The Whispering Swarm

  Max and Barry had been in the RAF together and were a year or two older than me. I had just escaped the call-up by a month or so. Originally we had met at the Globe because we had an interest in science fiction. The pub was only a street or two from my mum’s house. I was still looking to science fiction as a means of confronting what were particularly contemporary problems.

  Jack, confined as a child when the Germans invaded Guernsey, had innocently given his father up to the authorities when an avuncular German officer asked whose dads had radios. He had what some thought a skewed view of the world. Admirers of his short stories (he had yet to write a novel) said he was something close to a genius. I was, needless to say, an admirer. I had known nothing as terrifying as a German camp, but had come through the Blitz and the V-bombs.

  We were not concerned like the middle classes with shivering at the future and seeing doom in every scientific development. We embraced all innovation. We weren’t even standard bohemians, wanting to ban the bomb. Allard had seen the bomb as a sign of release from the appalling cruelty of the Germans and Japanese. Bayley wondered about its philosophical meaning and symbolism, while I, who had experienced so many V-rockets and known friends who disappeared suddenly as a result of those explosions, did not feel especially bothered about a lethal instrument which took you out instantaneously. So while progressives marched with the CND, we were inclined not to. The beneficiaries of most wars were the survivors. That’s how we saw ourselves. Fortunate.

  When we did march it was to please our friends. The experience sharpened our sense of what lay in store for us should our democracies break down, both politically and socially. John Brunner, with his goatee, yellow stock and corduroy sports jacket, was very disappointed in us. I knew his inner RAF officer was tempted to order us to volunteer. Instead he forced a smile and said our hearts were in the right places. That wasn’t true, either. Turning his back on his earlier romanticism, Allard was developing his bleak, existential parables of contemporary life. Influenced by the English absurdists and French existentialists, I was thinking about a character looking for a contemporary urban identity, who could relish and examine what most people considered the nightmares of the present and near future, who even took being a fictional character for granted. Bayley considered the most grotesque notions and imagined their logical outcome. Of the three of us, he was the most interested in using science fiction to examine and formulate ideas in theoretical physics. We had proven that we could suspend disbelief with the best of them. Now the trick was how to retain disbelief. We were strong on theories of alienation in those days. I loved Brecht. Allard found his inspiration in Freud. His work was becoming that mixture of austere romanticism which out-Greened Greene and was totally idiosyncratic. Max took to writing lyrics. And, eventually, jingles.

  We still dreamed of creating a glossy magazine, about the dimensions of Playboy, which would run features and fiction, all examining the world around us. We needed to find forms carrying the maximum number of narratives. We needed art paper so that we could reproduce modern paintings, photographs and good illustrations. We would use photomontage for some of those features. As viable literature we had to compete with and pinch from film and television for an audience’s attention. It was not for us to bemoan the ‘death of literature’; it was for us to stay alive and create new ways of attracting audiences by embracing their anxieties and examining their nightmares while offering them unfamiliar forms and unconventional elements which at the same time embraced all the methods we saw around us and were still rarely considered respectable literary forms. We were hugely idealistic and had no practical understanding of how to fund such a venture. But talk was good enough for those days. And I had my new girlfriend.

  9

  ROMANCE

  By 1960 I was twenty. I had enjoyed some brilliant affairs with spirited women and I’d come to know several of the writers I most admired. Some I read after I’d met them. Some became friends. They were my teachers. Lastly I enjoyed a fine education in the arms of Christina Vandeleur, an older woman who taught me a lot more than how to have fun in bed. She taught me about wines, food and travel. When I went to Sweden for a while she met me in Malmö and we had a tremendous month together. I think she had said she was reindeer hunting in the Arctic Circle or something. Those were the days, before cell phones and computers. Later I did go up to Norrlands, as it happened, and climbed there. It was a remote part of the world in those days and you could feel wonderfully isolated, hundreds of miles from the nearest civilisation or doctor.

