Présentation de l'éditeur
In his first-ever work of nonfiction, Graham Swift—Booker Prize-winning author of
Waterland and
Last Orders—gives us a highly personal book: a singular and open-spirited account of a writer’s life.
Here Kazuo Ishiguro advises on how to choose a guitar; Salman Rushdie arrives for Christmas under guard; Caryl Phillips shares a beer with the author at a nightclub in Toronto. There are private moments with Swift’s father and with his own younger self, as well as musings—on history, memory, and imagination—that illuminate his work. As generous in its scope as it is acute in its observations,
Making an Elephant brings together a richly varied selection of essays, portraits, poetry and interviews, full of insights into Swift’s passions and motivations, and wise about the friends, family and other writers who have mattered to him over the years.
Extrait
Chapter 1
Santa's Clinic
Croydon, 1955
I have two memories of childhood which have become per-manently entangled with each other. One is of being taken when I was very small to have my polio inoculation, an event anticipated with a mounting dread which the actual procedure did nothing to dispel. A special clinic had been set up in a local hospital, where small children passed through one door to the needle-plying doctors, then emerged through another where a grimly smiling nurse doled out sweets. There was a lot of screaming and blubbing, not only from those about to go in, but, rather more seriously, from those coming out, unconsoled by their sugary hand-outs. I can't remember if I cried myself. I've probably suppressed the trauma. But I do remember that the nurse with the sweets seemed as much a part of the ordeal as anything else.
I have the dimmest recollection of being prepared at my primary school for this event and of part of the dread being the realization that there was no route of exemption. As an infant, you could wriggle, almost by definition, out of most things, but this was brutal conscription aimed at the most tender. It was certainly beyond me to appreciate that the business of the two doors was my lucky birthright-the National Health Service in its own zealous infancy-and something for which I ought really to have been very glad. A whole generation, for the first time in history, was being spared at least one very nasty form of being crippled for life.
I must have had my polio jab around Christmas time, because the second memory is of being with my mother in a Croydon department store where a lavish, glittery Santa's grotto had been constructed. Here again there were the small children entering through one door then emerging through another, with, instead of sweets, little wrapped gifts in their hands. True, many of these children came out gleefully smiling, but not a few, I noticed, came out in tears. The similarities were too vivid, the throwback to that hospital room too overpowering. If I had any plans for calling on Santa, they stopped right there.
Whatever age I was, I knew more about Santa Claus than I did about polio. I didn't know why polio (a rather nice-sounding word) had to be avoided or how having a needle thrust in your arm could possibly ensure this. But I knew about reindeer and chimneys. If superstition consists of submitting to bizarre rituals in the cause of something you cannot rationalize, then that experience of the syringe and of the nurse sticking a sweet on my tongue like a communion wafer was superstition unqualified.
The Santa Claus business, though, isn't really about superstition. It's about that stuff-or that partner at least-of fiction, the suspension of disbelief.
I can't remember ever utterly believing in Santa Claus, but I do remember, even quite consciously, suspending my disbelief-playing along with the parental conspiracy-for the sake of the magic of the fiction. My instinct, seeing those tearful faces leaving the grotto, was that here was magic being destroyed.
Children aren't stupid or im
