Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

by Parkin, Lance

  In recent years, he has produced a number of projects based on Lovecraftian themes. The first was a prose story, ‘The Courtyard’, set in the present day (and later adapted for comics by Antony Johnston). Moore decided to write a sequel, Neonomicon. Freely admitting that he took the job because he needed the money, thanks to a combination of late royalty payments and an unexpected tax bill, he was nevertheless keen to create a work that depicted the horrors Lovecraft only alluded to in his stories, ‘to actually put back some of the objectionable elements that Lovecraft himself censored, or that people since Lovecraft, who have been writing pastiches, have decided to leave out. Like the racism, the anti-Semitism, the sexism, the sexual phobias which are kind of apparent in all of Lovecraft’s slimy phallic or vaginal monsters’. The result is suitably nasty, although the metatextual criticism of Lovecraft’s prejudices is overshadowed by a brutal, explicit rape scene that takes up almost a whole issue. Moore, who had once said ‘there isn’t a Too Far. And if there is, it’s absolutely the place to be seen’, now admitted to an interviewer, ‘Looking back, yes, maybe I have gone too far – but it’s still a good story.’ In late 2012 it was announced that Moore would be writing a longer series, Providence, based around the life of Lovecraft himself.

  He has also become a prominent advocate for the artist Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956), writing an introduction to the brochure for an exhibition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Spare’s death, and appearing on The Culture Show in 2010 to argue that ‘not only was he an incredible artist, he was also in my opinion possibly the greatest English magician of the twentieth century’. While Spare during his lifetime enjoyed a strong reputation as a portrait painter and for his nudes, he also produced works of occult significance, often inspired by dreams or produced using automatic drawing techniques. Moore – who has a nude by Spare hanging in his front room – praises him because ‘He kind of completely eschewed the gallery art scene and his middle-class upbringing and just said “I am going to move to Brixton amongst prostitutes and crooks, because I trust them and I am never going to exhibit other than in the back rooms of pubs.” And he excommunicated the whole of the human race and even he said later perhaps that was going a bit too far. You have got to admire the man, wonderful artist, brilliant magician.’ This, of course, mirrors Moore’s own resistance to moving out of the working-class areas of Northampton.

  Moore sees the ‘magical’ writers on his list as having a political purpose, or at least a practical, positive effect on society:

  I find myself very attracted to the Apocalypse school of poets, who are completely forgotten these days, and in fact nobody can understand why they were called Apocalypse poets when all they talked about was nature: little birds sitting in trees, and flowers … The big totem of Apocalypse poets was Dylan Thomas. [The movement] would have included people like Henry Treece and a lot of other forgotten names. But what they were, what they meant by ‘apocalypse’, was simply revelation. And that other thing in the world is kind of pregnant with revelation if you’re somebody who comes equipped with the right kind of eyes and the right kind of phrasebook, if you like, for decoding … At the moment, I feel that hopefully in some of the pieces that I’m doing, I might be providing attitudes, mental tools, ways of looking at things, that could actually be of use in these otherwise turbulent times. That’s the plan.

  Virtually everything Moore has produced in recent years has at least an echo of his belief that the world is on the verge of a transition to a new state. He has clarified when he feels the apocalypse will occur: ‘The time that I’d heard, and this is both from conventional sources and from imaginary friends when I was in my more extreme magical states, (that’s not to say there’s any validity to them at all, just feelings that I got), is that there is probably some sort of event looming between 2012 and 2017.’ And in Snakes and Ladders, he described what it would feel like: ‘As species or as individual, we approach the moment when the lights go on, the point of comprehension and of revelation. Of Apocalypse. The sum of human information doubles ever faster, every fifteen months and counting. The reaction at the core of us tips over into critical. Our crisis is approaching, though it may be in the late-Victorian pornographic sense. Pulse racing, human history convulses, nearing orgasm.’

