The Stealer of Souls (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

The past is a script we are constantly rewriting. Experience changes over the years to suit whatever story we believe we are telling about ourselves and our friends. It’s why the police and the courts are forever questioning accounts offered by honest people.

If proof of this were needed, it is in the stories I have told over the years about how Elric came into being. Nothing crucial hangs on my slightly varying versions of my hero’s conception; and in reprinting those versions I’ve made no attempt to make them coherent, so readers will discover some inconsistencies here which, were I interested in promoting a particular version of events, I would have edited out. They are what I believed to be truthful accounts when I wrote them or else I was arguing within a specific context, as in a letter I wrote to the fanzine
Niekas
some short while before the four-part serial published as
Stormbringer
came out in 1963–1964. In such arguments, where I was defending myself against criticism, I gave more emphasis to certain experience than I would have done ordinarily. Like much of my fiction, which nowadays seems so solidly a part of a genre’s history, when the Elric stories first appeared there were some readers who found them offensive or otherwise infuriating. Then, as now, some readers seemed to be uncomfortable with their ironic tone. They were probably the first “interventions” into the fantasy canon, such as it was. Later, writers like Stephen Donaldson, Steven Erikson, and Scott Bakker would be similarly criticized. The criticism I received in letters or in fanzine reviews at the time made me far more defensive than I would be these days. I’ve always known that fanzine critics prepared you for the worst any mainstream critics could say about you. They weren’t unlike some aspects of the web. It’s interesting to note in these pieces (which I’ve placed so as to avoid spoilers) the evident strength of my feelings when Elric was still, as it were, newborn and in need of his parent’s protection!

I notice, for instance, that I claimed to be the product of a particular form of Christian mysticism. While it is true that for a short time (at around the age of seven) I attended Michael Hall School in Sussex, which was run on the rather attractive mystical Christian principles of Rudolf Steiner (in turn a break-away from Madame Blavatsky’s brand of spiritualism), it is not really true to suggest, as I did in one of the pieces reprinted here, that I was “brought up” according to Steiner’s ideas. In fact, my background was almost wholly secular, much of my immediate circle was Jewish and I was only briefly interested, as a young adult, in Steiner’s ideas, which had influenced my mentor, Ernst Jelinek. These, however,
did
influence the cosmology of the Elric stories. Poul Anderson’s marvelous fantasies
The Broken Sword
and
Three Hearts and Three Lions
were probably of equal influence, as was my fascination with Norse, Celtic, Hindu, and Zoroastrian mythology.

I had begun my professional career as a contributor to a British weekly juvenile magazine called
Tarzan Adventures
, which was a mixture of reprinted newspaper strips and original text. My first regular commission was a series of articles on Edgar Rice Burroughs and his characters, but I was soon writing fiction, some, like Sojan, adapted from the stories that first appeared in my fanzine
Burroughsania
, which I had founded in my last year at school (I left at the age of fifteen). These first stories were fantasy adventures bearing, not surprisingly, a strong ERB influence, and I have reprinted one here to give a flavour of what I was doing a few years before I created Elric. More of my early ups and downs in publishing can be found in the various departments of www.multiverse.org. Warts and all, they don’t show as much promise as I sometimes like to think. They do offer, I hope, some encouragement to writers who are yet to publish professionally! Rereading these stories, however, I think they do show a fairly marked improvement as it began to dawn on me that there was a readership for that kind of fiction and that I was no longer—as I had been when I worked as a journalist and for the comics—anonymous.

