Stardust (23 page)

First and foremost, my thanks to Charles Vess. He is the nearest thing we have today to the great Victorian fairy painters, and without his art as an inspiration none of these words would exist. Every time I finished a chapter I phoned him up and read it to him, and he listened patiently and he chuckled in all the right places.

My thanks to Jenny Lee, Karen Berger, Paul Levitz, Merrilee Heifetz, Lou Aronica, Jennifer Hershey and Tia Maggini: each of them helped make this book a reality.

I owe an enormous debt to Hope Mirrlees, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell and C.S. Lewis, wherever they may currently be, for showing me that fairy stories were for adults too.

Tori lent me a house, and I wrote the first chapter in it, and all she asked in exchange was that I make her a tree.

There were people who read it as it was being written, and who told me what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. It’s not their fault if I didn’t listen. My thanks in particular to Amy Horsting, Lisa Henson, Diana Wynne Jones, Chris Bell and Susanna Clarke.

My wife Mary and my assistant Lorraine did more than their share of work on this book, for they typed the first few chapters from my handwritten draft, and I cannot thank them enough.

The kids, to be frank, were absolutely no help at all, and I truly don’t think I’d ever have it any other way.

—Neil Gaiman, June 1998

Writing and the Imagination

By Neil Gaiman

A speech delivered at the Chicago Humanities Festival, October 2000

When I grew up, I wanted to be a werewolf. Or a writer. But writer was definitely the number two alternative. Werewolfing was an easy number one.

I expected it would begin with the onset of puberty. Instead I got a number of other things, all of them a lot of fun. I got everything, pretty much, except turning into a wolf when the moon was full.

So far I still haven’t turned into a wolf, not as far as I know.

But I once dreamed I did, so I know what it’s like.

I forget most of my dreams on waking, and do not write them down. Fragments of them sometimes creep into stories, but writers cannibalise all of themselves for stories, and there is no reason that dreams should escape. However, most of the ones I can remember are plotless, set in huge houses I have never lived in, with rooms both topographically impossible and dark. Dreams and houses have always been linked for me, and I do not know why.

But let’s leave dreams for a moment and talk about mythology.

As a writer, and, more specifically, as a writer of fiction, I deal with myth a great deal. Always have. Probably always will.

It’s not that I don’t like, or respect, mimetic fiction - I do. But people who make things up for a living follow our interests and our obsessions into fiction, and mostly my interests have taken me, whether I wanted them to or not, into the realm of myth, which is not entirely the same as the realm of the imagination, although they share a common border.

I remember finding a copy, as a small boy, of a paperback Tales of the Norsemen and delighting in it as a treasure, reading it until the binding broke and the pages flew apart like leaves. I remember the sheer rightness of those stories. They felt right. They felt, to my seven-year-old mind, familiar.

“Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories,” said Lord Dunsany.

He was right, of course. Our imaginings (if they are ours) should be based in our own lives and experiences, all our memories. But all of our memories include the tales we were told as children, all the myths, all the fairy tales, all the stories.

Without our stories we are incomplete.

The process of composting fascinates me. I am English, and share with many of my countrymen an amateurish fondness for, frankly, messing around in gardens: it’s not strictly gardening, rather it’s the urge that, last year, meant I got to smile proudly at the arrival of half a dozen exotic pumpkins, each of which must have cost more than twenty dollars to grow and each of which was manifestly inferior to the locally grown produce. I like gardening, am proudly no good at it, and do not mind this at all.

In gardening, the process is most of the fun, the results are secondary (and, in my case, usually accidental).

And one learns a lot about compost: kitchen scraps and garden leftovers and refuse that rot down, over time, to a thick black clean nutritious dirt, teeming with life, perfect for growing things in.

Myths are compost.

They begin as religions, the most deeply held of beliefs, or as the stories that accrete to religions as they grow.

(“If he is going to keep killing people,” says Joseph to Mary, speaking of the infant Jesus in the apocryphal gospel of the Infancy, “we are going to have to stop him going out of the house.”)
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And then, as the religions fall into disuse, or the stories cease to be seen as the literal truth, they become myths. And the myths compost down to dirt, and become a fertile ground for other stories and tales which blossom like wildflowers. Cupid and Psyche is retold and half forgotten and remembered again and becomes Beauty and the Beast.

