Wizardry and Wild Romance by Michael Moorcock

I’d like all the writers I like to like each other. But writers, self-centred and individualistic as cats, are often the worst at being objective about other writers. There’s too much stepping on each other’s toes, too much “You don’t want to do it like that!” and “I was going to do that, and do it better!” As a result, I’ve learned to take a cruel joy in finding out that the writers I like in fact hate each other. There’s M R James on Lovecraft (“whose style is of the most offensive. He uses the word cosmic about 24 times”), Machen on Blackwood (“Tennyson said ‘the cedars sigh for Lebanon’, and that is exquisite poetry; but Blackwood believes the cedars really do sigh for Lebanon and that… is damned nonsense”). Both Tolkien and C S Lewis met and liked E R Eddison, but hated his outlook (Tolkien: “I thought that, corrupted by an evil and indeed silly ‘philosophy’, he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty”); while Fritz Leiber wrote of Tolkien, “He’s not interested in women and he’s not really interested in the villains unless they’re just miserable sneaks, bullies and resentful cowards…”

Wizardry & Wild Romance cover

Wizardry and Wild Romance, Gollancz (1987), cover by Les Edwards

Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry and Wild Romance is subtitled “A Study of Epic Fantasy”, but it’s no academic exercise in objectivity. I’ve read it many times, but reading it used to depress me, and it’s taken a good few years (and re-reads) to understand why. It is, of course, that Moorcock is a practitioner of the form he’s examining, and his “study” is more a cry than a critique. One of the reasons I’ve so often come back to reading it is that I wanted it to be like Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature”: a critical history of a genre by one of its major practitioners. But Lovecraft’s essay is, really, a critical history only by way of being a writer’s manifesto, a definition of what Lovecraft himself was trying to do. Because Moorcock shies away from explicit definitions (though he does offer one: “I am referring specifically to that body of prose fiction distinguished from myth, legend and folktale by its definite authorship and not genuinely purporting to be a true account of historical or religious events”), it leaves a sort of gap, the black hole of a definition which can only be inferred from the penumbra of praise and damnation that makes up the bulk of Wizardry and Wild Romance. And one of the problems is that Moorcock is so much better at damnation:

“…a new school is emerging of would-be Romantics, desperately striving to discover fresh sensibilities in the way repressed products of the middle-classes tried to loosen up with drugs and sentimental egalitarianism in the sixties. These people learned the school rules too well, however, and the main impression given by their fabulations is of red elbows and other miscellaneous bits of anatomy poking out through holes they have, with much effort and personal discomfort, rubbed in the straitjacket.”

And:

“Often the prose is little more than a mindless imitation of the euphonious aspects of the verse which, lacking the substance of the original, takes on the aspect of a mute attempting desperately to sing a Mozart song by mouthing an approximation of the sounds he has heard.”

And, most famously:

The Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle-class. The Lord of the Rings is much more deep-rooted in its infantilism than a good many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic.”

Like many an internet commentator, he brings the Nazis into the debate early on (mentioning Rudolph Hess in the Foreword). And he has a particular downer on HP Lovecraft:

“An aggressive, neurotic personality, though not without his loyalties and virtues, Lovecraft came under the influence of Poe, Dunsany and the imaginative writers of the Munsey pulp magazines and produced some of the most powerful infantile pathological imagery and some of the most astonishingly awful prose ever to gain popularity, yet his early work, written primarily in homage to Dunsany, from where he borrowed the idea of an invented pantheon of gods, is lighter in touch and almost completely lacking in the morbid imagery of his more successful horror stories in which death, idealism, lust and terror of sexual intercourse are constantly associated in prose which becomes increasingly confused as the author’s embattled psyche received wound after wound and he regressed into an attitude of permanent defensiveness.”

Whew.

That word, “aggressive”, occurs quite often in Moorcock’s little critiques, whether it’s of Lovecraft, John Norman, Tolkien or C S Lewis. But its use does itself come across as, well, quite aggressive:

“One should perhaps feel some sympathy for the nervousness occasionally revealed beneath their thick layers of stuffy self-satisfaction, typical of the second-rate schoolmaster, but sympathy is hard to sustain in the teeth of their hidden aggression which is so often accompanied by a deep-rooted hypocrisy.”

