This suited me much better. I decided that I would think up a hero as different as possible from the usual run of S amp;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
PS70 or PS80 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 del- icate 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:
- 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, trem- bling, 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.