And all the while the rise and fall of the Whispering Swarm. Not once, in my many attempts, had I completely escaped it. I’d had every kind of test, of course, but I knew that, since I was completely free of it when I entered the Alsacia, none of the wilder ideas of specialists, including psychiatrists, made much sense. Menacing, threatening to destroy everything I loved, everything I needed to keep myself focused and sane, it was relentless. I did not fear insanity the way a character in Poe or Lovecraft feared it, but there was an element in my family history I did not find entirely attractive. I had a barmy cousin in Amsterdam. I had a few eccentric relatives who were not, as we used to say, the full florin. Some had the odd paranoid delusion. We all found them fairly funny, especially if the relative believed themselves to be some famous person being victimised by a shadowy power. My grandfather’s brother Alf believed Lord Nelson hadn’t died at Trafalgar but was being hunted by French secret agents in the pay of the Bonapartistes. The very banality of such delusions shamed me. I would have felt laughably stupid if I emerged from a similar situation to be told that I thought I was Sherlock Holmes or at least that Holmes was on my trail. Admittedly, it would take a real brain of Holmes’s fictional brilliance to find a way of ridding me of the Swarm. The Sanctuary had mastered me. Only by choosing to live out my life within its confines would I ever know any real peace. And that peace, of course, was meaningless without my children and the company of those I cared for.
Like opium, marijuana and acid helped me a bit, as did coke, but I stopped short at heroin. Of course I was offered it often enough and took the odd snort, but it always left me feeling like crap and never completely covered up the noise of the Swarm. I could understand how people got to be junkies. I didn’t want to be dependent on drugs, whether booze or dope. People always had such pathetic rationales, usually to do with the quality of whatever it was they were hooked on. Bill Baker, my boss at Sexton Blake, used to blame his blackouts on drinking the wrong beer or mixing wine and whisky.
Drugs failing to drown out the sound of the Swarm, my despair passed and for a time at least I resolved to live with it, just as Smetana, for instance, lived the majority of his life forced to hear a perpetual A-flat while he composed his lovely music. But Smetana was a genius. I was only a working writer trying to reconcile a variety of old forms with a version of a new one. So, soon after I got back to Ladbroke Grove, inspired by my enthusiasm for the English Romantics, I took to hiking in the Dales and the Lakes whenever I got the chance. I had never had much interest in the countryside but I almost immediately fell in love with the wild, mainly unpopulated fells, where you could frequently walk all day without seeing anything much bigger than a sheep. The Whispering Swarm remained with me but was somehow less intrusive, and I got great relief from those walks.
30
ENGLISH DIVERSIONS
Molly was, of course, still in my thoughts, but I was very glad to be home. The girls were wonderful and I never tired of outings with them. It was also a pleasure to see old friends. My memory, never great at the best of times, seemed to be improving.
I understand how you might like to play down what some might see as a nerdier or less respectable past, but in my case at least I had to hang on tight to my memories or I’d forget them completely. I kept the tarot pack Mrs M had left with me. I used the cards to remember. Somehow, by association, the cards really did help me remember things fairly accurately. Naturally, in the pub or at a dinner party, you might exaggerate a little if you were telling a good anecdote or making a point, but you didn’t deny it when your wife or friends contradicted you. Not if you wanted to keep your grip on reality.
I remember, during a time I was working under a variety of pseudonyms in the mid-’60s, Helena warned me I’d wake up one morning and beg her to tell me who I was. And, she said with an evil grin, she’d refuse. Because of my situation I was terrified of losing the truth, of persisting and insisting on a lie or a false memory. My mum had grown infamous for her lies and inventions. Because my mum was such a mythologiser and had embarrassed me as a kid when I realised she was telling obvious porkies, I think I understood how the family had lost respect for her. I couldn’t bear that happening to me. I was convinced that you learn by remembering. Of course I didn’t mind polishing a good anecdote now and again, but I knew what I was doing. A narrative was a narrative all the better for the number of other narratives it carried. I never resisted being called on an exaggeration and I particularly valued close friends and partners to remind me if I got something wrong. But my more mythologically inclined friends made me uncomfortable. I suppose they found it a form of self-protection.
