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I thought I'd talk about authors,
and about three authors in particular, and the circumstances in which I met
them.
There are authors with whom one has a personal relationship and authors with
whom one does not. There are the ones who change your life and the ones who
don't. That's just the way of it.
I was six years old when I saw an episode of The Lion, The Witch and the
Wardrobe in black and white on television at my grandmother's house in
Portsmouth. I remember the beavers, and the first appearance of Aslan, an
actor in an unconvincing lion costume, standing on his hind legs, from which
I deduce that this was probably episode two or three. I went home to Sussex
and saved my meagre pocket money until I was able to buy a copy of The
Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe of my own. I read it, and The Voyage
of the Dawn Treader, the other book I could find, over and over, and
when my seventh birthday arrived I had dropped enough hints that my birthday
present was a boxed set of the complete Narnia books. And I remember what I
did on my seventh birthday -- I lay on my bed and I read the books all
through, from the first to the last.
For the next four or five years I continued to read them. I would read other
books, of course, but in my heart I knew that I read them only because there
wasn't an infinite number of Narnia books to read.
For good or ill the religious allegory, such as it was, went entirely over
my head, and it was not until I was about twelve that I found myself
realising that there were Certain Parallels. Most people get it at the Stone
Table; I got it when it suddenly occurred to me that the story of the events
that occurred to Saint Paul on the road to Damascus was the dragoning of
Eustace Scrubb all over again. I was personally offended: I felt that an
author, whom I had trusted, had had a hidden agenda. I had nothing against
religion, or religion in fiction -- I had bought (in the school bookshop)
and loved The Screwtape Letters, and was already dedicated to G.K.
Chesterton. My upset was, I think, that it made less of Narnia for me, it
made it less interesting a thing, less interesting a place. Still, the
lessons of Narnia sank deep. Aslan telling the Tash worshippers that the
prayers he had given to Tash were actually prayers to Him was something I
believed then, and ultimately still believe.
The Pauline Baynes map of Narnia poster stayed up on my bedroom wall through
my teenage years.
I didn't return to Narnia until I was a parent, first in 1988, then in 1999,
each time reading all the books aloud to my children. I found that the
things that I loved, I still loved -- sometimes loved more -- while the
things that I had thought odd as a child (the awkwardness of the structure
of Prince Caspian, and my dislike for most of The Last Battle,
for example) had intensified; there were also some new things that made me
really uncomfortable -- for example the role of women in the Narnia books,
culminating in the disposition of Susan. But what I found more interesting
was how much of the Narnia books had crept inside me: as I would write there
would be moment after moment of realising that I'd borrowed phrases,
rhythms, the way that words were put together; for example, that I had a
hedgehog and a hare, in The Books of Magic, speaking and agreeing
with each other much as the Dufflepuds do.
C.S. Lewis was the first person to make me want to be a writer. He made me
aware of the writer, that there was someone standing behind the words, that
there was someone telling the story. I fell in love with the way he used
parentheses -- the auctorial asides that were both wise and chatty, and I
rejoiced in using such brackets in my own essays and compositions through
the rest of my childhood.
I think, perhaps, the genius of Lewis was that he made a world that was more
real to me than the one I lived in; and if authors got to write the tales of
Narnia, then I wanted to be an author.
Now, if there is a wrong way to find Tolkien, I found Tolkien entirely the
wrong way. Someone had left a copy of a paperback called The Tolkien
Reader in my house. It contained an essay -- "Tolkien's Magic Ring" by
Peter S. Beagle -- some poetry, Leaf By Niggle and Farmer Giles of
Ham. In retrospect, I suspect I picked it up only because it was
illustrated by Pauline Baynes. I would have been eight, maybe nine years
old.
What was important to me, reading that book, was the poetry, and the promise
of a story.
Now, when I was nine I changed schools, and I found, in the class library, a
battered and extremely elderly copy of The Hobbit. I bought it from
the school in a library sale for a penny, along with an ancient copy of the
Plays of W.S. Gilbert, and I still have it.