The thing I always failed to notice in my early readings and re-readings of Moorcock’s book (which usually left me feeling how much he must hate the genre, and wondering why he bothered to write a book about it) was his evident passion for it. He swipes so eloquently against the writers he hates precisely because he feels so strongly about what they’re doing — or, to his mind, mis-doing. He does praise writers, some not unequivocally — Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E Howard — others highly — Fritz Leiber, M John Harrison, Robert Holdstock, Mervyn Peake — though never, sadly, as eloquently as his criticisms. But he also presents, if you can spot it amidst the fusillade, evidence of having not only read a great deal of it, but a good deal about it.

Rodney Matthews cover

Rodney Matthews cover

And, of course, he has written a lot of it himself. But here, Moorcock doesn’t discuss his own work, which may account for the key gap I find in Wizardry and Wild Romance (whose title I always assumed was a quote from a genuine poem, till I tried to track it down, and found that the “Wheldrake” it’s attributed to is a Swinburne pseudonym (used, appropriately, to write bad reviews of his own work) as well as, later, a Moorcock character).

Wizardry and Wild Romance was the first book about fantasy I read, and it certainly taught me a lot:

“An intrinsic part of the epic fantasy is exotic landscape…. and no matter how well drawn their characters or good their language writers will appeal to the dedicated reader of romance according to the skill by which they evoke settings…”

And:

“Melodrama and irony work very well together; the best fantasies contain both elements, which maintain tonal equilibrium…”

Moorcock may bash the “morally bankrupt” middle-classes, and he may sometimes present a rather defensive maturismo somewhat reminiscent of Jackie Wullschläger’s in Inventing Wonderland, but you have to admit he does it with style. And if you can stand back far enough not to be splashed by the acid he spits, there’s a good deal of enjoyment to be had from the sheer wit of the book, even if you disagree with the points being made:

“If the bulk of American sf could be said to be written by robots, about robots, for robots, then the bulk of English fantasy seems to be written by rabbits, about rabbits and for rabbits.”

And, perhaps the most revealing statement about Moorcock’s own tastes in fiction:

“If we must be given stories about talking animals, let them at least be sceptical, sardonic and world-weary talking animals.”

While to me, it’s to find recourse from scepticism, cynicism and world-weariness that I turn to fantasy in the first place — that, to me, is what literary magic is all about, what Tolkien called “re-enchantment” — but that, of course, is my own bias.

cover

John Picacio cover

Although it was updated in 2004 for the Monkeybrain Books edition, Wizardry and Wild Romance is, really, a product of its time, and is best read that way. It came from a writer witnessing the commercialisation of what had been, to him and the writers he admired, a deeply individualistic, often revolutionary art form — but that’s a battle that has long been lost, the commercial element of heroic fantasy being here to stay. The updates to the book, to me, feel a bit tagged on and less part of the central, anguished cry that spawned the kernel essay, “Epic Pooh”, back in — when was it? According to the Foreword, parts of Wizardry and Wild Romance were published as early as 1963, and that’s over fifty years ago!

Wizardry and Wild Romance is a book I will come back to and re-read, as I have come back to it many times in the twenty seven years since I first read it. But it’s been a process of learning how to read it: not as objective criticism, more as the expression of a passion, and of an ideal, that Moorcock never clearly states, but certainly defends — in style.

Comments (6)

  1. Aonghus Fallon says:

    My impression from reading that book (and admittedly it was a while ago) was that Moorcock was very consciously distancing himself from a certain kind of stodgy, middle-class fantasy, and the assumptions that come with it. In this respect, his criticisms of Tolkien have some justification: e.g. in ‘The Hobbit’, the trolls and the goblins both have cockney accents. But if this is his stance, it’s an inconsistent one. He’s a big fan of Peake whose work shares much the same prejudices. And that’s disregarding how his own S&S heroes are predominantly princes or counts. One could cite Jerry Cornelius as an example of a working-class hero, but Jerry’s place in the class-system is ambivalent: he’s working-class but has a social mobility that would have been denied to somebody of his background twenty years earlier, nor – for all his love of London – does he show any great eagerness to stay close to his roots, just dropping in on his Mum from time to time.

