Fantastic Metropolis

Michael Moorcock: The ticking of the Great Clock, the measurer and creator of time. Do you know Langdon Jones’s story, “The Great Clock”? I agree with you about spirituality and creativity. I also agree that novelty for its own sake isn’t worth having. That’s fashion, though, isn’t it? Spilling, as ever, into and out of the arts? I certainly agree with you about the value of repetition. Without repetition we don’t get music. Or anything else much. Replication offers validity. We all of course bewail the rafts of repeated generic fiction we see today (and have certainly always seen since the days of the artificial Romance), the vast amount of commercial music which all sounds the same, ideas constantly recycled in the press. We despair of a public which seems to demand only the familiar, to reject anything genuinely novel. Our commercial entertainers seek only to repeat exactly the same frisson they get from others and are well rewarded for their efforts. At best they produce methods of saying the same thing in a different way. It’s depressing but of course through repetition we all find comfort, fundamental solace, even spiritual enlightenment. An animal likes to know it can walk the same path to the waterhole every day and not get attacked. A baby loves repetition. You can’t do much better for one than sing the same little song to it every night. We all need that in some form, whether it is the same old story, the same old song, the same old symphony, the same old Mass. Sometimes we need to chant the old mantras, look at familiar pictures, find something new in favourite books, movies and records. What are your own familiar favourites?

Alan Wall: Don’t know the Langdon Jones story. The old and the new. Anything entirely new would be unintelligible, wouldn’t it? And yet repetition should represent a deepening. You never kiss anyone exactly the same way twice. I’ve never re-read any Shakespeare without feeling as though in some way I’m doing it for the first time, and in some way I am, because such a rich writing is always inexhaustible.

Favourites. Er.

Painting: Degas, Rembrandt, Picasso.

Music: Beethoven, Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt, Arvo Prt, Gillian Welch.

Literature: Shakespeare and most of the scripts designated sacred. The richness of all those traditions never ceases to astound me. I also love the greatest work of T.S. Eliot, though he’s under a cloud these days for his improprieties.

Michael Moorcock: I’m with you there. I tend to go back to Shakespeare, Dickens, Eliot. You might as well start with the best models, even if you fall short of them. Better than falling short of Martin Amis. In the classics there’s repetition which never lets you down. Always something new. That this fundamental need for repetition degenerates into bad generic art, received critical opinion, the lowest common denominators, should scarcely worry us, should it? Isn’t it how most of us grope our way past the terrors of mortality? The nearest my mother seemed to get to a sense of spirituality was when she went to the Chelsea Flower Show. She never needed the consolations of religion, even when she was dying. But flowers, pets and pretty scenery gladdened her soul. She didn’t ever seem to need more. Otherwise she was happy to pass her time with the television, watching her various serials. My guardian, a very spiritual man, who was also a shrewd businessman, tried to introduce her to more stimulating books, plays and music, but while she hated to disappoint him she simply wasn’t interested in art. Shouldn’t we respect that?

Alan Wall: I’m afraid I haven’t yet managed to grope my way past the terrors of mortality, but I’m delighted to hear you have, and as soon as we’ve finished here for the day, I trust you’ll be slipping me the nod.

I’m not telling anyone what to do, believe me. If your mum was at peace at the Chelsea Flower Show, good for her. I reckon the likes of you and me need negotiated torment to approach any form of peace. That’s the nature of our reality, no way round it. We have to cross the wasteland to get to the garden. If others don’t have that problem, I might even envy them, but I can’t share that world, so there’s no point lamenting it. Just hope one actually makes it to the garden, finally.

Michael Moorcock: I must admit I thought I’d confronted and bypassed those terrors in the introduction to a book I did thirty years ago, called Breakfast in the Ruins, where I confounded my readers by announcing my death at the front of the book. Since then I might have been living on borrowed time. However, as the future shrinks for me, passing sixty and getting health problems, I see I might have been fooling myself with nothing more than subtler strategies of avoidance. But that, too, is another subject.

