Early on I became a very conscious as well as a very rapid writer, pouring my life pretty much as it happened into my work. Emotional, visual, intellectual, it was all thrown into the pot. Like most writers I know, I wasted nothing. Many of the fantastic landscapes in my early stories were versions of those around where I lived in Notting Hill, when I would take my children out to the park and write while they snoozed or played. Holland Park had been blitzed, but though the house itself had been consumed by incendiary bombs, the outbuildings and the wonderful botanical gardens had been preserved pretty much intact. The already exotic plants and birds of that park, in particular, deserve credit for their inspiration of early books such as The Fireclown and The Shores of Death. The Blitz proved an excellent experience for the chaotic landscapes I wrote about in Stormbringer.
It took me a decade or so to realize that my stories are notable for their absence of fathers. Whether the character is Elric, Jerry Cornelius (his modern avatar), Gloriana or Colonel Pyat, fathers are rarely around for their offspring. My father's decision to leave my mother at the end of European hostilities was a blessing in so many ways but had clearly made something of an unconscious emotional impact on me. So what else is Elric looking for? You'll have to forgive me the odd reference to Freud or Jung because I began producing these stories at the time I was writing essays about the psychological roots of fantasy fiction. Although, of course, it was not my business to jam these ideas down the throats of readers of fiction, a glance at Wizardry amp; Wild Romance (MonkeyBrain Books, rep. rev. 2004), a version of those early essays, will show that they were not, at pretty much any level, unconsciously written. I was certainly aware of the Freudian interpretations of black swords or the Jungian interpretation of incubi and suc-cubi.
While Mervyn Peake's fiction soon became my favourite fantasy (ironically, it contains no real supernatural elements), I had also read a great deal of Gothic fiction and other, harder-going stuff, like Southey's Palmerin of England and the few available translations of Peninsula Romances a kid like me would be likely to find. I'd shuddered at TheMonk, skipped a bit through the longueurs of The Mysteries of Udolpho, loved the imagery of Vathek. As many of us do, who develop an enthusiasm, I had gone back as far as it was possible to go and met another early influence on the way-John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, together, of course, with Milton's Paradise Lost. Cornerstones of Puritan literature? But they worked for me. Bunyan taught me that you could tell more than one story in a single narrative. Milton taught me that Satan can be excessive attractive. To this day I advise people who want to write fantastic fiction for a living to stop reading generic fantasy and to go back to the roots of the genre as deeply as possible, the way anyone might who takes his craft seriously. One avoids becoming a Tolkien clone precisely by returning to the same roots that inspired TheLord of the Rings.
And so Elric himself figuratively went back to those wellsprings increasingly as I told his story. But it is here, in what became the first two books, I think you'll find the psychological roots, the essence, if you like, of Elric, before I understood that we were as locked together as firmly as Conan Doyle and Holmes and that my creations would engulf me in a tidal wave of imitations or inspirations. Poor Bob Howard, distraught over the death of his mother, took a shotgun to himself and at least avoided the Conan clones, just as Tolkien never had to see Gandalf bobbleheads or gaming companies lifting and vulgarizing aspects of his work wholesale. I'm sure Howard would have learned how to deal with anything, had he survived, and I still enjoy a fantasy of him as an old guy in a rocking chair, sitting on his front porch and swapping technical tips with his visitors while sometimes privately confiding that the fire's gone out of the stuff since he first started doing it. Except, of course-and then he'd reel off a list of names crossing a spectrum as wide as the state. Howard could not predict the success of his character any more than I could guess Elric's future. Unaware of the coming influence of Dungeons amp; Dragons and others, I cheerfully permitted free use of my ideas and cosmology until I had the peculiar experience of watching different companies going to law over characters and cosmologies I had created, which is why the Elric gods and demons appeared in the original D amp;D book but were later dropped.
We've come a long way since 1957, when it was still possible to order the set of The Lord of the Rings and wait a week before receiving the first editions at, as I recall, a guinea apiece. Tolkien's phenomenal story was still considered as much an expensive rarity as Arkham House Lovecrafts, luxuriously illustrated limited editions of Dunsany or the Gnome Press editions of the Conan books. Ironically, none was as widely published as Anderson's second novel (his first was a mystery) The Broken Sword, which was done in an ordinary commercial edition by Abelard-Schuman. This was long before Lin Carter's rediscovery series of fantasy classics, which provided a rich education for those interested in what was still a pretty disparate bunch of books! Before Carter's series, the fantasy canon was an expensive prospect, even if you could find the book in print. Weird Tales of the magazine's golden age were, however, still relatively cheap in the second-hand bookstores, especially those that specialized in giving you half price on any title you brought back in good condition. This meant that all my copies had big purple rubber stamps on the inside pages. I think I'd miss that purple if I saw the magazines in any other state! That's where I was introduced to the likes of Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith and other exotically named individuals, good writers who could find no commercial publication save in the marginal pulps, which, like Black Mask, had their own specific readerships. Some, like Frank Owen, loved couching their stories in styles influenced by Chinese tale-tellers. Other Weird Tales writers even pretended to be translating from Far Eastern sources. I remember coming across a story by Tennessee Williams which purported to be, as I recall, a previously untranslated Greek scroll. Weird Tales, which had published almost every major fantasist including Lovecraft, Howard, and Bradbury, inspired Carnell. He always saw Science Fantasy as the most literary of his magazines (though Science Fiction Adventures published The Drowned World and several other Ballard or Aldiss classics) and ran the best of John Brunner's Society of Time stories; Thomas Burnett Swann's tales of the Greek gods and demigods; together with stories by H. K. Bulmer, John Phillifent, Keith Roberts, E. C. Tubb and a few others, all at the top of their form. Science Fantasy also published some Mervyn Peake stories for the first time as well as some beautifully done covers by Gerard Quinn, Brian Lewis and James Cawthorn. Admittedly, Lewis's hefty Elric was painted before the story was completed. There was worse to come. Jack Gaughan's illustrations for the first U.S. Elric paperbacks of The Stealer of Souls and Stormbringer, with their strange, spiky hats, influenced Barry Windsor-Smith's depiction for a later Conan-meets-Elric comic story drafted by Jim Cawthorn and myself. I'm never sure where Jack got those conical hats, which looked like dunce caps to me, but he seemed very proud of them and I never liked to complain too much, at least until it couldn't hurt him. Soon after the British edition of Stormbringer appeared there came a number of other creations called "Stormbringer." music albums (by John Martyn and by Deep Purple), a band, some comics and even TV shows have borrowed it. Other bands around the world have also referenced the sword. That Stormbringer failed to appear in the movie Red Sonja was thanks to some swift footwork by lawyers. While I've watched as people lift stuff like the Chaos symbol, created as the opposite of Law's single arrow, and murmured "be my guest" as the multiverse term and concept is cheerfully appropriated, I've always felt especially proprietorial when people rip off my big black sword. The fully-loaded Raven Armoury version has to be kept in a gun cupboard, just in case…