The View from the Cheap Seats (8 page)

S
ix 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.

Outrageous Tales
was, let us make no bones of it, an offensive comic (we weren't using the phrase “graphic novel” much yet in 1987). Its purpose, at least as far as I was concerned, was to shock, to point out that the Bible contained material that was outrageously unpleasant and to bring that out into the open, to let it be talked about, seen, discussed. The book existed, in part, to shock and to offend, because it was a reaction to material in the Bible that we found shocking and offensive.

In retrospect, I am glad I was not sentenced to prison for blasphemous libel, like Denis Lemon a decade earlier; glad that Knockabout's Swedish publisher got off; and doubly glad that the fundamentalist Christian extremists back then mostly reserved their murders for doctors who performed abortions and
did not, to the best of my knowledge, kill people who wrote or drew comics.

Comics and cartoons can viscerally upset and offend people. Cartoons and comics get banned and cartoonists get imprisoned and killed. Some comics are hard to defend, especially if you prefer prettier drawing styles, lack cultural context, or were hoping for subtlety. But that does not mean that they should not be defended.

Back beneath the fiberglass blue whale, Gérard Biard, the editor in chief of
Charlie Hebdo,
concludes his speech. “Growing up to be a citizen,” he reminds us, “is to learn that some ideas, some words, some images can be shocking. Being shocked is part of democratic debate. Being shot is not.”

Originally published in the May 27, 2015, issue of the
New Statesman,
“Saying the Unsayable,” which was guest-edited by me and by Amanda Palmer.

I
hope none of you are here for answers. Authors are notoriously bad at answers. No, that's not right. We're not bad at them. We come up with answers all the time, but our answers tend to be unreliable, personal, anecdotal and highly imaginative.

These things can be drawbacks, as far as answers go, if you're hoping to use our answers in your lives. But they are all good things, not drawbacks, when it comes to questions. Authors are good at posing questions, and our questions are often pretty solid.

I don't write with answers in mind. I write to find out what I think about something. I wrote
American Gods
because I had lived in America for almost a decade and felt it was time that I learned what I thought about it.

I wrote
Coraline
because, when I was a child, I used to wonder what would happen if I went home and my parents had moved away without telling me.

(It could happen. Things sometimes slipped their minds. They were busy people. One night they forgot to pick me up from school, and it was only a wistful phone call from the school, at ten o'clock at night, asking if they were expected to keep me, that finally got me picked up. One morning my parents dropped me off at school without noticing that the half-term break had
begun, and I wandered, confused, around a locked and empty school until I was eventually rescued by a gardener. So it was unlikely, but it was possible.)

And if my parents had moved away, what if other people moved in who looked just like them? How would I know? What would I do? And for that matter, what was behind the mysterious door at the far end of the oak-paneled drawing room, the one that opened to reveal only bricks?

I write stories to find out what I think about things.

I am writing this speech to find out what I think about something.

What I want to know is this:
what is a children's book?
Or more emphatically:
what the [very bad swearword] is a children's book?

IT WAS A
tiny private school in the town in which I lived, and I only attended it for a year. I was eight. One day, one of the boys came in with a copy of a magazine with naked ladies in it, stolen from his father, and we looked at it, to discover what naked ladies looked like. I do not remember what these particular naked ladies looked like, although I remember the little biographies by the pictures: one of the ladies was a magician's assistant, which I thought very grand. We were, like all children, curious.

In the spring of that same year some kids that I used to encounter on my daily walk home from school told me a dirty joke. It had a swear word in it. In fact, I do not think it would be overstating matters to suggest that it had
the
swear word in it. It was not a particularly funny joke, but it was definitely sweary, and I told it to a couple of my school friends the following morning, thinking that they might find it funny, or failing that, think of me as sophisticated.

One of them repeated it to his mother that night. I never saw
him again. His parents were to pull him out of that school, because of my joke, and he never even came back to say goodbye.

I was interrogated the next morning by the headmistress and the principal, who had just bought the school and was intent on maximizing every drop of profit from it before she sold it to property developers the following year.

