Moorcock/Calvert (again)

[Jon Jarrett]

On Sun, 7 May 2000, david hall wrote:

> Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 18:04:33 +0100
> From: david hall <dave at PARMA29.FREESERVE.CO.UK>
> Reply-To: BOC/Hawkwind Discussion List <BOC-L at LISTSERV.SPC.EDU>
> To: BOC-L at LISTSERV.SPC.EDU
> Subject: Moorcock/Calvert (again)
>
> On the music side, Calvert wins. I've always found some of MM's input
> to be, ahem, suspect. On the writing side MM wins by a mile. MM
> generally agrees that some of his earlier stuff wasn't as well written
> as he would have liked. The Jerry C. books were excellent, but, IMO
> are now appear dated. The Dancers At The End Of Time, absolutely
> top-hole old bean! After this his work was excellent, the Pyat books
> are exceptional....IMO his best. Maybe because I'm interested in
> history, politics, etc etc. Anyway if MM hadn't written Gloriana
> perhaps I wouldn't have read Mervyn Peake' stuff, so thanks for that.
>  Hype was thin, very thin...and not very well written, a bit sad
> really as I was really looking forward to it. The LP was better, but
> not as good as Capt Lockheed, not as bad as Lucky L. tho'.

        Calvert wrote short things, and did it incomparably well. He was
first and foremost a poet and a lyricist and the amount of compression he
achieved in his wordsmithery is still quite amazing to me. I would find it
very hard to full "unpack" `Robot' in the space of five pages. On the
other hand, Moorcock has no difficulty with the full stretch novel, which
Calvert didn't seem to do. Moorcock's poetry is never as compressed, but
sometimes gets almost the same number of points for showcasing odd
concepts. On the other hand, most of his songs have no real merit except
for the lyrics unless they were written by Pete Pavli. That's how I see it
anyway. Or Dave of course - I do quite like `Kings of Speed'.

        After I ventured the notion that Moorcock had only really become a
great novelist quite recently, and four dozen people chimed on saying how
the early Elric stuff was great, I went back and had a think, and I still
don't agree, but I grant you they have an extremely compelling pace, and
you can read them at the pace they want to run at largely because nothing
is wasted on introspection, description or character development. They're
great action novels I guess, but I think the later stuff is so much
fuller. Elric is after all a man with the guilt of a nation on his
shoulders, enslaved to a weapon which keeps him alive only by destroying
everything about which he once cared, and he is forever denied the peace
of having achieved his aim. But you have to assume all that, because
there's no space given to it at all in the first saga - when the Dreaming
City falls, there's not much more than paragraph about it and Cymoril's
death is assimilated in a couple of lines. All this, to me, makes Elric a
lack-lustre puppet to the storyline when there's clearly so much going on
in his head that you never get to see, or even see affecting his
actions. Admittedly, even in the later books when the matter is addressed
he largely refuses to think about it but even that gives him more of a
character than the ceaseless cut and thrust and occasional
demon-summoning.

        So I guess what I'm saying is that Calvert would probably have
covered everything I think Moorcock failed to write about Elric in three
verses had he been so minded, but as long as it has to be books Moorcock
has the plume, and I'm just glad the later Elrics and things like _Blood_
are part of his output otherwise I'd think of him as little more than a
particularly visionary writer of sword-and-sorcery pulp fiction.

        But then there's the Steampunk stuff, which is cool. And some
(though not all) of the Cornelius stuff. But you see what I'm saying.

>  As for the MM/Calvert "thing", wasn't that due to Bob walking off
> with Mike's wife.

        He did it twice, didn't he? And the second in particular, Jill
Calvert, doted on him, and for all his genius (because of it) Calvert
must have been pure hell to live with. I can only assume a very odd story
thereunder lurks. Yours,
                         Jon

--
 |  Jon Jarrett (01223 741219)         jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk   |
 | ======================================================================|
 | "Now, back me up on this, but isn't it always the same? You've just   |
 | got on the phone and the bath starts running? Back me up!" Harry Hill |