by Neil Gaiman
When I was twenty and I told John Banks I was writing a book, he introduced me to the Penguin rep, who told me who to send it to at Kestrel. (The editor wrote back an encouraging no, and having reread the book recently, for the first time in twenty years, I’m terribly grateful that she did.)
There’s a brotherhood of people who read and who care about books. The best thing about John Banks was that when I was eleven or twelve he noticed I was a member of the brotherhood, and would share his likes and dislikes, even solicit my opinion.
III
THE MAN WHO owned Plus Books in Thornton Heath, on the other hand, was not of that brotherhood, or if he was, he never let on.
The shop was a long bus ride from the school I was at between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, so we didn’t go there often. The man who ran it would glower at us when we went in, suspicious of us in case we were going to steal something (we weren’t), and worried that we would upset his regular clientele which consisted of middle-aged gentlemen in raincoats nervously perusing the stacks of mild pornography (which, in retrospect, we probably did).
He would growl at us, like a dog, if we got too near the porn. We didn’t, though. We headed for the back of the shop on a treasure hunt, thumbing through the books. Everything had a PLUS BOOKS stamp on the cover or the inside, reminding us that we could bring it back for half the price. We bought stuff there, but we never brought it back.
Thinking about it now, I wonder where the books came from—why would a grubby little shop in what was barely South London have heaps of American paperbacks? I bought all I could afford: Edgar Rice Burroughs, with the Frazetta covers; a copy of Zelazny’s A Rose for Ecclesiastes that smelled of scented talcum powder when I bought it and still does, a quarter of a century later. That was where I found Dhalgren, and Nova, and where I first discovered Jack Vance.
It was not a welcoming place. But of all the bookshops I’ve ever been in, that’s the one I go back to in dreams, certain that in a pile of ragged comics I’ll find Action #1, and that there with a stamp on the cover telling you that it can be returned for half price, and smelling of beer or of beeswax, is one of those books I’ve always wanted to read from the shelves of Lucien’s library—Roger Zelazny’s own Amber prequel, perhaps, or a Cabell book that had somehow escaped all the usual bibliographies. If I find them, I’ll find them in there.
IV
PLUS BOOKS WAS not the furthest I went, after school. That was to London, on the last day of every term. (They taught us nothing on that day, after all, and our season tickets would take us all the way, and would die the day after.) It was to a shop that took its name from one of the Bradbury tales of the Silver Locusts: Dark They Were and Golden Eyed.
I’d heard about it from John Banks at the Wilmington Bookshop—I don’t know if he’d been there or not, but either way he knew it was somewhere I had to go. So Dave Dickson and I trolled up to Berwick Street, in London’s Soho, to find, on our first visit, that the shop had moved several streets away to a spacious building in St. Anne’s Court.
I had a term’s worth of pocket money saved up. They had teetering piles of remaindered Dennis Dobson hardbacks—all the R. A. Lafferty and Jack Vance I could have dreamed of. They had the new American paperback Cabells. They had the new Zelazny (Roadmarks). They had shelf after shelf after shelf after shelf of all the SF and fantasy a boy could dream of. It was a match made in heaven.
It lasted several years. The staff were amused and unhelpful (I remember being soundly, loudly and publicly ridiculed for asking, timorously, if The Last Dangerous Visions was out yet) but I didn’t care. It was where I went when I went to London. No matter what else I did, I’d go there.
One day I went to London and the windows in St. Anne’s Court were empty, and the shop was gone, its evolutionary niche supplanted by Forbidden Planet, which has survived for over twenty years, making it, in SF bookshop years, a shark: one of the survivors.
To this day, every time I walk through St. Anne’s Court I look and see what kind of shop is in the place that Dark They Were and Golden Eyed was, vaguely hoping that one day it’ll be a bookshop. There have been all sorts of shops there, restaurants, even a dry cleaner’s, but it’s not a bookshop yet.
And writing this, all of those bookshops come back, the shelves, and the people. And most of all, the books, their covers bright, their pages filled with infinite possibilities. I wonder who I would have been, without those shelves, without those people and those places, without books.