I had forgotten about the joke. They kept asking me if I knew any “four-letter words” and, while I had not run across that term before, I had an enormous vocabulary, and it was the kind of thing that teachers asked eight-year-olds, so I ran through every word made of four letters I could think of, until they told me to shut up, and asked me about rude jokes and where I had heard them, and to whom exactly I had repeated them.

That night, after school, my mother was summoned to a meeting with the headmistress and the principal. She came home and informed me that she had been told that I had said something so terrible, so awful, that the headmistress and the principal would not actually repeat it. What was it?

I was scared to answer, so I whispered it to her.

I had said
fuck
.

“You must never
ever
say that again,” said my mother. “That is the worst thing that you can say.”

She informed me that she had been told that I would have been expelled—the ultimate punishment—from the little school that night, but, because the other boy had already been removed from that seething den of scatological iniquity by his parents, the principal had announced, with regret, that she was not prepared to lose two sets of school fees. And so I was spared.

I learned two very important lessons from this.

The first was that you must be extremely selective when it comes to your audience.

And the second is that words have power.

CHILDREN ARE A
relatively powerless minority, and, like all oppressed people, they know more about their oppressors than their oppressors know about them. Information is currency, and information that will allow you to decode the language, motivations and behavior of the occupying forces, on whom you are uniquely dependent for food, for warmth, for happiness, is the most valuable information of all.

Children are extremely interested in adult behavior. They want to know about us.

Their interest in the precise mechanics of peculiarly adult behavior is limited. All too often it seems repellent, or dull. A drunk on the pavement is something you do not need to see, and part of a world you do not wish to be part of, so you look away.

Children are very good at looking away.

I DO NOT
think I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited.

I spent it learning what I could about adults. I was extremely interested in how they saw children and childhood. There was an acting copy of a play on my parents' bookshelf. The play was called
The Happiest Days of Your Life
. It was about a girls' school evacuated to a boys' school during the War, and hilarity ensued.

My father had played the school porter, in an amateur production. He told me that the phrase “the happiest days of your life” referred to your school days.

This seemed nonsensical to me then, and I suspected it of being either adult propaganda or, more likely, confirmation of my creeping suspicion that the majority of adults actually had no memories of being children.

For the record, I don't think I ever disliked anything as long or as well as I disliked school: the arbitrary violence, the lack
of power, the pointlessness of so much of it. It did not help that I tended to exist in a world of my own, half-in-the-world, half-out-of-it, forever missing the information that somehow everyone else in the school managed to have obtained.

On the first day of term I felt sick and miserable, on the last day, elated. To my mind, “the happiest days of your life” was just one of those things that adults said that not even they could have believed; things like “this isn't going to hurt” which were simply never true.

MY DEFENSE AGAINST
the adult world was to read everything I could. I read whatever was in front of me, whether I understood it or not.

I was escaping. Of course I was—C. S. Lewis wisely pointed out that the only people who inveigh against escape tend to be jailers. But I was learning, I was looking out through other eyes, I was experiencing points of view I did not have. I was developing empathy, realizing and understanding that all the different incarnations of “I” in stories, who were not me, were real, and passing on their wisdom and experience, allowing me to learn from their mistakes. And I knew then, as I know now, that things need not have happened to be true.

I read everything I could find. If the cover looked interesting, if the first few pages held my interest, I would read it, whatever it was, whatever the intended audience.

This meant that sometimes I would read things I was not ready for, things that bothered me, or that I wished I had not read.

Children tend to be really good at self-censorship. They have a pretty good sense of what they are ready for and what they are not, and they walk the line wisely. But walking the line still means you will go past it on occasion.

I still remember the stories that troubled me: a horror story
by Charles Birkin about a couple who had lost a daughter visiting a carnival freak show a few years later and encountering a golden-eyed creature that was probably their daughter, stolen and deformed by an evil doctor; a short story called “The Pace That Kills” about evil traffic wardens, in which I learned that women could be made to pee into bottles to have their alcohol levels checked; and a short story called “Made in USA” by J. T. McIntosh, in which an android girl was forced at knifepoint to undress in front of a gang of boys, to show them that she had no belly button.

