The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

by Neil Gaiman

When I reread it as a teenager, Fahrenheit 451 had become a book about independence, about thinking for yourself. It was about treasuring books and the dissent inside the covers of books. It was about how we as humans begin by burning books and end by burning people.

Why do we need the things in books? The poems, the essays, the stories? Authors disagree. Authors are human and fallible and foolish. Stories are lies after all, tales of people who never existed and the things that never actually happened to them. Why should we read them? Why should we care?

The teller and the tale are very different. We must not forget that.

Ideas, written ideas, are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our ideas from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the w...

(As a final note, in these days when we worry and we argue about whether ebooks are real books, I love how broad Ray Bradbury’s definition of a book is at the end, when he points out that we should not judge our books by their covers, and that some books exist between covers that are perfectly people-shaped.)

Which is, perhaps, one of the glories of Doctor Who. It doesn’t die, no matter what. It’s still serious, and it’s still dangerous. The virus is out there, just hidden, and buried, like a plague pit.

it’s hard to get near a film set without remembering Orson Welles’s description of a film studio as ‘the biggest electric train set any boy could ever have’.

A Speech to Professionals Contemplating Alternative Employment, Given at ProCon, April 1997

This whole essay is gold

Pretty soon Kurt and I were co-plotting a complete Batman story; and not just a Batman story, but the coolest, strangest Batman story you can imagine, in which every relationship in the world of Batman was turned inside out and upside down, and, in the finest comic book tradition, everything you thought you knew turned out to be a lie.

Be proud of your mistakes. Well, proud may not be exactly the right word, but respect them, treasure them, be kind to them, learn from them. And, more than that, and more important than that, make them. Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong, too scared to do anything.

Wells described the art of the short story as ‘the jolly art of making something very bright and moving; it may be horrible or pathetic or funny or beautiful or profoundly illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from fifteen to fifty minutes to read aloud. All the rest is just whatever invention and imagination and the mood can give – a vision of buttered slides on a busy day or of unprecedented worlds. In that spirit of miscellaneous expectation these stories should be received.’ And that suggestion holds as true now as when he wrote it.

Wells himself said of his short stories, ‘I make no claims for them and no apology; they will be read as long as people read them. Things written either live or die . . .’

Fantasy Masterworks edition of Votan and Other Novels, 2014.

back then, fairy tales were for adults. Children listened to them and enjoyed them, but children were not the primary audience, no more than they were the intended audience of Beowulf, or The Odyssey. J. R. R. Tolkien said, in a robust and fusty analogy, that fairy tales were like the furniture in the nursery – it was not that the furniture had originally been made for children: it had once been for adults and was consigned to the nursery only when the adults grew tired of it and it became unfashionable.

To begin with, the writing is beautiful. Dunsany wrote his books, we are told, with a quill pen, dipping and scritching and flowing his prose over sheets of paper, and his words sing, like those of a poet who got drunk on the prose of the King James Bible, and who has still not yet become sober. Listen to Dunsany on the wonders of ink: . . . how it can mark a dead man’s thoughts for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.

The King of Elfland’s Daughter is a book about magic; about the perils of inviting magic into your life; about the magic that can be found in the mundane world, and the distant, fearful, changeless magic of Elfland. It is not a comforting book, neither is it an entirely comfortable one, and one comes away, at the end, unconvinced of the wisdom of the men of Erl, who wished to be ruled by a magic lord.

The King of Elfland’s Daughter, on the other hand, is a tale of pure imagination (and bricks without straw, as Dunsany himself pointed out, are more easily made than imagination without memories). Perhaps this book should come with a warning: it is not a comfortable, reassuring, by-the-numbers fantasy novel, like most of the books with elves and princes and trolls and unicorns in them, on the nearby fantasy shelves: this is the real thing. It’s a rich red wine, which may come as a shock if all one has had experience of so far has been cola. So trust the book. Trust the poetry and the strangeness, and the magic of the ink, and drink it slowly.

I did finally meet her it was in the company of Colin Greenland, who had, shortly after their first encounter, persuaded her to entertain his suit (an odd expression, now I come to write it down. I mean that they had become lovers and partners, not that he had removed his clothes and left them with her while she performed small puppet shows for them).

I wanted to see them close-up – Millais and Waterhouse and the rest. I went there, and I liked the paintings, and admired them, and decided that I did not like the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti as much as I rather suspected Dante Gabriel Rossetti had, and the Burne-Jones picture of the ladies going downstairs made me catch my breath.

Those of us who write fantasies for a living know that we are doing it best when we tell the truth. There is something that people will respond to – the True Quill, a Texan writer I met once called it. My novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane includes a lady on a Sussex farm who is older than the universe, and a strange flapping creature from somewhere outside space and time who comes into our young protagonist’s life in the form of an evil nanny. None of it’s true, except it feels right. It feels honest.

Angela Carter wrote an astonishing radio play, Come Unto These Yellow Sands, about the painting, Dadd’s life, Victorian art. I wrote a film treatment once in which the painting was a key, and came close once to organising an anthology in which each story would be about one of the witnesses to the Fairy-Feller’s chestnut-smashing blow.

If you don’t know it’s impossible it’s easier to do. And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.

Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be – an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics and supporting myself through my words – was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal. And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain.

Thirdly, when you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thick skinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.

make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do. The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that’s not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The things I’ve done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about until the end of time. They always had that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea.

