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By Root 652 0

think up a hero as different as possible from the usual run of S&S heroes, and use the narrative as a vehicle for my own “serious” ideas. Many of these ideas, I realize now, were somewhat romantic and coloured by a long-drawn-out and, to me at the time, tragic love affair which hadn’t quite finished its course and which was confusing and darkening my outlook. I was writing floods of hack work for Fleetway and was getting sometimes £70 or £80 a week which was going on drink, mainly, and, as I remember, involved rather a lot of broken glass of one description or another. I do remember, with great pride, my main achievement of the winter of 1960 or 1961, which was to smash entirely an unbreakable plate glass door in a well-known restaurant near Piccadilly. And the management apologized…

I mention this, to give a picture of my mood at the time of Elric’s creation. If you’ve read the early Elric stories in particular, you’ll see that Elric’s outlook was rather similar to mine. My point is that Elric was me (the me of 1960/61 anyway) and the mingled qualities of betrayer and betrayed, the bewilderment about life in general, the search for some solution to it all, the expression of this bewilderment in terms of violence, cynicism and the need for revenge were all characteristic of mine. So when I got the chance to write “The Dreaming City,” I was identifying very closely with my hero-villain. I thought myself something of an outcast (another romantic notion largely unsubstantiated now I look back) and emphasized Elric’s physical differences accordingly:

His bizarre dress was tasteless and gaudy, and did not match his sensitive face and long-fingered, almost delicate hands, yet he flaunted it since it emphasized that he did not belong in any company—that he was an outsider and an outcast. But, in reality, he had little need to wear such outlandish gear—for…[he] was a pure albino who drew his power from a secret and terrible source.

(The Stealer of Souls, page 13)

The story was packed with personal symbols (as are all the stories, bar a couple). The “secret and terrible source” was the sword Stormbringer, which symbolized my own and others’ tendency to rely on mental and physical crutches rather than cure the weakness at source. To go further, Elric, for me, symbolized the ambivalence of mankind in general, with its love-hates, its mean-generosity, its confident-bewilderment act. Elric is a thief who believes himself robbed, a lover who hates love. In short, he cannot be sure of the truth of anything, not even of his own emotions or ambitions. This is made much clearer in a story containing even more direct allegory, the second in the series, “While the Gods Laugh.” Unfortunately, Ted left out the verse from which the title was taken:

I, while the gods laugh, the world’s vortex am;

Maelstrom of passions in that hidden sea

Whose waves of all-time lap the coasts of me,

And in small compass the dark waters cram.

Mervyn Peake, “Shapes and Sounds”

This, I think, gave more meaning to both title and story which involved a long quest after the Dead Gods’ Book—a mythical work alleged to contain all the knowledge of the universe, in which Elric feels he will at last find the true meaning of life. He expresses this need in a somewhat rhetorical way. When the wingless woman Shaarilla asks him why he wants the book he replies [in the magazine version]:

“I desire, if you like, to know one of [misprinted as or in magazine version] two things. Does an ultimate God exist—or not. Does Law or Chaos govern our lives? Men need a God, so the philosophers tell us. Have they made one—or did one make them?” etc., etc.

Here, as in other passages, the bewilderment is expressed in metaphysical terms, for at that time, due mainly to my education, I was very involved with mysticism. Also, the metaphysical terms suited the description of a sword-and-sorcery hero and his magical, low-technology world.

It may seem odd that I use such phrases as “at that time” and so on, as if I’m referring to the remote past, but in many