Neil Gaiman Ruined My Life

Neil Gaiman ruined my life.

Once I wore his leather jacket. Not in the romantic, one-step-from-engaged, day-after-day way. But literally, once. It was sometimes in the 1980s. I was at a publishing party at the St. Maritz (which now has the much more prosaic name of The Ritz-Carlton). It was overlooking Central Park on a freezing cold evening. The author I was minding went out on a balcony to smoke; willy-nilly I followed her and soon had chattering teeth and goosebumps. Then a rather nice voice said, “Take this,” and a leather jacket was thrust into my hands. Gratefully, I put it on, and a few moments later, when my author went back inside, I returned the jacket with thanks. Much later, I recognized the jacket’s owner from an author photograph: yes, Neil Gaiman.

That was not how he ruined my life, however. That came decades afterwards, in 2017. In the intervening years I read and enjoyed many of his books: Coraline and The Wolves in the Wallswhere if you ever thought things were what they seemed, you soon learn different; Stardust, which explores ideas about fairy tales while telling an enchanting one, and Good Omens (written with Terri Pratchett) which explodes a whole different set of ideas about quests and prophecies, while telling about very funny ones.

Then I discovered that he reads his own works for the audio editions. I went deep in the Underground (yes, with an upper case “U;” much of the story is set in the London subway) of Neverwhere, and nearly wept at the betrayals the characters endured. I lived with Bod and his friends in the euphonious The Graveyard Book. The Ocean at the End of the Lane taught me much about memory and truth, and what the past really might be. And I have never experienced anything quite like The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains, with the wonderful cello and orchestral score written for the novella in the background. It is such a simple story, and yet you find yourself questioning the truth of almost every word.
The View from the Cheap Seats
Earlier this year, I listened to The View from the Cheap Seats. As Gaiman himself says, it is not his complete non-fiction. “It is, instead, a motley bunch of speeches and articles, introductions and essays.” I think there may even be a few off the cuff remarks in there. It was the first of his books I did not read (or listen to) avidly, making time even when I did not have any, to enjoy a few more paragraphs or even sentences. Gaiman foresaw that would be the reaction for a number of his readers. He suggested it was more a book to sip than to take as a long draught. In my case, I listened to the first seven discs, and a couple of weeks later, finished the last few discs. There was a lot of his work I never heard or read before, but there were also jokes repeated, and stories about people, which while they remained fundamentally the same (and I have no doubt true) had niggling variations in the details making me think that if this were a novel, it would need a good copy editor.

I found things I loved in it. We share admiration for the author Diana Wynn Jones, whom I have long thought one of the most honest writers for children. Gaiman writes poignantly of her death, when he sat by her bed wondering which star she would become in the night sky. I discovered things - enchanting things, moving things - about authors such as Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and H. P. Lovecraft, all of which helped my understanding of what the authors had written. I learned that he has the good taste to like G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Mysteries and the works of James Thurber. I was fascinated by aspects of his life he revealed. One of his daughters was named for a drag queen; the house in The Ocean at the End of the Lane is (as I thought it must be) very like the one he grew up in; he started in journalism, because one was paid to write even if it was 3,000 words on the now ancient bestsellers Lace and Scruples or an article about spending the night on London streets in 1990 (wherein he discovers night life had changed in the last ten years, and not for the better).

So, how, you ask, did this man who writes so charmingly about everything that has touched his life, ruin mine? He discusses, in enticing detail, about a thousand books I have never read, never heard of. I am now fifty-seven. For the few generations we have records for, the women of my female line have lived into their nineties. So, let us be optimistic: I have forty years in which to squash a lifetime of reading, among other things.

I learned there is so much more to the world of comic books and graphic novels than I ever imagined, though I have enjoyed a number of (non-superhero) graphic novels. I am fascinated by the mixture of words and images, where the pictures can add so much to the text, and then a textless frame can give a whole new perspective on the action and characters. For example, I knew two things Will Eisner had been involved in: PS, The Preventive Maintenance Monthly (where a cast of characters reminded soldiers of the importance of chocks when parking on hills and how not to load a trailer), which I never read, and do not see any need to; and A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories, which I have been meaning to read for years. Now I know so much more. I need to read The Spirit, and a number of graphic novels by other authors I have never heard of. I need to read.
Sandman

I had always vaguely confused Watchmen and Sandman, but they were on my radar in that they were both graphic novels in which Gaiman played a part. Now I know that he occasionally helped out Alan Moore with Watchmen and wrote Sandman. And I know I must read both.

And there is the almost endless list of half-forgotten authors, people he read when he was young and haunted bookshops - about which he writes about with absorbing and witty nostalgia. Dennis Wheatley, J. P. Martin, Theodore Thomas and Kate Wilhelm, G. C. Edmondson, John James, M. John Harrison, and many, many others are going to feature on my reading list.

Finally (and I am touching only on what I consider to be the high points of The View From the Cheap Seats) I was introduced to an artist, Richard Dadd, a paranoid schizophrenic who lived for much of his life (1817-1886) in an asylum, where he produced minutely detailed paintings of a variety of subjects, including fairies. Gaiman discussed one of his paintings, The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke, in such vivid terms that when I tracked down a print, I knew at once what he meant when he said a copy did not do the painting justice; yet recalling Gaiman’s words, I could imagine a brightness and a sense of brushstrokes lovingly described. I must visit the Tate where it hangs.

Perhaps my life is not ruined. Perhaps it is even enriched. Gaiman’s reading of his retelling of the Norse myths: majestic, bawdy, as tangled and chronically improbably as the originals, in a style that we might call irreverent yet, to the Norse themselves would have seemed pious (had they had the concept), reminded me that all we can do is live life to the fullest. Perhaps it is best to have a list of books we can never finish reading, music we will never have the time to listen to, painters and paintings we can never fully explore. Without this, life could become rather boring.

-Mary Elizabeth, Hickory Corner Branch

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