London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction

Michael Moorcock, Allan Kausch

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781604866988
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Voted by the London Times as one of the best writers since 1945, Michael Moorcock was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Prize. He has won almost all the major Science Fiction, Fantasy, and lifetime achievement awards including the "Howie, " the Prix Utopiales and the Stoker. Best known for his rule-breaking SF and Fantasy, including the classic Elric and Hawkmoon series, he is also the author of several graphic novels.

Now, in London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction, Michael Moorcock personally selects the best of his published, unpublished, and uncensored essays, articles, reviews, and opinions covering a wide range of subjects: books, films, politics, reminiscences of old friends, and attacks on new foes. Drawn from over fifty years of writing, including his most recent work from the pages of the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian, along with obscure and now unobtainable sources, the pieces in London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction showcase Moorcock at his acerbic best. They include:

• "London Peculiar, " an impassioned statement of Moorcock's memories of wartime London. The architectural "improvements" wrought by the rebuilding of the city after World War Two brought cultural changes as well, many to the detriment of the city's inhabitants.
• Review of R. Crumb's Genesis, previously unavailable in English, this lengthy review of the underground comic artist's retelling of the first book of the Bible leads Moorcock to address nostalgia for the sixties.
• "A Child's Christmas in the Blitz"—An autobiographical recounting of Moorcock's childhood in wartime London, with memories of the freedom and hardships he encountered during the bombings, and the happy times he spent with his parents.

These, along with dozens more, make this a collection Moorcock fans won't want to miss, and the perfect introduction for new readers who will soon discover why Alan Moore ( Watchmen ) says: "Moorcock seizes the 21st century bull by its horns and wrestles it into submission with a Texan rodeo confidence."

INTRODUCTIONS AND REVIEWS

The Cosmic Satirist

A review of Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

From New Worlds, February 1965

Mary McCarthy has said of Burroughs and Naked Lunch ‘This must be the first space novel, the first serious piece of science fiction—the others are entertainment … In him, as in Swift, there is a kind of soured Utopianism.’ Although this suggests that she is not all that familiar with modern SF, she has a good point and Burroughs’s genius of course towers over the talents of the majority of our SF writers. Even those who object to his subject matter and literary innovations must admit that his ability to handle the English language is greater than any of his contemporaries.

Not since Joyce has there been a writer of such power and richness, and never before has there been purely imaginative writing of such wildness and intelligence. Burroughs is a satirist—his most obvious talents lie in this direction. More savage and puritanical than Swift or Eliot, more sweeping in his attacks, he is a cosmic satirist, taking a rise not only out of the human race but also out of Time and Space. He lets no-one and nothing—physical or metaphysical—off lightly. Although often compared with Rabelais, he is much closer to Swift in that he lacks the magnanimity of Rabelais—there is no gentle fun in Naked Lunch. If Swift wrote the first SF tale, then Burroughs has produced the ultimate one—choosing a wider selection of targets, dealing with them with a fierceness of attack, an intensity of vision, a mastery of language that inspires horror at a picture of life which is at once distorted and more truthful than anything else in literature.

The book covers such a wide range of subjects and ideas that it can be interpreted on dozens of different levels. JG Ballard sees Burroughs as fashioning from ‘our dreams and nightmares the first authentic mythology of the age of Cape Canaveral, Hiroshima and Belsen. His novels are the terminal documents of the mid-twentieth century, scabrous, scarifying, a progress report from an inmate in the cosmic madhouse’ (New Worlds 142). On the other hand Irving Wardle (The Observer, 22nd November, ‘64) thinks that ‘the essence of the book is in its record of the addict’s life—the daily pursuit of dope, the voluptuously savoured moment of the fix, and the apocalyptic fantasies it releases for which Burroughs draws on a large medical vocabulary as a brilliant extension of emotional language’. Anthony Burgess does not agree—’Burroughs is demonstrating that his difficult subject can only be expressed through the static (that is neither didactic nor pornographic) shaping of the imagination’ (The Guardian, 20th November, ‘64)—and so on and so on. Those who admire Burroughs cannot always agree on why they like him—he has so much to offer that Naked Lunch can be read many times before all its levels and implications become clear. This is partially its appeal for me—to know that I can enjoy it once, begin it again immediately I have finished it and find more to enjoy.

The reader who likes a book with a ‘beginning, a middle and an end’ need not be in the least alarmed by Naked Lunch. I am much more inclined towards the conventional novel myself. I certainly do not welcome novelty for novelty’s sake, nor obscenity for obscenity’s sake—I find most of the fiction produced under the label of ‘avant-garde’ boring and pretentious, disguising bad, undisciplined writing under a superficial cloak of equally bad and undisciplined ‘experimental’ styles. Just as the Buck Rogers brigade of SF writers bring SF into disrepute, so do these so-called experimental writers bring the handful of genuine innovators into disrepute. The simple fact with Burroughs is that he can write. He can write better than anyone else at work today. He has an ear for dialogue, an eye for reality, an ability to conjure up phantasmagoric visions that immediately capture the imagination, a powerful, uncompromising style that rips away our comforting delusions and displays the warts and the sores that can fester in the human mind. Not a pleasant vision at first, yet we are soon captured by Burroughs’s deadpan style which aids us to look upon the horrors without revulsion, and take, instead, a cool, objective look at perversion in all its states and forms—mental, physical and spiritual.

