The Bayley-Moorcock Letters

January 31, 2002

An Old Farts’ Fireside Chat

Michael Moorcock and Barrington J. Bayley

I first met Barry Bayley in either 1955 or 56 at the old Globe Tavern near Leather Lane, which is the area I ‘expanded’ to contain the fictional Brookgate of several of my London stories. Barry frequently put me up at his place and we shared a flat together while working on an aborted novella for E.J. Carnell, ‘Duel Among the Wine-Green Suns’. We would once or twice a week meet J.G. Ballard in Kensington and we would talk about the boring conventions of science fiction and how we intended to change the world of literature as we knew it. We saw the best sf serving as some kind of potential marriage between literary and popular fiction. That remained our goal throughout this period. New Worlds was ready to go long before I was approached to edit it by David Warburton, who until then had been famous for publishing Hank Janson books. Barry and I were working writers, taking on pretty much anything we could get. This improved Barry’s speed and taught me to write as rapidly as I still more or less do. When you are running on daily and weekly deadlines, often with only a few hours to produce a piece, you learn to think on your feet and not get too self-conscious about an idea. There’ll always be another one along in a minute. Barry has a massive brain. It is too big for his skull. Once you could get him awake, you just thumped his head and two or three more ideas would spill out. I’d have them down on paper before he realised they were his. However, I had my compensations for being the dumb one in the partnership. Barry, who is frankly dwarfish in stature, and I, a tall, godlike blond giant, made strange company. I remember one day we were walking along King’s Road, Chelsea, when it was still an ordinary place to live, we glimpsed ourselves side by side in a shop mirror and fell about helplessly laughing. We were like two different species, almost. I always got the larger portions in the greasy spoons we ate in. I think the matronly waitresses had decided Barry was beyond fattening up.

Though we often thought very similarly and complemented each other’s imaginations — Barry’s logic, my romantic invention — Barry’s invention, my ability as a story-teller — we did not always share the same sense of humour. I remember Barry becoming positively puritanical during the episode in which I tried to set fire to the underground carriage in which we were all travelling. This led to a set of consequences recalled by, among others, Tom Disch when I was not quite at one with myself. If only there was such a thing as group amnesia, when you’ve made a total and highly memorable pratt of yourself. Barry, in these letters, is considerably forgiving, it seems to me. But I am sure I’ve been just as generous to him in some way or another. (Come to think of it, his bringing a drunken ‘friend’ he’d met in the pub to my house and friend being thoroughly sick face down in my bed, might help the balance). We’ve been friends for so long, you can take such things for granted. This is the beginning of a correspondence in which, knowing it to be for public consumption, we deliberately tried to recall our impressions of a past when the worst thing we had to worry about was the H-Bomb. Not, come to think of it, that many of us did worry much about it. We left that sort of thing to John Brunner, who wrote the CND(Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) marching song, ‘Don’t You Hear the H-Bomb’s Thunder’. Ballard had particular reason to be fond of the Bomb, as had Aldiss, and we were as interested in the things nuclear energy could power as we were in worrying about getting blown up. We hadn’t worried during the V-bomb raids on London and an H-Bomb was an altogether more humane alternative. We never learned to start worrying. We all loved technology, especially its potential for the arts, and that was why few of our stories ever debated the conventional worries of the day. Though, oddly, we were a lot more interested in ecology than those who dismissed our work as self-indulgent. We also, as Bayley has done, had a way of coming up with fundamental scientific notions which appear to escape most of the technical lads over at Analog, whose contributors were confidently predicting World Peace and the discovery of perpetual motion by the end of the 20th century. Anyway, rough and ready as it is, here’s our correspondence to date.

— Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock: What if I ask you if you can remember when and where we first met. Do you remember? Globe? Pete Taylor?

Barrington J. Bayley: Casting my creaky memory back half a century (it’s like my creaking hard drive, which has too little RAM(Random Access Memory) support, so groans away and everything takes a long time), I started going to sf’s meeting place in the bar of the Globe in London’s Hatton Gardens while I was still in the RAF(Royal Air Force). The first person I ever met there was John Brunner, who spotted me hovering nervously in the doorway, advertising my fannishness by displaying a copy of New Worlds, and he invited me to join him.

