Modem Times 2.0 - Michael Moorcock [42]
Has Rowling discovered a strategy for continuing that especially English genre, the public school story (Thomas Hughes, Talbot Baines Reade, Charles Hamilton, and many others), thus successfully continuing to spread certain English class attitudes well into the 21st century and across the world?
Do you wear a hat when you write? Do you have a regular work regimen? Coffee or tea?
I wear different hats. Currently I’m wearing a FLASH baseball cap for my Doctor Who novel. I prefer to work outside whenever possible and then I wear a wide-brimmed Panama.
Do you stay in touch with the old New Worlds crowd (Sallis, Aldiss, Platt, Spinrad, Malzberg, etc.)? Why are they so grumpy?
Are they? I’m scarcely in touch with anyone but Aldiss and Spinrad, and they seem actually less grumpy on most issues than they were in the ‘60s. They were always fairly confrontational by nature, as I am.
I grumpily want to know why Malzberg pinched the title of my novel Breakfast in the Ruins. I’m not in touch with him at all or I’d ask him myself. Maybe they’re grumpy because all their bloody mates are dying. That pisses me off too.
Why was the New Wave such a Guy Thing? Or was it?
Not for want of trying to publish women. We published as many women as we could encourage—Emshwiller, Arnason, Sargent, Zoline, Castell (Vivienne Young in art), and of course Hilary Bailey. Would you count Doris Lessing?
You have to publish by example, if possible, and I know we tried to publish women, but they were thin on the ground. Judith Merril was strongly associated with the so-called New Wave. Much of the fiction I write and we published was decidedly pro-women in a way that a lot of guy fiction (the Beats, for instance) was not.
Precisely the reason I can’t enjoy either Amis. There’s always been a distinct smell of the saloon bar in much fiction. Could be why my “default” writer, the one I always turn to when I can’t think of anyone else to read, is Elizabeth Bowen (especially Death of the Heart).
My close friend Andrea Dworkin loved SF and wrote some, and we sometimes discussed this. She thought there were a lot more women published now because women don’t tend to submit work where they think it isn’t wanted. Given that Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, and others are associated with the so-called New Wave, I’m not sure that it was such a guy thing!
I always wanted something ambitious from Joanna.
Disch became somewhat bitter toward SF. In your Humble Opinion, was this critical or personal?
Tom was always a bit confused on this issue. He wanted literary respectability more than any other author I knew and used to say “The New Yorker can smell the SF on me.” (I just wrote a story touching on this, called “Stories” for an anthology called Stories.)
Once, when I got a full-page review in the Times Literary Supplement praising a book, Tom called me and said, “Congratulations. You’ve won!” I was baffled.
Tom was competitive, but he wanted his success to come from conventional institutions. He was far more a modern than a postmodern. He liked to think of himself as Henry James rather than Henry Kuttner. Yet he could be very generous and encouraging to new writers of SF.
He was always a snob, but never enough to hang out happily with other snobs. He was unhappy in New York, which is probably the snottiest town in the world, yet he hung on therewishing to be accepted—or accepted more.
That wasn’t why he killed himself, though, I think. Essentially he killed himself because his partner Charles Naylor had died, leaving him terribly alone.
I was very fond of Charlie, but he was a worse snob than Tom in some ways, though much more “liberal” in some ways (anti-Jewish attitudes aside).
Unlike, say, Ballard who became increasingly radical into old age, Tom became increasingly reactionary until even the Weekly Standard (for which he wrote regularly) found some of his stuff went too far.
Is England or the United States more receptive to (or at least forgiving of) satire?
The tradition seems to have remained healthier in the UK than in the U.S., though that said, there