  Moore’s work has often dealt with apocalyptic themes. When, in 2005, the magazine The End is Nigh drew up an ‘Alan Moore Apocalography – the complete apocalyptic works’, they found thirty-two stories that qualified. When Promethea ushers in the Apocalypse, in Moore’s most positive depiction of what he envisions might be coming, the happening represents a welcome shift. As Promethea explains: ‘Don’t be frightened. Our lives are all a story we’ve been telling to ourselves. Whiling away the long afraid night of our human ignorance. But now we are grown. Now the night is over. Now there is light.’ Moore is, however, keen to stress that he thinks ‘there is great change likely to occur, but whether that’s for the better or not, I really don’t know’. Elsewhere, he’s suggested the human race may not survive this apocalypse.

  But for all this talk of global transformation, the artists Moore identifies with often have a strong sense of place. Likewise, much of his recent work has been about his home town of Northampton. In practical terms, this means he has come full circle, back to the sort of community activism he was involved with when he began his career working for ANoN and The Back-Street Bugle. Consistent with that, he resurrected the Mad Love imprint to produce a magazine called Dodgem Logic, using the same title as the fanzine he had not been ‘together enough’ to compile in 1975. Debuting in December 2009, Dodgem Logic looked like an old school underground fanzine, albeit one with exceptionally high production values. Its contents included an essay from Moore about the underground press that began by quoting journalist H.L. Mencken’s assertion that ‘freedom of the press is limited to those who own one’, as well as cheap recipes, a how-to guide on guerilla gardening, illustrations by Kevin O’Neill and comedian Josie Long, and articles about feminism by Melinda Gebbie, Northampton’s notable rock concerts by Gary Ingham and Twitter by comedy writer Graham Linehan. The issue came with a CD of tracks by Northampton musicians.

  It was a print magazine in the internet age, a deliberate decision: ‘I see a chasm opening between the information-rich and information-poor and, possibly because of my own background, age and prejudices, I believe that something funny, lovely and informative that is available to everyone without the need for a device or internet connection is the option which, to me, makes most sense both emotionally and ethically.’ Moore was internet-savvy enough to spot that by assembling an eclectic selection of items he found personally interesting, he had basically invented ‘a new form of blog that avoids the internet altogether’. Wired were impressed, declaring that ‘Dodgem Logic’s spirit of triumphant creative individualism celebrates Moore’s individualist philosophy, delivering a perfectly timed message for a world filled with failing states and superpowers.’

  It was a tough sell, though, and while Moore hoped other people might create local offshoots of the magazine, replacing the Northampton content with material from their own towns, these failed to materialise. Moore planned to fund six issues, until it got on its feet; the magazine lasted only a little longer, eight issues, until spring 2011. Moore announced in the editorial for #8 that he had had ‘some of the best fun that I can remember having in my career’, but ‘our initial strategy of paying contributors, high production values, no stinking capitalist advertising and an affordably low cost cover price (basically “let’s do everything backwards and see what happens”) seems not to have worked’.

  Dodgem Logic #5 spoofed a Vanity Fair cover by featuring a picture of Spring Boroughs resident Phil, ‘a bad lad and a bad dad’, holding an albino ferret in one hand and a hatchet in the other, and captions enticing us to read about ‘Brian, Dougie, Frankie, Claire, Rosalind, Marion, Warren, Charlie and George’. Does this demonstrate a witty satire on the priorities of celebrity culture, or
does it indicate that Moore’s concerns are now meaningless to anyone who doesn’t live within sight of the National Lift Tower? How are we to take a statement like: ‘I’ve travelled very little, I have never lived anywhere else other than Northampton. Consequently, this is my microcosm. The entire of the human world seems to me to boil down to these streets, to this history, these anecdotes.’ Moore doesn’t have a passport; he’s left the UK only a handful of times. He has said of his second novel, Jerusalem, ‘My earlier book Voice of the Fire was set within Northampton/Northamptonshire, but this book is a lot less cosmopolitan and far reaching’. Even acknowledging that such remarks are meant lightly, there’s a sense of agoraphobia within them, rather than empowerment.

