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.

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The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen

The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen“Literature,” declares Machen’s protagonist Lucian Taylor at one point in the novel, “is the sensuous art of causing exquisite impressions by means of words.” But it’s not “exquisite impressions” Machen himself is after in The Hill of Dreams. Here, he traces the alchemical inner life of Lucian Taylor, and while he does achieve what Lucian himself strives for in his writing — “that indefinite something which is scarcely so much style as manner, or atmosphere” — it’s the oscillation between the extremes of agony and ecstasy that gives Machen’s book its life.

Beautifully written, The Hill of Dreams is never merely beautiful (as that harking after the “exquisite” might imply), for Machen’s “manner, or atmosphere” is tussling with very active, very dangerous, psychological forces, and the lyrical flow of the prose is shot through with moments of fiery vivacity — a storm of image and feeling, full of flame, light, wonder and horror, rather than anything so passive as the simply “exquisite”:

“The wind blew wildly, and it came up through the woods with a noise like a scream, and a great oak by the roadside ground its boughs together with a dismal grating jar. As the red gained in the sky, the earth and all upon it glowed, even the grey winter fields and the bare hillsides crimsoned, the waterpools were cisterns of molten brass, and the very road glittered. He was wonder-struck, almost aghast, before the scarlet magic of the afterglow. The old Roman fort was invested with fire; flames from heaven were smitten about its walls, and above there was a dark floating cloud, like a fume of smoke, and every haggard writhing tree showed as black as midnight against the blast of the furnace.”

Arthur Machen in the 1890s, from the Friends of Arthur Machen site

Arthur Machen in the 1890s, from the Friends of Arthur Machen site

There’s a reverie-like quality to the flow of the narrative, as Machen slips from one image or experience to the next, always harking back, again and again, to certain primal moments. Lucian’s story could, in fact, be described as a series of brief but deeply-felt encounters with female figures — imaginary, real or, in Lucian’s superheated inner world, the imaginary written over the real — after which he rebounds so deeply into his own inner realms, to deal with his ambivalent feelings of horror and desire, that he loses touch with reality altogether. The first is when, as a youth, he lies down in an old Roman fort and either dreams, or daydreams, or actually experiences a visitation from what may be a supernatural creature, or may be “the symbol of the Beloved in hill and wood and stream, and every flower and every dark pool”, whose presence is only described as an after-impression of “the dark eyes that had shone over him, and the scarlet lips that had kissed him”. Lucian feels a “panic fear”, and runs away, but all his life, afterwards, he’s drawn back, a helpless moth to the alchemical flame of this archetypal female. (Just as the landscape, as described in the quote above, is so lit up with images of fire and molten metal, Lucian’s women are, too: one has a “red flame” in her cheek and “bronze” hair.)

The least dangerous of these women is the entirely un-supernatural local girl, Annie, who takes pity on Lucian as he wanders, distraught, one night. Lucian falls in love with her, but in typical fashion prefers it when she has to go away, so he can set about devising rituals for worshipping her as an ideal, rather than a real woman. He creates a book of poetry “written all in symbols, and in the same spirit of symbolism he decorated it, causing wonderful foliage to creep about the text, and showing the blossom of certain mystical flowers, with emblems of strange creatures, caught and bound in rose thickets” (like the “matted boughs” into which that initial female creature disappeared), reciting it while lacerating himself with thorns and briars. (“A practice that seemed to me unwholesome”, Lord Dunsany says, with a certain understatement, in his introduction.) Meantime, Lucian begins another practice, that of imagining himself into another realm, a fantasised Roman past, “the garden of Avallaunius”, which he endeavours to make more real to himself than the village he lives in, whose people are (to his eyes) cruel, scornful and gossipy, or simply unable to understand his sensitive, imaginative nature. When he learns Annie has married someone else, Lucian doesn’t seem to mind; it’s as if it takes away the necessity of having to compromise his very exacting ideals: “he had feared lest love itself should destroy love.”