It would be another year or so before I was to discover the first two
volumes of The Lord of the Rings, in the main school library. I read
them. I read them over and over: I would finish The Two Towers and
start again at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. I never
got to the end. This was not the hardship it may sound -- I had already
learned from the Peter S. Beagle essay in the Tolkien Reader that it
would all come out more or less okay. Still, I really did want to read it
for myself.
When I was thirteen I won the school English Prize, and was allowed to
choose a book. I chose The Return of the King. I still own it. I only
read it once, however -- thrilled to find out how the story ended -- because
around the same time I also bought the one-volume paperback edition. It was
the most expensive thing I had bought with my own money, and it was that
which I now read and re-read.
I came to the conclusion that Lord of the Rings was, most probably,
the best book that ever could be written, which put me in something of a
quandary. I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. (That's not true: I wanted
to be a writer then.) And I wanted to write The Lord of the Rings.
The problem was that it had already been written.
I gave the matter a great deal of thought, and eventually came to the
conclusion that the best thing would be if, while holding a copy of The
Lord of the Rings, I slipped into a parallel universe in which Professor
Tolkien had not existed. And then I would get someone to retype the book --
I knew that if I sent a publisher a book that had already been published,
even in a parallel universe, they'd get suspicious, just as I knew my own
thirteen-year old typing skills were not going to be up to the job of typing
it. And once the book was published I would, in this parallel universe, be
the author of Lord of the Rings, than which there can be no better
thing. And I read Lord of the Rings until I no longer needed to read
it any longer, because it was inside me. Years later, I dropped Christopher
Tolkien a letter, explaining something that he found himself unable to
footnote, and was profoundly gratified to find myself thanked in the Tolkien
book The Return of the Shadow (for something I had learned from
reading James Branch Cabell, no less).
It was in the same school library that had the two volumes of Lord of the
Rings that I discovered Chesterton. The library was next door to the
school matron's office, and I learned that, when faced with lessons that I
disliked from teachers who terrified me, I could always go up to the
matron's office and plead a headache. A bitter-tasting aspirin would be
dissolved in a glass of water, I would drink it down, trying not to make a
face, and then be sent to sit in the library while I waited for it to work.
The library was also where I went on wet afternoons, and whenever else I
could.
The first Chesterton book I found there was The Complete Father Brown
Stories. There were hundreds of other authors I encountered in that
library for the first time -- Edgar Wallace and Baroness Orczy and Dennis
Wheatley and the rest of them. But Chesterton was important -- as important
to me in his way as C.S. Lewis had been.
You see, while I loved Tolkien and while I wished to have written his book,
I had no desire at all to write like him. Tolkien's words and sentences
seemed like natural things, like rock formations or waterfalls, and wanting
to write like Tolkien would have been, for me, like wanting to blossom like
a cherry tree or climb a tree like a squirrel or rain like a thunderstorm.
Chesterton was the complete opposite. I was always aware, reading
Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who
deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette.
Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and
it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any
perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the
scenes, giggling with delight.
Father Brown, that prince of humanity and empathy, was a gateway drug into
the harder stuff, this being a one-volume collection of three novels: The
Napoleon of Notting Hill (my favourite piece of predictive 1984 fiction,
and one that hugely informed my own novel Neverwhere), The Man Who
Was Thursday (the prototype of all Twentieth Century spy stories, as
well as being a Nightmare, and a theological delight), and lastly The
Flying Inn (which had some excellent poetry in it, but which struck me,
as an eleven-year old, as being oddly small-minded. I suspected that Father
Brown would have found it so as well.) Then there were the poems and the
essays and the art.
Chesterton and Tolkien and Lewis were, as I've said, not the only writers I
read between the ages of six and thirteen, but they were the authors I read
over and over again; each of them played a part in building me. Without
them, I cannot imagine that I would have become a writer, and certainly not
a writer of fantastic fiction. I would not have understood that the best way
to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined
the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams
could be a vital part of life and of writing.
And without those three writers, I would not be here today. And nor, of
course, would any of you. I thank you.
(Copyright Neil Gaiman 2004. Reprinted with permission from the October 2004
issue of Mythprint)
NeilGaiman.com:
Official Neil Gaiman Web Site
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