The View from the Cheap Seats Page 7
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How Dare You: On America, and Writing About It
Nobody’s asked the question I’ve been dreading, so far, the question I have been hoping that no one would ask. So I’m going to ask it myself, and try to answer it myself.
And the question is this: How dare you?
Or, in its expanded form,
How dare you, an Englishman, try to write a book about America, about American myths and the American soul? How dare you try to write about what makes America special, as a country, as a nation, as an idea?
And, being English, my immediate impulse is to shrug my shoulders and promise it won’t happen again.
But then, I did dare, in my novel American Gods, and it took an odd sort of hubris to write it.
As a young man, I began to write a comic book about dreams and stories called Sandman. I got a similar question all the time, back then: “You live in England. How can you set so much of this story in America?”
And I would point out that, in media terms, the UK was practically the fifty-first state. We get American films, watch American TV. “I might not write a Seattle that would satisfy an inhabitant,” I used to say, “but I’ll write one as good as a New Yorker who’s never been to Seattle.”
I was, of course, wrong. I didn’t do that at all. What I did instead was, in retrospect, much more interesting: I created an America that was entirely imaginary, in which Sandman could take place. A delirious, unlikely place out beyond the edge of the real.
And that satisfied me until I came to live in America about eight years ago.
Slowly I realized both that the America I’d been writing was wholly fictional, and that the real America, the one underneath the what-you-see-is-what-you-get surface, was much stranger than the fictions.
The immigrant experience is, I suspect, a universal one (even if you’re the kind of immigrant, like me, who holds on tightly, almost superstitiously, to his UK citizenship). On the one hand, there’s you, and on the other hand, there’s America. It’s bigger than you are. So you try to make sense of it. You try to figure it out—something which it resists. It’s big enough, and contains enough contradictions, that it is perfectly happy not to be figured out. As a writer, all I could do was to describe a small part of the whole.
And it was too big to see.
I didn’t really know what kind of book I wanted to write until, in the summer of 1998, I found myself in Reykjavik, in Iceland. And it was then that fragments of plot, an unwieldy assortment of characters, and something faintly resembling a structure, came together in my head. Either way, the book came into focus. It would be a thriller, and a murder mystery, and a romance, and a road trip. It would be about the immigrant experience, about what people believed in when they came to America. And about what happened to the things that they believed.
I wanted to write about America as a mythic place.
And I decided that, although there were many things in the novel I knew already, there were more I could find by going on the road and seeing what I found. So I drove, until I found a place to write, and then, in one place after another, sometimes at home, sometimes not, for nearly two years, I put one word after another, until I had a book. The story of a man called Shadow and the job he is offered when he gets out of prison. It tells the story of a small Midwestern town and the disappearances that occur there every winter. I discovered, as I wrote it, why roadside attractions are the most sacred places in America. I discovered many other strange byways and moments, scary and delightful and just plain weird.
When it was almost done, when all that remained was to pull together all the diverse strands, I left the country again, holed up in a huge, cold, old house in Ireland, and typed all that was left to type, shivering, beside a peat fire.
And then the book was done, and I stopped. Looking back on it, it wasn’t really that I’d dared, rather that I had had no choice.
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This piece was originally published in June 2001 on the Borders.com website, when American Gods was released.
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All Books Have Genders
Books have sexes; or to be more precise, books have genders. They do in my head, anyway. Or at least, the ones that I write do. And these are genders that have something, but not everything, to do with the gender of the main character of the story.
When I wrote the ten volumes of Sandman, I tended to alternate between what I thought of as male storylines, such as the first story, collected under the title Preludes and Nocturnes, or the fourth book, Season of Mists; and more female stories, like A Game of You, or Brief Lives.
The novels are a slightly different matter. Neverwhere is a Boy’s Own Adventure (Narnia on the Northern Line, as someone once described it), with an everyman hero, and the women in it tended to occupy equally stock roles, such as the Dreadful Fiancée, the Princess in Peril, the Kick-Ass Female Warrior, the Seductive Vamp. Each role is, I hope, taken and twisted 45 percent skew, but they are stock characters nonetheless.
Stardust, on the other hand, is a girl’s book, even though it also has an everyman hero, young Tristran Thorne, not to mention seven Lords bent on assassinating each other. That may partly be because once Yvaine came onstage, she rapidly became the most interesting thing there, and it may also be because the relationships between the women—the Witch Queen, Yvaine, Victoria Forester, the Lady Una and even Ditchwater Sal—were so much more complex and shaded than the relationships (what there was of them) between the boys.
The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish is a boy’s book. Coraline (which will be released in May 2002) is a girl’s book.
The first thing I knew when I started American Gods—knew even before I started it—was that I was finished with C. S. Lewis’s dictum that to write about how odd things affect odd people was an oddity too much, and that Gulliver’s Travels worked because Gulliver was normal, just as Alice in Wonderland would not have worked if Alice had been an extraordinary girl (which, now I come to think of it, is an odd thing to say, because if there’s one strange character in literature, it’s Alice). In Sandman I’d enjoyed writing about people who belonged in places on the other side of the looking glass, from the Dreamlord himself to such skewed luminaries as the emperor of the United States.
