The Whispering Swarm (15 page)

Moll became more and more the woman of my dreams, less and less of a reality. I gave the stories a mild love interest with a boyfriend, Gentleman Jeb Collins. Moll became the feistiest highway robber in the business. She made more than one foray into the world of fantasy. She had ancestors and descendants. I did a couple of haunted horse tram and ghost stagecoach stories but real trams, of course, were out as far as Midnight Moll went—a part of my dream which would be impossible for the readers to accept. In fact Moll/Meg soon didn't do much conventional coach robbing, either. Mostly she got involved with the machinery of the nineteenth-century Gothic and its secret caverns, glowing horsemen, hooded figures, phantom ships, mysterious castles and sinister dwarves. Pirate episodes. An American Indian story. The Spanish Inquisition. The Jacobite Rebellion. Hardy perennials. I had hit gold. Or at least silver. Editors as well as the public loved Meg.

For a while her popularity was pretty big. They gave her a modern descendant who could summon Robin Hood whenever she blew Robin's horn. Molly Midnight became a kind of Batgirl who fought crime. She featured for a while in
Tiger
. I wrote almost every other character in
Tiger
except her! Soon she was awarded Fleetways's highest accolade: her own Thriller Picture Library—sixty-four pages for a shilling.

For a while I returned to editing
Tarzan
but I was losing interest. Our skiffle-and-blues band was getting a little bit of attention. A bloke with a Polish name was keen on us to try a bunch of the outer-London pubs. We were flattered. We began to have musical ambitions.

The next time I went down to Metropolitan Typesetters in Old Bailey there was no sign of Friar Isidore. Had I imagined him too? Another week and he still didn't turn up. Quite a few people remembered him. ‘I think his paper folded', said one of the apprentices. He had read something about it in the last issue of
The White Friar
he composed. I got Sammy Samuels to do the proofs after that.

I was bothered by the very faint humming in my ears. I began to wonder if it was being up too close to the stage when a jazz band was on. It was hardly noticeable most of the time and was only irritating when I was overtired. I worried a little it would affect my playing but our local GP, Dr Dillon, told me it was nothing to worry about. I believed him. I had been seeing him since he delivered me. The Greenhorns had become Killing Floor, giving up our smart grey Stetsons, matching box jackets, and string ties. We had our biggest gig coming up at a jazz club in West Hampstead and I didn't want to blow it. That gig got us a demo at EMI. I suppose it was probably just as well it was so dire and I wasn't lured away from writing for a while.

Before I was nineteen I had left
Tarzan
, promising to continue writing for them while looking after the Tarzan strip, and once again gone to Paris to stay with Ray Napoleon. Ray still kept his San Francisco contacts and had hung out with the Beats. He took me round to a tiny hotel at the back of George Whitman's Le Mistral bookshop, and introduced me to Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. I thought they were nice, polite, clean-cut young Americans. They were kind to me. At that time I had never heard of them. Although I knew a lot about the music, I was almost entirely ignorant of modern American literature. That faint humming in my ears remained with me but I was having so much fun I didn't care. Ray and I busked outside Le Mistral. George didn't mind. Any money we made outside the shop was spent inside, anyway. Le Mistral eventually became Shakespeare and Co. That was where I bought the first modern SF novel I read, a serial in
Galaxy
of Alfred Bester's
The Stars My Destination
. I loved it. If that was SF, I was a convert. I found more old copies of
Galaxy
and read Pohl and Kornbluth's
The Space Merchants
. Eventually, tired of sleeping uncomfortably in Ray's living room, I went home. I had work to do.

Moll remained my most popular character, running in
Comet, Tiger
and Thriller Picture Library, for a while at the same time. I rewrote some as science fantasy for
Tarzan
simply by beginning ‘On Mars' … and making Moll a tough space rat in the manner of Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark. I didn't do many. Sammy had been awaiting his chance. The moment I left he took
Tarzan
swinging and whooping back to the early twentieth century. I dropped in one day and found my stories and Jim's illustrations actually in the wastepaper basket. ‘Healthy boys don't want that stuff,' he said of everything I loved. There weren't enough healthy boys, apparently. The paper lasted another ten or so weeks.

