by Steve Moore
In Steve Moore’s case, even a cursory reading of his dreams revealed the workings of a highly structured mind that was exact and scrupulous in ordering its information. The evocative and sometimes creepy names of characters parading on his mental stage, such as the memorable Wilfred Cruel or the interdimensional crime cartel known only as ‘The Suitcase’, seemed to emerge fully formed out of the basement of his mind without the need for conscious literary intervention. In the typed and ring-bound dream-logs there is also a precision when it comes to numerals, providing numbers for imaginary bus routes, or the sums of money needed for the purchase of some non-existent book or artefact from the emporiums of his private underworld. The catalogued nocturnal wanderings potentially afford a fascinating glimpse into a writer’s mind: is this the way it works for all of us? Is there some reflex we have learned or had imprinted through those years of unrelenting deadlines and providing creativity to order, something that compels us to immediately furnish all the salient details, names and numbers every time that we invent a place or person, even in our sleep? Or is that just one of Steve Moore’s many unique and distinct peculiarities?
Beyond this attention to minutiæ, the recorded night-script also has a signature approach to cast and setting. Other than the various invented characters, the dreams are almost repertory ensemble pieces with the same actors and actresses continually recurring. There’s a smattering of past or current friends and work associates, a thriving and continuing clan of ghostly, since-departed family and a rotating roll-call of incongruous celebrities, such as a cat-suit period Diana Rigg or, unexpectedly, a number of contemporary cricketers. The cast is noticeably small, around two dozen faces constantly reiterated, with a similarly striking limitation to the range of dream locations. These consist of streets and landmarks found on Shooters Hill where he has lived in the same home since he was born, a few familiar avenues from the metropolis, the occasional remote city or town that is somehow reachable by a 10-minute walk or bus-ride within the telescoped geography of his dreamscape, and most frequently the house in which the greater part of his existence has been contained. Oh, and an unusual preponderance of railway stations, which made the performance of Unearthing he attended in the oracle-cave tunnels under Waterloo doubly apposite.
Here and there are dreams which seem to have an obvious occult overlap, such as some of the many visitations by his patron Greek moon-goddess, Selene. Others provide strange little hints and seemingly hidden puzzles, such as the unusual multi-part false-awakening series of dreams that he had in a single night, commencing with a fragment in which I was visiting his house and insisting upon casting the I Ching using a novel method that Steve had, in reality, just been sent in the post. Since I was in fact visiting on the weekend following, when I read this dream I suggested that we repeat it in reality, just to see if anything interesting happened. We acted out the initial dream with close attention to detail, and since Steve couldn’t remember what question had been asked of the oracle in the original, we decided with a self-referential postmodern twist to make the query ‘What was the reading in the dream?’ The answer, after consulting the I Ching, turned out to be an almost comically accurate ‘playlist’ for the various sections of the multi-part dream itself. Perhaps you had to be there.
One of most notable and incongruous elements to be found in the daily-updated files was the distinctive and curiously consistent chunks of buried architecture that were often being dug up or otherwise unearthed from the Shooters Hill side streets of his nightly imaginings. With their scale and their art nouveau flourishes, these fragments might almost have been the remains of one of Winsor McCay’s soaring Slumberland cities were it not for the ancient classical touches that marked them as a product of Steve Moore and his great fondness for the beautiful, dead and buried classical world.
Around the commencement of the 21st century, circumstances seemed to have left the Shooters Hill anchorite with only sporadic work and with a certain degree of emotional cumulus clouding up his life and his moods. While the actual sequence of events has been obscured by distance, as far as I recall I’d arrived at Steve’s for a weekend visit and had read through his latest slew of dreams on the Friday night of my arrival. I think it was on the Saturday morning following, while we were both out for a brief constitutional walk around the hilltop, that I remarked to Steve on how it seemed odd for him to be without a project when he had such a fantastic amount of imagery, ideas, characters and situations collected up in his couple-of-decades-worth of ring-bound dream-logs.
He didn’t dismiss the observation out of hand, as I remember it, but expressed some doubts about how such random and irrational material could be successfully included in any kind of comprehensible narrative. I suggested that perhaps he could come up with some piece of new wave science fiction that might not have been out of place in Michael Moorcock’s golden age editorial stint on the remarkable New Worlds, perhaps a work with overtones of the early, baroque J.G. Ballard: a man, perhaps a writer, living on Shooters Hill and observing dispassionately as an encroaching breakdown of reality itself spreads out across London, manifesting in episodes taken from incidents in Steve’s dream-life. I might even have remarked upon the fact that in my own experience introducing a loop of self-reference into a work tends to produce unusual occult feedback in one’s actual life. On our way to the shop off Shrewsbury Lane for cigarette papers and Turkish Delight, it’s possible that I droned on about how it’s the capacity for self-reference in our own dual-stranded DNA that allows human or animal existence; that maybe self-reference is a key feature in the creation of living systems, whether that be an organism or, conceivably, a manuscript.