Not, I should say, that I had much say in what American Gods was going to be. It had its own opinions.
Novels accrete.
American Gods began long before I knew I was going to be writing a novel called American Gods. It began in May 1997, with an idea that I couldn’t get out of my head. I’d find myself thinking about it at night in bed before I’d go to sleep, as if I were watching a movie clip in my head. Each night I’d see another couple of minutes of the story.
In June 1997, I wrote the following on my battered Atari palmtop:
A guy winds up as a bodyguard for a magician. The magician is an over-the-top type. He offers the guy the job meeting him on a plane—sitting next to him.
Chain of events to get there involving missed flights, cancellations, unexpected bounce up to first class, and the guy sitting next to him introduces himself and offers him a job.
His life has just fallen apart anyway. He says yes.
Which is pretty much the beginning of the book. And all I knew at the time was it was the beginning of something. I hadn’t a clue what kind of something. Movie? TV series? Short story?
I don’t know any creators of fictions who start writing with nothing but a blank page. (They may exist. I just haven’t met any.) Mostly you have something. An image, or a character. And mostly you also have either a beginning, a middle or an end. Middles are good to have, because by the time you reach the middle you have a pretty good head of steam up; and ends are great. If you know how it ends, you can just start somewhere, aim, and begin to write (and, if you’re lucky, it may even end where you were hoping to go). There may be writers who have beginnings, middles and ends before they sit down to write. I am rarely of their number.
&n
bsp; So there I was, four years ago, with only a beginning. And you need more than a beginning if you’re going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you’ve written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.
A year later, I had a story in my head about these people. I tried writing it: the character I’d thought of as a magician (although, I had already decided, he wasn’t a magician at all) now seemed to be called Wednesday. I wasn’t sure what the other guy’s name was, the bodyguard, so I called him Ryder, but that wasn’t quite right. I had a short story in mind about those two and some murders that occur in a small Midwestern town called Silverside. I wrote a page and gave up, mainly because they really didn’t seem to come together.
There was a dream I woke up from, somewhere back then, sweating and confused, about a dead wife. It seemed to belong to the story, and I filed it away.
Some months later, in September 1998, I tried writing that story again, as a first-person narrative, sending the guy I’d called Ryder (who I tried calling Ben Kobold this time, but that sent out quite the wrong set of signals) to the town (which I’d called Shelby, because Silverside seemed too exotic) on his own. I covered about ten pages, and then stopped. I still wasn’t comfortable with it.
By that point, I was coming to the conclusion that the story I wanted to tell in that particular little lakeside town . . . Hmm, I thought somewhere in there, Lakeside, that’s what it’s called, a solid, generic name for a town . . . was too much a part of the novel to be written in isolation from it. And I had a novel by then. I’d had it for several months.
Back in July 1998 I had gone to Iceland, on the way to Norway and Finland. It may have been the distance from America, or it may have been the lack of sleep involved in a trip to the land of the midnight sun, but suddenly, somewhere in Reykjavik the novel came into focus. Not the story of it—I still had nothing more than the meeting on the plane and a fragment of plot in a town by a lake—but for the first time I knew what it was about. I had a direction. I wrote a letter to my publisher telling them that my next book wouldn’t be a historical fantasy set in restoration London after all, but a contemporary American phantasmagoria. Tentatively, I suggested American Gods as a working title for it.
I kept naming my protagonist: there’s a magic to names, after all. I knew his name was descriptive. I tried calling him Lazy, but he didn’t seem to like that, and I called him Jack and he didn’t like that any better. I took to trying every name I ran into on him for size, and he looked back at me from somewhere in my head unimpressed every time. It was like trying to name Rumpelstiltskin.
He finally got his name from an Elvis Costello song (it’s on Bespoke Songs, Lost Dogs, Detours and Rendezvous). It’s performed by Was (Not Was) and is the story of two men named Shadow and Jimmy. I thought about it, tried it on for size . . . and Shadow stretched uncomfortably on his prison cot, and glanced across at the Wild Birds of North America wall calendar, with the days he’d been inside crossed off, and he counted the days until he got out.
And once I had a name, I was ready to begin.
I wrote chapter 1 around December 1998. I was still trying to write it in the first person, and it wasn’t comfortable with that. Shadow was too damn private a person, and he didn’t let much out, which is hard enough in a third-person narrative and really hard in a first-person narrative. I began chapter 2 in June 1999, on the train home from the San Diego comics convention. (It’s a three-day train journey. You can get a lot of writing done there.) The book had begun. I wasn’t sure what I was going to call it, but then the publishers started sending me mock-ups of the book’s cover, and it said American Gods in big letters in the top, and I realized that my working title had become the title.
I kept writing, fascinated. I felt, on the good days, more like the first reader than the writer, something I’d rarely felt since Sandman days. Neither Shadow nor Wednesday was, in any way, an everyman figure. They were uniquely themselves, sometimes infuriatingly so. Odd people, perfectly suited for the odd events they would be encountering.
