Called Out of Darkness Page 0,50

mass audience. They were written by someone whose auditory and visual experiences shaped the prose. As I've mentioned over and over in this book, I am a terrible reader. But my mind is filled with these auditory and visual lessons and, powered by them, I can write about five times faster than I can read.

Somehow this led to my developing a style which sought to make real for the reader the acoustic and iconic world in which I'd been formed as a child. Almost all of my key learning had been imprinted on the right side of my brain.

Drawing on the left side of my brain, apparently, I used words to go beyond words.

Also because I wasn't "literary" by nature, I looked to old-fashioned models in my writing. I've mentioned this above. I didn't "get" modernism. I didn't "get" pedestrian realism, the values of which essentially controlled "high literature" of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. I didn't care about pedestrian realism or ordinary people. Mediocrity meant nothing to me, and a literature devoted to anatomizing mediocre or "typical" people was uninviting to me. In fact, it was almost impenetrable to me.

I wanted to tell stories of great lifetimes, of spiritual quests, and of tragic adolescent discovery, and of great moral battles between great individual souls and the social world.

These aren't what anyone would call contemporary themes.

I also wrote passionately about characters whom I personally loved. I was never interested in exposing or destroying or punishing characters. I never became obsessed by those whom I did not like. So my writing lacked irony and cynicism, and it lacked sarcasm.

And in this I was not modern but appealed rather to an audience that wanted to be swept up in the spiritual journey of a hero rather than proceed through the cooler pages of the fiction of alienation and cleverness. My work isn't critical of society, nor does it affirm nothingness. It's romantic in the full old-fashioned sense of the word. It can be seen as naive.

And certainly it can be dismissed as sentimental.

As already mentioned, I also believed intensely in spectacle - flamboyant behavior, violent clashes, a certain swashbuckling type of action which I'd learned from radio and from the films of the fifties that had made such a strong mark on my nonliterate mind. In my work, I strove for the high-pitched beauty of Michael Powell's The Tales of Hoffmann or The Red Shoes.

That there was an audience for this warmer approach to fiction isn't surprising. The high literary pedestrian realism of the 1970s tended to scorn the "mass audience." I didn't scorn the mass audience. I was part of it. In fact, I embraced the mass audience with a certain recklessness that often elicited from intellectuals a blatant contempt.

Countless times people out of the mass audience have come up to me and said, "Yours are the only books I can read." Others have said, "Yours are the only novels I've ever read." Still others have said, "Your novels started me reading.

After I read you, I read everything. But before that I never read at all."

Of course the novels, like any novels, are only fully accessible to those who can in fact read them, can in fact be swept along by the decided rhythm of the sentences, and those who can respond to the choice of adjectives as well as the choice of concrete nouns.

But concrete nouns and action verbs actually underpin all my writing. And there is always urgency, a driving pace.

There is, as mentioned above, a beginning and middle, and also an end, though often the end refuses to be an end in the artificial sense and makes the reader furious. In other words, the novels for all their strangeness usually have a conventional feel to them in terms of story, a feel somewhat like that of Dickens or Bronte, the first writing teachers I ever had.

As for the revolt against modernism, my writing doesn't in fact reflect the war on modernism that was part of my earlier Catholic world. The books are too transgressive, they're too committed to sexual freedom and gender equality to be part of that old Catholic war. They reflect, rather, the changing contemporary world which I pretty much ignored. The appeal is for the equality of persons, and for the redemption of sexuality as something which is not inherently sinful or sin related.

The books do protest the severity of modern architecture and painting, and the dissonance of modern music.

They go back into the baroque,