What amazed me was the vehemence with which people sometimes defended their new personae and histories. One, who periodically rewrote at least half his life as an ongoing project, frequently accused me of mythmaking when my version of events differed from his but seemed to be shared by the majority. People like him reminded me of my mother. They believed firmly in their refreshed identities. One of them took to yelling at old friends whose memories didn’t match his. He fell out with almost everyone, including his relatives. He clung fiercely to his re-created self. I cared for him and hated when he raged. He persuaded his new girlfriend of all his reinventions and she was malleable enough to accept the story when it changed, even if she were the subject. Some women are better at that sort of thing. They can transform before your eyes. You could say that generation was trained to it. The truth was important to me. I was pretty obsessive about it, doing all I could to never lie to my children, to teach them to respect truth, honesty and the other simple virtues.
I also did everything I could to give my daughters the egalitarian principles of my mother and her mother. I used to tell people who wanted my endless patronage as an editor, ‘Don’t expect me to be a father figure. I’m not even that to my own kids.’
I told the girls they were going to school for their own benefit, not that of the teachers, and they were to take the information, not the opinions, of those in authority. I did my best to teach them self-worth. I tried hard to make sure they didn’t blame themselves for any problems in our marriage. I loved them with all my heart. I sometimes wonder if they were the real objects of rivalry when it came to my affections. I was never short of love. Later, even my ex-wives came to believe I needed two women to love as well as to spell one another, I suspect, when I was maniacally working. It must have been horrible. Once focused on a literary book’s subject I never let it go and I talked on and on about it. The genre books were written so quickly, you might not have noticed.
The books were, it was true, beginning to take me longer to do. The generic books took me three days. If I tried anything else, it might be around two weeks. In 1969, after I’d handed New Worlds over to ‘the triumvirate’, I produced the second Cornelius novel in four episodes, as they were appearing in the magazine. Gloriana would take the longest time ever, at six weeks, but that would be years later. Maybe it was the adrenaline? I was never violent but I could get really crazy with anxiety. You need a strong woman for that, even to stand it for three or four years. By then you should have it under control. Looking back, I’ve never envied those women. It’s no surprise that Elric, my earliest successful fictional character, was some kind of monster. Of course, romantic women go in for a certain sort of monster. They think they can tame us the way Fay Wray tamed Kong.
I’m probably being a bit melodramatic, but I speak from the perspective of age. When young we lived fast, dramatic lives, all of us, no matter how many children we had. Our experience showed that the world was improving and would continue to improve if we were prepared to make a bit of an effort. We were living in the fast lane. Sex and drugs and rock and roll. When we talk about those days now, people think we’re exaggerating or else we were exceptional or perverted or nuts. It was the norm among the young romantics of Britain, especially in Ladbroke Grove. We were high on ideas and the arts, especially music. We were building the new Jerusalem. When the St
ones did ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, the Royal Albert Hall sold out on the choral version of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. A year or two earlier, Schoenberg concerts played to tiny audiences. Public taste improved enormously and with it a demand for ambitious popular fiction, painting and sculpture. Right up to the moment Margaret Thatcher went to ask the Queen about forming a government, there was reason to believe we were bumping forward. We certainly didn’t need the dire scare stories of these new Tories who produced a way, in common with Ronald Reagan, of tricking us into a short-term gain with ‘deregulation’, starting the snowball that would roll 99 per cent of us downhill. Maybe there’s an alternative world where the counterculture actually gained authority.
All of us involved in that odd threesome must have found our situation satisfying enough or we wouldn’t have gone on with it. If it hadn’t been for the Whispering Swarm I would have been enormously content. I think the Swarm distracted me more than I realised. I can’t believe that my ego was so enlarged I entertained only the faintest notion of Moll’s hiding deeper motives for being with me. To me love was love. I was very simple. It had, of course, crossed my mind that she didn’t want to be left alone in the Alsacia, probably because she didn’t want to be with her old lover, Duval or Turpin or whichever Cavalier it was.
