Labor Day is when Americans rather reluctantly celebrate the dignity of manual work, though a red flag hasn’t been seen flying in Union Square since 1945. Yankees still had a puritanical reluctance to give ordinary people the day off. Joe McCarthy continued to be a vivid memory and the anticommunist hysteria was only just starting to die down while in the South things were just better than intolerable. Primed by TV and movies I had come prepared for violence and found only goodwill. I fell in love with New York, of course. And I met people with whom I’d previously only corresponded. Rex disappeared off to Minnesota.
Four days later and thoroughly corrupted, I visited my publisher on his beautiful farm in the rolling foothills of the Poconos and I fell in love again. At last I understood the American dream! There was only good to say of it! I had never been nor never ever would’ve or whatever it was they wanted you to say in re communism, the Red Menace, and had no problem with that, but I didn’t necessarily swallow the right-wing view of the engine of Western prosperity and how it had arrived at its current levels of success. I knew how much American wealth had been built on the backs of dead natives, illegal immigrants, slaves and destitute refugees from starving Europe. But the people I met now lived only in a happier present. The future was an optimistic dream. Infectious stuff. I cheered up instantly. The depressed habits we identified as virtuous in England were considered doom-laded nightmares in the US. New Yorkers seemed as intolerant of historical analysis as they were forgiving of psychoanalysis and self-regard.
Back in New York, Rex had copies of New Worlds containing his serial and although he wasn’t in the best mental shape for it he planned to offer it to Random House. He hoped they would be impressed. He did not want a publisher even remotely associated with genre fiction.
Leaving it with an editor he knew there, he set off for Milford, Pennsylvania with me and a bunch of women SF writers including Judy, Anne McCaffrey and Joanna Russ. The Science Fiction Writers of America was only about a year old and we had all been invited to attend a conference at the rambling Victorian house of Damon Knight, an intelligent and ambitious writer and editor determined to raise the genre’s writing standards. As well as more established writers, Knight had also invited Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, Gene Wolfe, James Sallis, Norman Spinrad and a few others just making names for themselves who had sold to Knight’s anthology Orbit and to New Worlds.
There was much interest in my magazine. Knight had worked for years to improve the literary standards of science fiction and was something of an ally, although I had no particular interest in the genre beyond what was useful to me. We enjoyed some heady arguments and I found another contributor. Highly argumentative, with no special background in SF, Spinrad had already published some fairly run-of-the mill titles but he brought part of his unpublished novel Bug Jack Barron with him to the Milford conference. I fell in love with the book and asked him to send me a copy in London. The language and subject matter, although not derivative, were the closest I’d found to Bill Burroughs. One of a number of friendships begun in Milford which would last a lifetime.
In the USA for the first time, I was witnessing the modern economic liberal state in all its glory. Most of the checks and balances with which I was familiar were gone. Big-buck euphoria. Big numbers. Big heads. Pierrot and the Politics of Plunder. The Panto of Faux Prosperity. Rapacity at Full Ahead. The Ego, astride its favourite mount, was coming into its own! Yet the place was strangely old-fashioned. The strongest feeling I got from New York at first was nostalgia. A 1930s vision of the future.
Within a week I was exuding confidence and self-worth. I shudder to think what an old friend, meeting me on the streets of downtown Manhattan, would have made of me. Mistaking bright American good manners for admiration of my genius I became thoroughly convinced of my literary superpowers. Here I was, bringing the future to America. The Innovator! What would have got me jeered off the planet as a prig and wanker and stuck-up all-’round bounder in Ladbroke Grove made me merely a man with a sense of his own worth on Broadway. This unbashful Brit, modest in tone but arrogant in content, sat across the dinner table from editor Larry Ashfield, charismatic bullshitter of his golden cage, feeding him anecdotes Larry could make his own, and talked up a planned book which would use the tropes and methods of popular fiction with the structural ambition of modernism and would bring the great British novel and the great American novel back together.
I write, I told him, for money. The better the money, the better the book.
‘So what would you give me for a million bucks?’ asked Larry, flying high on my spiel.
‘War and Peace,’ I said.
