Fantastic Metropolis

He’d been written off. Affectionately, it was true, but still discounted as too much a creature of his times, who’d vanished with them into Ten Best retrospectives, hindsight orgies and I Love… The Bomb Years. Poor old Jerry, stood there shivering, watching while they repossessed the Roller. Sighs and wipes his nose, silvering one crushed velvet sleeve. Where had it all gone wrong? Or, for that matter, where had it all gone? Evaporated in the sweaty, wired Bolivian twilight of the later 1970s, around the time the Derry & Toms building had been claim-jumped, Biba’s Weimar flapper fantasies outflanked by Dorothy Perkins and her pastel horde. When the New York Dolls played the roof-garden there in ‘73, Biba employees were obliged to first dispense with a neat queue of pack-a-mac clad female skeletons left over from A Cure for Cancer’s opening chapter. Now look at it. The location and its aura both had gone into some sort of kabbalistic plunge through layers of materialisation and mundane solidity, from the ethereal heights of fiction, to a haven for Art Deco proto-goths, finally grounded as twin-set high-street emporium.

If the dreamtime’s collapse had ended there, the situation would still have been salvageable. In the same decade, though, other fictions, far more dangerous, began their catastrophic plummet into form. Miss Brunner, obviously, had always been the one to keep your eye on. Even when confined entirely to the symbol level as an icy fascist glyph, a rune, she’d been unnerving. Dropped into reality, however, she was ruinous. That dominatrix essence, percolating down through cinematic, near real astral planes in the cheekbones of Jenny Runacre, to be at last made manifest in Grantham’s Iron Virgin, Downing Street, 1979. What had it said, the cover line in that last 1960s issue of New Worlds, beneath the paranoiac photo-silhouette? “Forget 1970. What about 1980?” Something like that. By 1980, everyone’s bad dreams would be made actual. In some instances, they’d be in office. ‘Ennit real, ay?’ as his mum would no doubt have indignantly observed.

Mind you, by 1980 Mrs. C. herself had died. Not for the first time admittedly: the whole clan had been dead and resurrected at one time or other, shifted into new identities and names, Cornell, Carnelian, caught up in some karmic witness protection program. Still, it made you think. It wasn’t only family, with their reversible demises and their deaths no obstacle, but friends of family too, gone by the century’s end, not coming back. Angela Carter, with that trapdoor in her smile. Jack Story, one last whisky breath escaping through the snottygobble trees. James Colvin and that bloody fateful filing cabinet filled with rejected manuscripts. The 1900s, like an old style Mafia, had tried to take as many people down with them as possible. If not by the plain, straightforward rubout then, like Jerry, by planned obsolescence. He’d always been too much about the twentieth century to survive it, or so everyone assumed. As it turned out, everyone was wrong. As it turned out, even the twentieth century hadn’t been about the twentieth century.

Easy mistake to make, the assumption that Cornelius was too much of his times, and not an impression he sought to correct. Every word and gesture, every article of clothing or accessory was so up to the moment that it risked rear-end collision. Parodying Ian Fleming’s fetish for the listed brand name, he would end up inadvertently prefiguring the thousand-year Reich of the hot designer label. Many’s the time you’d see him looking lost in Berwick Street, pacing in circles searching for the offices of International Times, dressed in a Glyn Jones car-coat, looking smart and solarised and Art Nouveau; or else some striking and magnificently vulgar number from Mal Dean’s latest collection.

The circling, elliptic dialogue was also of its moment, grown in the same Ladbroke Grove edifice basements as the looking-glass exchanges of Performance, in which Fox and Jagger lip-synch the sardonic, cryptic quips of vanished David Litvinoff. (Cornelius family associate Taffy Sinclair would, for reasons of his own, later deliberately confuse and conflate Litvinoff with the vanished inhabitant of the Princelet Street synagogue, another disappeared David, but that’s a different story.) The resonant and somehow menacing Cornelius non-sequiturs would be, before the century’s end, a language every television set and media personality was talking. Zeit-bites. Verbal stun-grenades. Bomb mots. Spin doctors flung into political oblivion by the centrifugal force of their own language.