Of course, he never listens to me. Apart from anything else, despite his admiration for Moorcock and many of the writers of the New Worlds stable, Steve Moore has never really been in his heart a new wave science fiction man and has always had more of an inclination towards the romantic fantasy, from his Adam Strange adolescence onwards. When he informed me a few weeks or months later that he’d tentatively started work on what would be his first serious novel, I was unsurprised to learn that no traces of anything that could remotely be called science-fictional were to be found in the new work, and that rather than making his dreams into the content of the novel he intended to make it instead a work about his emotional situation as, in more than one sense of the word, a dreamer. The suggested location of Shooters Hill itself had remained intact, and the main protagonist was still a writer, but that was the point at which any resemblance to anything which I myself might have imagined ended. The working title that he was turning over in his mind and considering was a one-word reference to the chunks of excavated architecture from his dream adventures: Somnium.
I read through the work in randomly spaced instalments as it was produced, and began to experience a sense of both wonderment and alarm at where it seemed to be headed. Whether it had been my own suggestion or not, self-reference was clearly playing a large part in the developing narrative. The main protagonist is a 19th century writer in self-exile on the top of Shooters Hill, fleeing from a doomed and forbidden infatuation, drinking and writing his way towards madness while lodging in rooms at the Bull Inn, an establishment just up the road from Steve’s place that he walked past every day. Although he’d distanced the prose by a couple of centuries from his own actual times and circumstances, the mood of the early-Victorian protagonist seemed to be in keeping with what I knew to be Steve’s developing fondness for the doomed æsthetes of the later Decadent movement, part of his general retreat from involvement in a distasteful present or future. The faintest of warning bells started to tinkle when the book’s main character suddenly decides that the best way out of his intractable emotional predicament is to write a fantasy novel set in the same location in which he is currently residing, but transposed to an earlier century. The haunted fictional author, Kit, decides to call his novel Somnium.
Uh-oh.
While I might have suggested adding a loop o
f self-reference to the work, I certainly hadn’t been irresponsible enough to suggest introducing further such loops to the narrative. Wouldn’t that be likely to create some sort of ontological vortex? Or was that what he was aiming for; a bottomless conceptual maelstrom to fling his scrawny carcass into? Either way, I read on with some trepidation.
This meta-novel, this Somnium-within-Somnium, takes place upon a phantasmagorical Elizabethan Shooters Hill in keeping with the flesh-and-blood author of Somnium’s then-current preoccupation with harpsichord music and the enchanted proto-psychedelic culture of the 16th century. The hero, a Walter Ralegh man of action with the lunar appellation of Endimion Lee, finds himself lost in the amorous intrigues of a moon-palace, the enchanted realm of Diana Regina (a name which neatly compresses that of the classical moon-goddess Diana with the honorific of Elizabeth R., and ends up sounding not dissimilar to ‘Diana Rigg’). You might say that he’s a ‘Prisoner in Fairyland’, to borrow from Shooters Hill-born Algernon Blackwood’s original title for what would become Starlight Express. As I’ve already remarked in my excavation of Steve Moore’s life, Unearthing, the resultant adventures are like an inverted version of Aubrey Beardsley’s decadent pornographic take upon the Venus and Tannhäuser story, Under the Hill, only set on top of the hill and without the fleshy consummation.
Just at the point in the developing tale where I was starting to fear that a rebuffed Endimion Lee would find solace in penning a mediæval romance set on Shooters Hill and entitled Somnium, it became apparent that while it was indeed the real-life author’s intention to deepen his whirlpool of stories this would not be accomplished by simply reiterating the novel’s principal device. Instead, we and the Elizabethan protagonist are introduced to the Library of Somnium and its unending array of liminal never-written dream-tomes. These, as it transpires, contain short decadent pieces such as This Dull World and the Other, a prose-poem that Steve had previously written during an idle moment and which, with its style and content, had turned out to fit perfectly within the expanding and unfolding layers of Somnium. Moving between these layers, the camera-eye of the prose could pull back in a vertiginous swoop from a fascinating and engrossing self-contained fable, to 16th century Endimion Lee reading it in the Library of Somnium, to the 19th century where Kit Morley is writing all this and starting to suspect that there’s another writer, somewhere on Shooters Hill in its future, who is writing him. It may have been around this juncture, as the novel neared its completion and began to enter a process of re-drafts and revisions, that I elected to wait and read the book when it was finished, from beginning to end, to see whether this complex twilight endeavour would stand up to daylight scrutiny.
Finally reading the completed work, being able to perceive the whole of its literary shape, was a revelation. As is usually the case upon stumbling across something of rare originality, the mind tends to flail around looking for comparisons by which to measure it. I could only find two. The first, purely in structural terms, was Jan Potocki’s overlooked fantasy The Saragossa Manuscript with its hallucinatory maze of stories-within-stories and its mirrored characters and situations. The second, for reasons that are more difficult to articulate, would be the equally neglected A Voyage to Arcturus by Steve’s near-neighbour from down the hill, Blackheath resident David Lindsay.