‘You got it,’ he said. I was thinking of Jerry Cornelius, whom I was just reviving in short stories. I made some notes and typed them up on my agent’s machine.
Two days later I sat with Bob in Larry’s office and signed the contract in the middle of a press conference, going instantly from work-for-hire hack to literary novelist. Jerry Cornelius was a character Mick Jagger felt was too freaky to play in the movie; a smart aleck, eccentric, working-class, dandy, rock-and-roll-scientist, an urban role-player who understood he was several Commedia characters, as familiar with the languages of science as with arts and politics. A man of the New Renaissance, he was entangled in absurd stories conceived against the background of Vietnam and an ex-Imperial Britain reimagining herself as part of Europe. His career would last through a dozen books and various spin-offs, comics, a movie and more. He was as much a technique as a character. The nearest nineteenth-century character I could think of for comparison was Vautrin/Jacques Collin, Balzac’s wonderful villain.
Balzac was one of my heroes because he did reams of hackwork before doing reams of ambitious, innovative fiction. Why shouldn’t I identify with him? My uncles wanted me to emulate Disraeli, the legendary ancestor. Meg Midnight was the nearest I got to Sybil. I planned nothing in conscious imitation. Those linked stories came naturally to me. Theme echoes theme. Image sparks phrase. Phrase strikes theme. Image carries narrative. Anthony Powell’s comic Dance to the Music of Time wasn’t Proust but it was the nearest he could get to tell his story. He lacked a method for our postwar age. We do our best with the techniques and ideas that come to us. But only so much can be done with the retrospective tone before it becomes sentimental and nostalgic.
Bullshit? Maybe. But Ashfield bought it.
The best form for carrying the weight of contemporary concerns was a modified SF. But I was trying to suspend belief, not disbelief. I borrowed as much from noir, Ubu and Firbank as I did from Bester. I rejected Horizon as well as Galaxy. Drunk on my self-awarded authority, my urgent persuasion, Ashfield applauded the dawning of a new art. I had to move fast and get the contract before other voices persuaded him to think along different lines. Of course the money wouldn’t all come at once but it was enough to pay the rent and allow me to work at a more ambitious level.
Naturally, some, including me, would always wonder if I wasn’t just another ’60s con artist who had found a sucker to back a Fun Palace project. Yet I believed my spiel. I wanted to appeal to that modern audience who helped Sgt. Pepper stay so long at number one when there had never been anything like it ever before and that, in the more modest form of modern fiction, was my offering to the common pot of innovation and egalitarianism. Jerry Cornelius was modern man who had given up looking for a soul but needed to discover a role. At least one. A modernist rejecting the failed ideas of the twentieth century, accepting the impossibility of drastically improving the human condition, Jerry sought instead to remain constantly adaptable, constantly able to change the script, even the nature of his own character.
The culture had started to cook, I told Ashfield. Many more ingredients would go in my particular pot and many sips would be taken from my dipped ladle before it simmered into its fullest flavour but it would take decades before the goal was fully achieved. Now I was preparing the recipe I would create from the coming interaction of world cultures … and
here I began to falter, having extended, as it were, my brief. But Larry had drunk enough Chateau Prude to see the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. That beard and burnoose still worked miracles. He could see I was an authentic prophet. A guru! Advised by Marc Haefele, a bright young man who worked as his assistant, Larry was caught by the euphoria of highly paid innovation. I was his first hit of acid. He had his own trip. He was the publisher of the English New Wave and to prove it I got my War and Peace advance. Larry would buy Allard’s The Savagery Show in the same spirit. And, in the spirit of another age, his bosses would have it pulped.
I got so many gifts for Helena and the girls I had to pack some big parcels and post them straight to the house. I was quite the conquering hero. I was pleased with myself on another count. Given the considerable opportunity, I had not given in to any sexual temptation. I came home on a cold Tuesday morning and the first parcel arrived about an hour after I came in. Helena snorted as she held up a dress to look at it in the light. ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘Too good for me.’ She was in one of those moods where she didn’t believe she deserved anything. Or that there really was such a thing as altruism. Or love. ‘What did you get up to in the States?’
