The Stealer of Souls (58 page)

I don’t know whether I could have left Moonglum out and still kept the stories the same. Moonglum is, apart from everything else, to some extent a close, valued friend of mine who has been a lot of help in various ways over the last few years. If Elric is my fantasy self, then Moonglum is this friend’s fantasy self (as I see him at any rate). I am not particularly gloomy by nature. I put Moonglum in to make remarks about Elric when he gets too self-absorbed or too absorbed in self-pity, etc.

A little more of Elric’s background and some clue as to why he is what he is will be found in “Doomed Lord’s Passing.” I’ve been aware of this absence and have tried to rectify it a bit here.

I was pleased that you have used the Gray Mouser as a comparison since, as must now be evident, I’m a great fan of the Mouser’s. Perhaps Moonglum also owes a little to the Mouser. As for Elric being an idealist rather than a materialist, this is probably because I’m often told I’m a materialist rather than an idealist. I don’t like to be told this, but it could be true.

Elric’s disregard for danger is of the nature of panic rather than courage, maybe. The Mouser, on the other hand, seems not to disregard danger—he evaluates it and then acts. Conan—well…

The cosmology of the Elric stories probably owes its original inspiration to two things—Zoroastrianism (which I admire) and Anderson’s
Three Hearts and Three Lions
. It was developed from there, of course. This set-up simply is:

I have a more complex chart. The sixth story is the one where the cosmology becomes clearer and the reader should realize the rest as he reads the last stories.

I have probably helped anyone who wants to assess the Elric stories on a slightly different level. Who wants to?

THE SECRET LIFE OF ELRIC OF MELNIBONÉ

(1964)

S
OME YEARS AGO
, when I was about eighteen, I wrote a novel called
The Golden Barge
. This was an allegorical fantasy about a little man, completely without self-knowledge and with little of any other kind, going down a seemingly endless river, following a great Golden Barge which, he felt, if he caught it would contain all truth, all secrets, all the solutions to his problems. On the journey he met various groups of people, had a love affair, and so on. Yet every action he took in order to reach the Golden Barge seemed to keep him farther away from it. The river represented Time, the barge was what mankind is always seeking outside itself, when it can be found inside itself, etc., etc. The novel had a sad ending, as such novels do. Also, as was clear when I’d finished it, my handling of many of the scenes was clumsy and immature. So I scrapped it and decided that in future my allegories would be intrinsic within a conventional narrative—that the best symbols were the symbols found in familiar objects. Like swords for instance.

Up until I was twenty or so, I had a keen interest in fantasy fiction, particularly sword-and-sorcery stories of the kind written by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and the like, but this interest began to wane as I became more interested in less directly sensational forms of literature, just as earlier my interest in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s tales had waned. I could still enjoy one or two sword-and-sorcery tales, particularly Poul Anderson’s
The Broken Sword
and Fritz Leiber’s Gray Mouser stories. A bit before this casting off of old loyalties, I had been in touch with Sprague de Camp and Hans Santesson of
Fantastic Universe
about doing a new series of Conan tales.

I think it was in the autumn of 1960, when I was working for Sexton Blake Library and reading SF for
Suspense
(the short-lived companion to
Argosy
) that I bumped into a colleague at Fleetway Publications, Andy Vincent, who was an old friend of Harry Harrison’s (who had also free-lanced for Fleetway for some time). Andy told me he was meeting Harry and Ted Carnell in the Fleetway foyer and suggested I come along. As I remember, that was where I first met Harry. Previously, I’d sold a couple of stories to Ted, one in collaboration with Barry Bayley, and had had more bounced than bought. Later on in a pub, Ted and I were talking about Robert E. Howard and Ted said he’d been thinking of running some Conan-type stuff in
Science Fantasy
. I told him of the
Fantastic Universe
idea which had fallen through when
Fantastic Universe
folded, and said I still had the stuff I’d done and would he like to see it. He said he would. A couple of days later I sent him the first chapter and outline of a Conan story. To tell you the truth, writing in Howard’s style had its limitations, as did his hero as far as I was concerned, and I wasn’t looking forward to producing another 10,000 words of the story if Ted liked it.

Ted liked it—or at least he liked the writing, but there had been a misunderstanding. He hadn’t wanted Conan—he had wanted something on the same lines.

