The City in the Autumn Stars

by Moorcock, Michael

  Not all my fiction looked for new forms for the new century. Like many ‘revolutionaries’ I looked back as well as forward. As George Meredith looked to the eighteenth century for inspiration for his experiments with narrative, I looked to Meredith, popular Edwardian realists like Pett Ridge and Zangwill and the writers of the fin de siècle for methods and inspiration. An almost obsessive interest in the Fabians, several of whom believed in the possibility of benign imperialism, ultimately led to my Bastable books which examined our enduring British notion that an empire could be essentially a force for good. The first was The Warlord of the Air.

  I also wrote my Dancers at the End of Time stories and novels under the influence of Edwardian humourists and absurdists like Jerome or Firbank. Together with more conventional generic books like The Ice Schooner or The Black Corridor, most of that work was done in the 1960s and 70s when I wrote the Eternal Champion supernatural adventure novels which helped support my own and others’ experiments via NEW WORLDS, allowing me also to keep a family while writing books in which action and fantastic invention were paramount. Though I did them quickly, I didn’t write them cynically. I have always believed, somewhat puritanically, in giving the audience good value for money. I enjoyed writing them, tried to avoid repetition, and through each new one was able to develop a few more ideas. They also continued to teach me how to express myself through image and metaphor. My Everyman became the Eternal Champion, his dreams and ambitions represented by the multiverse. He could be an ordinary person struggling with familiar problems in a contemporary setting or he could be a swordsman fighting monsters on a far-away world.

  Long before I wrote Gloriana (in four parts reflecting the seasons) I had learned to think in images and symbols through reading John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Milton and others, understanding early on that the visual could be the most important part of a book and was often in itself a story as, for instance, a famous personality could also, through everything associated with their name, function as narrative. I wanted to find ways of carrying as many stories as possible in one. From the cinema I also learned how to use images as connecting themes. Images, colours, music, and even popular magazine headlines can all add coherence to an apparently random story, underpinning it and giving the reader a sense of internal logic and a satisfactory resolution, dispensing with certain familiar literary conventions.

  When the story required it, I also began writing neo-realist fiction exploring the interface of character and environment, especially the city, especially London. In some books I condensed, manipulated and randomised time to achieve what I wanted, but in others the sense of ‘real time’ as we all generally perceive it was more suitable and could best be achieved by traditional nineteenth-century means. For the Pyat books I first looked back to the great German classic, Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus and other early picaresques. I then examined the roots of a certain kind of moral fiction from Defoe through Thackeray and Meredith then to modern times where the picaresque (or rogue tale) can take the form of a road movie, for instance. While it’s probably fair to say that Pyat and Byzantium Endures precipitated the end of my second marriage (echoed to a degree in The Brothel in Rosenstrasse), the late 70s and the 80s were exhilarating times for me, with Mother London being perhaps my own favourite novel of that period. I wanted to write something celebratory.

  By the 90s I was again attempting to unite several kinds of fiction in one novel with my Second Ether trilogy. With Mandelbrot, Chaos Theory and String Theory I felt, as I said at the time, as if I were being offered a chart of my own brain. That chart made it easier for me to develop the notion of the multiverse as representing both the internal and the external, as a metaphor and as a means of structuring and rationalising an outrageously inventive and quasi-realistic narrative. The worlds of the multiverse move up and down scales or ‘planes’ explained in terms of mass, allowing entire universes to exist in the ‘same’ space. The result of developing this idea was the War Amongst the Angels sequence which added absurdist elements also functioning as a kind of mythology and folklore for a world beginning to understand itself in terms of new metaphysics and theoretical physics. As the cosmos becomes denser and almost infinite before our eyes, with black holes and dark matter affecting our own reality, we can explore them and observe them as our ancestors explored our planet and observed the heavens.