The girls were pleased with their toys and cowboy outfits. I also got them BB guns like Colt .45s, jeans and shirts and cowboy wellies. And that night Helena made love as if there were no tomorrow. I consoled myself that she didn’t like to say what she felt. There were plenty of other perfectly good ways of welcoming me home. And while there were a few ways I cared less for, there were few others I preferred more. I felt virtuous and deserving. I had brought back a pretty substantial elk. I had learned to stop looking for my father everywhere and not to sleep with and expect to marry every woman who wanted to. We stayed up in the bedroom until it was time to go together to collect the girls from school. Life was getting alarmingly sweeter by the minute.…
Then the war against New Worlds heated up in earnest. The British Bill of Rights, written in 1689, was too early for free speech to be covered. And we weren’t protected. W.H. Smith and Son booksellers, that old Quaker family, decided that Langdon Jones’s protagonist, entering into a perfectly respectful conversation with Christ on the cross in a story dedicated to Olivier Messiaen (that most devout of composers, whom Jones revered), was an obscene, blasphemous or libellous act, maybe all three. They weren’t too sure but there had to be a law against it. There was also Bug Jack Barron, Norman Spinrad’s novel using the language of the LA streets and the Hollywood studios. That might be even worse, since it contained much F&C and all the other disgusting words ever created by human ingenuity. They wanted it axed. Or no sales. Our circulation had grown wonderfully before the Quakers determined we should not foul their racks. I was sorry. I had always liked Quakers, found their religious beliefs and practises admirable and, for my pleasure and health, regularly ate their oats.
Sadly the battle for New Worlds became the context for everything else we did, just like the Vietnam War. For months, growing increasingly exhausted, I struggled to keep the mag going. We were ultimately saved by a press outcry which shamed Smiths and newsagents Menzies into reluctantly taking us back, but by then we were all exhausted. The battle lines were still drawn. There I was in my long hair and lace and feathers and there they were in their drab suits; hard, grim haircuts and letterbox mouths. It was the English Civil War all over again. Roundheads primly putting down Cavaliers. And, as usual, the Roundheads were winning. Temporarily. Also as usual.
We needed a holiday.
But when I suggested it, Helena refused to come with me to the Alsacia. Even though she refused to believe it existed, she also seemed afraid of the place, associating it with madness. She said she would leave me if I started all that again. I understood her concern though she seemed to be overreacting. I was soon so embroiled in trying to save the magazine that I didn’t have time even to think about the Alsacia. Or a holiday.
18
RALLYING THE TROOPS
The following year, 1968, would prove an extraordinary one. The novel versions of Behold the Man and The Final Programme came out to great reviews, New Worlds received enormous amounts of publicity from a mainly sympathetic press; my work published in hardcovers had always been reviewed as literary fiction, while my fantasy paperbacks were almost never reviewed by the mainstream press. That suited me. I refused to use pseudonyms for my books but the paperbacks, most of which I wrote in three days, were distinguished at that time by the format. Critics were not confused. They knew that hardbacks were ‘serious’ and that paperbacks were not. I took ten days to write The Last Menu and about the same to write Behold the Man while it only took three days to write a fantasy ‘historical’.
As a result of the publicity a new publishing partner presented himself for New Worlds, a man who had produced Drum in South Africa during the years in which it fought against being banned, so he seemed naturally sympathetic. I was slowing down on the fantasies. I only planned to complete a few more. The magazine no longer needed the influx of cash. I had three more Jerry Cornelius novels to write. I had signed with Ashfield.
By now the Ladbroke Grove area was turning into the future. This was where all the rock bands began to hang out. Every other kind of experiment went on around us. Because my books somehow caught the mood of the times I had turned into some sort of guru. Our ups and downs with New Worlds took on the character of a fight against authority. We mingled with poets, painters, filmmakers and musicians and our activities were enough to get us in the gossip columns.
