The Whispering Swarm (20 page)

Mysteriously, and for a short while after both children were born, I first heard the Whispering Swarm. That faintest of distant murmurings in my ears would briefly grow into a torrent of unfamiliar, whispering voices. I made out no words, but after a while I thought I heard something, because of certain repeated notes. I would lie in that old double bed worrying what was best for the baby, where we should move and so on, and before I knew it the Swarm would begin to whisper in my left ear. I thought at first that it was Helena, but she always slept on my right. I hardly heard it at first. Perhaps she was snoring? I washed my ears in case I had picked up a virus. But the whispering voices—and I was now convinced they were voices—were just as insidious. I tried hard to detect words but heard nothing coherent. And then, in the darkness, they went away, leaving a questioning silence. At night I was in no doubt that they represented some kind of intelligence. By daylight, however, they became an irritant, a minor hallucination: I thought it might be acid-reverb, when LSD taken months earlier suddenly kicks in again. Or maybe a subconsciously originated distraction from my responsibilities?, suggested Arthur Paine, the local shrink, when, at the pub one night, I told him about the Swarm. He hardly listened, though. He wanted to talk about his son. Dr Paine had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. ‘A suicide!' the boy declared.

I took my responsibilities seriously enough, though it meant a lot of hackwork. I never regretted having our children so relatively young, but Helena and I weren't prepared for babies, especially two in less than a year. We knew so little about what to do. Mothers offered conflicting advice. Other wisdom sounded like superstition to us. Thank god for Doc Spock.

Abortions were still illegal. Helena had a horrifying one via the old boyfriend so that wasn't an option. But at that moment in our lives a third young child would have been ruinous, both financially and emotionally for everyone. Just in time, female contraception became widely available. Of course we accepted our responsibility as parents, buying the special foods, the books and the clothes, negotiating the convictions of well-meaning relatives, doing the best that could be done by conscientious, uninformed young people. I wasn't exactly a New Man, but I did more than most men of my generation to take on my share of the domestic work.

The children were never a burden, though it wasn't easy in our two rooms, a bath in the kitchen and a toilet downstairs on the landing, but we managed reasonably well. We had been raised during austerity and were used to making do. There was virtue in it. We had a TV. Although Len Matthews and I had fallen out at the end of my time with AP, I still freelanced for all his editors. They just asked me to contribute under Helena's maiden name because Len had put it about that I was some kind of commie agitator, maybe because I knew too much about his ruthless careerism. My freelance earnings were reasonably good and we had only minor money worries. I had given up music for the time being. Our girls were huge, healthy and generally happy even though their cot was a little close to a record player constantly broadcasting the Beatles and Beethoven, which preserved our sanity. That flat couldn't have been more than three hundred square feet. For a bit I rented a daytime room from my brother-in-law, where I could work. It was miles away in Southwark. I started looking for a bigger flat we could reasonably afford, but for eighteen months we lived in very-cramped, somewhat-noisy conditions as the babies became toddlers with their own increasingly complex personalities.

Colville Terrace then was a mixture of brothels, bohemians, old people and young parents. Two years earlier we had the so-called race riots, running fights between Teddy Boys and West Indians. Now the neo-Nazis were trying to exploit the situation from their headquarters in Princedale Road. We had a steel band rehearsing next door. Outside, at three
AM
every weeknight, a big whore called Marie got drunk and wielded a giant kitchen knife and needed three policemen to wrestle her down and take the weapon away from her before she killed her pimp and her client. The cops never charged her. They were too scared. Nobody accused Marie to her face. She was the sunniest of neighbors when sober. But she always carried that knife.