  At the end of the 90s I’d returned to realism, sometimes with a dash of fantasy, with King of the City and the stories collected in London Bone. I also wrote a new Elric/Eternal Champion sequence, beginning with Daughter of Dreams, which brought the fantasy worlds of Hawkmoon, Bastable and Co. in line with my realistic and autobiographical stories, another attempt to unify all my fiction, and also offer a way in which disparate genres could be reunited, through notions developed from the multiverse and the Eternal Champion, as one giant novel. At the time I was finishing the Pyat sequence which attempted to look at the roots of the Nazi Holocaust in our European, Middle Eastern and American cultures and to ground my strange survival guilt while at the same time examining my own cultural roots in the light of an enduring anti-Semitism.

  By the 2000s I was exploring various conventional ways of story-telling in the last parts of The Metatemporal Detective and through other homages, comics, parodies and games. I also looked back at my earliest influences. I had reached retirement age and felt like a rest. I wrote a ‘prequel’ to the Elric series as a graphic novel with Walter Simonson, The Making of a Sorcerer, and did a little online editing with FANTASTIC METROPOLIS.

  By 2010 I had written a novel featuring Doctor Who, The Coming of the Terraphiles, with a nod to P.G. Wodehouse (a boyhood favourite), continued to write short stories and novellas and to work on the beginning of a new sequence combining pure fantasy and straight autobiography called The Whispering Swarm while still writing more Cornelius stories trying to unite all the various genres and sub-genres into which contemporary fiction has fallen.

  Throughout my career critics have announced that I’m ‘abandoning’ fantasy and concentrating on literary fiction. The truth is, however, that all my life, since I became a professional writer and editor at the age of 16, I’ve written in whatever mode suits a story best and where necessary created a new form if an old one didn’t work for me. Certain ideas are best carried on a Jerry Cornelius story, others work better as realism and others as fantasy or science fiction. Some work best as a combination. I’m sure I’ll write whatever I like and will continue to experiment with all the ways there are of telling stories and carrying as many themes as possible. Whether I write about a widow coping with loneliness in her cottage or a massive, universe-size sentient spaceship searching for her children, I’ll no doubt die trying to tell them all. I hope you’ll find at least some of them to your taste.

  One thing a reader can be sure of about these new editions is that they would not have been possible without the tremendous and indispensable help of my old friend and bibliographer John Davey. John has ensured that these Gollancz editions are definitive. I am indebted to John for many things, including his work at Moorcock’s Miscellany, my website, but his work on this edition has been outstanding. As well as being an accomplished novelist in his own right John is an astonishingly good editor who has worked with Gollancz and myself to point out every error and flaw in all previous editions, some of them not corrected since their first publication, and has enabled me to correct or revise them. I couldn’t have completed this project without him. Together, I think, Gollancz, John Davey and myself have produced what will be the best editions possible and I am very grateful to him, to Malcolm Edwards, Darren Nash and Marcus Gipps for all the considerable hard work they have done to make this edition what it is.

  Michael Moorcock

  Dedication

  For Colin Greenland

  THE DIRECTION OF this new force, liberated by the love, vanity and inspiration of a sharp little shop assistant, was through the spirit of the times to a personal power that bot
h were content to wish as large as possible, without any limitation or detailed idea. This spirit, since it was the Age of Reason, was love of Mystery. For it cannot be disguised that the prime effect of knowledge of the universe in which we are shipwrecked is a feeling of despair and disgust, often developing into an energetic desire to escape reality altogether. The age of Voltaire is also the age of fairy tales; the vast Cabinet des Fées, some volumes of which Marie Antoinette took into her cell to console her, it is said, stood alongside the Encyclopédie … This impression of disgust, and this impulse to escape were naturally very strong in the eighteenth century, which had come to a singularly lucid view of the truth of the laws that govern our existence, the nature of mankind, its passions and instincts, its societies, customs, and possibilities, its scope and cosmical setting and the probable length and breadth of its destinies. This escape, since from Truth, can only be into Illusion, the sublime comfort and refuge of that pragmatic fiction we have already praised. There is the usual human poverty of its possible varieties … there are all the drugs, from subtle, all-conquering opium to cheating, cozening cocaine. There is religion, of course, and music, and gambling; these are the major euphorias. But the queerest and oldest is the sidepath of Magic … At its deepest, this Magic is concerned with the creative powers of the will; at lowest it is but a barbarous rationalism, the first of all our attempts to force the heavens to be reasonable.