The book had a gender now, and it was most definitely male.
I wonder now, looking back, if the short stories in American Gods were a reaction to that. There are maybe half a dozen of them scattered through the book, and all (but one) of them are most definitely female in my head (even the one about the Omani trinket salesman and the taxi driver). That may have been it. I don’t know. I do know that there were things about America and about its history that it seemed easier to say by showing rather than telling; so we follow several people to America, from a Siberian shaman sixteen thousand years ago, to a Cornish pickpocket two hundred years ago, and, from each of them, we learn things.
And after the short stories were done, I was still writing. And writing. And continuing to write. The book turned out to be twice as long as I had expected. The plot I thought I was writing twisted and snaked and I slowly realized it wasn’t the plot at all. I wrote the book and wrote the book, putting one word after another, until there were close to two hundred thousand of them.
And one day I looked up, and it was January 2001, and I was sitting in an ancient and empty house in Ireland with a peat fire making no impression at all on the stark cold of the room. I saved the document on the computer, and I realized I’d finished writing a book.
I wondered what I’d learned, and found myself remembering something Gene Wolfe had told me, six months earlier. “You never learn how to write a novel,” he said. “You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.”
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This was originally published on Powells.com in 2001, to accompany the launch of American Gods.
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The PEN Awards and Charlie Hebdo
Six writers had pulled out of hosting tables at the PEN literary gala in New York. To host a table, you sit with eight people who have bought expensive tickets to the shindig in the vague hope of mingling with real writers. Your task is to make pleasant writerly conversation and not to spill your wine. Also, not to show disappointment when you realize that the whole table has been block-booked by, say, Google, and the people next to you don’t know who you are.
The six writer hosts who pulled out from the gala did so because among the awards that would be given that night was one for courage, going to the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo. It was for having the courage to put out the magazine after the 2011 firebombing and after the 2015 murders—and the six writers did not want to be there when Charlie Hebdo got that award.
I was asked if I would host a table. I said of course. So did Art Spiegelman; so did the cartoonist Alison Bechdel.
I tell my wife. “You are doing the right thing,” she says. Then, “Will you wear a bulletproof vest?”
“No. I think the security in the natural history museum will be pretty tight.”
“Yes. But you should wear a bulletproof vest, anyway. Remember, I’m pregnant,” she points out, in case I have forgotten. “And our child will need a father more than a martyr.”
My assistant Christine calls me regretfully on the afternoon of the gala. “With a little more time,” she says, “I could have got you a made-to-measure bulletproof vest, the kind the president wears under his shirt. But all I can find at this short notice is an oversized police flak jacket. You would have to wear it over your tuxedo . . .”
I weigh my options. On the one hand, possible death by gunfire. On the other, definite embarrassment. “That’s okay,” I tell her. “I’ll be fine.”
I wear a bow tie. Art Spiegelman wears his Nancy comic tie, to show that he is a cartoonist, and we travel uptown by subway. We reach the museum. There are police in the streets and on the steps and TV crews—mostly French TV crews. Nobody else is wearing a bulletproof vest. There is a metal detector, though, and we walk through it one by one, authors and officials and guests.
Hanging above us as we eat is a life-size fiberglass blue whale. If terrorist cells behaved like the ones in the movies, I think, they would
already have packed the hollow inside of the blue whale with explosives, leading to an exciting third-act battle sequence on top of the blue whale between our hero and the people trying to set off the bomb. And if that whale explodes, I realize, even an oversized flak jacket worn over a dinner jacket could not protect me. I find this vaguely reassuring.
Tom Stoppard is given an award first. Then Charlie Hebdo’s award is given. Finally, they give an award to the arrested Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova. I wonder why the idea of being in the room while Charlie Hebdo is honored upset the six former table hosts enough that they had to not be there and why they couldn’t have turned up for the bits they liked and supported and just sloped off to the toilets for the bit they felt uncomfortable with. But then, I don’t get only supporting the freedom of the kind of speech you like. If speech needs defending, it’s probably because it’s upsetting someone.
I suspect that the reason why it seems so simple to me and to those of us from the world of comics is that we are used to having to defend our work against people who want it—and us—off the shelves.
The first comics work I was ever paid for was in the 1987 Knockabout Comics book Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament. I was one of a few writers and I retold several stories, mostly from the Book of Judges. One story immediately got us into trouble: an account of the attempted rape of a male traveler to a town, thwarted by a host who offers the rapists his virgin daughter and the traveler’s concubine. A gang rape follows and the traveler takes his concubine’s corpse home, cuts it up and sends a segment of it to each of the tribes of Israel. (It’s Judges 19 if you want to go and look, and it’s pretty noxious.)
I was twenty-six and soon after publication I found myself on the radio defending the book, as a Tory MP complained about the lack of prosecutions for criminal blasphemy and how both the book and those who made it should be locked up; I watched the Sun attempt to stir up popular anger against it; and then, a few years later, I watched the Swedish publisher of the book fight to stay out of prison for publishing it over there.