The Whispering Swarm (25 page)

Bullshit? Maybe. But Ashfield bought it.

The best form for carrying the weight of contemporary concerns was a modified SF. But I was trying to suspend belief, not disbelief. I borrowed as much from noir
,
Ubu and Firbank as I did from Bester. I rejected
Horizon
as well as
Galaxy
. Drunk on my self-awarded authority, my urgent persuasion, Ashfield applauded the dawning of a new art. I had to move fast and get the contract before other voices persuaded him to think along different lines. Of course the money wouldn't all come at once but it was enough to pay the rent and allow me to work at a more ambitious level.

Naturally, some, including me, would always wonder if I wasn't just another '60s con artist who had found a sucker to back a Fun Palace project. Yet I believed my spiel. I wanted to appeal to that modern audience who helped
Sgt. Pepper
stay so long at number one when there had never been anything like it ever before and that, in the more modest form of modern fiction, was my offering to the common pot of innovation and egalitarianism. Jerry Cornelius was modern man who had given up looking for a soul but needed to discover a role. At least one. A modernist rejecting the failed ideas of the twentieth century, accepting the impossibility of drastically improving the human condition, Jerry sought instead to remain constantly adaptable, constantly able to change the script, even the nature of his own character.

The culture had started to cook, I told Ashfield. Many more ingredients would go in my particular pot and many sips would be taken from my dipped ladle before it simmered into its fullest flavour but it would take decades before the goal was fully achieved. Now I was preparing the recipe I would create from the coming interaction of world cultures … and here I began to falter, having extended, as it were, my brief. But Larry had drunk enough Chateau Prude to see the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. That beard and burnoose still worked miracles. He could see I was an authentic prophet. A guru! Advised by Marc Haefele, a bright young man who worked as his assistant, Larry was caught by the euphoria of highly paid innovation. I was his first hit of acid. He had his own trip. He was the publisher of the English New Wave and to prove it I got my
War and Peace
advance. Larry would buy Allard's
The Savagery Show
in the same spirit. And, in the spirit of another age, his bosses would have it pulped.

I got so many gifts for Helena and the girls I had to pack some big parcels and post them straight to the house. I was quite the conquering hero. I was pleased with myself on another count. Given the considerable opportunity, I had not given in to any sexual temptation. I came home on a cold Tuesday morning and the first parcel arrived about an hour after I came in. Helena snorted as she held up a dress to look at it in the light. ‘Lovely,' she said. ‘Too good for me.' She was in one of those moods where she didn't believe she deserved anything. Or that there really was such a thing as altruism. Or love. ‘What did you get up to in the States?'

The girls were pleased with their toys and cowboy outfits. I also got them BB guns like Colt .45s, jeans and shirts and cowboy wellies. And that night Helena made love as if there were no tomorrow. I consoled myself that she didn't like to say what she felt. There were plenty of other perfectly good ways of welcoming me home. And while there were a few ways I cared less for, there were few others I preferred more. I felt virtuous and deserving. I had brought back a pretty substantial elk. I had learned to stop looking for my father everywhere and not to sleep with and expect to marry every woman who wanted to. We stayed up in the bedroom until it was time to go together to collect the girls from school. Life was getting alarmingly sweeter by the minute.…

Then the war against
New Worlds
heated up in earnest. The British Bill of Rights, written in 1689, was too early for free speech to be covered. And we weren't protected. W.H. Smith and Son booksellers, that old Quaker family, decided that Langdon Jones's protagonist, entering into a perfectly respectful conversation with Christ on the cross in a story dedicated to Olivier Messiaen (that most devout of composers, whom Jones revered), was an obscene, blasphemous or libellous act, maybe all three. They weren't too sure but there had to be a law against it. There was also
Bug Jack Barron,
Norman Spinrad's novel using the language of the LA streets and the Hollywood studios. That might be even worse, since it contained much F&C and all the other disgusting words ever created by human ingenuity. They wanted it axed. Or no sales. Our circulation had grown wonderfully before the Quakers determined we should not foul their racks. I was sorry. I had always liked Quakers, found their religious beliefs and practises admirable and, for my pleasure and health, regularly ate their oats.