Over a period of time following almost exactly the period in which I was writing the first Elric stories, I was inclined to distance myself from the work of Robert E. Howard, even though he had been an important influence (unlike Lovecraft, for whom I had no taste). Over the years I have seen many other writers put space between themselves and their main sources of inspiration and have come to understand it as an important, if not particularly admirable, part of the process of trying to make one’s individual mark. I soon began giving Anthony Skene the credit he deserved for Zenith the Albino. Eventually I was instrumental in helping get Skene’s only Zenith hardback novel,
Monsieur Zenith the Albino
, republished in a particularly fine edition by Savoy Books (www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/zenith.htm). Until then, there were only three copies of the book known, one of which was in the British Library. In recent times, of course, I have also given Howard due credit and even by the early 1960s was perfectly happy to announce him as an important influence. Tolkien, although my dislike for
The Lord of the Rings
became exaggerated in argument, was never an influence. As with Lovecraft, I think I came to him too late. Neither author needed any help from me to get the readership he deserved. I am proud, however, of my part in getting Skene republished and helping, in a small way, to make so many of his old magazine stories available online. From being a hero of my youth Monsieur Zenith appears to have become the friend of my seniority. As well as helping Savoy to reprint their extraordinarily lavish version of
Monsieur Zenith
, I have written a number of stories designed to return Elric to his roots. By linking Zenith (or Zodiac as he’s sometimes called) and Elric, I hope I show how they were almost certainly the same person! Sexton Blake is “disguised” by my use of the detective’s real name (Seaton Begg) from his days as a Home Office investigator. These stories were recently published as
The Metatemporal Detective
(Pyr, 2007). Zenith, rumoured to be a Yugoslavian aristocrat, disappeared during the intensity of World War II, making his last Sexton Blake appearance in a story called “The Affair of the Bronze Basilisk.” Another version of his return can be found at the Sexton Blake web site written by Mark Hodder (Blakiana.com).

Looking back through the non-fiction pieces of the 1950s and early 1960s, I seem to have been consistent in my admiration for Fritz Leiber. My dislike of
The Lord of the Rings
has, as I say, been exaggerated. I do, I must admit, dislike the religiosity exhibited by the work’s nuttier fans but had, in fact, every reason to like Professor Tolkien. When I was young and
The Lord of the Rings
was seen as one idiosyncratic book among others—like William Morris’s pseudo-sagas, E. R. Eddison’s
The Worm Ouroboros
, Lord Dunsany’s
The Gods of Pegana
or David Lindsay’s
A Voyage to Arcturus
—Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were both very kind to me, as were writers I admired rather more, like T. H. White, author of
The Sword in the Stone
, and Mervyn Peake, author of
Titus Groan
. Peake in particular was a more direct influence on the Elric stories. I came to know Leiber and take as much pleasure from his company as I did from his fine, precise prose which in my view is superior to that of every English fantast of his generation. I don’t think I was alone as a boy in preferring, for well-written escapism at least, the work of American writers. And not just for escapism, of course. Faulkner—though not most of Hemingway or Fitzgerald—was a huge enthusiasm, and I had others, including Twain, of course, together with Sinclair Lewis and his generation of realists. There were many I found in the pulps. I had loved the full-blooded science fantasies of Leigh Brackett and the work of the young writer she had befriended, Ray Bradbury, who often appeared in the same issues of
Planet Stories
and
Thrilling Wonder Stories
. It only occurred to me later how so much that was good about Anglophone fiction came out of California. It wasn’t just the great movies being made there from the beginning of the twentieth century. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars wasn’t too far away in the deserts beyond Tarzana, and both Brackett and Bradbury grew up there, making of Burroughs’s Mars what others made of Dickens’s London. Like his Vermilion Sands, Ballard’s Mars is as Californian as the language that influenced the likes of Chandler, Hammett, Cain and all those other Americans whose tone can still be heard, faintly perhaps in English literary fiction, to this day.

Before I came to write the first Elric stories I was already absorbing the kind of literature which influenced my generation, including that of the great French Existentialist writers and film-makers. I made my first trip to Paris at the age of fifteen. I went to see Sartre’s
Huis Clos
and Camus’s
Caligula
. I read their novels. I became an enthusiast for the likes of Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Boris Vian, Blaise Cendrars and William Burroughs. Although no great fan of most of the Beats, I had met some of them in Paris and had friends who were huge admirers. Later, I did come to know and like Burroughs. I absorbed the ideas of the time as much through conversation as by reading and, when I had gone from editing
Tarzan Adventures
to becoming an editor at Sexton Blake Library (a pulp series that had begun before World War I and that had published many of those Zenith stories before World War II), I had lost my taste for most fantasy fiction. SBL publishers, Amalgamated Press, at that time the largest periodical producers in the world, were horribly overstaffed in those easy years. Editorial offices were full of young men like me who came to journalism through juvenile publishing but who were huge enthusiasts for surrealism and the situation-alists, for Brecht and Beckett and Ionesco. They would go on to do great things, not always as journalists.