  – William Bolitho, ‘Cagliostro (and Seraphina)’,

  Twelve Against the Gods, 1929

  Preface

  THIS ACCOUNT, FIRST published in Heidelberg in about 1840, was printed and written anonymously. Only recently, through the records of the Vernon family, has the authorship been traced to Manfred von Bek who was born in Bek in 1755 and died in Mirenburg in 1824, having in his youth been involved in a number of scandals and dubious adventures throughout Russia, Asia Minor, America and most of Europe.

  The narrative (mentioned in passing in Carlyle’s German Romance, 1827) does not seem to have had much public distribution and today’s Count von Bek, to whom I am indebted for much more help than is evident here, points out that his ancestor issued instructions for it to be printed only after his death. This accords with his references in the text.

  The account is in the nature of a Confession and if read as fiction might well qualify as a romance; though it does bear resemblances both to the classic picaresque and to the Gothic novels then fashionable. The Grail itself of course has been part of the family’s coat of arms for over three hundred years and their name is inextricably bound up with the German versions of the myth. There is, for instance, a legend (mentioned in many sources) that the von Bek family is fated to keep and protect the Grail, to seek it out if it ever becomes lost.

  Manfred von Bek’s reputation as a young man – he was frowned upon by many – might suggest this story was a hoax, either written by himself or someone who had known him well. The reader must judge that. However, before making a final assessment it might be worth consulting the records of the present Count which have not yet been made available to the public, either in Germany or elsewhere. These records are currently in preparation.

  This somewhat modernised version of Manfred von Bek’s ‘Confession’ is adapted from an English edition published in London by D. Omer Smith of St Paul’s Churchyard, 1856, revised and expanded by Michael Moorcock, who acknowledges, as always, his enormous debt to Prince Lobkowitz and, of course, to the von Bek family itself which has entrusted him with many documents covering the last four centuries of its history.

  The Publishers

  Chapter One

  In which I take my leave of Paris, Romance, and the Radical Cause

  WERE IT NOT for that Terror which captured France in 1793, and which at length caused me to flee Paris, I might never have discovered an exquisite love, nor ventured to the City in the Autumn Stars, where, with wits, sword and the remnants of Faith, I fought again for the world’s future, and lost my own.

  The day Tom Paine was jailed on Robespierre’s specific order, I determined at last to put revolutionary ideals behind me. Even as I pleasured sweet Madame F – (whose bad news was incidental to her visit) I planned my impending flight. Tom imprisoned meant I had lost my final ally in the Assembly. My own name would now inevitably appear on a warrant issued by the Committee of Public Safety. Indeed, a boisterous mob of enragés could already be on its way to my lodgings with the intention of offering me its familiar choice: tumbril to the guillotine or rotten hulk to the Seine’s bottom. Clearly it would be prudent for me to spend the New Year of ’94 abroad.

  As soon as was seemly I dressed in the disguise held ready for that moment, packed all I owned into two old leather saddlebags, made hasty courtesies to my mistress and hurried through Paris’s dawn alleys to a certain mews in the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. There, for 2fr., I redeemed my feckless manservant’s nag from a sleepy ostler. More silver got me a saddle and harness, which had seen far better days, and this I settled on the poor beast as she shivered and fumed in the stableyard’s chill.

  I fancied I now looked the image of some medium-rank revolutionary officer. My customary silks and lace were abandoned (or hidden). I was engulfed in an old black coaching cloak, while a crushed Kevenküller bicorne rested on my uncombed hair. To this I had added a coarse muffler of greyish wool, greasy dun-coloured breeches, cheaply finished Jack-leather boots, and I had pinned a tricolour cockade to my hat. An antique cavalry scabbard sheathed my own good Samarkand sabre and this was tucked into a blue, white and red sash of doubtful cleanliness. I must surely pass as a typical servant of the Committee and I intended to claim that identity if anyone stopped and questioned me. Should disguise and argument fail to persuade my suspicious zealot, then I would resort to two large Georgian flintlocks settled in my greatcoat’s gunpockets.