  Christina Vandeleur was a cousin of the Queen’s and a friend of Princess Margaret. I met her first at a gig. I think she was slumming with her husband, a rather remote Tory MP who had, she said, an American boyfriend. He had to be in New York a lot. On business, she told me with a jolly wink. Most of the time, in fact. She preferred London. He went home that night. She stayed, she said, for a one-night stand. I wasn’t disappointed. Some generations seem to produce a lot of handsome people. Mine was definitely one of them. I think I owe a great deal of my finish to Christina Vandeleur. Perhaps every young sexual savage, naïve, shy and brutal, delicate and clumsy at the same time, should get his training in the art of love from the likes of her. I passed her education on to some younger women. Those girls have much to thank their mothers for.

  Born Christina Bright in 1933 to the Rev and Mrs Bright of Havercombe Morley, Somerset, cousins to Lord and Lady Bright of the same address, Christina’s was a face well known to the scandal sheets and gossip columns to which she also contributed as a skillful journalist. She had negotiated her way out of Godolphin and Latymer School for supersmart girls when she joined forces with the teenaged Lord Acreman to be the youngest pair of consenting English adults married in the month of September, the day after her sixteenth birthday. She was soon persuaded to dissolve the marriage on grounds of nonconsummation. Apparently Acreman wasn’t the most interesting of lovers. A year later she had married John Calvert, a dashing RAF officer. Almost at once both bride and groom were involved in some infamous and highly publicised affairs. She was nineteen when she married the named co-respondent in her divorce from Calvert. Jimmy Vandeleur was a bit of a walking cliché. Newspaper readers probably remember him as the daring young Formula One driver tragically killed during a practise run. Christina mourned him publicly and far more discreetly than before. She had later married Lord Mackenzie of Mourne and Jute, the newspaper owner, and wrote a column for the Daily Graphic which most people agreed was all that kept the paper afloat. It was a marriage of equals. While he was off buggering boys in Bangkok she indulged her not-dissimilar pleasures in Brighton.

  We met again at a posh dinner party given by Monotype for all the editors on their lists. That was how I knew her name. They put little tags in our places. By chance I was seated across from her. Vandeleur was the name she kept for her journalism. We have all forgotten how, before personal computers, the makers of typefaces pursued us trying to persuade us to use their products. I still have a measuring stick I was given at a similar party. Christina was flattering, fascinated when I was introduced as the youngest editor in Fleet Street, which I might or might not have been. I, of course, had no idea how much I appealed to her. I thought she was being kind to a young, rather gauche fiction editor. News people generally despised us. We’d had a perfectly good night after the gig but now she showed genuine interest in my story and background. I thought she perceived me as some kind of Ettrick Shepherd. But in fact, as she crowed later, I was everything she wanted for her birthday tied up with blue ribbon and delivered to her door.

  Her Mitsouko worked on me a bit like Viagra. I vaguely remember her giving the taxi an address in Chelsea which in those days was part of a rundown bohemia. She had an apartment at the top end of King’s Road in a block of flats called Mackintosh Mansions. Yeats had lived there at some point. Designed to supply everything to residents they could possibly want, ‘the Mack’ had its own restaurant, hairdresser, newsagent and grocer?
??s shop. Twentieth century, here we come! The idea was that residents were just beginning to feel the lack of available labour as well as inherited money. The flats still had servants’ quarters, one room for a valet or lady’s maid. Turned into spare bedrooms or even sublet by some. Many residents were forced to run their own errands after the Great Depression of the 1880s. So the young moderns were lured with services and exclusive shops all under one roof. If they liked to pose as painters they could also rent one of the studios where Augustus John and others worked. Sporting Club Square, where I went to live years later, was a similar idea on a much larger scale.