We went to Paris every chance we had. At George Whitman’s Paris bookstore (then called Mistral but now known as Shakespeare & Company) I would busk with my guitar, seated on a chair outside the shop (George didn’t mind since he knew all the money went back to him), and then as soon as I had enough, buy a couple of paperbacks for the rest of the day. It was there, in the shadow of Notre Dame, that I read my first true SF story, Alfred Bester’s
The Stars My Destination
, and wondered what I’d been missing. As it turned out, Bester was one of the few SF writers of his day that I enjoyed. He was a sophisticated, much-traveled man. He was associated with a group who published primarily in
Galaxy
magazine and included Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley. During the shame of McCarthyism, they were amongst the earliest to raise literary voices to examine modern times often far more rigorously and amusingly than literary writers had done. There were a few brave voices who, like their Russian counterparts, found places to publish and speak to a public who mourned what was going on.

I wasn’t the only one to see some sort of literary salvation in science fiction. That Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest and Edmund Crispin shared enthusiasm for certain kinds of SF is well-known, but many of us found it sketchy and condescending (Amis hated Burroughs and the Ballard of
Atrocity Exhibition
). But less obvious people, including Doris Lessing (then known only as a realist), were keen SF readers. Considered by many to be the finest literary writer of his day (and a prescient SF writer, as in his
The Old Men at the Zoo
) Angus Wilson had recommended that Sidgwick & Jackson in the UK publish
Tiger! Tiger!
, the original title of
The Stars My Destination
. Wilson, Elizabeth Bowen and an increasing number of writers of social fiction, as well as a surprising bunch of well-known philosophers, were discriminating readers of SF and other kinds of imaginative fiction. They sometimes even wrote it. Although the Amis camp demanded that SF remain a kind of literary ghetto, the rest of us wondered if it was possible, through the genre, for popular fiction and literary fiction to find common ground. At some point in the nineteenth century, perhaps even the early twentieth century, fiction had become the victim of a random kind of snobbery which denied a public to many highly accessible writers of equal ambition and artistic success and thus also discouraged a popular public from reading the established canon (“too highbrow”). My friends—Ballard, Bayley and Aldiss especially—believed much as I did. Quite a bit of our late-1950s and early-1960s conversation envisaged a magazine that would combine the values of the best SF and the best contemporary literature as well as features about what was happening in the arts and sciences.

You can imagine—with all these glorious ideas of reuniting the values of popular and literary fiction, which we shared with composers and visual artists as well as film-makers—the last kind of fiction I imagined myself writing was what Leiber had christened both heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery but which I had, it appeared, already termed epic fantasy (see “Putting a Tag on It”). By some strange twist of fate I was telling tales that had more in common with the nineteenth century than the twentieth in order to help support an avant-garde movement which looked forward to the twenty-first.

Though Tolkien had been published, he was still relatively obscure, and his kind of fantasy fiction was never published in the mainstream (Tolkien’s primarily academic publisher, George Allen & Unwin, was better known as Jung’s). Hard as it is to believe now,
The Lord of the Rings
was considered as some kind of post-nuclear allegory, too risky to chance in a paperback edition (which Tolkien, anyway, regarded as a bit vulgar). Both Burroughs and Howard were thoroughly out of fashion in the United States (though not so much in Britain), and there was no longer any kind of market for supernatural adventure fiction. The eagerness with which the public embraced the fantasts when they were finally released, an uncaged flock, upon the world, is a good lesson for publishers and for politicians.