The Gonzo Daily: Michael Moorcock: “I think Tolkien was a crypto-fascist”

Thursday 6 August 2015

Michael Moorcock: “I think Tolkien was a crypto-fascist”

Photo: French Cockpit

You can’t go home again. The last time Michael Moorcock visited Notting Hill – once the countercultural cradle of his dimension-spanning science fantasies and home to the author, his young family and one of his best-loved creations, the polymorphous secret agent and flâneur Jerry Cornelius – he “pitched an absolute fit”, according to his Texan wife, Linda. The old, febrile Notting Hill of squats and squalor had long given way to iceberg houses, billionaires’ basements and the well-tended tedium of extreme wealth. The last straw came when Moorcock witnessed a woman getting out of her four-by-four wearing jodhpurs.
“He was raving about this,” Linda recalls with amusement.

“The place made me feel ill,” Moorcock admits wearily. The writer and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, a friend of his, had brought Moorcock back in order to film reminiscences of his old stomping ground. “But it had become unbelievably horrible on every level,” he says. “I mean, Notting Hill had been a place of horror and violence in the 1960s and 1970s. My mother daren’t visit us. Next door was always knife fights and the police. But it was cheap and that’s what you need as a writer with a young family. Now look at it. It’s people in jodhpurs.”

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