Around us there was less and less street noise as the hippies took over and became what they called the boss culture, and we all began living in wonderland, dressing up in our feathers and lace, our lovely clothes with our beautiful hair and hats and monstrous bean-crusher two-tone Saturday nighter shoes ready to strut into the Age of Aquarius. Light blues and dark blues and deep greens and luminous scarlets, silver and gold, long hair and dreadlocks and profound postwar desires gave us that peacock poise, swinging our guitars like lords with their swords, Death with his scythe. As far as the culture went, we said who lived or died. We had the moral high ground. We were the wonderlads. We had the secret. At parties merchant bankers asked our advice on the latest trends, as if we knew. Astonishingly beautiful and intelligent models were interested in what we thought about Vietnam. Had I been single I could have gone home with a different stunner every night, or it might have been the same one. They could be hard to tell apart. No temptations. Not really. I was perfectly at ease with domestic life at last. God, I felt happy. Content. Peter-fucking-Pureheart. No thanks, I’m married.
And so happy again with Helena and the kids. And my confident self. Don’t fix the effect, fix the cause. But fame is power and power is a drug. You fascinate everyone, including yourself. You start getting as interested in you as they are. Life is so easy. Power is thrust at you from all sides. They want you to lie to them. Screw them. They wanted you to tell them stories. Sing them songs. In return you could do whatever you wanted. Women in particular just loved to give you power. Take it. I don’t want it. I don’t have the strength or the taste for it. They came up to you and offered their liberty to you. I’m yours. But what if you didn’t want it? Then you got some weird reactions. You don’t love me. We need to discuss our relationship. I don’t know why, but at the very period when I was most happily married, women were intriguing me more and more. I was fascinated by their attitudes. I was infatuated by their femininity, by their motives and ambitions. I wrote The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century from them and to them. I wanted to know and understand them, each fucking individual, every bloody friend. There was no such thing as ‘women’. People want to know how I turned from MCP to profeminist. Well, that was how. But it took a long time.
I was learning my guitar better. Keep it simple. Keep it soulful and keep it cool. I loved slide at home. At home it was: I can’t break with you baby because the stars rule my loving heart, I?
??ll give anything to keep you, babe, nothing will ever tear us apart. On stage it was: We are the veterans of the psychic wars. We are the cruel, the cold, the unkind. We are the lost, we are the last, unfeeling, blind. We had followed a familiar arc from rhythm and blues to psychedelic and experimental, from mods to hippies, riding the zeitgeist, possibly even tugging the wheel a little.
Psychedelia by night, Willie Dixon by day. Footprints in the sands of time. I took the kids to gigs whenever possible. Sometimes they would sleep behind the stacks. The pounding speakers were better than a lullaby. The rhythms were primal. A giant loving heart. That’s why so many rock-and-roll kids are secure and well-balanced. Even the survivors who snorted their first line before they were nine. Just like my generation with the Nazi bombs, nothing could ever keep my kids awake. I remember going back to where they were sleeping in their carrycots seeing their seraphic faces glowing with contentment as their little chests rose and fell, their little noses snored in unison to the music on the stage out front. It was even better when you stopped having to change shit-filled nappies. When they were clean they smelled so good, so warm and sweet. I still get turned on by the smell of Johnson’s baby oil and talc. Especially when one of our records comes on the radio at the same time. City guerilla, I’m a shitty psycho killer, sings poor old dead Captain Crackers, that genius of the stage and studio. Talented bloke. Magic on stage.
What with sex, drugs, rock and roll and writing novels I didn’t have a lot of extra time to think about the Alsacia or its messengers. I’d made it clear how I felt to the abbot. There wasn’t much to make me nostalgic for the Alsacia. The murmuring was constant and getting louder but not especially loud. I was having a very good life in the real world. The kind of life most people dreamed of. I had already enjoyed the full catalogue of male fantasies. And a lot of interesting female ones. But sometimes, even when I was onstage, in the middle of a performance, getting great riffs out of my Rickenbacker, the murmur would grow suddenly louder, at first like a faint hum in the amplifiers, a badly stacked cabinet, some feedback; then the intensity rather than the sound level increased, an insistent whisper threatening to throw me off completely as I played. This felt like an attack and I decided the best way to deal with it was to ignore it. The worse it grew in my head, the more frenzied was my playing. Audiences loved it!