During the day people were generally friendly to young couples with children who shopped in what then was a cheap Portobello Road market. In a pushchair solid enough to go up against a Sherman tank, Sally and Kitty sat chuckling and waving as their massive, wheeled battering ram charged through knots of tourists adding our junk-and-antique market to their itineraries. Secure in their machine, the girls were a big hit with the local shopkeepers, especially Mrs Pash who, with her companion Mr Skinner, ran Elgin Music in Elgin Crescent. We spent a lot of time in Mrs Pash's. She loved the kids. Mr Skinner had opened the shop in 1905 when he closed his father's old place in Kilburn. ‘It was all banjos and ukes until the 1930s,' he told me, looking at a fretless banjo I'd picked up in the market. ‘This is off a minstrel show, isn't it?' He admired the sunburst surround, the gold-and-scarlet resonator. ‘We saw a lot of these once.' He loved the Epiphone guitar I found. ‘They used to tune these classical,' he said. ‘Bit of a mistake. Because of classical orchestras, that's all. Always best in G, though.' The Epiphone had a huge resonator on the back and was used for dance-band work before electric amplifiers. He talked of old customers, of Jack Jackson, Carol Gibbons and his Savoy Hotel Orpheans. He wasn't aware that half the most famous popular musicians in the world were now hanging out in his shop. One afternoon I walked in to find Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix and Martin Stone all there together.

After Mrs Pash's husband died in the 1940s Mr Skinner moved into the basement and ground-floor flat at 87 Ladbroke Grove, W11. Mr Skinner had taught her grandsons to play every fretted instrument there was. One of them, David, became a guitar prodigy and appeared on the cover of
BMG
. Mrs Pash was as enthusiastic about Sally and Kitty as she was about her own grandchildren, one of whom was a foreign correspondent. Cheerful, enthusiastic David worked in the shop part-time. I admired his classical training, he envied me my self-taught idiosyncrasies.

Meanwhile for a series of articles on fantasy fiction for
Science Fantasy
I immersed myself in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Bayley and I were still making most of our money from journalism while Allard kept his day job as editor of
Science and Industry
. We needed every penny we earned.

When
Science Fiction Adventures
folded suddenly it was the writing on the wall. We weren't surprised when Carnell told us his magazines, which had put a bit of jam on our bread and butter, were under threat of extinction. We started looking for more work. We sent a few stories to
Argosy
and American magazines and had them accepted, but those markets, though they paid a little better, were even more conservative than
New Worlds
. We had no market for our ambitious fiction.

Next, to my surprise, Ted Carnell phoned me to say
New Worlds
and
Science Fantasy
had been bought. He would not continue as editor but he had named me as his successor because of my editorial experience. It turned out, however, that Kyril Bonfiglioli, the accomplished fencer and art dealer, had been suggested as Carnell's replacement by Brian Aldiss. Like them, the new publisher lived in Oxford. They all used the same pubs. I was almost relieved, certainly reconciled, that I would not be editing the mags. I had lost any enthusiasm for commercial SF and most fantasy and was hardly reading it any more. I had a different sort of novel to write.

In the end a compromise was proposed: Impact Books offered me first choice of the magazines. Against expectations I picked
New Worlds
. It was the best vehicle for what I had talked about doing. The title was at least a little ambiguous. And so began what others would call the ‘SF New Wave'. While Bon followed a policy similar to America's
Magazine of Fantasy And Science Fiction
concentrating on improvements in characterisation and more sophisticated writing, I was determined, with Burroughs, some British poets like George MacBeth and the British pop artists, to take what we needed from SF but drop some genre clich
é
s and rationalisations, moving on to create our own kind of fiction. Using methods developed from both modernism and SF, the work remained rooted in popular traditions but also encouraged innovation. I wanted the general reader. I wanted women like Helena to buy it. I wanted art paper, large quarto, colour. They let me have a bimonthly paperback magazine printed on already disintegrating cardboard—the nearest thing an English magazine of its type ever came to actual pulp.

Some saw this as a refreshing change from a degenerated modernism. SF was threatened with losing precisely what made it work for Allard and myself. Richard Hamilton feared the same. He thought SF should keep its popular vitality, by which he meant spaceships and robots. People knew little of my taste for Ronald Firbank, Jarry or Vian, abstract absurdism, or of Allard's fierce intention to engage in bloody experiment where he invoked to his own requirements the ikons of Anglo-American culture. They didn't see us coming. Certain readers and critics became disenchanted. Early allies deserted us. Some distanced themselves, citing my youthful naïvet
é
. Others recognised and celebrated what we were doing.