I would have been lonely, I think, and empty, needing something for which I did not have the words.
V
AND THERE IS one more bookshop I haven’t mentioned. It is old, and sprawling, with small rooms that twist to become doors and stairs and cupboards, all of them covered with shelves, and the shelves all books, all the books I’ve ever wanted to see, books that need homes. There are books in piles, and in dark corners. In my fancy I shall have a comfortable chair, near a fireplace, somewhere on the ground floor, a little way from the door, and I’ll sit on the chair, and say little, browsing an old favorite book, or even a new one, and when the people come in I shall nod at them, perhaps even smile, and let them wander.
There will be a book for each of them there, somewhere, in a shadowy nook or in plain sight. It will be theirs if they can find it. Otherwise, they will be free to keep looking, until it gets too dark to read.
* * *
This was the preface to Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores, edited by Greg Ketter, 2002.
* * *
Three Authors: On Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton; The MythCon 35 Guest of Honor Speech
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 meager 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 realizing 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 they 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 realizing 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 W. S. Gilbert’s Original Plays, 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 twelve 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 reread.
I came to the conclusion that The 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 twelve-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 The Lord of the Rings, than which there can be no better thing. And I read The Lord of the Rings until I no longer needed to read it, 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 The 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 favorite 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.
* * *
This was the guest of honor speech I gave at MythCon 35, which was held at the University of Michigan, in 2004. This is the annual conference of the Mythopoeic Society. I also read them my just-finished short story “The Problem with Susan,” and nobody garroted me.
* * *
The Pornography of Genre, or the Genre of Pornography
This is a transcription of a talk I gave in Orlando to an audience mostly composed of academics. It’s not the actual speech I wrote, because I departed so far from my notes in the giving of it.
Thank you so much. That was so moving. Oddly enough, I think in some ways my talk is about passionate unknowing. I’ve written a speech, because I’m nervous, but I’ve also made lots of little marks in green ink where I’ve told myself I’m allowed to go off and just sort of start talking if I want to. So I have no idea how long this is going to be. It depends on the green-ink bits. What is the official title?<
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[From crowd: “‘The Pornography of Genre, or the Genre of Pornography.’”]
Yeah, or something like that. It’s actually nothing at all about the genre of pornography. That was just put in to make it a catchy title. I make no apologies.
It is the job of the creator to explode. It is the task of the academic to walk around the bomb site, gathering up the shrapnel, to figure out what kind of an explosion it was, who was killed, how much damage it was meant to do and how close it came to actually achieving that.
As a writer I’m much more comfortable exploding than talking about explosions. I’m fascinated by academia, but it’s a practical fascination. I want to know how I can make something work for me. I love learning about fiction, but the learning is only as interesting as it is something that I can use.
When I was a boy, we had a garden. Mr. Weller was eighty-five, and he came in every Wednesday and did things in the garden, and the roses grew, and the vegetable garden put forth vegetables, as if by magic. In the garden shed every kind of strange hoe and spade and trowel and dibber hung, and Mr. Weller alone knew what they were good for. They were his tools. I get fascinated by the tools.
The miracle of prose is this: it begins with the words. What we, as authors, give to the reader isn’t the story. We don’t give them the people or the places or the emotions. What we give the reader is a raw code, a rough pattern, loose architectural plans that they use to build the book themselves. No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author. I don’t know if any of you have ever had the experience of returning to a beloved childhood book. A book that you remember a scene from so vividly, something that was etched onto the back of your eyeballs when you read it, and you remember the rain whipping down, you remember the way the trees blew in the wind, you remember the whinnies and the stamps of the horses as they fled through the forest to the castle, and the jangle of the bits, and every noise. And you go back and you read that book as an adult and you discover a sentence that says something like, “‘What a jolly awful night this would be,’ he said as they rode their horses through the forest. ‘I hope we get there soon,’” and you realize you did it all. You built it. You made it.