  After the first passionate days, I saw Christina at the Mack about twice a week and went on dates with her more often. Affectionately, humorously, quietly, most of the time, she taught me an extraordinary range of sexual techniques so subtle that I never once felt a moment’s resistance or nervousness. I even discovered a range of fantasies I might never have imagined for myself and enjoyed what others, I suppose, might think of as perversions. ‘It depends on your attitude,’ Christina would say. It was from her I learned the great mantra: Lips. Tongue. Eyes. Teeth. Swallow. Everything depended on the mood of those involved. If the mood wasn’t right not much else would be. I suspect attitudes changed after 1980 or so. We’d learned which drug induced what response. Before then, before AIDS, a sort of glorious golden age ruled much of the world, promising peace and prosperity for everyone. The sexual adept was much higher on the social scale. Then somehow it all darkened. Later I would feel oafish and unsophisticated because I needed no special stimulus to fill my cock with blood. Until then I enjoyed the whole range of sexual pleasure and was willing to enjoy other people’s fantasies, although I never needed fantasy to be stimulated. Many, I learned, did. By the cocaine-snorting 1980s it was almost impossible to find a sexual partner who wasn’t into something weird. At that time my lifestyle was entirely different. I had anticipated the end of the golden age. I’d wanted it to last forever, but it was pretty clear by the time Reagan and Thatcher solidified their power that we had missed our chance. I remember the moment in 1983 when a sadness swept over me and all I wanted to do was stay in bed and dream.

  10

  THE STOLEN ALBINO

  I have to admit that Christina Vandeleur developed in me a strong Pavlovian reaction! My friends came to recognise her ‘type’. A little older. Very pretty, with shortish brown hair, small breasts and a few other aspects which remain a bit elusive to me. I just don’t know quite why. Her certain way of dressing? Of responding? I didn’t feel any special lust for violent fantasy but she knew how to tease out the brute in me. And she wasn’t alone. Women were quite open in those days. Eventually, I stopped being surprised. I played the games, acted the fantasies, but I was often sad, feeling a distinct loss. All the women I came close to loving were like Christina, with a couple of exceptions. I began to see her as the norm. And she probably was.

  After a year or so, as if she had done all she could for my sentimental and fleshly education, Christina tired of me. I had grown used to her, thought myself in love with her. I became jealous, morbidly self-involved. When you catch yourself watching a TV situated at the end of a single bed, weeping to Garbo’s self-sacrificing dismissal of Robert Taylor in Camille, you should know you’re in trouble. Christina was kind according to her own lights. ‘I never strive to hang on to the joys of youth,’ she said, a bit mysteriously. I think I was that youth.

  As a going-away present Christina introduced me to DiDi Dee, as she was known. The Honourable Deirdre Dee was the daughter of a blended-whisky robber baron. I liked her quite a bit but she was as controlling in her way as I was in mine at that age. And relentlessly intellectual. She painted. She had started a review and wanted me to contribute. I held back. I’d had enough of bluestockings. For a while I seemed to attract women who felt I could teach them something more intellectual or romantic or even technical that was the secret of their need. Really, I could only teach them what Christina had taught me. Christina was a huge influence on the sexual fashions of several generations. She deserved a statue or at least a plaque.

  After DiDi I’d had a series of girlfriends but refused, against all natural instincts, to commit. My weakness was that I committed far too readily. And then caused problems. I wasn’t the bastard who buggered off, I was the bastard who hung around. Not always, I suppose, but it seemed pretty often. My romantic, overblown, melodramatic self-image was beginning to be grounded in Meg Midnight’s adventures with various Byronic villains. Almost to my surprise I found I took great pleasure in sex but preferred my lovemaking on an equal basis. I think that was what my grandma had drummed into me. I don’t do moody or wounded or stern. I can’t play head games. Sadly it left a lot of unhappy women who eroticised inequality so triumphantly and inescapably they identified it as their deepest self and defended that self against all attempts to expose it. They offer you so much power. All that patriarchy! So tempting to take advantage of it. It doesn’t last all that long, not for me at any rate. Cheap thrills aren’t my style anymore. Eventually even the old temptations get satisfied once too often.

  Naturally, I made a melodrama of all this.

  I was in the office one evening when Harry Harrison, an ebullient American SF writer living in Europe, dropped in. He and an editor friend, Andy Vincent, were about to cross the road to the White Swan and have a drink. Why didn’t I come? He was seeing Ted Carnell and John Wyndham there later. So I went. It was one of those watershed moments.