 

8

LITERARY LIFE

I moved to Earls Court. A big furnished flat by the tube. Of course I was as profligate as any young man capable of earning large amounts of money. With all that money to spend, I became a teenage drunkard. I also became attractive to women. I put it down to playing in a group and making money from my writing. Whatever it was, I somehow got on well with women. At eighteen I had a reputation. It was completely mysterious to me but for a while every time I turned up at the Globe I was with a new girlfriend. I enjoyed their company enough but I felt no strong attraction for the girls I met. Until I fell in love with Maria Papadoupolis.

I met Maria at a party of
Outsider
author Colin Wilson. People had brought Colin and me together because they saw us both as enfants terribles but we didn't have a lot in common. I got on better with his friend Bill Hopkins, another self-styled ‘angry young man', who wrote a couple of rather lush novels. They lived together in a big flat off Portobello Road. When I was there, most of their anger seemed to do with who had used up the last of the milk. Maria had come to the party as a friend of Charlotte, Charlie Shapiro's sister, whom I'd taken to dinner a couple of times. Charlotte, Colin and Bill had got into tarot reading and Ouija boards for some reason. Probably because of the gypsies and Auntie Ethel, I'd shown a surprising aptitude for the usual silly party tricks like who was being faithful or unfaithful, where something could be found and so on, but I wouldn't do ‘talking to the dead' stuff.

Maria had pale skin, dark curly hair cut to the nape of her neck, dark eyes, spectacular lashes. She was short but she had the figure of a Greek goddess, over which she wore a scarlet velvet frock. Her high heels matched that frock. Her earrings probably weren't real pearls and diamonds but somehow they looked real on her. And she wore just the right amount of Shalimar. She leaned against my shoulder while I dealt the cards and she huskily asked me to read her tarot. We were soon in bed, courtesy of Bill, who luckily had his own plans for the evening, as did Colin. She clearly wasn't the virgin her dad presumed her to be.

Maria had slept with some pretty useful communists. She knew a lot more about pleasure, how to find it and sustain it, than I did. I was soon more than willing, as Charlotte joined us, to risk the wrath of the most feared communist gangster in North London. But, as the weekend wore on in Charlotte's little Bloomsbury boarding house room, I understood that wasn't really the problem. Mr P believed his daughter was visiting family in Cyprus, which gave her a lot of freedom in those days before everyone had a phone. The problem was me. I had fallen in love with a woman who wasn't in the mood for love and I was, as far as she was concerned, something of a wimp. I thought I came out of it pretty well. I learned how to give her multiple orgasms. I did several kinds of threesome. Drugs were harder to find in those days, but I found them. I refused to let her try heroin or morphine and hadn't tried them yet myself. Slowly but surely I became protective of her. She was seventeen, bursting out of her convent school full of frustration and ready for everything. And of course, within weeks I drove her away. Now, I can sympathise with her state of mind, but then I was shattered. She simply disappeared. Charlotte didn't know where she had gone. Her father, of course, told me she was in Cyprus. I think it was at that moment I started to cry.

My old posh girlfriend Alexandra had been sent off to finishing school almost as soon as we broke up. After Maria, I started seeing Alex's sister Memphis. Her parents were heavily into Egypt for some reason. Memphis Gupta had to be the coolest name in town, especially in 1958. We had a lot of fun. For a while Alex's friend Indigo joined us. I wined and dined everyone and drove a few real friends away. I wanted to share my good fortune, that was all. It took me years to understand why they would feel insulted. Some came to dislike me for flashing my money about. Some could handle it. Some wound up despising me. I berated others for their lack of imagination and sensitivity while often completely lacking it myself. Possibly I had come to all this money too soon. Certainly it didn't occur to me to save it. I could always earn what I needed by writing another Moll story.

I made even more money by doing the odd bit of guitar work. There were a lot fewer people who could play blues and the like in London at that time. I got around twenty quid an hour. Union rates. Some people liked my weird half-banjo sound. Open G, picking, the bass string as a kind of drone. All sorts of weird tricks. I also got gigs with the little Dixieland bands springing up everywhere. Sometimes I did a couple of blues songs while they took a break. The customers thought of me as some kind of one-man skiffle group. Gradually, though, I got anonymous work on British rock-and-roll records. I was very grateful for the anonymity.

