I cannot claim that Pyat’s ravings make any great sense to me - it was hard enough to follow him in interview when I could ask him for dates or clarifications - but the family claims he makes perfect sense and if so I suppose it’s fair to say I lack their imaginative gifts or, indeed, their considerable experience. I really had no idea what Pyat’s memoirs would reveal nor can I guess why the family spend so much needless time and money on useless lawsuits. My rights were not merely moral but legal. I have the colonel’s own letters giving me his papers in trust until such time as I have edited them into what he called ‘our Mrs Cornelius book’. His story will go up to 1940, when he arrived in England, whereupon I am to offer the papers to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, where they will be available to any bona fide researcher. The tapes, however, remain my property. This has now at last been established through a long process of law and I hope we can all return to our normal lives without rancour. I for one am distressed at the enmity I have earned from a family whose interests I believed I faithfully served, much as I have served Colonel Pyat’s. It does not seem to me either respectful of the dead or of the truth to obscure the ‘negative’ side of a biographical subject. I say once more and for the last time - I never wished to show the slightest ill will towards any member of the family, especially Mrs Cornelius, for whose memory I continue to hold the greatest affection and admiration.
But spades, as Colonel Pyat often insisted, must be called spades and if A Notting Hill Family was not completely flattering to Frank or Jerry, neither did it trivialise them. This study was my first non-fiction and I do not deny that as a thesis it perhaps deserved its success but as a popular book it gave something of a false impression of the family and I did everything I could to make amends in the many books which followed that first one’s wholly unexpected success.
Part of Colonel Pyat’s fascination for a person like myself, with almost wholly contradictory views, was his larger than life manner and concerns. Everything was always marvellous, grandiose, romantic, and perhaps in some ways I remain the best medium for a man possessed of such a vivid and singular imagination.
I cannot, however, explain his lapses into foreign languages (he was not wholly fluent in any and I have reproduced parts of his manuscripts exactly as he wrote them) and there is no consistent reason for his using them, except where he describes some of his sexual adventures (almost always in French). As for his racialism, my own views and actions on the subject are a matter of record, but I was duty bound to keep some of his to me quite disgusting opinions. Sadly, his is a voice which did not die in 1945 and seems to have more echoes now than at any time since the end of the War.
More than once, in the past eight years, my wife has mentioned how like my subject I have grown and I must admit the thought was distasteful, since I have so little in common with him, but I have observed in mental hospitals how the traits of one patient can be passed on to another until the imitated symptoms become as established as the real, so it is indeed possible that frequent exposure both to Colonel Pyat and everything he left behind did have some effect, although I was insulted by one critic’s suggestion that I had failed to distinguish between myself and my subject.
Lastly I should mention the considerable debt I owe to my wife, who helped especially with the additional research, to John Blackwell, whose steady eye and sound judgement got me through some of the worst times, and to Langdon Jones, who so successfully reconstructed Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone and whose remarkable skills were invaluable in putting this book together. I would like to thank those already mentioned in previous volumes, together with friends in Egypt - especially ‘Black-and-White Josef, Mustafa el-Bayoumi, Colonel ‘Johnny’ Said and the El Fawzi family, all of whom helped keep me on Pyat’s trail, to ‘Rabia and her sisters, her mother, grandmother and brothers, for their wonderful hospitality and help as I followed the colonel to Marrakech; to Jean-Marie Fromental, who was able to verify much of what Pyat reported of 1920s Marrakech. Thanks also to ‘Mad Jack’ Parker, The Ephemera King of Crawley, who was able to supply me, from his own stock, several pictures of Ace Peters as The Masked Buckaroo. I must also recognise the special help of Sir Alan and Lady Taylor for invaluable information about Egypt, of the Manchester Savoyards, Francesca V. (‘El Enaño’) Luce-Maria and Jesus of Ajijic, Old Doc Gibson of Delaware, Captain Robert Harding, Lord Shapiro and Waterbury Pasha, whom I visited at his home near Reading to look through his remarkable collection, much of which, he claimed, came from the famous al-Habashiya house after it was opened up by the Nasser authorities in 1957. It is not something I would wish to do again. All I shall say here is that I feel able to vouch for the substance of Pyat’s story but must leave it to readers to make what they wish of his interpretations.
Michael Moorcock
December 1991
ONE
I AM THE VOICE and the conscience of civilised Europe. I am all that remains. But for me, and a few like me, Christendom and everything she stands for would today be no more than a forbidden memory!
This at least Mrs Cornelius understands. ‘Yore a bloody miracle, Ivan,’ she says. ‘A bleedin’ monument ter a bygone bloody age.’ But her children are lost to her. Their naive scepticism will not shield them against the coming night. They challenge my ‘racialism’. They say that I generalise and that there are many exceptions to every rule. I agree! I have known noble camels and extraordinary horses whom I have respected and admired as my superiors in character and soul. But this did not change the camel into a horse or the horse into a camel and it turns neither into a human being. Equally, I tell them, it is both foolish and unscientific to pretend there are no differences between peoples. This logic defeats them. Few were ever a fair match for my intellect, even during my childhood. I have devoted a lifetime to mental training. But the consequent self-knowledge can, you will understand, be a curse as well as a blessing.
Already, at the age of twenty-four, on August 24, 1924, I had some intimation of my vocation. In the glory of refreshed success, having earned acknowledgement at last of my engineering genius, I was soaring towards New York to reclaim my soulmate. I had begun to sense how I might become a positive force for good in a war-weary world where humiliated enemy and exhausted victor alike were preyed upon by every form of human carrion. (I refer, of course, to those amoral and ubiquitous descendants of Oriental Africa, the minions of a Carthage which has for centuries coveted our dignified wealth.) I rarely thought of God in those days. I attributed everything to myself. It was not until later that God provided me with a salutary lesson in humility and I came to find the wonderful rewards of Faith. In 1924 I was, in almost every sense, ‘flying high’. What happiness I anticipated when Esmé and I were at last reunited!