New Grub Street (Penguin Classics) by George GissingComing into a small inheritance, he moves to London, finds himself a garrett, and engages in “the great adventure of letters”. Despite being set in the same city and the same era, Machen bypasses the world of Gissing’s New Grub Street, and on both sides — not for him the wearing-down drudgery of commercial realities, Lucian’s world is entirely composed of the extremes of agony and ecstasy, that even Gissing’s most idealistic and downtrodden writers, Edwin Reardon and Harold Biffen, with their Sunday-afternoon discussions of “a line or two of Euripides”, miss by miles. Lucian is not trying to earn a living, but to achieve something far more occult:

“He had fallen into the habit of always using this phrase “the work” to denote the adventure of literature; it had grown in his mind to all the austere and grave significance of “the great work” on the lips of the alchemists…”

It’s amazing to see how Machen can pull off an entire chapter about the agonies, futilities, and desperations of the entirely internal battle of making art — “an infernal passion, a species of madness” — as Lucian strives to capture his literary ideal on paper and fails again and again and again, till “he had bought, by a long experience and by countless hours of misery, a knowledge of his limitations, of the vast gulf that yawned between the conception and the work…” Locked in his own inner struggles for too long, he realises too late that:

“…he could not gain the art of letters and he had lost the art of humanity.”

Yet Machen makes this relentlessly downward tale readable. The Hill of Dreams is, above all, a book that survives on its style, its “manner, or atmosphere”. Sometimes, reading it, I was unsure exactly what was happening — were we in a new experience, or revisiting an old memory? — but, in a sense, this is the point of the book, as Lucian’s preference for imagination over reality, and the way every encounter with any woman pulls him back to that primal, supernatural incident, casts echoes throughout all his subsequent experience. So, in a way, all his experiences are both new and the same, re-encounters with his primal, inner archetype — “the symbol of the Beloved” — never with anything real, but always with something unreal, though dangerous, and desirous, enough, to him.

Machen - Tales of Horror and the Supernatural vol 1The end, for Lucian, is inevitable — he has come to rely a little too much on the contents of a certain bottle of “dark blue glass”, and he’s found, at last, having taken “a drop too much”, by his landlady, a woman with “splendid bronze hair”, the final female he must retreat from. But The Hill of Dreams isn’t a tragedy. It’s the story of one highly sensitive, highly imaginative man’s internal transformation of a reality he can’t face, into something wild, dangerous, ecstatic and terrible, an alchemical working whose focus was only accidentally literature — it’s far more in Lucian’s head, in his entire sensory experience, that finds wonders and horrors alike in both country and city. Most of all, it is Machen’s prose that defies any tragic reading. Always alive, always seeking the bright and fiery, the energetic and, if necessary, the dangerous, it carries you along like an enchantment.

For an epilogue, Machen could well have used his own words from “The White People”:

“Yes… magic is justified of her children. There are many, I think, eat dry crusts and drink water, with a joy infinitely sharper than anything within the experience of the “practical” epicure.”

Replace “magic” with “literature”, or perhaps just “imagination”, and that statement applies to Lucian’s “taking of heaven by storm” (the “essence of sin”, according to Ambrose in “The White People”): “an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner.” Like Lovecraft’s, Machen’s strongest writing defies being read simply as horror. Rather, it’s a striving to capture the terrifying and ecstatic clash between a strongly-felt imagination and an unignorable reality. In such a clash, it’s always reality that wins out, but those aesthetic souls like Lucian can have their private victories at least — on the printed page, if nowhere else.

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Arthur Machen’s The White People, Jo Walton’s Among Others

Arthur Machen’s “The White People” is one of the true masterpieces of short fantasy fiction, one that never fails to surprise me with its downright weirdness whenever I read it. Its main portion purports to be the journal of a young girl initiated by her one-time nanny into a strange world of rural magic and skewed faerie folklore. Its narrative veers from fragmentary dark fairy tales to the narrator’s exploration of the weirder, wilder regions of the surrounding countryside, all written in a breathless stream-of-consciousness style that predates the experiments of the Modernists by almost a decade.