I remained unjealous, trusting. Whenever I was in the area I did my best to drop by. I think she was able to leave the Alsacia but I was not sure when. I was so secure in my sense that my love was reciprocated that I forged cheerfully ahead, making all the decisions, because she said that was what she wanted. But I suppose I didn’t listen very well. Was I totally self-deluded? I do miss those years when, maybe at others’ expense, I was sublimely self-confident.
There are DVDs of me performing or giving interviews. I’m utterly fearless, horribly arrogant and aggressive. That’s when I think I can see what they saw. Helena said I was always one to make a decision, even when no decision was possible. Uncertain people were attracted to my certainty. And there were a lot of uncertain young women about in those days. Some of them were talented but needed to learn self-confidence. I tried to get them work. I couldn’t, in those days, conceive of anyone having talent and not wanting to earn money with it. I had spent most of my professional life as a writer. I had no conception of the amateur or the talented dabbler. I now realise I might have pushed one or two of them where they didn’t want to go. Too much responsibility. Some women and men really did just want to look after someone. Preferably someone interesting.
Even when I wasn’t nuts I didn’t slow down much. Holidays were usually spent doing something, going somewhere. I was no good at simply lying on a beach. Christina Mackenzie, with whom I had a brief affair, told me I had an unsleeping brain. Was she right? Actually, I almost never dreamed. I said I sold my dreams before I went to bed. And I didn’t go in for fantasy much, either. Helena said I would never stop writing. I was compelled to do it. I wasn’t sure. I found it a lot easier to work with a band than on my own. I had no desire to be a front man, in spite of the accident that gave me a good voice. On stage I was a natural sideman, playing rhythm guitar while the blokes who liked the attention bent all the flashy notes up the back end of the neck. I loved being onstage, working with others. I loved performing, particularly when we actually did well. But it really was for the pure pleasure of making music. Helena did something for my ego when she said she’d forgotten how good sex could get without tricks. Maybe those multiple orgasms compensated for my many shortcomings which she was happy to list on other occasions. When I needed it I always had the Sanctuary, where I could write escapist fiction without feeling I should be doing something better with my time. In the outside world this went against my own work ethic.
By 1969 I had everything in some sort of balance. Two lives, two wives, two children, two careers. The arrangement seemed to suit everyone. In spite of the stress, with the magazine undergoing various assaults, I remember those years with great pleasure. I anticipated an old age in which we took care of one another, shared jokes and memories, and became almost the same person, our experiences and memories entwined. I loved seeing both Helena and Molly, as well as the children, grow. But, of course, I didn’t anticipate what would actually happen.
Helena still refused to hear anything I tried to tell her about the Alsacia. Why did the Swarm stop whenever I was in the Alsacia? Did the Sanctuary actually call me back? A kind of Lorelei? By April 1969 it had grown so loud I definitely wasn’t sure it was just tinnitus. I had to go to the doctor and make up a story about anxieties and symptoms like a migraine. But he gave me nothing strong enough to silence the Swarm. The downer, of course, just made me sleepy. I began to wonder if the Swarm could be escaped by putting a few thousand miles between us.
Helena thought we needed a break. The girls were now old enough to leave with my mum who was eager to have them to herself for a bit. Helena had never been to the United States and I needed to see my editors. In particular I also had to find a former writing partner and get our manuscript back. In 1968 a bright young American, Ray Soulis, began collaborating on a book about pop culture with me. An emergency at home in New York meant Ray had had to leave, taking the only manuscript with him. For some time he had dropped out of sight and I began to despair of seeing our book again. Then he wrote out of the blue. Damon Knight and his wife, Kate Wilhelm, had gone to Oregon to see two of their children and Ray had been asked to housesit for them. I must have known Ray better than they did. But Ray was going to be in Milford, Pennsylvania, for three months in the summer and suggested I come over to discuss what we were going to do with the book. To be honest, all I wanted was the bugger back so I could finish it and not be asked about it whenever I saw Livia Gollancz, who had commissioned it. Why, I proposed, didn’t Helena and I go over, stay in New York, explore a few other parts of the Northeast and get hold of the manuscript?