  One of the main characters in Halo Jones, Rodice, always panics at the thought of going outside. But perhaps we see a clearer echo of Moore in the character Brinna, a rich old lady who lives with Halo and Rodice. In 1986, Moore said: ‘Brinna is someone who is too rich to need to live in the Hoop but who is emotionally trapped there by her basic nostalgie de la boue, which roughly translates as “nostalgia for the mud”. It’s like when rich people go and live in Greenwich Village because they like the atmosphere and liveliness that poverty often brings with it. In her way, Brinna is as helpless to escape the Hoop as anyone else is, despite her money, and it is this which eventually kills her.’ Is Moore’s nostalgia for the mud of Northampton an indication he’s ‘helpless’? Moore clearly doesn’t think so, and this sequence from Big Numbers #1 (1990) is evidence it was his position when the world was his oyster.

  Moore is attempting to make a point that wherever we live is important. For him it’s Northampton, for us it should be where we live: ‘They’re all wonderful. And rather than berating them or complaining about them, we should actually appreciate the things that are mythical and powerful about them.’

  Meanwhile, without any intervention on his part, Moore was having a very visible impact on the face of political activism around the world:

  From New York, to London, to Sydney, to Cologne, to Bucharest, there has been a wave of protests against politicians, banks and financial institutions. Anybody watching coverage of the demonstrations may have been struck by a repeated motif – a strangely stylised mask of Guy Fawkes with a moustache and pointy beard.

  With CCTV cameras and police videotaping of demonstrations now routine, protestors began wearing V for Vendetta masks to render themselves anonymous. Fittingly, it was members of a group called Anonymous, a collective of computer hackers, who were the first to adopt the V masks, outside offices of the Church of Scientology in March 2008. Moore admitted to Entertainment Weekly, ‘that pleased me. That gave me a warm little glow,’ and he told Laura Sneddon of the Independent: ‘Obviously I couldn’t say that I am universally behind everything that they might do in the future, you know? But sort of so far at least I’ve got a huge amount of admiration for the stuff that Anonymous and LulzSec and people like that have been doing. They are, they seem to be, genuinely frightening authority in general because they’re very hard to root out or track down and they seem to be very efficient in digging up information that we are entitled to know.’

  The use of the mask became more widespread in 2011, during the ‘Occupy’ protests against governments, banks and corporations implicated in the global banking crisis. The BBC reported that 100,000 masks were being sold a year, and by November 2012, the United Arab Emirates had banned them from being worn during National Day celebrations, while security forces confiscated stocks from shops. Many journalists have noted that the anti-corporate demonstrators are channelling money to one of the world’s largest entertainment corporations, Warners, who own the rights to the masks – it’s reported less often that the creators, including Dez Skinn, are also entitled to their cut (in David Lloyd’s case, a reported £50,000 a year).

  Reporting on the V mask’s ‘inescapable presence at the anti-capitalist protests around the world’, Britain’s Channel 4 News sent Moore to the Occupy demonstration outside St Paul’s Cathedral, from where he declared, ‘It’s a bit surprising when some of your characters who you thought you’d made up suddenly seem to escape into ordinary reality … I’m amazed, I’m very impressed and I’m rather touched. The people here are amazing. I think that this is probably the best-organised and most forward-thinking protest that I’ve ever had experience of.’ He later told the Observer that the mask

  turns protests into performances. The mask is very operatic; it creates a sense of romance and drama. I mean, protesting, protest marches, they can be very demanding, very gruelling. They can be quite dismal. They’re things that have to be done, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re tremendously enjoyable – whereas actually, they should be … I think it’s appropriate that this generation of protesters have made their rebellion into something the public at large can engage with more readily than with half-hearted chants, with that traditional, downtrodden sort of British protest. These people look like they’re having a good time. And that sends out a tremendous message.