Sadly the battle for
New Worlds
became the context for everything else we did, just like the Vietnam War. For months, growing increasingly exhausted, I struggled to keep the mag going. We were ultimately saved by a press outcry which shamed Smiths and newsagents Menzies into reluctantly taking us back, but by then we were all exhausted. The battle lines were still drawn. There I was in my long hair and lace and feathers and there they were in their drab suits; hard, grim haircuts and letterbox mouths. It was the English Civil War all over again. Roundheads primly putting down Cavaliers. And, as usual, the Roundheads were winning. Temporarily. Also as usual.

We needed a holiday.

But when I suggested it, Helena refused to come with me to the Alsacia. Even though she refused to believe it existed, she also seemed afraid of the place, associating it with madness. She said she would leave me if I started all that again. I understood her concern though she seemed to be overreacting. I was soon so embroiled in trying to save the magazine that I didn't have time even to think about the Alsacia. Or a holiday.

 

18

RALLYING THE TROOPS

The following year, 1968, would prove an extraordinary one. The novel versions of
Behold the Man
and
The Final Programme
came out to great reviews,
New Worlds
received enormous amounts of publicity from a mainly sympathetic press; my work published in hardcovers had always been reviewed as literary fiction, while my fantasy paperbacks were almost never reviewed by the mainstream press. That suited me. I refused to use pseudonyms for my books but the paperbacks, most of which I wrote in three days, were distinguished at that time by the format. Critics were not confused. They knew that hardbacks were ‘serious' and that paperbacks were not. I took ten days to write
The Last Menu
and about the same to write
Behold the Man
while it only took three days to write a fantasy ‘historical'.

As a result of the publicity a new publishing partner presented himself for
New Worlds
, a man who had produced
Drum
in South Africa during the years in which it fought against being banned, so he seemed naturally sympathetic. I was slowing down on the fantasies. I only planned to complete a few more. The magazine no longer needed the influx of cash. I had three more Jerry Cornelius novels to write. I had signed with Ashfield.

By now the Ladbroke Grove area was turning into the future. This was where all the rock bands began to hang out. Every other kind of experiment went on around us. Because my books somehow caught the mood of the times I had turned into some sort of guru. Our ups and downs with
New Worlds
took on the character of a fight against authority. We mingled with poets, painters, filmmakers and musicians and our activities were enough to get us in the gossip columns.

Around us there was less and less street noise as the hippies took over and became what they called the boss culture, and we all began living in wonderland, dressing up in our feathers and lace, our lovely clothes with our beautiful hair and hats and monstrous bean-crusher two-tone Saturday nighter shoes ready to strut into the Age of Aquarius. Light blues and dark blues and deep greens and luminous scarlets, silver and gold, long hair and dreadlocks and profound postwar desires gave us that peacock poise, swinging our guitars like lords with their swords, Death with his scythe. As far as the culture went,
we
said who lived or died.
We
had the moral high ground.
We
were the wonderlads.
We
had the secret. At parties merchant bankers asked our advice on the latest trends, as if we knew. Astonishingly beautiful and intelligent models were interested in what we thought about Vietnam. Had I been single I could have gone home with a different stunner every night, or it might have been the same one. They could be hard to tell apart. No temptations. Not really. I was perfectly at ease with domestic life at last. God, I felt happy. Content. Peter-fucking-Pureheart. No thanks, I'm married.