  I could not help but despair the progress of my career and the collapse of our political dreams. In the previous year France had executed her King and proclaimed a true Republic. But now the Mob’s passing whim had become the only law, as Robespierre himself would soon discover. I felt cruelly betrayed: by the Revolution, by men I had embraced as brothers, by Circumstance, and, as always, by God.

  Being no admirer of despotism or privilege, I had first celebrated then served the Revolution, becoming at last a deputy in the parliamentary assembly. When, however, the bloodletting grew unjust and excessive I, like Paine, lifted my voice against that nightmare of hypocrisy and falsehood, that degenerate orgy of revenge and animal savagery! But, like Paine, I was a foreigner and next encountered sudden antagonism from the very comrades whose own rights and liberty I had lately championed.

  They claimed the Mob performed identical crimes as the aristocrats, yet not so prettily disguised. To me, this justified nothing. Their argument was in itself illustrative of their impoverished and perverted souls.

  Such was the substance of my statements to my fellow deputies when my doubts grew to a new kind of certainty after I witnessed their ‘September Days’, those days when the Beast in all his horrid barbarity stalked our streets wearing Liberty’s cap and wiping his bloody chops on Liberty’s flag.

  The first I saw of it was beneath a brilliant late Summer sky when six coaches full of captured priests were set upon in the rue Dauphine. The rabble sliced off hands stretching from windows in search of Mercy, then hacked the occupants to pieces. The same day a Carmelite Convent near rue de Vaugirard was likewise attacked, its inhabitants murdered and thrown into a well. Prisons were invaded and their defenceless charges slaughtered. The murder of innocents continued. Drunken Septembristers dragged young and old, mad and sane, into the jails’ courtyards and impaled them on pikes. When not stabbing prisoners to death in their very cells where they awaited trial, those frightful savages split their victims’ heads with hatchets. I grew used to seeing heaps of horrid, mutilated corpses. Other bodies were displayed in the streets for public amusement. Crones dragged to the pavements the still limp cadavers of young
boys, jerking these lifeless partners in a further parody of human illusion, the figures of a hideous, erotic dance. At La Petite Force prison the Princesse de Lamballe was stripped, humiliated before the crowd, then repeatedly raped. Her breasts were cut off and while she still lived she was again subjected to indecencies of every description, her tormentors constantly sponging blood from her skin so the Mob should note its aristocratic whiteness. When the lady at last expired, her private organs were amputated, impaled on a pike by the same gallant who ripped out her heart, roasted it on the stove of a nearby wineshop, and ate it.

  Everywhere in Paris similar barbarities were practised, distracting me almost to madness. My wretched brain could not encompass all that horror; the cruel destruction of my idealism. That month alone fifteen hundred persons were tortured and killed by wine-swilling rogues and harlots who in coming weeks proudly exhibited swords, spears and axes crusted with innocent blood. Even that, perhaps, I might have ignored, had the Tribunal voiced its outrage. Instead, the Mob was praised. Marat and Billaud-Varenne encouraged it: it performed a public duty in slaying the nation’s enemies. By force of will I yet remained in the Assembly, passionately arguing a return to our Cause’s original virtues, but even born Frenchmen were howled down if they offered such pleading!

  A native of Saxony, I had been invited to join the Revolution by Anarcharsis Cloots and my Jacobin friends. With Cloots I had renounced lands, title and family loyalty, following him to Paris where we were welcomed as brothers and immediately made citizens. Elsewhere in Europe of course my enthusiasm was not so well received. Having cried out for the Rights of Man and shown my wholehearted support of that most violent upheaval in the body politic there was now every chance, should I travel beyond France’s boundaries, I would be immediately arrested.