And sometimes the things I did really didn’t work. There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted. Some of them never even left the house. But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that worked.

when I was asked by editors who I’d worked for, I lied. I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely, and I sounded confident, and I got jobs. I then made it a point of honor to have written something for each of the magazines I’d listed to get that first job, so that I hadn’t actually lied, I’d just been chronologically challenged . . . You get work however you get work.

And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.

I would stare and stare, puzzling over who I was, and what the relationship was between who I thought I was and who I really was and the face that was staring back at me. I knew I wasn’t my face. If something terrible happened to me, like a fireworks accident, if I lost my face and spent my life bound in bandages like a mummy in a scary film, I’d still be me, wouldn’t I? I never found an answer, not one that satisfied me. But I kept asking. I suppose I still am.

This is who we are, the albums said to us, and this is the story we are telling ourselves.

The images of our forebears and our loved ones give us context, they tell us who we are.

Initially, I walked the galleries looking for the people I was familiar with – the ones whose stories I knew, the ones I wondered about, the ones I would have loved to have met. And then I moved wider, using the Gallery as a way of learning about people. Wondering, as I walked and as I stared, about the faces I passed: how they fit into the history of the country, why each person was there and not someone else in their place. The faces became a dialogue, the paintings became a conversation.

The National Portrait Gallery is the nation’s family album, I realised. It gives us context. It is our way of describing ourselves and our past to ourselves, our way of interrogating and explaining and exploring who we are, inspecting our roots in a way that is more than just looking at the places from which we come. There is landscape, and there is portrait, after all, and they are ways of explaining the orientation of a sheet of paper, and they are the ways we understand who we are: the places we came from, the people we were.

Some portraits were important because of who the subjects were. Others were important because of the artist. Still others were important because of the historical moment, because they were a record of their times, which are our times. Most images gain their power from the moment of intersection: painter and subject, time and history and context, ever-changing context. All come together as we walk the corridors of the National Portrait Gallery.

We look at a portrait and we begin to judge, because human beings are creatures of judgement. We judge the person being painted (a bad king? a good woman?) in the same way that we judge the artist, and occasionally we find ourselves judging them both, particularly when the subject is also the painter: Dame Laura Knight’s self-portrait, a symphony in crimson and vermilion, shows the painter in perfect profile, flanked by the naked flanks of both a model and of the painting of the model. As a woman she was forbidden to attend life-drawing classes, and here she tells us that she is a woman, and she is a master at drawing from life. The technique is remarkable, the statement powerful.

a cross-dressing spy, caught up in intrigue, royal proclamations and court cases. Legally pronounced female, apparently against his will. I knew all this, but I did not know how kind he looked. I know that if ever I write about him, this portrait, painted by Thomas Stewart after an original by Jean-Laurent Mosnier, who knew d’Eon, will change the way I tell his story.

Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark! I think. And may there be no sadness of farewell, when I embark. I learned the poem as a boy, when Death was merely an abstract idea, one I suspected I would almost certainly manage to avoid as I grew up, for I was a clever child and Death seemed quite avoidable back then.

Because we are all interesting. Because we cannot gaze into a mirror without being changed. Because we do not know who we are, but sometimes there is a light caught in someone’s eyes, that comes close to giving us the tiniest hint of an answer.

If you want to know who we are, then take my hand and we will walk it together, and stare into each picture and object until, finally, we begin to see ourselves.

And the third, and strangest, thing about the Dolls is that they are, when they play, quite obviously, telepathic, like a couple who can finish each other’s sentences. They know each other and the songs so well that it’s all there, in muscle memory and in their heads and in the subliminal cues that the rest of the world is never going to see. I’d never really got that until now. I’d puzzled over why, if the songs needed a drummer, Amanda didn’t simply go and get a drummer. But drumming is only part of what Brian’s doing. He’s commenting, performing, pantomiming, playing, yin to Amanda’s yang. It’s a remarkable, virtuoso, glorious thing to see them play together.

It’s all about life. And in the midst of whatever else we’re in, it’s always about life.

Life is a stream: an ongoing conversation of nature with itself, contradictory and opinionated and dangerous. And the stream is made up of births and deaths, of things that come into existence and pass away. But there is always life, and things feeding on life.

And it’s easy to be cynical about death when you’re young. When you are young, death is an anomaly. It’s not real. It only affects other people. It’s a bullet you’ll dodge easily. It’s why young people can go into battle: they really will live forever. They know.

Life has a sense of humor, but then again, so does death.

Though one may conquer a million men in battle, yet the noblest of victors is he who conquers himself. Self-conquest is far better than the conquest of others. Not even a god, an angel, Mara or Brahma could turn that triumph back into defeat.

In the end we lose everything. No matter who’s with us, we always die alone. When you fight your battles, whatever battles you fight, it’s always going to be about life.

This book is a gift, and, as I said, it is the tales that accompany the gift that matter: the stories that show us the joy of event, of the shaping of memories, and the joy of a life lived, as all lives are lived, both in the light and in the darkness.

I realise I have stopped thinking about political divides, about freedom fighters or terrorists, about dictators and armies. I am thinking only of the fragility of civilisation. The lives the refugees had were our lives: they owned corner shops and sold cars, they farmed or worked in factories or owned factories or sold insurance. None of them expected to be running for their lives, leaving everything they had because they had nothing to come back to, making smuggled border crossings, walking past the dismembered corpses of other people who had tried to make the crossing but had been caught or been betrayed.