Anansi the African Spider God becomes Bre’r Rabbit, whaling away at the tar baby.

New flowers grow from the compost: bright blossoms, and alive.

Myths are obliging.

When I was writing Sandman, the story that, in many ways, made my name, I experimented with myth continually. It was the ink that the series was written in.

Sandman was, in many ways, an attempt to create a new mythology - or, rather, to find what it was that I responded to in ancient pantheons and then to try and create a fictive structure in which I could believe as I wrote it. Something that felt right, in the way that myths feel right.

Dream, Death, Delirium, and the rest of the Endless (unworshipped, for who would want to be worshipped in this day and age?) were a family, like all good pantheons; each representing a different aspect of life, each typifying a different personality.

I think, overall, the character that people responded to most was Death, who I represented as a cheerful, sensible sixteen-year-old girl - someone attractive, and fundamentally nice; I remember my puzzlement the first time I encountered people who professed to believe in the characters I had created, and the feeling, half of guilt and half of relief, when I started to get letters from readers who had used my character Death to get through the death of a loved one, a wife, a boyfriend, a mother, a child.

(I’m still bewildered by the people who have never read the comics who have adopted the characters, particularly Death and Delirium, as part of their personal iconography).

Creating a new pantheon was part of the experiment, but so was the exploration of all other myths. (If Sandman was about one thing, it was about the act of storytelling, and the, possibly, redemptive nature of stories. But then, it’s hard for a two-thousand-page story to be about just one thing.)

I invented old African oral legends; I created cat myths, which cats tell each other in the night.

In Season of Myths I decided to tackle myths head on, both to see how they worked and how robust they were: at what point did suspension of disbelief roll over and die. How many myths could one, metaphorically, get into a phone booth, or get to dance on the head of a pin?

The story was inspired loosely by something the Abbe Mugnier had once said - that he believed that there was a Hell, because it was church doctrine that there was a hell. He was not required to believe that there was anyone in it. The vision of an empty Hell was one that fascinated me.

Very well; Hell would be empty, abandoned by Lucifer (who I represented as a fallen angel, straight out of Milton) and as prime psychic real estate would be wanted by various factions: I culled some from the comics, took others from old myths - Egyptian, Norse, Japanese - added in angels and demons and, in a final moment of experiment I even added in some fairies, and was astonished to find how robust the structure was; it should have been an inedible mess, and instead (to keep the cooking metaphor) seemed to be a pretty good gumbo. Disbelief continued to be suspended and my faith in myth as something fundamentally alive and workable was upheld.

The joy of writing Sandman was that the territory was wide-open. I wrote it in the world of anything goes: history and geography, superheroes and dead kings, folk-tales, houses and dreams.

Mythologies have, as I said, always fascinated me. Why we have them. Why we need them. Whether they need us.

And comics have always dealt in myths: four-colour fantasies, which include men in brightly coloured costumes fighting endless soap opera battles with each other (predigested power fantasies for adolescent males); not to mention friendly ghosts, animal people, monsters, teenagers, aliens. Until a certain age the mythology can possess us completely, then we grow up and leave those particular dreams behind, for a little while or forever.

But new mythologies wait for us, here in the final moments of the twentieth century. They abound and proliferate: urban legends of men with hooks in lovers’ lanes, hitchhikers with hairy hands and meat cleavers, beehive hairdos crawling with vermin; serial killers and barroom conversations; in the background our TV screens pour disjointed images into our living rooms, feeding us old movies, newsflashes, talk-shows, adverts; we mythologise the way we dress and the things we say; iconic figures - rock stars and politicians, celebrities of every shape and size; the new mythologies of magic and science and numbers and fame.

They have their function, all the ways we try make sense of the world we inhabit, a world in which there are few, if any, easy answers. Every day we attempt to understand it. And every night we close our eyes, and go to sleep, and, for a few hours, quietly and safely, we go stark staring mad.

The ten volumes of Sandman were my way of talking about that. They were my way of looking at the mythologies of the last decade of the twentieth century; a way of talking about sex and death, fear and belief and joy - all the things that make us dream.

We spend a third of our lives asleep, after all.