The writer thinks that John Rackham's fantasies (or properly "Occult-thrillers") will outlast my stories. I don't think either will last for long, but I might as well admit that I was slightly hurt by this remark, for Rackham's stories that I have read struck me as being rather barren, stereotyped tales with no "true" sense of the occult at all (whatever a true sense of the occult is). Moreover I know John doesn't believe in his stuff for a second (at least not in any supernatural sense), whereas I believe whole-heartedly in mine, as I've pointed out. It's silly to take up someone's remark like this, especially since it is fair criticism and just a statement of someone's individual taste, but I suppose I'm still young enough to feel defensive about my stories-especially my Elric stories for which I have an odd mixture of love and hate. They are so closely linked to my own obsessions and problems that I find it hard to ignore any criticisms of them and tend momentarily to leap to their defense.
As I said earlier, and Cele Goldsmith said in a supplement to AMRA, sword and sorcery seems to appeal to an enthusiastic minority and may receive a large volume of praise from a fairly small section of readers.
When Carnell asked me to think up a sword-and-sorcery series, I tried to make it as different as possible from any other I'd read. I'd hesitate to agree that the two best known magic swords are Excalibur and Prince Valiant's Singing Blade-Excalibur, certainly, and probably Roland's Durandana. The idea of the magic sword came, of course, from legend, but I willingly admit to Anderson's influence, too. The idea of an albino hero had a more obscure source. As a boy I collected a pre-War magazine called Union Jack. This was Sexton Blake's Own Paper-Blake was the British version of your Nick Carter, I should imagine, and Union Jack was the equivalent of your dime novels. One of Blake's most memorable opponents was a character named M. Zenith- or Zenith the Albino, a Byronic hero-villain who aroused more sympathy in the reader than did the intrepid detective. Anyway, the Byronic h-v had always appealed; I liked the idea of an albino, which suited my purpose, and so Elric was born-an albino. Influences include various Gothic novels, also. Elric is not a new hero to fantasy-although he's new, I suppose, to S amp;S.
I cannot altogether agree that Elric remains an essentially simple character. I think of him as complex but inarticulate when he tries to explain his predicament. His taste for revenge seems to be a sort of extension of his search for peace and purpose-he finds, to coin a phrase, forgetfulness in action. Elric's guilt over the slaying of Nikorn was guilt for the slaying itself, not because he'd killed a particular man.
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:
COSMIC HAND
balance
Law Chaos
Grey Lords
Elementals
Men
Law Sorcerers
Chaos Sorcerers
Beasts
Men pledged to Law
Men pledged to Chaos
etc.
etc.
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 MELNIBONE
(1964)
SOME 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 imma-ture. 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 Harri-son'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 col-laboration 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.