Some time later, when I was out of the RAF, a large young man in flannel trousers turned up — you. I can remember our second meeting, but only very vaguely the first. I do remember that we became friends practically immediately. I was impressed by that Moorcockian determination: a professional writer and editor since leaving school at fifteen! You said (inaccurately) that you were purely commercial. It was a good attitude to take at the time.

Like everyone else I assumed you to be older than you were. I recall asking you, one day, how you had avoided National Military Service (which was in force at the time). I got no distinct answer beyond a sense of puzzlement. That was because you weren’t old enough for National Service yet!

Pete Taylor was a longstanding friend of yours and I became friends with him through you, though of course he also was a Globe attendee. I remember him saying to me once, ‘Never get rid of your collection, man. I got rid of my collection, and I could cry over it.’ I know now exactly how he felt.

The atmosphere in that dingy little bar, every Thursday night, was wonderful, a regular mixture of fans and professionals, so that you got to know almost everybody in London who took sf seriously. People would turn up there from all over the world. It’s something I’m very glad to have experienced, and since sf was not as generally accepted then as it is now, it’s probably something which will never be repeated.

Michael Moorcock: Your memory of all this is clearer than mine. I remember how stimulated I was by your intellectual ideas. I had never met anyone before who thought naturally like a philosopher! And who understood advanced scientific ideas so thoroughly. I am pretty sure that if I began as ‘commercial’, any early ambitions I got to do something else were a good deal inspired by you. We lived and worked together after I came back from Sweden. We tried to collaborate on a novella for Carnell called Duel Among The Wine Green Suns. Parts of this found their way into The Sundered Worlds and parts into The Final Programme. You, of course, invented DUEL, the mighty computer, for ‘Duel Among the Wine Green Suns,’ which I lifted whole for FP. But you also turned me on to the possibilities of computers and we used to discuss those huge cryogenic giants with awe, never quite realising we’d actually have a version in our own homes one day. Most of our collaborations, in fact, were exactly what I said — commercial. We did a lot of work together for the Fleetway Magazines. We did science, historical and natural history articles for Look and Learn and I wrote ‘The Life of Constantine the Great’ for Bible Story Weekly. I had the practical instincts, I suppose, of a working journalist. I expected to make a living from my writing. It was my job. Our first sale to New Worlds was a collaboration, too — was it ‘Going Home’? — and didn’t we also collaborate on a story published under Hilary Bailey’s name? Carnell had a prejudice against your work, so I suggested you use a pseudonym. You used the name of a friend. As I recall Carnell started buying your stories at once and sent the money to the friend. Not all that money came to you in the end! And when, as a kind of proof of his prejudice, I revealed to Carnell that this was really Barrington Bayley his response was ‘well I still don’t like Bayley’s work.’ So you were stuck with your dodgy friend. We lived together for a bit — or if you prefer, I squatted on your floor. We used to go to The Swan in Knightsbridge, near the offices of Chemistry and Industry, where Ballard worked, and meet once or twice a week to discuss how awful sf was, how awful modern fiction was, and what we could do with it. Do you remember persuading Carnell to run The Terminal Beach? The excitement with which we first read The Drowned World? Do you remember when you first met Ballard?

Barrington J. Bayley: Yes, I can see that we complemented each a great deal. I benefited rather more than you did, I think.

And yes, those gigantic computers! Something sf writers didn’t foresee was that electronics was going to become microscopic (well, someone did - there was a one-off story in New Worlds). Electronic machines were envisaged as getting huger and huger. I had a fight between a mobile building-sized ‘electronic brain’ and an equally big biological monster in one of my boys’ serials. Still, we bucked the trend in ‘Duel Among the Wine-Green Suns’. It had a cabinet-sized computer which could do world-scale simulation. We got around the size problem with ‘electron resonance plates’ (silicon chips hadn’t been invented yet.) They sound good, a bit like the quantum computers people talk about nowadays.

Something which makes me sniff about more recent sf is how it harps on about computer simulation and virtual reality and stuff (they keep doing it in Star Trek). It’s old hat to us. It was all in ‘Duel’! The reader isn’t sure at the end if the computer was only there to run simulations, or if the whole saga had taken place within it. Dear old Ted Carnell. He took the trouble once to write me a long letter explaining why he thought my stuff was hopeless. The gravamen, put over with much kindness and sympathy, was: you can’t write, you never could write, and you never will be able to write. I am a testament to the advantage of stupidity. I never listened to discouragement, but treated its sources to my favourite emotion, disdain (FYI: I live in Donnington because I can disdain ceaselessly). They never understood that I had no ambition to be a writer, because I already was a writer, had become a writer at the age of fourteen. So there.