And then, of course, there were all the supporting players, the outrageous fever-dream grotesques, all the impossibly exaggerated jet-black satires, as we then fondly imagined them to be. The seedy, sentimental backstreet arms-dealer, or the sleek Indian nuclear physicist. The monstrous sticky-fingered Bishop and the crackhead-blueprint brother. Whitehall and Westminster ice-queens that preceded Stella Rimington or Margaret Thatcher. Storming, psychopathic U.S. Generals amok in Europe. Creatures such as these were nowhere to be found in life, or science fiction. This was not, could never be the human future, where we had been promised jetpacks, robots, space migration, ways to skip out on the consequences of our history and leave the black mess of our past behind. The horror circus, the global psychosis promised in the pages of New Worlds was surely nothing but the product of embittered, cynical neurotics, talking up their own arrested-adolescence paranoia as pretended vision, as attempted literary movement, as another spurious Onew wave’. Why was John Sladek wasting time on texts that seemed obsessed with codes, as if encryption had some part to play in human times to come? Why couldn’t J.G.Ballard just stop going on about how tower blocks shape psychopathologies, about celebrity car crashes as emergent icons, bloodied obelisks erected in the new group mind? What had this to do with science fiction, with the future, with the price of fish, with anything?

By 1980, Jerry seemed as obsolete as any other glittering exotic piece of wreckage that originated from that now alternately reviled and sentimentalised decade, the 1960s. He would rarely stick his head outdoors. A Tank Trapeze here, a Swastika Set-Up there, but you could tell he wasn’t having fun. A gloomy Gus, and could you blame him? Norman ‘Never Trust a Hippy’ Tebbit, unacknowledged architect of Punk Rock, had already named the ’60s as the source of the insidious blight responsible for all subsequent social ills. Experimental fiction or indeed experimental anything was, we now realised, merely another paving slab along the path to chaos, hell, and other impediments to a Free Market economy. Martin Amis himself had confidently dismissed William Burroughs as ‘boring’. Sixties. Even the word became a curse, a judgement. The styles and language of the times, worn like a strawberry-mark, became a stigma, became fashion suicide. If you could admit to being there, you weren’t there. Jerry, with his haircut, with his Cuban-heeled elastic-sided boots and dandy mannerisms, clearly never stood a chance. All washed up, he could feel the ’90s and Laurence Llewellyn Bowen bearing down on him. He knew he had to cut his losses, get out fast, go underground, or end up travestied. The decade’s very light conspired, it seemed, to make him look his age, to look less than the man he’d been when we first met him.

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.

Now it is 2002, a flinching toe dipped tentatively in the tides of a new century. Cricket-ball Boeings and skyscraper wickets. Lonesome Cowboy George and Taliban Sam, the al-Qaeda Kid. Bloody tit for bloody tat in the Holy Land, and nervous nuclear Kashmir sweaters. Now we have Firing the Cathedral, and suddenly it’s obvious which century the Cornelius canon was describing all along. Unlike transsexual novelist Jillian Burnes and her ilk, unable to find language adequate to our contemporary human plight, unable to describe our times, our current situation, Moorcock seizes the 21st century bull by its horns and wrestles it into submission with a Texan rodeo confidence that seems equal to his youthful zest of more than thirty years ago. The reassembled original cast, Mo Collier, Una Persson and all the rest seem almost gleefully aware that this is their time, the apocalypse they were created to embellish, attacking their familiar roles with gusto. The random news-bite interjections have never seemed more relevant, suggesting as they do vectors of history colliding as an eight-lane pile-up in the present. Professor Hira’s quantum worldview hints at imminent disruptions in the linear human view of time, some looming singularity where our banal, nostalgically remembered past and our banal anticipated future are collapsed into a blazing, simultaneous Now; a single room that’s papered with five hundred years of headlines. Meanwhile, oceans rise. The map, both literally and politically, becomes a thing in flux where nothing’s fixed and where, for better or for worse, there are no longer limits to the possibilities.