  ‘If there’s one quality in Alan Moore that I envy more than any other,’ Eddie Campbell said in 1986, ‘it is simply his understanding of the temper of our times.’ Is it possible for Moore to be in tune with a generation of protesters who organise via social media, when the nearest he has ever got to a hashtag is the sticker on a large tin he keeps half-hidden in his kitchen? When protestors wear the V mask, are they proclaiming their sympathy for Moore’s political positions?

  There’s some evidence that representatives of Anonymous are familiar with the philosophy behind V for Vendetta. The nature of the group is anarchic: they don’t have ‘an official spokesman’ or leadership, and they’ve issued videos highly reminiscent of V’s video address to the nation. This is not, however, always the case with the street protests. Many journalists covering the Occupy protests asked protestors why they wore the V masks; the BBC quoted one as saying, ‘It’s a visual thing, it sets us apart from the hippies and the socialists and gives us our own identity. We’re about bypassing governments and starting from the bottom.’ And the net effect of the Occupy movement, a coalition of various political positions, was perhaps closer to the movie’s rather vague protest against Bush-era policies than the comic’s specific alternative of anarchism; the Channel 4 reporter noted that Moore maintained a diplomatic silence when protestors he talked to mentioned the movie. While the V of the comic is rebelling against an oppressive government, the book stresses the roles of individuals, rather than any mass protest. V’s technique is one of targeting individuals for assassination or political indoctrination. There’s not even a near equivalent in the book to the movie’s scenes of a crowd of protesters all wearing V masks. At least one anarchist was moved to circulate a pamphlet exhorting people to seek out the original (see below).

  Perhaps as a similar corrective, Moore has contributed articles and interviews to Occupy publications such as Occupy Comics (2013), offering general advice and historical context. He suggests that psychogeography might help root the protests, as it is

  derived at least in part from Situationist conceptions of the city, is a means by which a territory can be understood and owned, an occupation in the intellectual sense. Those able to extract the deepest information from a place are those most able to assert some measure of control on that environment, or at least on the way it is perceived. At the same time, by mining seams of buried or excluded information, it is possible to reinvest a site with the significance and meaning which contemporary town planning and commercial vested interests have removed from it.

  When pushed, Moore can easily justify it in more accessible terms: ‘Illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do. Do that, and little by little it might gradually get to be, if not a better world, then a better understood world.’

  Moore’s most affectionate wo
rk in this vein takes as its subject his friend and mentor Steve Moore. Unearthing was originally a prose piece commissioned by Iain Sinclair for the psychogeographical anthology London: City of Disappearances. Lex Records produced a lavish boxset containing Moore’s reading of the piece (2010), and three years later an illustrated book was issued. The release of the box set led to some glowing coverage in the mainstream press. The writing is unmistakably Alan’s, but the story is charming in a way that’s rare for his work. Steve Moore himself ‘thought the piece would disappear as one of Alan’s “minor works”. Obviously it didn’t happen like that!’

  Much of Moore’s recent output seems to be a conscious summation of his life and art to this point. The most explicit example has to be the long-promised Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, co-written with Steve Moore and illustrated by artists such as Kevin O’Neill, Melinda Gebbie, John Coulthart and José Villarrubia. It’s a ‘how-to’ guide for the Moores’ brand of magic, but also a playful history of the occult that Alan and Steve Moore have painstakingly researched, and have been working on in its current form since at least 2007 (it started life as a magazine called Atziluth three or four years earlier). Steve Moore has linked the projects: ‘Alan and I tend to see all this as an ongoing process, somehow. Somnium [and] the non-fiction Selene book [both by Steve Moore], Unearthing, Alan’s forthcoming novel Jerusalem, The Bumper Book Of Magic … they all seem to be part of some sort of vague, barely defined Moon and Serpent project to provide an alternative view to simple materialistic reality.’