Fantastic Metropolis

Michael Moorcock: Good point. I also liked your point about Marsalis in the book. Came across very well. But that’s a new problem of aesthetics isn’t it, since we became used to the idea of spontaneity in an age of improvisation, of performance music rather than performed music? The tensions in listening to jazz quite often are wondering how a musician is going to modulate from one key to another, to produce a resolution when it seems impossible to reach, to return to the theme. Have there been previous ages where individual musicians or groups of musicians came to symbolise our own spiritual and political convictions, where a singer who changes direction can be said to ‘betray’ their audience? Was this what bards and troubadours provided before universal literacy? When previously did we criticise an art for its lack of immediacy or connection with the politics of the day?

Alan Wall: Wordsworth and Coleridge were both attacked (savagely by Hazlitt) for having betrayed the revolutionary beliefs of their earlier lives and work. In the case of Wordsworth I think it was assumed that the great organic form of the earlier work had taken on a mechanical and premeditated shape in things like the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. In Coleridge’s case Byron obviously felt that the immediacy of the earlier work had come to protect itself in a baffle of abstruse philosophy: ‘Coleridge explained his metaphysics to the nation/I wish he would explain his explanation.’ In both cases I think there was a sense that what had been a spontaneous engagement with the time and its history had defaulted to a set-response in the form of social and religious conservatism.

So, nothing new there then. The age-old shift from left to right has been going for a while, and produces the same sense of outrage.

Beethoven’s the interesting one here—he does the denouncing. Withdrawing the dedication to Napoleon the minute the Corsican upstart dubs himself Emperor. That’s what I call class. Faeces in the chamberpot under the piano, and a sense that what he does is worth ten times any king’s daily labour. Some of them probably left their faeces about the place as well.

Michael Moorcock: Well, I wouldn’t call Beethoven a great improv performer, mind you. Or Wordsworth. I take your point about spontaneous involvement, though I don’t think this is the same as spontaneous performance. And there was no expectation of poetry that it should all be radical, the way we sort of expect good popular music to be nowadays. Still, the innovators no doubt have almost always become shadows of their former selves and establish a genre which then threatens to swamp what’s original to them. And Theo is, of course, a representative of more than just jazz. You’re one of the few modern poets I can think of who, in their novels, creates form out of content rather than working within an established, if personal, form. Quite a lot of the writers I admire actually seem to adapt their material to suit their style and structural methods. Ballard, Nye, Harrison, even Sinclair to some degree. You certainly haven’t done that in China. China has an organic feel. Its form emerges from its themes, its characters, its time and place. That’s not all that common, these days, in my experience.

Alan Wall: Well I’m glad you feel China found its own form. I always have so many obsessions going in my books—at least three in any one—that I never have the faintest notion how I’ll pull it all together when I start.

In China there was the sense of industrial decay and death linked to the Potteries; the notion of the troubadour without a function in Theo; the sense of financial trust betrayed through greed and incompetence with Digby; the notion of the difficulty of parenting in the modern world with both Digby and Daisy; and Howard’s critique of corporate capitalism from an anarchist angle, but using the new technology and the internet. Now anyone running a course on writing would tell you that’s too many themes. Someone reviewing one of my earlier books said there were three good novels here, and it was a pity Alan Wall hadn’t chosen one and written it. I fear I haven’t changed much, though I’m happy to say I’ve forgotten the name of that reviewer.

I’ve got such a low boredom threshold, I have to keep changing the subject. And yet it’s the same subject finally, isn’t it? That’s the hope anyway. The structure of the book is the scaffolding you put up so you can construct this weird edifice, and just hope it’s substantial enough for people to live in for a while.

Michael Moorcock: It’s the wealth of themes and ideas in your books which, of course, make you so much more satisfying than the average writer. It’s certainly what first attracted me to your work. But most critics, poor things, are only able to grasp one idea at a time and, of course, the novels which offer only that are often the most successful, these days. Science, society, art, industry, replication, the creation of wealth, the making of money… As I said earlier, almost all your books will touch on notions of science at some point, some of them more than others. You seem fascinated by the origins of modern scientific thought. I’m thinking especially of The Lightning Cage, which has just come out in the USA, where you describe the idea of treating lunatics with electricity by exposing them to lightning storms, rather as Viktor Frankenstein used lightning to bring life to his composite corpse. Why the fascination with early science? And, with reference to gravestones in Bless The Thief, why the fascination with stones. Is it a Yorkshire thing? Didn’t you climb for a bit?