I dimly remember our being in Carnell’s office and discussing Ballard’s novel, which Ted was doubtful about — probably because it was so good! — but it must have been mainly you who persuaded him to use it. Ted wouldn’t have heeded me. The only time he ever asked my opinion was when he was terribly upset over a cranky letter he had received trashing New Worlds, saying it contained only rubbish, took only twenty minutes to read, and wasn’t worth the money. I told him he was bound to get letters like that, it was part of being an editor, and he shouldn’t worry about it. What I really wanted to say was, you should use my stuff, then! One of Ted’s criticisms of my stories was the way I treated the whole universe as mankind’s backyard.

I think our first New Worlds collaboration was ‘Peace on Earth’. It was about death, and its place in life. Did we do a Hilary Bailey story? I vaguely remember doing some work on one she had written, about people turning into ants. Was that it?

When my ‘dodgy friend’ wrote to confess why I wasn’t getting the New Worlds money (he had been spending it) I used his letter in a new story. So that was one he really did co-author!

I recall with fondness the daytime pub meetings with Jim Ballard, and a friend of his whose name I forget, who was very shy. He and Jim had worked out a private philosophical vocabulary between them. Jim referred to some idea, and his friend replied, ‘That’s very spinal.’

I can’t remember where and when I first met Ballard, but it was almost certainly through you. You made it your business to get to know writers who interested you. You would write to them and introduce yourself. I still remember T.H. White’s reply when you asked him for advice to a young writer wanting to improve. It’s the advice I now give: Read, read, read!

It was you who first enabled me to make a living as a writer (as apart from starving and owing the rent) by introducing me to the juvenile field, which was great fun. Do you remember our rubber stamp when we were in partnership? You also wrote a letter of introduction to Don Wollheim when I wanted to start writing novels. He was sf editor at Ace Books then. I had written a couple of these for him, I think, when I first met him in the flesh in the English town of Worcester. His eyes shone. “Barrington Bayley? You really exist? I thought you were Mike Moorcock masquerading under another name!” He explained that your output was so enormous he had believed you had adopted a second identity to help market it.

Not the only time I have been compared with your shadow!

Michael Moorcock: You are kind — but what’s this ‘we’ worked out — you fucking worked it all out. I’m too dumb for that.

Barrington J. Bayley: Listen to this. There’s a story in one of your Millennium omnibus editions (don’t know the title as I can’t lay my hands on it) in which the galaxy is slowly being eaten up by a huge object at its centre, which you didn’t actually call a black hole, probably because the term hadn’t been coined yet. At the time I would guess it was written, nobody knew that galaxies have black holes in the middle. Furthermore, astrophysicists then thought the expanded universe would eventually fall together again by gravitational attraction. Guess what? Recent measurements show that there isn’t enough matter to do it! The galaxies will just carry on receding until they are all swallowed by their black holes. And who thought of it first? You did!

Michael Moorcock: Let’s do another long chunk of this reminiscence to take us up, say to the start of New Worlds.

Barrington J. Bayley: Events are a bit too scrambled in my mind. I’ll burble on for a bit.

You’d introduced me to Dave Gregory at Fleetway, which published boys’ papers among other things, and he started giving me work. One day he agreed an outline for a picture strip story. I think it was an ‘Olac the Gladiator’ (a house character) story set in Roman times. Well, I’d never done any picture story scripting before, although you’d already shown me the layout. You were sleeping on my floor at the time. The day after (when the script had to be written) you got up, announced you were off somewhere, and made some helpful suggestions. Then you must have realized that I didn’t really have a clue how to do it, because you took pity on me and stayed behind, and we wrote the script together. Next day I toddled into Dave’s office and he read it. I told him we’d co-authored, but he plainly believed it was all your work (well, he was three-quarters right); it must have been too practised and professional. To catch me out, he asked me to write a few inserted frames on the office typewriter. He seemed quite surprised that I could actually do it!