We decided to go on a three-week return. Our first transatlantic plane trip together! Helena was already in love with America and didn’t share the anti-Americanism which had become epidemic since the country’s involvement in Vietnam. So I dashed to the Alsacia to tell Moll I had to be in New York on business. She suggested I look up her mother. Mrs Melody was there all year.
31
AMERICAN DIVERSIONS
Our trip would prove unexpectedly tiring. Somewhere between October 1967 and May 1969, America had discovered sex. Our first clue to this was being met at the Gramercy Park Hotel, Manhattan, by Rex Fisch.
Rex had left England in a sober suit, a shirt, a tie and a neat haircut. He arrived outside our hotel lobby in tiny black leather shorts and a studded bolero jacket, astride his monster twin-cam 1100cc BMW bike. All six feet two inches of him. As he swung off his bike and flounced towards us I knew the sight would never leave my memory. Only Rex could mince under the weight of that many metal studs. He clearly intended to shock us, but of course we had trouble not smiling. We would have enjoyed ourselves in New York the more if Rex hadn’t begun showing signs of what would become one of his periodic attacks of paranoia.
I insisted on taking Helena to Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s where she reluctantly bought some beautiful clothes. We went up to the top of the Empire State Building and we took a boat ride around the island. Rex, dressed a little less like a Village Person, introduced us to some great restaurants. We went to the MoMA and the Strand bookstore. We enjoyed the Gramercy Park Hotel, which was at the height of her run-down glory and one of the cheapest, funkiest hotels in Manhattan. I preferred it by far to the Chelsea where Mrs Melody was staying. I had no intention of looking up Moll’s mother! We found Port Authority Bus Terminal and off we went to Milford, where Ray awaited us. The bus was already packed so I sat down near the front and Helena took a seat near the back, causing sardonic comment from black passengers. Helena, with her posh English accent, still understood all that was being said and blithely ignored it until a black lady told off the men and made room for me. The law had changed but the culture
hadn’t. That would take a few more years.
We stayed at a creaking old Victorian four-decker mansion in what was then a near-deserted Pennsylvania town marked for flooding as a reservoir. The cabbie who drove us up there was so scared when he saw the house he gave us about five seconds to leave the taxi before he took off at speed. It did look a bit like the house in Psycho. I, of course, had been there before, but I hadn’t arrived at night. Ray, skinny and neurotically stooped as ever, now wore a fashionable Zapata moustache. His eyes intense, he led us up to the third floor along creaking hallways and groaning stairs. I was already fond of the house but it freaked out some guests, including Ray’s new girlfriend and her friend. Ray’s wife and small son had been staying in the house for some time. They both had a strange, distant look. Helena and I soon realised that Ray had gone barking barmy. Not only had he invited another woman to stay, but he was already hitting on her friend.
After our first uncomfortable night and what was for most of us an awkward breakfast, we went to visit Rex and Jim Stephanopolis, who had recently rented a house nearby. Rex hadn’t told us they were breaking up. So Rex decided to return with us to Ray’s. We got back that afternoon to find even more people arriving. I was reminded of the opening act of a musical comedy. Ray had also given open invitations to a bunch of the most neurotic would-be writers and artists in the nation. They usually drifted in on Friday and stayed through to the following Monday. The exchanges of bodily fluids were so complex that Rex at one point joked that Jackie Kennedy was the father of his child. Avoiding advances from all sides exhausted us, but Rex was in his element, swanning about like a villainous Disney great white, sporting vast, grinning teeth. He would have had those gnashers filed if he hadn’t been such a sissy about visiting the dentist.