Burroughs’s Black Utopias are more horrifying, more relevant and more convincing than any that have appeared to date in SF. His State of Interzone, dominated by the coolly grotesque figure of Doctor ‘Cancer is my first love’ Benway makes the worlds of Huxley and Orwell seem like paradise in comparison. Its nearest equivalent is the world of Limbo ‘90.

Dr Benway had been called in as an advisor to the Freeland Republic, a place given over to free love and continual bathing. The citizens are well adjusted, co-operative, honest, tolerant and above all clean. But the invoking of Benway indicates all is not well behind that hygienic façade: Benway is a manipulator and co-ordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control. I have not seen Benway since his precipitate departure from Annexia, where his assignment had been TD—Total Demoralisation. Benway’s first act was to abolish concentration camps, mass arrest and, except under certain limited and special circumstance, the use of torture. “I deplore brutality,” he said. “It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skilfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realise that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct.”

Annexia is somewhat like the world of The Trial—though Burroughs tends to be rather more explicit and specific than ever Kafka was. Interzone is not only a State, it is a state of time and mind:

Panorama of the City of Interzone. Opening bars of East St Louis Toodleoo … at times loud and clear then faint and intermittent like music down a windy street…. The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion. The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian—races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realised pass through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants grow out of genitals, vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of the body) across the Pacific in outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.

Minarets, palms, mountains, jungle…. A sluggish river jumping with vicious fish, vast weed-grown parks where boys lie in the grass, play cryptic games. Not a locked door in the City. Anyone comes into your room at any time. The Chief of Police is a Chinese who picks his teeth and listens to denunciations presented by a lunatic. Every now and then the Chinese takes the tooth-pick out of his mouth and looks at the end of it. Hipsters with smooth copper-coloured faces lounge in doorways twisting shrunken heads on gold chains, their faces blank with an insect’s unseeing calm…. High mountain flutes, jazz and bebop, one-stringed Mongol instruments, gypsy xylophones, African drums, Arab bagpipes…. The City is visited by epidemics of violence, and the untended dead are eaten by vultures in the streets. Albinos blink in the sun…. People eaten by unknown diseases watch the passerby with evil, knowing eyes.

Other inhabitants of Interzone are ‘servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states … ‘, etc., etc. These descriptions of Interzone are amongst the most powerful in the book.

Benway’s sidekick is Dr Schafer ‘The Lobotomy Kid’:

SCHAFER: “I tell you I can’t escape a feeling … well, of evil about this.”
BENWAY: “Balderdash, my boy … We’re scientists … Pure scientists. Disinterested research and damned be him who cries, ‘Hold, too much!’ Such people are no better than party poops.”

In Naked Lunch we have left for ever the mythological worlds of Winston Churchill, Mickey Mouse and Ernest Hemingway, have gone past the worlds of The Beatles and James Bond, and have entered the world of the present, seen an indication of Things To Come for, whereas most SF is speculation, Naked Lunch is visionary—and this contributes to its fascination. Anyone attracted to SF by its more serious elements will find Naked Lunch rewarding. The novel costs 42s. and is published by John Calder.

Dark Continents, Dying Planets

Foreword to Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Richard A Lupoff, 2005

It’s probably fair to say that I owe my career to Edgar Rice Burroughs. From the age of fourteen I produced an ERB fanzine, Burroughsania, before I really knew what fanzines were. Through it I discovered the world of science fiction fandom and began to exchange letters with Richard Lupoff!

When I was sixteen I interviewed the editor of Tarzan Adventures in London. He didn’t much like my interview, but his assistant liked it a lot. Before I knew it I was writing a series of articles about Burroughs for that magazine. Tarzan Adventures published reprints of the Sunday newspaper strips as well as original text features and fiction. Soon the assistant editor, the new editor, had commissioned a serial, an ERB pastiche, for Tarzan Adventures. This was ‘Sojan the Swordsman’, my first fantasy hero. The new editor offered me the job of assistant. My career in journalism and fiction had begun.

In the late 1950s, by the time I was seventeen, I was editing the magazine and filling it with all kinds of Burroughs-derived science fiction and fantasy as well as more features about Edgar Rice Burroughs himself. By the 1960s, when my magazine New Worlds needed financing, I wrote a series of Burroughs-type novels to support it (more of this later). My last close association with Burroughs was writing The Land that Time Forgot for Amicus Films in the early 1970s. As Lupoff does, I regard that novel as probably Burroughs’s finest, with an intriguing idea that puts it firmly in the realm of science fiction, even though the form of the story is more of a fantasy adventure. I worked with Jim Cawthorn, a long-time friend and Burroughs illustrator, who had also drawn strips and written stories for Tarzan Adventures. Cawthorn broke the book down into scenes. I then did the finished script, turning the stereotypical German U-boat commander into, I hope, a subtler character who became the intellectual ‘voice’ for the story’s fascinating central idea, which Lupoff describes in detail here. Cawthorn and I also wrote an outline for the sequel, The People that Time Forgot, but after seeing the final shots of the first film, we pulled out from any further involvement. We had hoped to bring ‘authentic’ Burroughs to the screen. We didn’t want any part of producing further bastardisations.

