Introduction to Firing the Cathedral
That would have been, what, in 1968 or thereabouts? Fourteen years old, still anxious over penis size and therefore reading Howard’s Conan in attempted compensation, finding it impossible to care a shred about this great-thewed simple-minded rapist yob or his adventures, we eventually alight on Moorcock’s Elric. Pale and moody, doomed, unable to get out of bed without the aid of drugs, obsessively involved in hopeless and impossible relationships that would forever haunt him, how could any teenage boy fail to identify? Ravenous, besotted by this new, exotic flavour, wolfing down all the available material which, as it turned out, was no more than two slim paperback collections. Mayflower, wasn’t it? Those dreamy psychedelic montage covers that would later turn up in the slide-projected image banks of the progressive light show. The Stealer of Souls. Stormbringer.
Then nothing. No Elric the Freebooter, Elric the King, Elric the Warrior, Elric in Las Vegas. No posthumous collaborations with Lyn Carter or L. Sprague De Camp. Only the news that Moorcock was both editor of and contributor to New Worlds, a science fiction magazine available from Westone’s the Newsagent, opposite the Chinese laundry and the Labour Exchange up in Grafton Street. In spite of the disturbing photographic cover imagery, this was presumably a monthly publication dedicated to further exploits of the cursed albino prince from lost Melniboné, to further tales of swords and sorcery and melanin deficiency. Purchased and taken home, opened immediately to the Moorcock piece, A Cure for Cancer. The accompanying spot illustrations by the great Mal Dean, despite depicting a protagonist with long white hair, provided no immediate reassurance. For a start, the white haired man was black, dressed in a fur coat but inclined to drag, and not a runesword anywhere in sight. That first slack-jawed, fourteen-year-old, horror-struck glimpse of Jerry and his world. So utterly, grotesquely wrong, and yet so right.
Love at first sight. Cornelius cultists from the very start, asking their mums to get them ‘car coats’ like their hero, ending up in something waist-length, brown and made of Rayon fabric with a furry road-kill collar. If only they had a sister to fuck, a brother to shoot, a social collapse to say something cryptically witty about, a blitzed-out urban backdrop to pose foppishly against, a Miss Brunner to cringe before, all unlikely prospects in those boom years. Come the 1980s, though, it was a different story. Brunnerland. All of the urban meltdown you could ever hope for, with the fratricide and incest both available in any soap-opera. You could even get the proper car coats, but by then the whole idea was turning out to be a lot less fun that it had sounded like in the initial pitch.
Jerry dropped out of sight. The man we had erroneously believed to be the very spirit, the essential literary creation of the twentieth century, had seemingly upped stumps and limped dejectedly for the pavilion without waiting for the final scoreboard, the millennial after-match commiserations. Written off. Dismissed. Forgotten. Hippy ephemera, like Caroline Coon or the Oz trials. The smart money said that we should hear no more of him outside of wistful subterranean retrospectives, tragic ill-advised appearances on After They Were Famous in a double bill with Peter Wyngarde. Moorcock himself had similarly disappeared into a trail-dust cloud of rumour: pursued by Pinkertons and Revenuers he’d run off and joined the Texas Rangers. Shot part of his foot off in a fumbled quick-draw accident, or so they said. It all seemed such a sorry end for such a glorious folly.
