The series of unfortunately TRUE events behind LEMONY SNICKET
Fear of the dark and being abused by a teacher left Daniel Handler in a psychiatric ward – but the children’s books he went on to write have sold 70 million
AND THEN? AND THEN? WHAT ELSE? A WRITER’S LIFE
by Daniel Handler
(Oneworld €24.65, 240pp)
DANIEL HANDLER, the author behind the A Series Of Unfortunate Events phenomenon, has perfected a gothic imagination, making things up about addiction, murder and sexual violence (‘comparatively rare events in real life’), in order to produce his popular children’s books (70 million copies sold) about ‘terrible things happening over and over to orphaned children’.
Written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket, the 13-book series recounts the tale of the three Baudelaire siblings as they face repulsive villains — particularly their new guardian, the murderous Count Olaf — house fires and cold porridge for breakfast.
What comes across in Handler’s memoir is that terrible things have happened over and over to him, too.
At the age of ten he was sexually abused by a teacher. ‘I remember the man and what he did . . . I remember refusing to believe my realisation of what it was my hand was gripping. I was very scared.’
The motivation and psychology of the abuser perplex Handler to this day: ‘How he found such opportunities and exploited them, how he wrested away whatever qualms he might have had.’ The experience resulted in an understandable lifelong mistrust of adults and what they insist everybody takes seriously: the law, being responsible, the world of work — with commuters off to the office, lining up like Snow White’s dwarfs departing for the mine.
Handler, born in 1970, was already a fanciful child, instinctively aware that the normal and the peculiar are entwined. In the home of his well-off parents in San Francisco he lived in the attic (‘like Anne Frank, I used to think’), and made juice from the poison berries found in the garden. He liked reading books about ‘enormous, strange, frightening things’; and if he had a fear of the dark, it’s because he suspected ‘something dreadful will happen when the sun goes down’, as is proved by horror movies.
For prolonged periods, during his college years particularly, Handler suffered from severe mental health issues, fainting, having seizures, feeling exhausted, weeping, hallucinating. He was examined by lots of doctors. ‘Nothing makes you feel crazier than being tested to see how crazy you are.’
Handler kept seeing things — bald monkeys outside the window, troupes of Japanese dancers lurking in doorways or on street corners. He painted
himself white, with white shoe polish in his hair. Finally, he could no longer read, write or speak, and felt thoroughly ‘detached from ordinary life’.
He was locked in a psychiatric ward, his time in hospital ‘so confusing and scary, I’m tempted to think it didn’t happen at all’.
Fellow inmates included women with eating disorders, who’d carry around a paper cup and an apple, so they could taste the fruit and spit it out. There were also the suicidal sons of Catholics and Muslims, who couldn’t face being gay. ‘The best way to figure out if you really like guys is the same as figuring out if you like Korean food. Try it.’
Handler seems to have followed his own advice, as when he was 18 he allowed himself to be seduced by an older man. ‘I spent the summer in secret with him . . . I call it a mistake, just a mistake.’ (Handler now has a wife and family.)
Today, if Handler attends a literary festival, he is surrounded by screaming crowds and placed on the largest stage. Yet his career took years to get going and he accumulated many rejection letters.
Mental illness making him all but unemployable (chronic sleep deprivation was the eventual diagnosis), Handler worked with computers, in bookshops, and taught creative writing classes where students wrote prose poems about ‘queer desire and werewolves’.
Though Handler doesn’t tell us quite how he made his massive breakthrough, he still likes to write in public, on full view in San Francisco cafes, as he did when a nobody, sorting out his index cards, jotting on a yellow legal pad, taking note of the ‘things stuck in my head’. He is generally left alone, ‘because other customers think you are a lunatic’ — and Handler clearly cherishes the role of eccentric outsider.
I was interested, in this memoir, to see how the artists he loves and absorbs have proved an enduring inspiration, the psychic background for Lemony Snicket. Handler enjoys the bad sci-fi films of Ed Wood, for example, also Hitchcock’s ‘ridiculous plots,’ which are nevertheless ‘emotionally engaging’. He likes the sentences of Vladimir Nabokov, which ‘stayed luminous, whether you picked them apart like a scholar or just gobbled them up’.
He is a fan of Monty Python, the macabre picture books of Edward Gorey, and has read his copies of Roald Dahl ‘to tatters’. Handler appreciates grand opera, for its plots about betrayal, conspiracy and ‘tragedy by the bucketful’.
All this has fed into his personal cosmos of suspicious millionaires, secret societies, murder and intrigue in mansions and garrets.
BEING a writer, as Handler says, is a compulsion. And as he argues, quoting Isaac Hayes: ‘It ain’t how good I make it, baby, it’s how I make it good.’ Artists look for balance, for expectation and surprise. The space where it works, for reader and writer alike, is inside the head, jostling with a lot of dreams and fantasies, memories and desires.
If, owing to his own traumatic experiences, Handler sees life as mostly characterised by ‘stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust’, and that ‘bewilderment is at the heart of being human’, what appals him is our cancel culture, with authors ‘blocked from participating, invited or disinvited, prized or banned’, according to the whims and dictates of the prigs and progressives, who, wanting a more ‘inclusive’ community, go up to Handler demanding apologies, telling him his novels are ‘gallingly inappropriate’. He was once banned from a panel on banning books, which made me laugh.
But if the Lemony Snicket output is looked at closely, it isn’t wayward but moral: misfits setting off from home and overcoming obstacles, building towards some great triumph; steadfastness in the face of chaos and menace.
Isn’t this, also, the formula underlying Tolkien, JK Rowling, CS Lewis, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Dahl’s Matilda — all those authors who perceived that children generally ‘have a firmer grasp on what might be interesting to say’.
Daniel Handler’s creations belong in the company of these classics.