And so happy again with Helena and the kids. And my confident self. Don't fix the effect, fix the cause. But fame is power and power is a drug. You fascinate everyone, including yourself. You start getting as interested in you as they are. Life is so easy. Power is thrust at you from all sides. They want you to lie to them. Screw them. They wanted you to tell them stories. Sing them songs. In return you could do whatever you wanted. Women in particular just loved to give you power.
Take it. I don't want it. I don't have the strength or the taste for it.
They came up to you and offered their liberty to you.
I'm yours
. But what if you didn't want it? Then you got some weird reactions.
You don't love me
.
We need to discuss our relationship.
I don't know why, but at the very period when I was most happily married, women were intriguing me more and more. I was fascinated by their attitudes. I was infatuated by their femininity, by their motives and ambitions. I wrote
The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century
from them and to them. I wanted to know and understand them, each fucking individual, every bloody friend. There was no such thing as ‘women'. People want to know how I turned from MCP to profeminist. Well, that was how. But it took a long time.

I was learning my guitar better. Keep it simple. Keep it soulful and keep it cool. I loved slide at home. At home it was
: I can't break with you baby because the stars rule my loving heart, I'll give anything to keep you, babe, nothing will ever tear us apart.
On stage it was:
We are the veterans of the psychic wars. We are the cruel, the cold, the unkind. We are the lost, we are the last, unfeeling, blind.
We had followed a familiar arc from rhythm and blues to psychedelic and experimental, from mods to hippies, riding the zeitgeist, possibly even tugging the wheel a little.

Psychedelia by night, Willie Dixon by day. Footprints in the sands of time. I took the kids to gigs whenever possible. Sometimes they would sleep behind the stacks. The pounding speakers were better than a lullaby. The rhythms were primal. A giant loving heart. That's why so many rock-and-roll kids are secure and well-balanced. Even the survivors who snorted their first line before they were nine. Just like my generation with the Nazi bombs, nothing could ever keep my kids awake. I remember going back to where they were sleeping in their carrycots seeing their seraphic faces glowing with contentment as their little chests rose and fell, their little noses snored in unison to the music on the stage out front. It was even better when you stopped having to change shit-filled nappies. When they were clean they smelled so good, so warm and sweet. I still get turned on by the smell of Johnson's baby oil and talc. Especially when one of our records comes on the radio at the same time.
City guerilla, I'm a shitty psycho killer,
sings poor old dead Captain Crackers, that genius of the stage and studio. Talented bloke. Magic on stage.

What with sex, drugs, rock and roll and writing novels I didn't have a lot of extra time to think about the Alsacia or its messengers. I'd made it clear how I felt to the abbot. There wasn't much to make me nostalgic for the Alsacia. The murmuring was constant and getting louder but not especially loud. I was having a very good life in the real world. The kind of life most people dreamed of. I had already enjoyed the full catalogue of male fantasies. And a lot of interesting female ones. But sometimes, even when I was onstage, in the middle of a performance, getting great riffs out of my Rickenbacker, the murmur would grow suddenly louder, at first like a faint hum in the amplifiers, a badly stacked cabinet, some feedback; then the intensity rather than the sound level increased, an insistent whisper threatening to throw me off completely as I played. This felt like an attack and I decided the best way to deal with it was to ignore it. The worse it grew in my head, the more frenzied was my playing. Audiences loved it!

I still had no idea of the sound's nature. Its insistent quality appeared increasingly aggressive. I began to wonder if there was more than one force sending messages to me from the Sanctuary.

Although
New Worlds
now had to use a different distributor it looked as if the customers could find us. I broke with Stonehart Publications, who were neither passing on the Arts Council money nor supporting me in my struggle with authority, and became the sole publisher and owner of the title. The magazine had begun to do well again and I was considering handing it over in good order to someone else. My books were getting generous reviews. I appeared on radio and TV, became a subject for Sunday supplement interviews. Sales went up accordingly until we were seized in a raid on England's Glory, Manchester's alternative bookshop.

And then we were back in a new nightmare, another campaign. We were never alone, but the fight went on forever and everyone was getting so weary and I wanted to keep with my kids. I wasn't going to wreck it, hurt the woman I loved. We'd been tested and found true and trustworthy. But at some point where the coke and the speed met the mary jane and the wine my poor, puny little ego decided that promises were negotiable, for ordinary people. There was no brain in the equation. Not a gram. I decided I must go to Alsacia and, as I put it, face my demons. But I didn't do anything about it until I saw the Lagonda again.