We had been attracted to doing the film for the same reasons Richard Lupoff liked the book—it is perhaps one of the two best science fiction ideas Burroughs ever had. In the hands of its producer, John Dark, The Land that Time Forgot (with Doug McClure and Susan Penhaligon) rather obscured its central idea and came dangerously close to being just another dinosaur picture with a volcanic explosion as the cliché dénouement, robbing the movie of much of its special atmosphere, although some, I think, was retained.

The same company corrupted Burroughs’s novel At the Earth’s Core, another of his best works, but luckily box office receipts began to drop, as they deserved to, so that the producers gave up any further attempts to bastardise the work of a writer who, for all his faults of repetition and sometimes hasty writing, deserved far better treatment. What was more, as I understood it, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., the company which looks after Burroughs’s copyrights, couldn’t stand the bastardisation any better than we could. Aside from some decent versions of Tarzan made in recent years, ours was more or less the last attempt to make a movie worthy of Burroughs’s originals. He has never been served well by movies, which, considering that he lived within driving distance of most of the Hollywood studios, has always seemed ironic to me.

It makes me wonder whether, for instance, John Carter’s Martian adventures will ever successfully be brought to the screen. I would love to see the moody landscapes of the Red Planet populated with baroquely armoured Tharks and their noble human foes, the ancient towers of gorgeous Helium rising into the thin air, the horrors of the River Iss, the lazy curve of fliers as they stream across the skies beneath the twin moons of Mars. It would need the same sort of loving attention as that which brought The Lord of the Rings to the screen, but it would definitely beat anything Star Wars has yet been able to offer. If they ever do decide to make the movies, I hope the writers, director and producers will read Lupoff’s excellent account of the stories and their merits before they begin.

Lupoff has an intelligent, sensitive taste for the virtues of Burroughs’s books. Not only can he explain the merits of Burroughs’s best work, he can say what’s wrong with the fiction that doesn’t measure up to the best.

I was surprised to learn from this book how poorly served American readers were with Burroughs during the years I was most enjoying him. Unlike American readers of the 1950s I had plenty of Burroughs available to me in the United Kingdom. The Methuen hardbacks with their wonderful J Allen St John dust-wrappers were still cramming our library shelves while the Pinnacle paperbacks could be bought at any bookstore or railway newsstand. Not only the Tarzan stories, but the Martian, Venusian, Pellucidarian and other novels could be found everywhere. It was even possible to get relatively obscure titles, such as The Outlaw of Torn and, as I recall, The Bandit of Hell’s Bend, The Eternal Lover and Apache Devil. Why this should have been so, I have no idea, except that perhaps Burroughs’s popularity remained high in Britain, where we did not have quite so many rival fantasy publications in the years immediately following the Second World War.

The paperback covers weren’t always the best, but I spent many a summer vacation acquiring and reading most of what ERB had published in book form before his death. When I bought second-hand hardbacks I could even write to Methuen and ask for fresh jackets, which they were happy to send entirely free of charge! A different and happier era!

Contrary to George Orwell’s predictions about the bad influence of popular fiction on young minds, I did not grow up to become a fascist, racist or casual killer of beasts and men from reading Burroughs. Indeed I somehow managed to be a left-winger, a committed anti-racist and a preserver of animal life firmly opposed to the death penalty! If I now blanch at some of the disgusting racial language which so infects Burroughs’s work, as it does that of John Buchan, Edgar Wallace, Ernest Hemingway and a mass of lesser writers, I can always listen to the BBC serialisation of, say, Tarzan of the Apes, which was cleansed of its racist comments and stereotypes yet lost none of the pace and pleasure of the original. A talking book can get rid of a multitude of sins.

Burroughs was indeed a master tale-spinner. The serial devices he used keep readers turning pages as fast as you would in Dickens. His influence on the likes of Robert E Howard, Leigh Brackett, Philip Farmer and Fritz Leiber continues to be felt in the work of writers they influenced. He is without a doubt a key figure in the history of science fiction, fantasy and adventure fiction.

In the mid-1960s, as I said, I paid direct homage to Burroughs. Writing as Edward Powys Bradbury I produced, in nine days, three books still in print as Kane of Old Mars. In them I tried to make my hero behave not like John Carter of Mars but according to Burroughs’s stated moral views. Rather than respond violently to aggression, as they usually do in his books, I have my heroes and her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Other Books
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Man on the Stairs: Introduction by Iain Sinclair
• Editor’s Foreword by Allan Kausch
• Scratching a Living
• A Child’s Christmas in the Blitz
• London
• Other Places
• Absent Friends
• Music
• Politics
• Introductions and Reviews
• Afterword by Michael Moorcock
• Bibliography
• About the Author