Then, at last, I began to sell short science fiction to the English magazines. There were three left:
New Worlds, Science Fantasy
and
Science Fiction Adventures,
all edited by Ted Carnell. I first met my friend Jack Allard in Carnell's offices, where we were both delivering stories. I was not overly familiar with his work but one novella,
The Vices of Thaym,
had struck me as outstanding and I was able to tell him. He took my praise graciously and we began to meet intermittently, sometimes with Barry Bayley, first at a nearby pub and then closer to Jack's editing job in Knightsbridge. We shared a frustration with the contemporary novel only matched by our disappointment with science fiction. It all looked old-fashioned to us. Nostalgic. We loathed nostalgia and bemoaned its dominance of American and British literature. William Burroughs was our favourite SF writer. I had been introduced to him briefly in Paris and had a desultory correspondence: a few postcards. I introduced Allard to his work one time after I returned from Paris with a bunch of Burroughs's Olympia Press stuff. He was the only Beat I really liked

The fiction we visualised should be presented in a large, slick-paper format to reproduce good art, in a magazine with an up-to-date title designed to appeal to a modern, educated audience. Not SF as such, but borrowing from it. I showed Allard some mock-ups I'd done for a new kind of publication. I couldn't think of a decent title. We were looking for a fresh vocabulary to explain our special experience as the postwar generation which had known the war as children and were embracing modern scientific ideas, computers, psychosexuality, new social interpretations and so on. Allard was older than me and his ideas of how the magazine should look were in my view a little outdated. He seemed to think my visual notions were driven by fashion rather than the zeitgeist. I thought his a bit 1940s. We argued but rarely fell out because we agreed in general. We joked that if we ever got what we wanted we would be like Trotsky and Lenin, quarrelling over who knew best, who should have the most power. The amiable, superbright Barry, who chuckled approvingly at our ideas but saw no chance of them reaching any kind of fruition, said that as long we wanted to take his stories, rejected by Carnell, we had his support.

I admired Camus, to whose work I'd been introduced in Paris along with stuff by Jarry and Ionesco. I thought Philip K. Dick was a bit like that but I was disappointed by the rationalisations he provided to please his publishers. Allard liked Bradbury, noir films and the Nouvelle Vague in French cinema. I joked with him that if he hadn't been tone deaf he would have liked bebop. But existentialism and absurdism were in the air we breathed. He loved surrealism. I loved pop art. We would have long, fierce, friendly arguments about all this. He had read very little, preferring to get his culture via the screen or from the radio, but this didn't stop him having strong opinions about literature. I had grown up between two great public libraries in a neighbourhood and surrounded by secondhand bookshops. I had been an early reader. He had read mostly American comics and science fiction magazines. We didn't even have the same tastes in those!

After the liberation of Guernsey, where he had grown up under German occupation, Allard had gone to posh schools and Cambridge. I had barely been educated formally after I was fourteen. But we got on well and were soon warm friends. Allard was married with two little children so we rarely met in the evenings. We talked a bit about the unusual stories we had written and how there was nowhere to sell them now that
Lilliput
was a shadow of its former self. We looked eagerly for particular markets. We kept on submitting to
Argosy
and the posher monthlies, like
Encounter,
which occasionally bought imaginative fiction. Whenever we were rejected we comforted ourselves that we were proving how out of touch those editors were. He spoke of Kafka's rejections. I said they only accepted what they could recognise. Even when Allard sold to
Argosy
he claimed it was one of the most ordinary stories he'd ever written, thus underpinning his argument.

I didn't much share Allard's enthusiasm for the New Wave French film-makers and he didn't share mine for Vian, Cendrars, Henry Green and the American avant-garde. I eventually realised that the only fiction he liked was his own. Meanwhile, he wrote brilliant, lyrical stories which were a bit like Ray Bradbury, a bit like Graham Greene and were as original as anything the genre had ever seen. By contrast, I found a profitable facility for reviving the pulp sword-and-sorcery story for which I still had a fondness and which Carnell began to commission from me.