that he felt “Earl Aubec and the Golem” (or “Master of Chaos”) was a sort of crystallization of everything I’d been working on in the Elric series. Maybe not everything, but I think he’s right. “Earl Aubec” is more a kind of sword-and-philosophy tale than an outright sword-and-sorcery. Elric tales—or the best of them—were conceived similarly.
The writer thinks that John Rackham’s fantasies (or properly “Occult-thrillers”) will outlast my stories. I don’t think either will last for long, but I might as well admit that I was slightly hurt by this remark, for Rackham’s stories that I have read struck me as being rather barren, stereotyped tales with no “true” sense of the occult at all (whatever a true sense of the occult is). Moreover I know John doesn’t believe in his stuff for a second (at least not in any supernatural sense), whereas I believe whole-heartedly in mine, as I’ve pointed out. It’s silly to take up someone’s remark like this, especially since it is fair criticism and just a statement of someone’s individual taste, but I suppose I’m still young enough to feel defensive about my stories—especially my Elric stories for which I have an odd mixture of love and hate. They are so closely linked to my own obsessions and problems that I find it hard to ignore any criticisms of them and tend momentarily to leap to their defense.
As I said earlier, and Cele Goldsmith said in a supplement to AMRA, sword and sorcery seems to appeal to an enthusiastic minority and may receive a large volume of praise from a fairly small section of readers.
When Carnell asked me to think up a sword-and-sorcery series, I tried to make it as different as possible from any other I’d read. I’d hesitate to agree that the two best known magic swords are Excalibur and Prince Valiant’s Singing Blade—Excalibur, certainly, and probably Roland’s Durandana. The idea of the magic sword came, of course, from legend, but I willingly admit to Anderson’s influence, too. The idea of an albino hero had a more obscure source. As a boy I collected a pre-War magazine called Union Jack. This was Sexton Blake’s Own Paper—Blake was the British version of your Nick Carter, I should imagine, and Union Jack was the equivalent of your dime novels. One of Blake’s most memorable opponents was a character named M. Zenith—or Zenith the Albino, a Byronic hero-villain who aroused more sympathy in the reader than did the intrepid detective. Anyway, the Byronic h-v had always appealed; I liked the idea of an albino, which suited my purpose, and so Elric was born—an albino. Influences include various Gothic novels, also. Elric is not a new hero to fantasy—although he’s new, I suppose, to S&S.
I cannot altogether agree that Elric remains an essentially simple character. I think of him as complex but inarticulate when he tries to explain his predicament. His taste for revenge seems to be a sort of extension of his search for peace and purpose—he finds, to coin a phrase, forgetfulness in action. Elric’s guilt over the slaying of Nikorn was guilt for the slaying itself, not because he’d killed a particular man.
I don’t know whether I could have left Moonglum out and still kept the stories the same. Moonglum is, apart from everything else, to some extent a close, valued friend of mine who has been a lot of help in various ways over the last few years. If Elric is my fantasy self, then Moonglum is this friend’s fantasy self (as I see him at any rate). I am not particularly gloomy by nature. I put Moonglum in to make remarks about Elric when he gets too self-absorbed or too absorbed in self-pity, etc.
A little more of Elric’s background and some clue as to why he is what he is will be found in “Doomed Lord’s Passing.” I’ve been aware of this absence and have tried to rectify it a bit here.
I was pleased that you have used the Gray Mouser as a comparison since, as must now be evident, I’m a great fan of the Mouser’s. Perhaps Moonglum also owes a little to the