But then he hit "The Golden Compass" and he slowed down and took his time.
Not to say that great works of literature haven't been written in very brief periods of time. Sometimes the words come tumbling out in this white heat of composition. It's not a reliable indicator, but sometimes it's what separates a routine or genre writer from one we see as "a true artist."
I wonder if national origins have a role in this. This country was founded by Puritans, who considered any kind of aesthetic pleasure to be idolatry. While Britain evolved out of a tradition of myths and legends and folk tales, which you can see in Tolkien and elsewhere.
They may be less eager to make those kinds of distinctions and keep them rigid. When I look at the British pop charts, for example, I'm always surprised at the British Top 40 and what a strange mixture of incredibly refined and edgy kinds of taste are represented there alongside pap and stuff that you would never see here. It's mixed together in this wonderful jumble that seems a lot less stratified. Some of that same sensibility might be reflected in literature as well.
It's certainly true in other countries. It's not an accident that we had the auteur theory developing in France: Those critics were watching Hitchcock films and John Ford films and Howard Hawks films and westerns and crime films and decided that they were clearly great works of art. H.P. Lovecraft too was acclaimed as a great American writer in France much sooner than here. When the Library of America included Lovecraft, there were a lot of people here who were smirking about it.
It seems like behind your essays is this larger argument about childhood, which you seem to think our culture has misunderstood in some ways.
Childhood is a subject I talk about a lot. I haven't thought it through to know how much it has to do with what I'm saying about fiction and the short story. But there is unquestionably a connection for me between the maps I encountered as a young reader -- the endpaper maps -- and the maps I created for himself, both literally drew myself, of imaginary lands I was trying to bring into existence, and the internal maps I was creating of the world that I lived in, the world that I played in -- the neighborhood. . . . Where the mean dogs were, where the mean dads were, where the bad kids hung out. All of that was intimately connected in my mind with what I was reading.