Machen wrote the core part of “The White People” in the 1890s, but (quite understandably) didn’t know what to do with it, and it remained unpublished till 1904, when he packaged it up with an explanatory prologue and epilogue and submitted it to Horlick’s Magazine. Or was it Ovaltine Monthly? Either way, some magazine with far too cosy a title for such a twisted little tale. Perhaps because it was the only way it could be published, Machen’s prologue and epilogue try to turn the tale into a decadent horror story, with two gentlemen aesthetes discussing the young girl’s journal as an example of “sin”, and concluding with the information that the young girl was found dead, probably poisoned by an overdose of whatever had been giving her all these weird visions. This, perhaps a necessary defensive manoeuvre on Machen’s part to fend off the criticisms of literary conservatives, has always struck me as a false note. The narrator of “The White People” is just too full of vitality, and of magic, to be the mere victim of a horror story. “The White People” touches the genuine twilight world of early adolescent imagination gone weird, blurring the dividing line between childhood games and magic ritual, fairy tales and ecstatic religious vision.

This is a whole favourite sub-genre of mine: stories of the superheated twilight world of adolescent imagination, particularly where fantasy is used to make the distinctions all the more explicit. Examples include Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Steve Cockayne’s The Good People, (is Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory one? I can’t remember, now) and films such as Spirit of the Beehive and of course the superb Pan’s Labyrinth. The most obvious thing to do with this sort of story is to equate the fantasy/magical aspects with childhood imagination, and to have the adolescent narrator come to terms with the loss of their childhood by having them lose the magic. This is the Peter Pan approach, where the only way to retain the magic of childhood is to remain stuck as a “Lost Boy”, an eternal child, regressed and cut off from adulthood. But the best of these stories see through this rather obvious use of fantasy-as-metaphor for childhood, and do something different. The best of them take the magic through to the adult world. Doing this convincingly, and meaningfully, is difficult, which is why a good example can be hard to find.

Jo Walton’s Among Others does it marvellously. Like Machen, Walton is Welsh, as is her narrator, Morwenna. (I did my best to sound the story in a Welsh accent as I read it. It probably wouldn’t have convinced a native speaker, but what would a native Welsh speaker be doing in my head, anyway?) Written in the form of Mor’s diary when she is fifteen (and set quite specifically in 1979 and 1980), Among Others starts soon after a terrible event in its young heroine’s life. She was born with a twin, with whom she shared the intensely imaginative world of her childhood life. Like Machen’s heroine, the pair rambled the Welsh countryside, naming its ruins and hidden pockets with fantasy-tinged names (many of them lifted gleefully from The Lord of the Rings), and quite naturally interacting with the wonderfully imagined faerie folk they find there. But Morwenna and Morganna’s mother is a witch; she is also insane (the two may go together), and has dark plans. The girls go against their mother. The story of exactly what happens is spread out through the novel, so I won’t say any more on it, but by the time Among Others begins, Mor is living in the aftermath. Her twin is dead, she herself has a badly injured leg, she has run away from her mad mother, and her childhood is over forever.

The fantasy elements in Among Others are spot-on subtle. Mor spends a lot of time wondering about the fairies she sees and the magic she does, and how it is different from the way the world operates anyway. The book provides one of the best, most succinct, explanations of faerie nature when it says fairies are as they are because they’re “part of everything”. But for much of it, Among Others could be a non-fantastic novel, merely about an imaginative teenager. One of the best parts of the book is Mor’s passion for science fiction, which she consumes by the bookload. It’s amazing how fun it can be to read about a fictional character’s reaction to a book you yourself have read. It’s not essential to know a bit about late 70s SF, but it would certainly add to your appreciation of the book. (If not, anyway, the internet can provide all the footnotery you need. Not having read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, I had to look up “karass“, for instance, which is a key word in Among Others, referring as it does to a group of true friends who share your interests; one of the main threads of Mor’s story is her wish to find such a group, and what happens when she uses a little magic to do so.)

A wonderful book. I’m amazed it hasn’t yet found a UK publisher, as I think it could well be a mainstream, as well as an SF/fantasy, success over here. Still, perhaps in the current Amazonian age of bookselling, such things matter less. (Actually, now I come to think of it, I got mine through the Book Depository.) (And I should point out that I first heard about the book via the wonderful Notes from Coode Street podcast.)

But to return to “The White People”, Among Others reads more like how Machen’s tale should have ended, with its teen narrator not losing herself in the horrors of a dangerously un-Christian world of imagination, but finding the proper place for magic in a real, adult world. Among Others has a wonderfully affirmative ending. It’s one of those rare books that blends its fantastical and realistic elements seamlessly into a single vision, that manages to seem far more true, and far more insightful, of what it means to be a human being than a merely realistic novel ever could.

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