This sudden agoraphobia-inducing disappearance of our normal human boundaries is almost certainly the key to Jerry’s timely reappearance and to the unusually light-hearted, sprightly mood that Firing the Cathedral finds him in. Moorcock has caught the tang of something in the 21st century air beside Daisycutters, fallout, Buddha-dust, cremated cow. A whiff of new potentials, new excitements, new discoveries. New Worlds. The nature of the catastrophe was not terminal. Despite the enervations and inertia of the century’s last decades, its energy survived and Heat Death was averted. Entropy theory itself, in a right old turn-up, had fallen to bits in the face of so-called Chaos mathematics, which suggested that just as chaos naturally generates islands of order (such as Jupiter’s Red Spot), so too will order tend inevitably to complexity, spontaneously generating fractal chaos. Planebombs. Tumbling markets and Plastique pedestrians. Strontium Shiva dancing in Islamabad. Thomas the Tank-Engine’s horrified eyes, all of those signals passed on Red. Verwirrung. Chaos. Arioch.

With the collapse of any structure, be it Trade Tower, currency, Uranium atom, ideology, comes a release of energy. That, no doubt, is what has put the bracing Skegness ozone in the century’s air, the spring in Jerry’s step. It’s given him the giggles, all this raining rubble, flares descending slowly over Manger Square, giant dust clouds rolling down Manhattan avenues as though from the stampeding ghosts of vanished buffalo. With every human signal buckling under the sheer weight of information, breaking down to noise and incoherence, he has never made more sense, never before seemed quite so confident and chipper.

You could say the same about his author. Moorcock is perhaps the most imposing landmark left upon the British literary landscape, once one ventures past the neatly-tended suburbs of Booker-approved civilisation and into the lurid, surprisingly healthy pulp wilderness beyond. The breadth of vision evident in later works such as the stunning, monumental Mother London or the shamelessly enjoyable King of the City (almost a Cornelius outing without Jerry) has always been there, most obviously in his Cornelius quartet and the accompanying short stories, comic strips, apocrypha, Corneliana. It’s just that back in the 1960s and the 1970s very few people yet possessed the language or the terms of reference necessary to decode that vision, would need a couple more decades to see it as a comically horrific prophecy, precise in all its major details. Now, though, it’s 2002. With the runaway train right on top of us, we finally make out the shouted warning. Now, with his fictions blooming monstrously into reality about him, Moorcock and his most iconic vehicle return into a world, a century, a context, that has suddenly made shocking sense of both of them.

Jerry Cornelius, Pierrot of Armageddon, is reaffirmed in Firing the Cathedral as one of the only genuinely modern characters in British fiction, certainly the only one in science fiction (which, we were told, was the only fiction capable of describing the present. Mind you, that was then). Right from those ingenious Elric re-treads in The Final Programme, Jerry was the first post-quantum personality, his various identities, agendas and appearances existing as a kind of super-position, a one-man multiverse of mixed states that would collapse down to a single fixed self only when observed. As such, he is perhaps the one essential, necessary fictional construction of our times, almost our only means of fashioning an adequate response to them. A vital thought-experiment. Cornelius explores the nightmare territories that are ahead of us; are now upon us. And, just when we need him, here he is.

With Firing the Cathedral, Michael Moorcock serves us up a story of fine vintage although clearly newly bottled, something he could have written thirty years ago or only yesterday. It contains the fire and energy and aura of the author’s earliest Cornelius outings, yet without the faintest DNA trace of nostalgia. Rather than some tragic band reunion tour around the chicken-in-a-basket circuit, Firing the Cathedral reads like something that the early works were merely leading up to. This is an exhilarating, crackling third rail of a novella, sparks in every line, and best not stepped upon by accident. One of our greatest authors dusts off what is arguably his greatest character, revealed now as a crucial archetype of our new and combustive century. Slam a fresh clip into the needlegun, slip Deep Fix: Greatest Hits in the car stereo and prepare for a millennium buggering that will make your eyes water and will forcibly remind you What Time It Is. like the author, like his fresh-as-a-daisy old assassin, you’ll never have felt better.

Alan Moore
Northampton
22 June 2002

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This introduction was written for the first issue of Firing the Cathedral, PS Publishing. Firing the Cathedral was reprinted in the anthology Cities, edited by Peter Crowther and published by Victor Gollancz (UK) and Four Walls Eight Windows (US). It will appear again in Michael Moorcock’s collection The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius from Four Walls Eight Windows in October 2003.