  Talking to John and Ted, we mourned the passing of the old fantasy adventures done by the likes of Robert E. Howard and C.L. Moore in Weird Tales. The best remembered of these were the Conan stories. As it happened, I’d done half a Conan story at the request of Hans Stefan Santesson, the editor of Fantastic Universe. I’d tried it out but wasn’t all that enthusiastic. John said I ought to come up with a character of my own for Science Fantasy. ‘That way they remember the character when they’ve forgotten who you are.’

  Thinking that over, I remembered Elric. Elric had been the central character I’d discussed with Jim Cawthorn when talking over doing a comic. I hadn’t read most of the ‘classics’. At that time Lord of the Rings hadn’t been published in America and become a cult. It was considered just one of several offbeat books. I had read the Conan stories and Poul Anderson’s first published fantasy The Broken Sword. I would want my own story to be as different as possible from all existing stories of the type. So, influenced in spite of myself by Poul Anderson and Blake writer Anthony Skene, who created Blake’s opponent Zenith the Albino, I came up with a sorcerer king too weak to fight without drugs or his sinister sword Stormbringer. Elric was born.

  I never planned to write more than one story. I had no strong desire to write more. Then the readers’ letters started coming. Carnell was amazed at the number. Most were enthusiastic. So he asked for another. I had started the first story well into Elric’s narrative. I had to do my best with that. Off he went looking for his identity or at least an identity, enslaved by the demon lurking in his blade. And then Carnell wanted a third and a fourth and a fifth. And in between the Elric stories Carnell wanted novellas. As many as I wanted to write. From being an obscure writer who occasionally published in New Worlds or Science Fiction Adventures, I now had the lead story, illustrated on the cover. I was, Carnell said, his best discovery since Allard. Of course the stories initially made less money than my journalism. Yet they were a better investment of my time. Books might pay less, but they kept reprinting. If you made sure of your royalties, you could also leave something worthwhile for your spouse and children.

  Elric was proving popular, not entirely from luck. All that reading of Freud and Jung, an absorption in metaphysics and the existentialists, paid off for a young lad earning a living from weird fiction. Knowing the Victorian Gothics helped, too. There’s a lot to be said for going back to basics and for the existence of a good public-library system.

  When I met the next girl of my dreams
, I didn’t think I had a chance. I discovered your knees really can knock together if you hold them close enough. It was horrible. As a rule I scarcely noticed a girl’s advances yet I never lacked for female company. I thought incuriously, for I was supremely self-confident, that my attraction was something to do with my editorial power.

  I honestly didn’t think in terms of looks, but I was by no means the only one to decide that Helena Denham was the prettiest young woman in a world of good-looking women. Existentialist chic had at last brought a plethora of female beauty to the creative world, even if that world was one of mostly commercial fiction. Juliette Gréco set the standard and many women were well above it.

  I caught sight of Helena at a party given by a friend of DiDi’s, Ildiko Hayes. I had gone there on my own, having just broken up with a young woman who had dumped me and returned to her husband, a sergeant in the Household Cavalry who made me nervous, so I was a bit relieved.

  Helena had recently split with her boyfriend and, determined to have nothing further to do with men, had made herself as unattractive as possible. She had given herself a pudding-bowl haircut and wore frumpy tweeds but I still knew she was beautiful. She was posh, slightly awkward in a cute sort of way, a million times better educated than me, with a double first from Cambridge, a job at the Ministry of Information and the reputation, Ildiko told me, as a bit of a belle dame sans merci. That probably came from her preference for long, Left Bank cigarette holders, pageboy haircuts and big black jumpers.

  There are only a few photographs of us and they show us trying to dress conventionally. She’s in a fashionable 1961 Courrège suit, Sassoon hairdo. I have short hair and a neat ‘cavalier’. I’m in a white button-down shirt with a thin black tie, black car coat, tight grey trousers and Cuban-heeled winkle-pickers. My kids insist I was a mod. I didn’t think I was dressing in any particular style. They were the clothes my peers wore. Later we’d all wear feathers and velvet. In reality most of the time Helena wore existentialist chic: black stockings, big jumpers. A Beat. People said we were the image of cool, the spirit of the age. Natural partners.