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By Root 450 0

SF—and, the insistent Ms. Atwood aside, I need name only Lessing, Rushdie, Roth, McCarthy, Mosley and Pynchon to support my understanding that we are at last all happily wallowing in the same pond, no longer able to distinguish by subject matter or even language what is art and what is not, choosing the techniques that best suit our current subject. Which is not to say that everything is art! These stories, for instance, are escapism, however intensely imagined and felt. They were written quickly by a young man who was still throwing everything he had into whatever he did and still getting rejected, whether by editors or girls, enough to hurt. So it’s all in here. All the angst that’s fit to print and maybe a little more that isn’t. I describe somewhere in here how one period of my life was marked by broken glass (and a sequence of small, though happily not especially destructive, fires, miscellaneous victimless hurlings of typewriters and so on) as the elemental agony of my existence, coupled with an indulgence in some good clarets and single malts, overwhelmed me. Elric could not confront many of the contemporary concerns, however, which is how by 1965 I came to re-invent him in the person of Jerry Cornelius, rewriting “The Dreaming City” as the beginning of The Final Programme.

In those years I was a bit self-destructive, I think. I was tall, speedy, with a Fleet Street journalist’s capacity for drink and a habit of knocking stuff over or breaking it by accident. Luckily, I was also for the most part pretty amiable. Although not as a rule quarrelsome, I was also eloquent enough, it seems, to wound people, which I never did intentionally. I was self-dramatizing, as my mother had been before me, and I had learned a lot about the melodramatic gesture. I hated that in myself, however, and set about getting rid of it. As a result I sometimes had a grimmer, narrower notion of the truth, which perhaps compensated for having something of a Baron Munchausen at the family home.

Early on I became a very conscious as well as a very rapid writer, pouring my life pretty much as it happened into my work. Emotional, visual, intellectual, it was all thrown into the pot. Like most writers I know, I wasted nothing. Many of the fantastic landscapes in my early stories were versions of those around where I lived in Notting Hill, when I would take my children out to the park and write while they snoozed or played. Holland Park had been blitzed, but though the house itself had been consumed by incendiary bombs, the outbuildings and the wonderful botanical gardens had been preserved pretty much intact. The already exotic plants and birds of that park, in particular, deserve credit for their inspiration of early books such as The Fireclown and The Shores of Death. The Blitz proved an excellent experience for the chaotic landscapes I wrote about in Stormbringer.

It took me a decade or so to realize that my stories are notable for their absence of fathers. Whether the character is Elric, Jerry Cornelius (his modern avatar), Gloriana or Colonel Pyat, fathers are rarely around for their offspring. My father’s decision to leave my mother at the end of European hostilities was a blessing in so many ways but had clearly made something of an unconscious emotional impact on me. So what else is Elric looking for? You’ll have to forgive me the odd reference to Freud or Jung because I began producing these stories at the time I was writing essays about the psychological roots of fantasy fiction. Although, of course, it was not my business to jam these ideas down the throats of readers of fiction, a glance at Wizardry & Wild Romance (MonkeyBrain Books, rep. rev. 2004), a version of those early essays, will show that they were not, at pretty much any level, unconsciously written. I was certainly aware of the Freudian interpretations of black swords or the Jungian interpretation of incubi and succubi.

While Mervyn Peake’s fiction soon became my favourite fantasy (ironically, it contains no real supernatural elements), I had also read a great deal of Gothic