For many years I lived off the Portobello Road. When I first lived there most of the stuff you saw for sale was, for what it was worth, original, or at least the manufactured artefacts of an earlier age. Gradually the dealers learned that what most customers really wanted was the familiar—that is, art or an antique which they recognised either as valuable or inspiring, something already approved—so the dealers began to reproduce it. I think I mentioned to you I had wondered for some time about doing a novel set behind the scenes of the business of manufacturing scrimshaw, Chippendale, Lalique or Dalton, art nouveau lamps, deco statuettes for those tourists who will buy them, value them, treat them as any renaissance patron might have treated the art he commissioned. Once these ersatz treasures are taken back to Atlanta or Oklahoma City and proudly, lovingly displayed, they become unique again. Do they take on something of the quality the original artist imbued them with? It’s a question you ask in China, I know, through that rather vulgar, good-hearted neighbour Jonty whom you seem to have a soft spot for. From what you say, it comes up again in White Ivory.

I long since gave up telling American friends that their valued discoveries were probably fakes, that the provenance offered was almost certainly a lie. They might be poor copies, or machine-made reproductions, but if the individual values the object, however many times you have seen it being made and remade, then the object is surely valuable? Context is surely important? We despair of the young. Their enthusiasm for things we believe are third-rate, all done before, yet wouldn’t we like to know their undiscriminating enthusiasm again, that sense of engagement, of revelation?

Is it really only novelty and uniqueness in art we’re searching for? Aren’t we also trying to reproduce those first experiences of life, of confirmation and revelation, just as some people need to fall in love over and over again to confirm their own existence? Or cling to the Latin liturgy? This certainly seems one of the questions China is asking. That’s what makes it the satisfyingly good book it is. Without moving away from common experience (mostly that of a group of contemporary, recogniseable South Londoners) you discuss such questions, including the function of the market place in the production or reproduction of art. You ask what price we pay for the comforts of art, for the solace of repetition. Or, at any rate, that’s what the book offers me as well as an engaging story!. There is no sense that you despair of ordinary people in China. Almost all the characters, however they affect the others, are seen in what I’d call a sympathetic light. And that includes the vulgarian Jonty. Did you feel that general sympathy for them?

Alan Wall: I lived off the Portobello Road for years too—Denbigh Road. We must at times have been a matter of yards from each other. Curious. Parallel worlds again.

Well, given the number of meals I shared with Jonty during my hidden years, I’d have to have a bit of a soft spot for him, you know. I’d best say no more. It’s conceivable, though incredibly unlikely, that he might be looking in on us and, however amiable, he’ll still be up for a bit of litigation from time to time.

Yes I know what you mean about this remaking of something. I once had to show a young Swiss woman round (believe it or not) Portobello Road. This was part of my professional duties, even though it was a Saturday. Portobello seemed to represent some sort of Shangri-La for her, and I daresay it made a pleasant change from Berne. At least everything hadn’t been entirely cleaned. She finally found what she was after, after hours of darting in and out of the dark interiors of sundry vendors. Know what it was? A wood-framed mirror advertising Coca Cola. A copy, I suppose, of some homely product of the US from decades before. I shifted uneasily, and tried to point out to her that it wasn’t… well… authentic. She shrugged: she wasn’t shopping for authenticity. I was the one carrying that baggage around.

In China I think the crucial image for this problem culturally (since Jonty’s sleep is uninterrupted except for his nuptial engagements with Tessa) is Wynton Marsalis. Remember how the Breezer says that Miles Davis once said jazz had turned into a museum. Breezer adds that Marsalis is the curator. I can’t listen to him doing jazz, though I tried once. It’s an odd thing, spontaneity recaptured, because it isn’t spontaneous any more, however faultless the performance. The faultlessness of the recapturing destroys the spontaneity being recaptured.

But the icon painter is different, surely. And Arvo Prt isn’t pastiche, but resurrection.

We both know there are no new stories, but how could we get to sleep (or pay the bills) without telling one of the old ones—with just the odd word rearranged. Tradition and the individual talent.