Fantastic Metropolis

Michael Moorcock: Maybe we should ask an elephant? I’m fascinated by the way a living elephant inspects the bones of a dead one, clearly getting significant information from the process. Tom Disch and I were talking years ago and he said he’d always wanted to be a first rate intellectual, able to analyse the world and see it in a clear, new light. What had I always wanted to be? Me? I answered. I’ve always wanted to be an elephant. So I look forward even more to the book…

Popular songs and their spirituality. Popular music as a form of prayer. Certainly as an expression of common rage against injustice. Dylan’s finest, known to millions. And Dylan’s still getting across to young audiences, if the last Dylan concert I went to a couple of weeks back is anything to go by—still a lot of teenagers ready to spend fifty bucks a pop to get in, listening with reverence and enthusiasm. Can Dylan and certain others represent some sort of model of art and commerce coming together via Mr Edison’s invention? Are certain performers the equivalents of old-fashioned charismatics? Successful tycoons and politicians dream of being guitar heroes. They secretly understand the real measure of acceptance by the world. If only they could be Joni Mitchell. Or even Public Enemy. Rock and roll music. Narrative country songs. The blues. Authentic experience restated in Elvis. The best of the Beatles. Serious anger. Songs of Innocence and Rage. Visionary songs. Songs of Love and Experience. Would you rather be a reasonably successful singer/songwriter? You’re certain proof that the novel isn’t dead but I think I’m asking you if you feel that the performing songwriter has more validity in today’s world?

Alan Wall: Yes, let’s ask the elephant.

One thing you can do with a guitar wrapped round your neck is perform that which you have written. There’s something tragic about the gap that appears between writing and getting the response—being a singer-songwriter heals the gap. It all happens at once. But I’m not a great one for public performance, even without the presence of those RTWs you and I have meditated on. I’m pretty solitary by nature, so novel-writing suits me in that respect.

But the great singer-songwriters have filled a gap other people can only dream of, I reckon. I’ve known people entirely ruined by Dylan, people who so wanted to be him they couldn’t ever become themselves. It was as though they were saying, if you couldn’t be him, what was the point of being anyone? I can understand it, though it seems a shame to so entirely miss his point, that it’s not he or she or them or it that you belong to.

Michael Moorcock: Commerce and Art? For me it always brings to mind an image of Holborn Viaduct, built to facilitate trade and public intercourse, supported by those cast-iron Victorian virtues, which passes over Farringdon Street. Farringdon Street then runs south to Ludgate Circus, a crossroads named for mythic King Lud, founder of London. One way to Fleet Street and the West End, with its theatres, galleries and museums, the houses of the wealthy, Buckingham Palace; the other eastward to St Paul’s and the City, Bank of England, the Stock Exchange (and brutal Barbican) and beyond that Tower Hamlets and the vertical homes of the poor. Then south again to the Thames, Blackfriars Bridge. The Elephant itself and Southwark, Shakespeare territory, a reproduction Elizabeth theatre replacing the Blitzed warehouses. Although you have now moved to a Welsh village, you lived in London for some time and most of your novels are set at least partially there. You share something with Ackroyd, Sinclair, Duffy. Your earlier books have tended to run parallel narratives, one in the present, another in the past. Do you look for parallels of today’s world in the past?

Alan Wall: Always liked Holborn Bridge. Something very comforting about the warmth of its red paint. That part of London is a bottomless quarry of memory and mischief.

Parallels. Nothing exists except in relation to something else. And nothing exists at all, in any meaningful sense, without its perception. Repetition and pattern give our lives meaning; novelty by itself is chaos. If we can’t find shared patterns between what we call the past and the present, then there can be no history and nothing can be redeemed. Remember Eliot in Four Quartets? ‘If all time is eternally present, All time is unredeemable.’ I think we want to make the past flare up, make it bright enough to catch a faint glimpse of recognition.

Michael Moorcock: Wealth and guilt. Arts and sciences. I lived through the Golden Sixties in Ladbroke Grove, a relatively guilt-free time of considerable wealth flowing through society, before the giant grab-back of the Thatcher and Reagan years. It was also a time of commercial expansion and of dynamic creativity. In common with many at that time, we at New Worlds were keen on unifying the arts and sciences. In the magazine and at parties and conferences, we brought painters, writers, poets, physicists, economists, psychologists and engineers together. We published engineer poets like Redgrove. Eduardo Paolozzi, the pop artist, was our Aeronautics Advisor. Ballard’s training was in medicine. Jones was a trained concert pianist. Our designer had done mathematics before dropping out of Cambridge. In my own writing I began to search for the roots of modern argument from 1870 on. We wanted, if you like, to produce a magazine for the renaissance person. But gradually I came to feel that many of those with whom I had shared this ambition were withdrawing. The same thing happened with the broader radical movement. The eighties and nineties became rather miserable years for me, in that I seemed to be speaking to fewer people. We entered a period of snobbery, of reaction, exclusivity. It became easier to narrow down, to exclude, to deride any idealism, to measure achievements only in terms of money. Now there are hints that our idealism is returning, perhaps more substantially. Yet the world has in other ways seemed to reach a fresh level of imperial ruthlessness. I’m wondering, Alan. Maybe we always get the best art at a time of ferocious commerce? In your earlier novels, such as The Lightning Cage, you described the melding of scientific curiosity and spirituality, of the18th century’s enquiring intellectual zest and the divine madness of Blake. Imperial commerce? The birth of modern concerns? Did you find the eighties and nineties spiritually rather bleak? Do you notice any change? Better or worse?

Alan Wall: The eighties and nineties seemed to be characterised by a curious lack of recklessness amongst the young. The great creative squander of what had gone before might have sounded some sort of klaxon horn, and people ran for cover towards the bank. I was just making a living for much of the time myself, like so many other people. I didn’t get seriously going until the nineties. I did what I suppose people all too often do in times of great confusion: worked enough to provide myself with a living, such as it was; surrounded myself with the books I cared about; played the music I loved. I’m not particularly proud of it. It took the catastrophe of redundancy with a young family to provide for that kicked me finally into writing. So as so often in life the worst thing turned out to be the best thing. It always amazes me that certain people, like Dylan or you, just step straight out of the house and get on with their work for life, as though there’d never been any doubt about it. It took me at least forty years before I noticed I wasn’t someone else. Some RTWs have still been known to refer to me as Bob.