This suited me much better. I decided that I would think up a hero as different as possible from the usual run of S&S heroes, and use the narrative as a vehicle for my own “serious” ideas. Many of these ideas, I realize now, were somewhat romantic and coloured by a long-drawn-out and, to me at the time, tragic love affair which hadn’t quite finished its course and which was confusing and darkening my outlook. I was writing floods of hack work for Fleetway and was getting sometimes £70 or £80 a week which was going on drink, mainly, and, as I remember, involved rather a lot of broken glass of one description or another. I do remember, with great pride, my main achievement of the winter of 1960 or 1961, which was to smash entirely an unbreakable plate glass door in a well-known restaurant near Piccadilly. And the management apologized…

I mention this, to give a picture of my mood at the time of Elric’s creation. If you’ve read the early Elric stories in particular, you’ll see that Elric’s outlook was rather similar to mine. My point is that Elric
was
me (the me of 1960/61 anyway) and the mingled qualities of betrayer and betrayed, the bewilderment about life in general, the search for some solution to it all, the expression of this bewilderment in terms of violence, cynicism and the need for revenge were all characteristic of mine. So when I got the chance to write “The Dreaming City,” I was identifying very closely with my hero-villain. I thought myself something of an outcast (another romantic notion largely unsubstantiated now I look back) and emphasized Elric’s physical differences accordingly:

His bizarre dress was tasteless and gaudy, and did not match his sensitive face and long-fingered, almost delicate hands, yet he flaunted it since it emphasized that he did not belong in any company—that he was an outsider and an outcast. But, in reality, he had little need to wear such outlandish gear—for…[he] was a pure albino who drew his power from a secret and terrible source.

(
The Stealer of Souls
, page 13)

The story was packed with personal symbols (as are all the stories, bar a couple). The “secret and terrible source” was the sword Stormbringer, which symbolized my own and others’ tendency to rely on mental and physical crutches rather than cure the weakness at source. To go further, Elric, for me, symbolized the ambivalence of mankind in general, with its love-hates, its mean-generosity, its confident-bewilderment act. Elric is a thief who believes
himself
robbed, a lover who hates love. In short, he cannot be sure of the truth of anything, not even of his own emotions or ambitions. This is made much clearer in a story containing even more direct allegory, the second in the series, “While the Gods Laugh.” Unfortunately, Ted left out the verse from which the title was taken:

I, while the gods laugh, the world’s vortex am;

Maelstrom of passions in that hidden sea

Whose waves of all-time lap the coasts of me,

And in small compass the dark waters cram.

Mervyn Peake, “Shapes and Sounds”

This, I think, gave more meaning to both title and story which involved a long quest after the Dead Gods’ Book—a mythical work alleged to contain all the knowledge of the universe, in which Elric feels he will at last find the true meaning of life. He expresses this need in a somewhat rhetorical way. When the wingless woman Shaarilla asks him why he wants the book he replies [in the magazine version]:

“I desire, if you like, to know one of [misprinted as
or
in magazine version] two things. Does an ultimate God exist—or not. Does Law or Chaos govern our lives? Men need a God, so the philosophers tell us. Have they made one—or did one make them?” etc., etc.

Here, as in other passages, the bewilderment is expressed in metaphysical terms, for at that time, due mainly to my education, I was very involved with mysticism. Also, the metaphysical terms suited the description of a sword-and-sorcery hero and his magical, low-technology world.

It may seem odd that I use such phrases as “at that time” and so on, as if I’m referring to the remote past, but in many ways, being a trifle more mature, perhaps, happily married with a better sense of direction, etc., all this
does
seem to have taken place in the remote past.

The Dead Gods’ Book is eventually located in a vast underground world which I had intended as a womb-symbol, and after a philosophical conversation with the book’s Keeper, Elric discovers it. This passage is, to me now, rather overwritten, but, for better or worse:

It was a huge book—the Dead Gods’ Book, its covers encrusted with alien gems from which the light sprang. It gleamed, it
throbbed
with light and brilliant colour.

“At last,” Elric breathed. “At last—the Truth!”

He stumbled forward like a man made stupid with drink, his pale hands reaching for the thing he had sought with such savage bitterness. His hands touched the pulsating cover of the Book and, trembling, turned it back…With a crash, the cover fell to the floor, sending the bright gems skipping and dancing over the paving stones.
Beneath Elric’s…hands lay nothing but a pile of yellowish dust
.

The Dead Gods’ Book and the Golden Barge are one and the same. They have no real existence, save in the wishful imagination of mankind. There is, the story says, no Holy Grail which will transform a man overnight from bewildered ignorance to complete knowledge—the answer already is within him, if he cares to train himself to find it. A rather over-emphasized fact, throughout history, but one generally ignored all the same.

