Rachel, Randy and ice-cream but no zap
Duncan FaHowell
LETTERS FROM HOLLYWOOD by Michael Moorcock, drawings by Michael Foreman
Harrap, £10.95
The shaggy old whore of Hollywood continues to cast her fascination on people from other places, including Michael Moorcock, the shaggy fantasy writer, who was captivated in childhood. He grew up after the second world war and in the Fifties when American culture generally was at its most alluring via films, television and pop music. Since then the cultural action has returned to Europe — with the USA returning to its role of repackager — but Moorcock's romantic heart didn't re- turn with it. 'You can't beat the pleasure of watching Hollywood movies in Hollywood itself,' he writes. So he goes to L.A., Hollywood, whatever that pitch should be called: for Europeans it is usually the City of Sunshine Exile.
Specifically he goes for two reasons: to see an old English friend dying from cirrhosis of the liver — this is Graham Hall, who like many seemingly of Moor- cock's friends, never got it together to be a Writer; and to 'do' a film script which he hopes will help him sort out his life by providing money and escape. Clearly the author was in a rough emotional state at this period, trying to wrest himself free of debt and a failed marriage. Whatever the opposite of zap is, this book's got it. A dingy melancholy pervades the whole. There's an honourable place in writing for melancholy but in this case it is coupled with a sense of déjà vu which is rather depressing. For a start the letters were mostly written between 1979 and 1982 and Moorcock doesn't sufficiently escape his own problems to make them seem more than yesterday's papers. When he tries, by moving into a more touristic gear, the style follows a dull familiar groove which is by no means unpleasant and has the soporific rumble of train wheels. 'With our friends Rachel and Randy we had some ice-cream, took some photos and Rachel and I (she shares my lust for flashy souvenirs) bought various bits of plastic junk.'
It would be fair to call Michael Moor- cock an old hippy, with his uppers, dow- ners, tattooes, Hell's Angels, hanging out with bands, and over all disillusionment. The hippy era was indeed amazing. Pub- lishers are already trying to revive it, get it written up. I alone have turned down three offers — so God knows how many other blokes have been approached. But it is too soon. Hippiedom is not yet an historical movement. Maybe in 30 years' time it will blossom like Bloomsbury. But at present it's rancid, largely represented by a bunch of slobby has-bins with thinned-out hair and grey skin. When you live in the fag-end of the summer of love, vigour don't come easy — and Moorcock has been caught in the tail of this.
The most vigorous character in the book is a film director for whom Moorcock, in a contemptuous frame of mind, is trying to supply a script. This director is preposter- ous and energetic. He zips about throwing out ideas (other people's of course — this is America), causing problems, winding everyone up — Moorcock is in no con- dition to be wound up, least of all by this representative of traditional movie-making.
'My boss tells me,' he writes, 'he has a great idea. What about having Lancelot and Guinevere fucking while Lancelot's still wearing his armour? I am learning discretion. In this case I do not say that this scene — which strikes me, anyway, as ridiculous — already occurs in Excalibur.' And after the whinge. Moorcock gets the shakes.
He gets the shakes fairly frequently in this book. You have to respect a man with the shakes. He is experiencing something painful and deep. But just as he is too preoccupied with personal problems to supply us with an original traveller's eye, so he insufficiently confesses these prob- lems to make the book humanly revealing and sympathetic. The reader is thrown scraps. One is aware all the time of this great personal blancmange that's being withheld. So finally one asks the obvious 'question — what's he trying to say? It is a question which his film director finally puts to him too. 'What are we trying to say?' the director asks. 'What point are we making with all this?' Moorcock is flabbergasted by such a thought and replies 'I'm at a loss to suggest anything.'
On p143 something odd occurs. The whole text wakes up as if a needle's been jabbed in its bottom. It begins with a vicious joke made by a dog-breeder in Orange County. Question: what's black and brown and looks good on Mexicans? Answer: a Doberman Pincher. Not nice. But not asleep either. Here the text tight- ens and moves forward quickly, economi- cally and vividly. Until p160 when it slumps again and it's back to the basic 'With our friends Rachel and Randy we had some ice-cream, took some photo's etc.' What happened for those 17 pages? Did the author take some miracle drugs? Or stop taking them? Very curious.
John Betjeman once said that 'certain publishers have no house style at all — Harrap for example.' Maybe. But they've certainly done a stylish job on this one (apart from bad proof-reading). The wash illustrations by Michael Foreman, many in full-colour, are excellent — somehow both vivid and soft, just like Hollywood itself. Who is Michael Foreman? We are not told. Nice paper, nice stitched binding, nice reasonable price. And behind it all the battered conscience of Michael Moorcock himself. He has taste: for example he dislikes Mexican food. He is genuine: for example he finds Los Angeles far prefer- able to San Franciso. And he is intelligent — any man who survives two years of the shakes is intelligent. But there's one myth bigger than Hollywood that's sitting inside this book and crushing the life out of it. And that's the myth of Writing. He and the people he meets are always going on about it, who's doing it, who's failing to do it, going to conferences about it and so on. Michael Moorcock is one of those writers who cares passionately about Writing. He has this ridiculous relationship with Writing. Perhaps that's why he don't do it so good.
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