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A little while ago, I almost posted a bit of a rant about a comment Philip Pullman made in a recent interview in which he makes clear, once again, that he doesn’t like, read, or write fantasy. I’ve heard him express this view before, and am at once annoyed (because I like fantasy) and embarrassed (because I really liked Pullman’s Northern Lights), not to say a little disappointed (a lack of generosity in a favourite author always disappoints me, because generosity — of understanding and imagination — is one of the things that makes an author a favourite, for me). In this case the actual quote was:

“I don’t read fantasy because I’ve very seldom found that the story in the book rewards my effort in getting to know the world of the story. You know, it’s all about the Sword of Gungleblath, and the Stom-Swallower of Zenbar or something… and it’s such an effort to do that…”

So, I thought, is it possible to come up with a book that would provide a counter-argument to that blanket dismissal of all imaginative fiction that strays that little bit too far beyond what is acceptable by serious (perhaps too serious) readers? I mean, for instance, Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan and Gormenghast? Or Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood? Or Alan Garner’s Elidor? Or Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan? The trouble is, with many of these books, there’s always the possibility of special pleading. Peake’s Gormenghast contains no magic, so might be real, therefore we can pretend it’s not fantasy. Holdstock’s Mythago Wood takes a rationalising, scientific approach to the fantastic, so we can call it science fiction instead. And Garner and Le Guin — both accepted by the literary crowd — used fantasy when writing for children, and you’re allowed to do that.

So, is there a book that is both undeniably fantasy of the “Sword of Gungleblath” type — by which Pullman means, I suppose, heroic fantasy, or otherworld fantasy — but which I think would stand up to a serious reader (or at least one who wouldn’t giggle in flustered embarrassment at the mention of magic)? Two candidates come to mind. One is Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight, but I’ve only read that once and would like to give it another go to make sure (and as it’s a long book, that may have to wait). The other is Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser series. And, to limit it to one book, I’d choose the first, Swords and Deviltry.

Leiber’s Fafhrd (“Faf-erd”) and the Gray Mouser stories are unashamedly of the “Sword of Gungleblath” type. They’re sword and sorcery, the most Gungleblathy type of fantasy there is. (Leiber coined the term “sword and sorcery”.) The pair, one a tall, brawny, Northern barbarian, the other a short, quick, wily southerner, are (to use Leiber’s own words) “the greatest swordsmen ever to be in this or any other universe of fact or fiction”. They do battle with sorcerers. They name their swords (not Gungleblath, but Scalpel and Graywand). They do derring, and engage in derring-do. But two things make these books truly magical (not in the fantasy sense, but in the wonderful-to-read sense). One is Leiber’s love of linguistic play. Leiber was the son of Shakespearean actors, and was brought up on the plays. He seems to have absorbed Shakespeare’s attitude that language isn’t a dictionaried thing (as it wasn’t, in Shakespeare’s time) but is to be played with, toyed with, tinkered with, enjoyed, owned. The other is that Leiber, as a writer, seemed to be driven by a need for a sort of human honesty, perhaps even self-confession, not usually found in writers of sword & sorcery. His pair of heroes may be “the greatest swordsmen ever to be”, but are far from perfect human beings. What’s more, pre-stealing a trick from Rowling a good thirty/forty years in advance, they mature as the series progresses. Their first-published tale (“Jewels in the Forest”, 1939) may well be a pretty much standard sword & sorcery yarn, but by the end of the series (The Knight and Knave of Swords, 1988), we’re dealing with two battle-scarred (Fafhrd has lost a hand) ex-bravos trying to put their wayward days behind them and live normal lives.

But it isn’t just at the end of their lives that the more serious themes appear. The first book in the series (which was not the first written) sets up the pair of adventurers for their first fall — a fall into disillusionment, loss of love, and loss of innocence.

It’s a book of three novellas. “The Snow Women” is about what forces Fafhrd to break with the oppressive battle of the sexes in his homeland, and go in search of the supposed wonders of civilisation. “The Unholy Grail” tracks the transformation from a rather hippie-ish hedge-wizard’s apprentice called Mouse to the darkly cynical, grey-magicking Mouser. And best of the three, the Nebula-winning “Ill Met In Llankhmar”, is about how the two heroes join forces for the first time, are egged on to a dangerous adventure by boastfulness, a little too much wine, and an attempt to impress the women they love, and in which, although it could be argued they succeed, they pay a price far higher than they expected.

No character in Leiber’s stories is a cliché, however much they may wear the costume of one. Fafhrd may be a brawny barbarian, but he is thoughtful, is trained as a singing skald, and is, therefore, a poet; and the Gray Mouser’s air of sophistication is always just being undermined by Leiber’s own constant sense of self-deflating irony.

I don’t think Pullman would ever read Swords and Deviltry. Perhaps, if he did, he’d get no further than the introductory chapter that introduces us to the ancient world of Nehwon (a rather clumsy name — yeah, it’s no-when backwards, but forwards it’s not among the great fantasy-world names) — that would sound, to him, I’m sure, uncomfortably like “Gungleblath”. But you, dear reader, gentle reader — oh, so perceptive and imaginative reader! — if you have any sympathy for fantasy, and can stand invented names, and heroes who name their swords, and perhaps can even bear to read a little about magic, surely you might enjoy Swords and Deviltry.