For me as a writer, the overwhelming impressions that I have when reading an original work like Lindsay’s visionary novel or like Steve Moore’s Somnium are not un-akin to the impressions that I get from the later James Joyce or the gloriously mad rapture of William Blake: there is awe and there is admiration, but there is also that sense of bewildered amazement when it occurs to you to ask the question ‘Why would anybody write this?’. Why would anyone, least of all a professional commercial writer of 30 or 40 years’ experience, spend so much time and energy and passion upon a work which, in their heart of hearts, they must have known would only be read and understood and enjoyed by a handful of people, if that? It’s clearly a task not undertaken in the hope of reward or acclaim, but most probably with an expectation of baffled dismissal. As to why the author wrote it in the way they did, whether we’re talking about Blake or Joyce, about David Lindsay or Steve Moore, the only answer that we end up being left with is ‘because they had to.’ These are all works of vision that speak from their authors’ individual souls, things that had to be said in order to articulate the unique feelings, ideas and perceptions that these writers felt were at the core of their personal being.
They are works of compulsion where their creators, we suspect, had no choice but to do things how they did. It wasn’t up to them, it was up to the work itself. This kind of pure writing, perpetrated without lust of result, is without question about as courageous as it gets on this side of the typewriter.
Of course, to comment on Somnium’s undoubted bravery and originality is to avoid the question which Steve Moore put to me when he gave me the completed and revised manuscript to read around five years ago now, namely, is it any good? Considering the book’s ambition, taking into account the dexterity with which it shifts from the prose style of one era to another, bearing in mind the sheer lusciousness of the language and the dizzying range of ideas, I’d have to reply now in the same way that I did to Somnium’s author back then: ‘I think it’s a masterpiece …’
Given the fact that I’m presently writing this afterword for the first edition, I feel it’s more prudent to omit the original ending of my response to this extraordinary novel, which was ‘… but I don’t see how it will ever be published.’ It just seemed to me that, from the perspective of a publishing industry increasingly unwilling to blow their budgets on new fiction while there are still celebrity chefs out there who haven’t yet given us their autobiographies, Somnium was far too weird, exotic and defiantly unfashionable a fish to fry. Its plot, not immediately visible to the untrained eye, is much too peculiar and abstract to sum up in a two-line blockbuster pitch. Its Victorian/Elizabethan stylings are scholarly and authentic and therefore not in step with the current trend for retro-fitting bygone eras in order to make them more comprehensible and palatable to a contemporary audience. Its capitalised Romanticism is not of the type required by the modern equivalent of the Mills & Boon readership. There’s no shopping, there’s no sex (for all the lingeringly sustained erotic atmosphere pervading the work), and the intellectual readership who are intelligent enough to appreciate the book are all currently embattled by logic-dodging religious fundamentalists who think the Earth was made around last Tuesday, at least geologically speaking, and are subsequently in no mood to be sympathetic to any species of numinous and archaic fantasy. When I speak of Somnium being courageous, this wilful refusal to follow the established conventions of this or any other era is what I’m talking about.
Luckily, the world changes very quickly these days, and my abilities as a Cassandra are clearly pitiful. The apparently ongoing fragmentation of culture, far from being the catastrophe that it originally seemed, seems to have allowed a situation where the giant saurians of mass culture are finding themselves in difficulty while enterprises conceived on a smaller and more mammalian scale are becoming possible, providing a way for even the most outré and marginalised of sensibilities to find their natural audience. I hope this is what happens for Somnium. I like the idea of modern readers, however many there turn out to be, being able to stumble by chance upon this unexpectedly deep and exquisitely perfumed pool of prose, to encounter an unlikely conjugation of beautiful language and sensibilities so time-sensitive that they may almost seem alien to the modern ear. I also like the notion that every reader who is willing to entertain this genuinely marvellous fantasy is in a way allowing the buried palace of Somnium that lies under Shooters Hill a purchase in their own subconscious mind; could be said to be founding and building that magnificent astral structure, making it more solid and substantial, a mind or a brick at a time.
Somnium is not a novel for our time, or necessarily for any other. It exists in the
same timeless, visionary continuum that the work of William Blake or David Lindsay exists in, and it is in my opinion one of the most extreme and unique applications of the imaginative writer’s craft that I have ever had the privilege to find myself absorbed in; one of the strangest and most lyrical made-up worlds that I have ever visited. I hope that, having reached this afterword, you will agree and recognise a work and author that have, in Colin Wilson’s words, the strength to dream: without leaving your bedroom, which is half a dozen paces from the spot where you were born, to construct such a luminous edifice of narrative, with that narrative itself never venturing more than a few hundred yards from that same bedroom. The strength to insist upon a personal territory of the heart and mind, and then to chart that territory so that other love-wrecked mariners might reach it too.
Dream on.
Alan Moore
Northampton, April 2011
About the Authors
STEVE MOORE has written comic strips for 2000AD, Marvel Comics, Radical and other publishers in the UK and USA, authoring innumerable characters including Dr Who, Dan Dare and Hercules in a career lasting 40 years; he also wrote the novelisation based on the movie V for Vendetta. He has written numerous non-fiction books on fortean and oriental subjects. His work has been translated into languages as diverse as Greek and Japanese.