In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [15]
19. Georges Feydeau wrote many farces that depend on impeccable entry-and-exit timing.
Blue bunny comic book cover by Margaret Atwood
The Estonian cover of The Robber Bride (Röövelpruut):
Burning Bushes:
Why Heaven and Hell
Went to Planet X
Those finds concern religious beliefs prevalent during the Eighth Dynasty of Ammer-Ka; they speak of various Perils—Black, Red, Yellow—evidently cabalistic incantations connected in some way with the mysterious deity Rayss, to whom burnt offerings were apparently made.
STANISLAW LEM, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency towards myth.
NORTHROP FRYE, Anatomy of Criticism
My superhero-creating or flying-rabbit phase ended when I was eight. By the time I was nine or ten, I had become a confirmed under-the-covers midnight flashlight reader, devoting myself not only to adventure stories but also to comic books of an increasingly wide variety. In my daytime life, I would read anything that was handy, including cereal boxes, washroom graffiti, Reader’s Digests, magazine advertisements, rainy-day hobby books, billboards, and trashy pulps. From this you might conclude that I quite possibly have never been an entirely serious-minded person, or perhaps that I simply have eclectic tastes and like to rummage. Given a choice between a stroll in a classic eighteenth-century garden and the chance to paw through someone’s junk-filled attic, I would probably choose the attic. Not every time. But often.
As the twig is bent, so the tree grows, they used to say, so I suppose I should reveal what sort of things bent my own twig; for surely at least some of the books that writers eventually produce as adults are precipitated by what they read avidly as children.
Our house had a ready supply of the same kinds of odd and non-naturalist late-Victorian and Edwardian tales that delighted—for instance—Jorge Luis Borges and many of the “magic realists” that emerged from Latin America in the mid-twentieth century. Between the ages of eleven and seventeen, I read M. R. James, the master of the creepy tale, and all of H. G. Wells’s fantastical stories—The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, “The Country of the Blind,” and many more. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, complete with dinosaurs and Primitive Man, was a favourite; so were H. Rider Haggard’s once highly popular King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain, and She, with their lost civilizations frequently ruled over by beautiful, shoulder-baring, drapery-fluttering queens; and whatever derivative Boy’s Own Annual adventure stories I could get my hands on.
It goes without saying that I was in love with Sherlock Holmes, and, once I got around to it, with Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe as well. There is something to be said for a greatcoat or trenchcoat, a back alley, and a clenched jaw, and that none of these men au fond had much respect for women did not bother me a whit: the blonde usually did it, and I was not a blonde.
I also read a lot of SF. As I proceeded through high school, I dug into the John Wyndhams—The Day of the Triffids came out in 1951, The Midwich Cuckoos in 1957. I devoured any Ray Bradburys I could get—it was the 1950s, so The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 were both available.
I often read this kind of book when I was supposed to be doing my homework. I was, in fact, leading a double life, or even a triple one: the terms highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow were much in use at that time—the metaphor was based on some idea of Neanderthals having receding foreheads—but I seemed to have a taste for all three kinds of brow, which I can’t say disturbed me. In the classroom we took Shakespeare—a play or two a year—and the romantic and Victorian poets, among others. Over the five years of high school that were mandated there and then, we studied two novels