We regularly co-authored picture scripts after that, but you had flair for it — pictorial imagination, snappy dialogue — and my role would be more tightening up the sequence a bit. I carried on after we separated, but I never really felt confident with comics. I was happier with text. Luckily there was plenty of that work to be had as well.

Fleetway would sometimes get Italian artists to draw the comics. But the translated instructions were only the picture descriptions, not the stories. Consequently the artist didn’t know what expressions to put on the characters’ faces!

Michael Moorcock: We worked with some talented artists. Frank Hampson, the Embletons, Don Lawrence, Frank Bellamy, pretty much with all the best graphic artists of their day. It was more like the studio system in films or the production of two and a half minutes singles. Not much room for self-expression. I used to keep myself awake by doing Karl the Viking stuff in Anglo Saxon alliterative verse. I told Dave Gregory about that eventually and his comment was ‘I thought you were writing a bit funny’. He, of course, had sensibly edited it to proper comic English. We did a lot of lost city pieces, as I recall, and also I did a whole series on the Cathedrals of England for Bible Story. You were writing ‘The Man from T.I.G.E.R.’ for Tiger. We would occasionally pass on work, because it was never by-lined. I remember the horror we felt when Boys World started crediting authors. I think at least one of my short stories appeared under your name. A problem for future bibliographers! Another thing you taught me, in a way, was how to sit still and think!

Barrington J. Bayley: Round about then you married Hilary Bailey, and set up home three times in succession, coincidentally coming closer to where I lived each time. One day you phoned me up and said ‘I’m now editor of New Worlds.’ Kyril Bonfiglioni (I heard about him on the radio the other day, but I can’t remember what. I think it was a books programme) took on one of the sister magazines (Science Fantasy, later SF Impulse). Your editorship ideas were all a transformation of New Worlds. Even the cover designs were original. Questions were raised in the House of Commons objecting to the content of a Norman Spinrad serial!

Michael Moorcock: I remember — the days when we all used to be taken seriously. Before we seemed to drown in a tide of juvenilia…

Barrington J. Bayley: Your flat and Ladbroke Grove in general became a dynamo and a magnet for the sf world. Jim Cawthorn, Graham Hall, Charles Platt, Judy Merril, Graham Charnock, Bert Filer, John Sladek and Tom Disch all ended up living close by — Judy and Tom in the same house as myself, just along the road.

Michael Moorcock: I used to call on Judy and she always had some famous old jazzman, who was playing at Ronnie Scott’s or somewhere. I’ll swear I bumped into Buck Clayton, pulling on his pants and leaving with a mumbled greeting…

Barrington J. Bayley: One day I called on you carrying a typescript (it wasn’t in the Ladbroke Grove flat, but the previous one). It was a story I had written in draft some years before, but I had regarded it as unpublishable: ‘All the King’s Men’. I wouldn’t have dreamed of offering it to Ted Carnell! Because I liked the story myself, I had just revised it and typed a fair copy.

As I remember, I wasn’t submitting it, only wanting your opinion. You took it in your hand, but then announced that you needed to use the toilet, and would read it in there.

You’ve had to suffer several instances of odd behaviour from me, but now I can explain this one. I became almost hysterical, snatched the typescript back, and simply would not allow you to take it into the toilet with you.

I recall your look of mystification. Knowing you weren’t aware it was the only copy — not expecting to see it published, I hadn’t bothered taking a carbon — and knowing your sense of humour, I felt absolutely, totally certain that Moorcock would emerge from the toilet wearing a smug smile, and saying, “Well, there wasn’t any toilet paper.” And the story would be lost.

I still think it! How irrational am I?

Michael Moorcock: I couldn’t possibly have used the whole manuscript. I put it in New Worlds instead. One of our most popular stories and it blew Mike Harrison’s mind, as I recall. Your aliens were the inspiration for his early science fantasies. And while you were knocking Harrison’s brains out in the UK, there was a whole group of young writers based around Austin, Texas, who were beginning to speak of you as if you were a god. You produced your masterly Soul of the Robot, Knights of the Limits and The Garments of Caen, amongst others. You are, in many people’s eyes, the First Cyberpunk. But then you’re probably the first New Waver, too, for that matter. And you’re still turning out the most astonishing, unexpected stories, like ‘Love in Backspace,’ which remains one of my very favourites of your short stories. Let’s carry on with some more stuff about the New Worlds days later.