(If you haven’t read it already. In which case, wasn’t it good?)

Dracula wasn’t the first Victorian vampire novel. In Dickens’ Bleak House (1853), the court of Chancery, tangled nest of claims and counterclaims that it is, sucks the life out of all those who place their hopes in it (and isn’t Miss Flite’s collection of caged birds, to be released “on the day of judgement”, a little too much like Renfield’s menagerie?). In George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), though, the vampire is literature itself, with the three-decker novel of the day being described as “A triple-headed monster, sucking the blood of English novelists.”

Gissing isn’t talking about the likes of Dickens, but those jobbing writers trying to make a living in a conventionally-minded market where the power lies with the lending libraries first, the publishers second, and the writers last of all. Or, worse, he’s talking about those poor idealistic writers whose ideals don’t conform to the market, but persist with them all the same. Among the former is Edwin Reardon, whose one success as a novelist has led him into a too-hasty marriage with a woman a little too expectant of better things, after which the demand to write another, and another triple-decker, better or at least equal to his one good effort, destroys his finances, his marriage, his hopes and his health. Among the latter is Harold Biffen, whose devotion to a literary ideal (his long-worked-on novel, Mr Bailey, Grocer, takes as its subject “the ignobly decent” — i.e., the trade- and working-classes, unromanticised, and so made entirely unpalatable for the genteel-minded lending-library readership) leads him to live a life of constant borderline starvation, barely able to scrape together enough for a meal without pawning his coat. He nevertheless loves nothing more than to go round Edwin Reardon’s of a Sunday afternoon to spend an hour discussing a line or two of Euripides.

There’s a peculiar scene in Dracula, in which Jonathan Harker cuts the Count with a kukri knife, only to have pound notes and gold coins pour out. The effect is surreal, more like a political cartoon than a moment from a horror novel, but it may get to the heart of it. The vampire in Victorian fiction is, ultimately, money, or rather, the peculiar Victorian attitude to money: that it is far better to inherit a fortune (unearned) than to stoop to the horror of actually working for it. It’s the need to present a genteel front, to pretend to be of the moneyed classes rather than the working classes, which causes so much suffering in so many Victorian novels.

I first read New Grub Street in search of one of those immersive reading experiences only a Victorian blockbuster can give, and was in no way disappointed. Gissing based a lot of the plot on firsthand experience of his life as a jobbing writer (exaggerated a little, perhaps, to better express his own disappointments and frustrations). He somewhat bitterly lays down the rules of being a writer. Success, for all but the genuine genius (“Oh, if you can be a George Eliot, begin at the earliest opportunity”), is nothing to do with literary ability; it’s to do with money. For money wins you connections, connections get you not just work but reputation, and it’s reputation — social as much as literary — that assures you an income. Because of this, Gissing (who was expelled from university and imprisoned for stealing, which he did to keep a woman he later married — and who later died from drink — from prostituting herself) says a writer must endeavour to remain unmarried till his success is assured. For, as a bachelor, he can accept invites to important, connection-making dinners without being expected to repay the compliment with dinners of his own, something that requires not just a presentable wife, but a presentable home — which all comes down, once more, to needing money in order to make money. If he must marry before that, Gissing says, he should marry a good-natured working class girl, who will have no expectations of living in style while her writer husband hacks away to earn his paltry living. But by doing so, he will of course sacrifice his future success, for a working-class wife will never be presentable, should the writer progress to the stage of having to give dinners.

My favourite moral tangle from the novel — and moral tangles are a thing Victorian novels do so well — centres on Marian Yule, the daughter of a fading man of letters, Mr Yule. Mr Yule’s worsening eyesight and diminished reputation causes him to hit on a last-gasp plan to launch his own literary magazine, at the exact same time (amazingly enough) that his daughter stands to inherit a small sum of money — small, but large enough to fund a literary magazine. Or enough to allow Marian to marry the man she loves, Jasper Milvain, the Steerpike of Gissing’s novel, whose cool judgement of the literary market fits into a perfect five-year plan to see him ensconced at the top, by providing what it demands, flattering those who will further his career, and reminding himself, with a cold practicality, not to get carried away with awkward distractions like love. The trouble is, Jasper can’t help proposing to Marian, particularly when he hears of her small inheritance. To make things that little bit worse, Marian’s father thinks Jasper wrote a bad review of one of his works, and already hates him. It’s a perfect little moral dilemma, throwing love, family and money into the same pot, then adding a twist at the right moment to ensure it all gets that little bit worse, and then worse again.

Gissing is brilliant at depicting the Gormengastian gloom of literary London (“the valley of the shadow of books” is his term for the fog-swathed British Library, the centre of literary production), a world of bruised egos, thwarted ambitions, disappointed ideals, and subtle betrayals, all in the name of oh-so-Victorian practicality. He can spin an entire chapter out of one extended exchange full of muted sarcasm and wounded loyalty, subtly shifting power relationships (that between Marian and the father she does all the literary drudge work for being one of the best), and emotional manipulation, along with a little wallowing in pessimism in the name of realism.

It’s dark, despairing, and just that little bit stern — as a Victorian novel should be. But also, so very readable.

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…”

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.

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.

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.