The weight of responsibility settled on me for a while and then fell off. Our mothers were pleased. We were procreating as fast as we could. I spent most of my time working. Now I would have to start producing novels in earnest. When, as an editor, I couldn't get something I liked as a serial, I wrote a two-parter for
New Worlds
and then sold it to Ace Books in the US. They paid between $750 and $1,000 and ran short novels back to back. Some of the old SF hacks accused me of writing all
New Worlds
myself because they'd never heard of anyone they saw on the contents page, but I was finding good new writers, bringing good old writers into a more sympathetic environment, only writing what I hoped were exemplary stories and not paying myself for them. The money was passed on to pay contributors a little better. Any pseudonym I used had already previously been in a Carnell mag. Criticism was done as Jack Corbal. A fitting name for a critic, I thought. In those columns I talked up Bill Burroughs, Borges and others, new and old, demonstrating that the realist rationale wasn't important to visionary stories. We needed to find new ways of telling such tales and we needed to stop the modern novel comforting itself and the contemporary novelist and only addressing part of a certain class. We wanted to get rid of the retrospective narrative as the only significant factor in separating one genre from another. We could parody it and did, but we were tired of a device which made it difficult to confront the actualities of the modern world. I stepped a little cautiously in our early numbers. I knew from revamping
Tarzan
and Sexton Blake that in time most people accepted change and that change attracted new readers. You lost perhaps twenty-five per cent but you gained fifty per cent or more. You built from there.

The new publisher also wanted a line of SF novels. I offered a couple of my own but mostly I bought what was available from friends, Carnell's clients, or people I enjoyed as a boy. I bought what I knew from experience of the SF fanzines would sell and what would probably sell. Roger Zelazny, E.C. Tubb, L. Sprague de Camp, Kenneth Bulmer, Judith Merril, Dan Morgan, Daphne Castell, Jack Vance, Connie Stern and others all came aboard. I wanted to buy some P.K. Dick and went to see his agent who offered us a deal: £150 a book or four for £500. He had rubber bands around each batch. I would have bought them instantly, of course. Many were Ace Doubles just like mine but their quality was so much superior to mine. He deserved more than our miserable advances, so I wrote to Phil and told him his agent was selling him short. I and others spoke to Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape, thought to be one of the two or three top publishers of literary fiction. I got John Brunner to write the first ever article which saw Phil as a serious writer. We talked him up as a unique visionary in
New Worlds
and soon Cape was publishing barmy, brilliant, treacherous old Phil. Maschler was soon taking cues from us. He would ask me who were the next new writers to look out for. I had already recommended Allard. Maschler suggested I send him something but I knew I wasn't ready. I was happy to keep the obscurity of paperbacks and learn my craft a bit better.

A year or two before that brief golden age of the revivified noveI, around 1965 when we were just beginning to emerge as an identifiable group based on the magazine, I was still doing Fleet Street hackwork in partnership with Barry. He tended to write the science articles and I did historical, geographical and ‘social' features. I still have our rubber stamp: Moorcock and Bayley, 8 Colville Terrace, London W11. The history of London was my speciality. Alsacia was never that far away. I was sometimes tempted to look for the gates again but resisted. I stopped thinking about Moll, the abbot, The Swan With Two Necks or any other complex acid trip I'd enjoyed!

Although I sometimes referred to ‘Alsacia' to demonstrate the power of an acid hallucination, I was increasingly focused on the magazine, my family, my work. Gradually we built up readers. Helena was at once relieved and unhappy about my taking over the magazine. We weren't making much money from it but it offered me the chance to ask her for a real story. She had already sold one story to Carnell. She was a natural. I knew she could do well.

Helena's brilliant novella
The Haul of Frankie Steinway
appeared in our second issue. She wrote reviews. Her periods of depression grew fewer. And, perhaps best of all, Mrs Pash persuaded her landlord to let us take over her big two-storey flat in Ladbroke Grove for six guineas a week. The flat had been occupied by Mrs Pash for thirty-odd years. Into the bargain, Mrs Pash left us her mighty player piano, an impressive Banning and Goethe Model 97 which had rolls from Gilbert and Sullivan to Schoenberg. It had been brought in the back way over wartime bomb damage and through some big French windows. The damage had since been repaired. Consequently there was no way the pianola could leave what became the kids' room. So the Moorcocks became stewards to that clangy, old, hardly tuneable, beautiful instrument for another thirty years or so.