“The Stealer of Souls,” the third story, continues this theme, but brought in rather different kinds of symbols. Coupled with the Jungian symbols already inherent in any tale using direct mythic material, I used Freudian symbols, too. This was a cynical attempt and a rather vulgar attempt to make the series popular. It appeared to work. “The Stealer of Souls,” whatever else it may be, is one of the most pornographic stories I have ever written. In Freudian terms it is the description of, if you like, a night’s love-making.

Which brings me to another point. Although there is comparatively little direct description of sexual encounters in the stories, and what there are are largely romanticized, the whole Elric saga has, in its choice of situations and symbols, very heavy sexual undertones. This is true of most sword-and-sorcery stories, but I have an idea that I may be the first such author to understand his material to this extent, to know what he’s using. If I hadn’t been a bit fed-up by the big response received by “The Stealer of Souls” (magazine story, not the book), I could have made even greater use of what I discovered.

Other critics have pointed out the close relationship the horror story (and often the SF story for that matter) has with the pornographic story, so there’s no need to go any deeper into it here.

The pornographic content of the Elric saga doesn’t interest me much, but I have hinted at the relationship between sex and violence in several stories, and, indeed, there are a dozen syndromes to be found in the stories, particularly if you bear in mind my own involvement with sexual love, expression in violence, etc., at the time the stories were first conceived. Even my own interpretation of what I was doing is open to interpretation, in this case!

The allegory goes through all ten stories (including “To Rescue Tanelorn…” which did not feature Elric) in
Science Fantasy
, but it tends to change its emphasis as my own ideas take better shape and my emotions mature. When, in the last Elric story of all, the sword, his crutch, Stormbringer turns and slays Elric, it is meant to represent, on one level, how mankind’s wish-fantasies can often bring about the destruction of (till now at least) part of mankind. Hitler, for instance, founded his whole so-called political creed on a series of wish-fantasies (this is detailed in that odd book
Dawn of Magic
, recently published here). Again this is an old question, a bit trite from being asked too often, maybe, but how much of what we believe
is
true and how much is what we
wish
were true? Hitler dreamed of his Thousand Year Reich, Chamberlain said There Will Be No War. Both were convinced—both ignored plain fact to a frightening extent, just as many people (not just politicians whose public statements are not always what they really believe) ignore plain facts today. This is no new discovery of mine. It is probably one of the oldest discoveries in the world. But, in part, this is what nearly all my published work points out. Working, as I did once, as editor of a party journal (allegedly an information magazine for party candidates) this conviction was strengthened. The build-up of a fantasy is an odd process and sometimes happens, to digress a bit, like this.

The facts are gathered, related, a picture emerges. The picture, though slightly coloured by the personalities of the fact-relaters, is fairly true. The picture is given to the politician. If the politician is a man of integrity he will not deliberately warp the facts, but he will present them in a simplified version which will be understood by the general public (he thinks). This involves a selection, which can change a picture out of all recognition, though the politician didn’t deliberately intend to warp the facts. The other kind of politician almost automatically selects and warps in order to prove a point he, or his party, is trying to make. So the fantasy begins. Soon the real picture is almost irrevocably lost.

Therefore this reliance on pseudo-knowledge, which seems to prove something we wish were true, is a dangerous thing to do.

This is one of the main messages of the Elric series, though there are several others on different levels.

Don’t think I’m asking you to go back over the stories looking for these allegories and symbols. The reason I abandoned
The Golden Barge
was because among other things it wasn’t entertaining. The Elric stories are meant to entertain as much as anything else, but if anyone cares to look for substance beyond the entertainment level, they might find it.

One of the main reasons, though, for taking this angle when Alan [Dodd] asked me to write a piece on Elric, was because I have been a little disappointed at the first book being dismissed by some professional critics (who evidently didn’t bother to read it closely, if at all) as an imitation of Conan. When you put thought and feeling into a story—thought and feeling which is yours—you don’t much care for being called an imitator or a plagiarist however good or bad the story. Probably the millionth novel about a young advertising executive in love with a deb and involved with a married woman has just been published, yet the author won’t be accused of imitating anyone or plagiarizing anyone. It is the use to which one puts one’s chosen material, not that material, which matters.

This is the first lengthy review of
Stormbringer
published, as it happened, in
New Worlds.
Perhaps I should not have let it be reviewed in my own magazine, but Alan Forrest the writer was at the time literary editor of a national newspaper and I thought the book might best be reviewed by someone who had no intimate knowledge of SF and fantasy. Also I didn’t want the book reviewed by someone who might be hoping to sell me a story. Forrest does give a flavour, I think, of how strange and
sui generis
such fiction seemed to readers in 1965.