There was also a newspaper I read, aged nine or ten, while waiting for my parents, with nothing else to read, that turned out to be a factual sixteen-page description, with photographs, of Nazi concentration camp atrocities and horrors. I read it, and I wished that I had not, because my view of the world was so much darker afterwards. I had known about the millions of people who had been killed—I had lost almost all my European extended family, after all. I had not known about the medical tortures, the cold-blooded, efficient monstrousness that humans had inflicted on other, helpless, humans.

Helplessness upset me. The idea that I could be stolen from my family and turned into a monster and they would not know me. That people could be forced against their will to pee into bottles or forced at knifepoint to take their clothes off—both of which, for me, were about helplessness and embarrassment, that most crippling of English conditions. The stories upset me, and I did not have the engines to deal with them.

I don't remember ever being bothered by running into references to sex, which, for the most part, I did not actually understand. Adult authors tended to write in something that seemed like code, comprehensible only if you already knew what they were saying.

(Years later, writing a long fairy tale called
Stardust,
I tried to write a sex scene in the same coded way, and succeeded per
haps too well, as kids seemed barely to notice it, while adults often complained that it was embarrassingly explicit.)

There were things I read as a boy that troubled me, but nothing that ever made me want to stop reading. I understood that we discovered what our limits were by going beyond them, and then nervously retreating to our places of comfort once more, and growing, and changing, and becoming someone else. Becoming, eventually, adult.

I READ EVERYTHING
but Young Adult fiction. This was not because I did not like it, merely that I do not remember coming across any as a child or even as a young adult. There was always more adult fiction around than there were children's books, and at school from the age of about eleven the books that we read in the quiet period after lunch, the books that we passed around, that went from boy to boy as each of us was done with it, were tales of James Bond and Modesty Blaise,
Pan Books of Horror Stories,
the occult thrillers of Dennis Wheatley, books by authors like Edgar Wallace and Chesterton and Conan Doyle, J. R. R. Tolkien and Michael Moorcock, Ursula Le Guin and Ray Bradbury.

There were children's authors I still read and loved, but the majority of them wrote books I never saw in bookshops, or on any shelves other than my local library's: Margaret Storey, for example, who wrote magical fantasies that fed my inner landscape in a way that only matched the magic of C. S. Lewis and Alan Garner, or J. P. Martin and his very peculiar books about an enormously rich elephant called Uncle, and Uncle's battles with Beaver Hateman and the Badfort gang. These were library books, to be read there, or to be borrowed and, reluctantly, returned.

My book-buying habits were driven by thrift. In England, the years immediately following decimalization were years of spiraling prices. I discovered that books priced in shillings
would often be half the price of later printings, and so I would rummage my way through the shelves of bookshops checking the prices of books, looking for books priced in shillings, trying to get the most fiction for my limited pocket money. I read so many bad books just because they were cheap, and I discovered Tom Disch, who made up for all of them.

As a child, and as a young adult, I was reading adult fiction and children's fiction with the same eyes and the same head, and I was reading anything in the space I happened to be in, indiscriminately, which is, I am certain, the best way to read.

I worry when people ask me how to stop their children reading bad fiction. What a child takes from a book is never what an adult takes from it. Ideas that are hackneyed and dull for adults are fresh and new and world-changing for children. And besides, you bring yourself to a book, and children are capable of imbuing words with magic that not even the author knew was there.

I had one book confiscated, when I was twelve, a cold war political farce by David Forrest called
And to My Nephew Albert I Leave the Island What I Won off Fatty Hagan in a Poker Game
, taken away because, if I remember it correctly, the cover showed two naked female breasts with American and Russian flags painted on them. I tried to get the book back from the teachers by explaining that the cover was misleading and, apart from a sunbathing young lady, there was pretty much no sex or nakedness in the book. This did not work. I eventually got it back from the teachers at the end of term by claiming, falsely, that it was my father's and I had taken it without his knowledge, and it was, reluctantly, returned.

I had learned not to read books in school with breasts on the cover, or, at least, to cover the covers with something else, if I did.