  2. Murray Ewing says:

    Yes, what Wizardry and Wild Romance is crying out for is Moorcock talking about his own fiction. I haven’t read any of it recently, though I have six volumes of collected Elric on my to-read shelf… Never read any Jerry Cornelius, though.

  3. Aonghus Fallon says:

    A Moorcock autobiography would be well worth checking out. He would have grown up while the war was on-going, been a teenager in the ‘Fifties and a young man in the ‘Sixties. Add in examples of how he was influenced by the media of the day and an overview of the publishing world during those periods (especially the world of British pulp) – yeah, I think many people would find it fascinating.

  4. Murray Ewing says:

    I’d certainly read it. His new novel coming out later this year, The Whispering Swarm, is said to contain ‘semi-autobiographical’ details, whilst also being a fantasy — so, that’s got me intrigued.

  5. George says:

    I would disagree with a couple of points here. First, the bit about the Moorcock study being “a product of its time” and that the battle for “a deeply individualistic, often revolutionary art form” has long been lost, “the commercial element of heroic fantasy being here to stay” seems simplistic. For one thing, this creates the depressing feeling that the fantasy genre is now nothing more than a set of programmatic directives that may as well be served by a computer. But the “commercial element” was always there. And anyone with talent, intelligence and something to say, i.e. anyone individualistic, will inevitably use found materials to create something distinctive. Whether this amounts to something “revolutionary” is always a possibility.

    My second point is with Aonghus Fallon’s observation that many of the writers Moorcock likes – and even himself – share the prejudices of Tolkien & co. Well – fantasy writers have almost always had a habit of writing about aristocrats and lords. But you only have to compare their outputs to note that there are profoundly different world views being expressed. Tolkien’s world is one that is deeply nostalgic and wishes to preserve a certain order. In this world, evil comes from outside. Moorcock’s multiverse creates a sense of infinite possibilities in which morality seems a shifting uncertain matter. Indeed Moorcock tends to avoid the concepts “good” and “evil” and talks instead about “law” and “chaos”. Peake’s Gormenghast novels depict a closed world that seems to be decaying form within.

    Ironically I don’t feel I have any grievance against Tolkien. He expressed the way he felt and he did it quite spectacularly – as does any fantasy writer with originality and imagination. One of the fairest comparisons between Tolkien and Peake (and those two always seem to be pitted against each other) came from Brian Aldiss in his Trillion Year Spree. Aldiss felt that Tolkien’s prose was merely serviceable but this made it ideal for the long emphatic read. Peake’s prose was sharp and quirky but also highly concentrated which made it too much to take in long hauls but good for short bursts.

  6. Murray Ewing says:

    I suppose what I said about the commercialisation of fantasy was me trying to get to the root of what (by my reading) was behind Moorcock’s criticisms of the genre, and why I always finished a reading of Wizardry and Wild Romance feeling he didn’t like fantasy. I certainly didn’t want to make it sound as though I felt fantasy was a lost cause! You’re right, individual talents will always come through. Commercialisation of a genre does, though, does mean there’s a lot more noise against which to make themselves heard!

    Tolkien and Moorcock certainly seem to exist at opposite ends of the conservative/revolutionary spectrum. I wouldn’t put Tolkien’s position entirely down to nostalgia. Fighting in the First World War must have given him a very different perspective on how a world could be lost. Defending it from such a loss is a bit more of a noble motive than just nostalgia. I suppose it must all come down to a balance between the two poles, in the end. As Moorcock has it, when he depicts a world entirely ruled by law or by chaos, both extremes are boring. (If I’m remembering, right!)

    That’s interesting about Aldiss’s take on Tolkien and Peake. Though I’d say Peake’s style could work in extended sequences, when the drama was there. The section where Steerpike is pursued through the abandoned sections of Gormenghast in the second book I remember being really gripping.

    Thanks for those interesting comments!

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