Alan Wall: Actually, the critics have been pretty positive about China, to be fair, though a certain Roz Kaveney in Time Out needed to reach for the word bourgeois. You know a poor soul must be in dire straits when they’re reduced to fossicking about as far down in the lexicon as that.

I suppose I’m always trying to get to the bottom of things. Origin is the goal, said Karl Kraus. I’m trying to explain to myself how things came to be thus and thus. The continuities can be startling. It was thought that electricity might be curative in the eighteenth century, for those indisposed in mind or body. ECT —electro-convulsive therapy—was popular in this country certainly until the late sixties. Electricity versus madness. The other technique used—to get the bad spirits out of us—was trepanation. Corpses found in the house in London where Benjamin Franklin lodged for many years had been trepanned. We’ve been drilling holes in people’s heads for a very long time, as far back as the Bronze Age possibly, and we’ve been at it pretty recently too. Egas Moniz, the Portuguese neurologist who invented the technique of lobotomy, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949. Cut a hole, saw away. Watch as the evil spirits fly. How quiet you seem now, dear.

George Braque was trepanned, you know, after he received a serious head-wound in the Great War. Picasso said he could never talk to him properly afterwards—because by then he’d entered his mystical phase. Braque’s Art didn’t suffer: I think he became even greater. It’s part of the theme of that extraordinary film Pi.

I try to read books as I read gravestones. Imagining each word might have as much weight—when all’s said and done, the gravity of our lives is so forceful it will ultimately put us underground. There are the lovely lines in Bunting’s Brigflatts:

Words are too light
Take a chisel to write

One’s dream is to be a lapidary writer, however long the book. From lapis, stone, of course, the cutting of epigraphs. Words can be too flighty. We should all be given chisels and blocks. That would slow us up, although I’m already the slowest reader I know.

I did some climbing—but more falling. The main function of my few years of grappling with mountains was to assert the laws of gravity to even the most committed levitationist. I’m fascinated by climbers in the same way I’m fascinated by people who can play Die Hammerklavier. I actually started climbing to see if I could get rid of my fear of heights, which is chronic. In fact it just became worse, as it gradually dawned on me how bloody dangerous it really is up there.

Michael Moorcock: I’ll drink to that. Can you give us any idea when White Ivory will be finished and when the publisher is thinking of bringing it out? I know Andy Hedgecock thinks highly of your songs, which he’s had the opportunity to hear and I haven’t yet. Any plans for performances? Any other subjects stacking up for future examination?

Alan Wall: White Ivory has only just been started. I need to do lots of research yet before I even settle down to the serious slog. I’ve been greatly heartened by your comments on the little sections I sent you.

I finished the long novella/short novel Dealer, which I mailed you electronically, and which I’ve a feeling you haven’t read. That’s not a complaint—I’m astonished and very flattered indeed you’ve read as much of me as you have, and read it so attentively. Dealer’s length makes it problematical to publish alone, so it will have to sit there for the moment. Be perfect for periodical publication. Now I reckon what the contemporary literary world needs is Moorcock’s Weekly… it does need it, actually. I’ve been astonished in reading those copies of New Worlds how good they are, and how they filled a gap which has simply re-appeared. If there’s an intelligent philanthropist out there he should endow you for the purpose immediately. Looks like we’ve just missed John Paul Getty, sadly.

I’m waiting to hear if I’m to be awarded a research fellowship which would involve me writing a book over the next year about the biggest and smallest things in the universe, or rather their representations. We’d need a whole interview to talk about that one. If I get it, White Ivory will have to be set aside for a year while I do a lot of work in areas about which I know remarkably little. If I don’t get it, I’ll press on with White Ivory and my teaching at Warwick University. Would like to think the book might then come out in January 2005, which seems like a very long time away.

The music. Right. I’m sending you a tape this week, and you can finally judge for yourself. No plans for performances, to be honest, though if you can get yourself over to dear old blighty, as you occasionally promise, we’ll fix one up for you. As long as you join in. Tuxedos and bottlenecks will be optional.

Michael Moorcock: Thanks, Alan, I look forward to all of that! Including reading Dealer… And let’s hope China continues to do well and get you the readers who deserve you!

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Alan Wall and Michael Moorcock were in conversation by email during the second week in May, 2003.