The View from the Cheap Seats Read Online Free PDF Page A

wrote them becauseI wanted to find out what happened next to people I had made up. I wrote them to feed my family.
    So I felt almost dishonorable accepting people’s thanks. I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library; fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it.
    And I remembered. I would not be the person I am without the authors who made me what I am—the special ones, the wise ones, sometimes just the ones who got there first.
    It’s not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It’s the most important thing there is.
    V
    SO I WROTE a book about the inhabitants of a graveyard. I was the kind of boy who loved graveyards as much as he feared them. The best thing—the very best, most wonderful possible thing—about the graveyard in the Sussex town in which I grew up is that there was a witch buried in the graveyard, who had been burned in the High Street. My disappointment on reaching teenagehood and realizing, on rereading the inscription, that the witch was nothing of the sort (it was the grave of three stake-burned Protestant martyrs, burned by order of a Catholic queen) stayed with me. It would become the starting place, along with a Kipling story about a jeweled elephant goad, for my story “The Witch’s Headstone.” Although it’s chapter 4,it was the first chapter I wrote of The Graveyard Book, a book I had wanted to write for over twenty years.
    The idea had been so simple, to tell the story of a boy raised in a graveyard, inspired by one image—my infant son, Michael, who was two, and is now twenty-five, the age I was then, and is now taller than I am—on his tricycle, pedaling through the graveyard across the road in the sunshine, past the grave I once thought had belonged to a witch.
    I was, as I said, twenty-five years old, and I had an idea for a book and I knew it was a real one.
    I tried writing it, and realized that it was a better idea than I was a writer. So I kept writing, but I wrote other things, learning my craft. I wrote for twenty years until I thought that I could write The Graveyard Book —or at least, that I was getting no better.
    I wanted the book to be composed of short stories, because The Jungle Book was short stories. And I wanted it to be a novel, because it was a novel in my head. The tension between those two things was both a delight and a heartache as a writer.
    I wrote it as best I could. That’s the only way I know how to write something. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be any good. It just means you try. And, most of all, I wrote the story that I wanted to read.
    It took me too long to begin, and it took me too long to finish. And then, one night in February, I was writing the last two pages.
    In the first chapter I had written a doggerel poem and left the last two lines unfinished. Now it was time to finish it, to write the last two lines. So I did. The poem, I learned, ended:
    Â Â Â  Face your life, its pain, its pleasure
    Â Â Â  Leave no path untaken.
    And my eyes stung, momentarily. It was then, and only then, that I saw clearly for the first time what I was writing. AlthoughI had set out to write a book about a childhood—it was Bod’s childhood, and it was in a graveyard, but still, it was a childhood like any other—I was now writing about being a parent, and the fundamental most comical tragedy of parenthood: that if you do your