Description: I went to Los Angeles for the very first time in December of last year. I had never been there before. I was picked up at the airport by a driver in a stretch limo who said, "Hi! I''m Sam!" So we''re cruising down Santa Monica boulevard and he said, "What are you doing here?" I said, "I''m involved with this Spielberg," and he said, "Oh, I''ve written a lot of movie scripts. I do a bit of investment counseling, and I''m a karate instructor." [laughter] And I thought, "That''s wonderful! This can only be Los Angeles." It could only be America, perhaps. I looked around and saw this city which was one of the great mythic cities of the 20th century, and the fount of--most of the 20th century''s dreams had emerged from the landscape around me as I was going down this big avenue from the airport. And nothing about it was unfamiliar. It was 1000 episodes of the Rockford Files, and so on. Hundreds of feature films had identified it with absolute exactness. There was only one thing that was wrong--just one thing--and that was: suddenly I saw this huge billboard the size of a tennis court with "Steven Spielberg''s EMPIRE OF THE SUN" with my name, and I thought, "This shouldn''t be happening!" I drove on a bit more and there was another one of these things. Anyway, I got to the hotel, switched on the TV and out came this high-powered commercial for the movie. I opened up the newspaper: full-page ads. I looked up in the Beverly Hilton hotel and it was like a Science-Fiction film from the ''50s: A monster has gotten out of control from this mad doctor''s mind and it''s crawling across the rooftops of L.A. The ironies of all this weren''t lost on me, I can assure you. By and large the States have presented its image more accurately. I mean, when you think of the certain image that Britain, for example, purveyed to the world, which is, you know, beef and toast, the Tower of London guides, and I don''t know what the image is . . . broken-down Jags by the wayside or whatever? I mean, the image is ludicrously out-of-kilter with reality. But not in the case of the States. Q: Describe your first encounter with Surrealism-- JGB: First encounter with Surrealism? I came to England in 1946 when I was sixteen. At that point I knew nothing about the Surrealists. Within about two years (this is just after the Second World War) I became intensely interested in them--I must have seen illustrations. I don''t know; it''s very difficult to remember how I did. In England--I can''t speak for the States, but in England, until really the late ''60s, the Surrealists were completely--I wouldn''t say out of fashion--but they were looked down upon as bizarre purveyors of the lurid and perverse. No reputable art critic would even go to an exhibition of Surrealist paintings. Even in the ''60s I used to go to exhibitions held in London in sort of second-rate galleries, of works by Delvaux, Ernst, even Dali. I remember new Magrittes selling for about 500-600 pounds--about a thousand dollars each--paintings which are now sold for two to three hundred thousand dollars. The only place in the late ''40s and ''50s where you were likely to see a reproduction of a Surrealist painting was in the popular tabloid newspapers, where the latest Dali outrage would be illustrated. Something clicked. I think the Surrealist formula tapped something within my own experiences in Shanghai and China before and during the Second World War, when Shanghai itself was a kind of Surrealist landscape in which all of the malevolent elements of the unconscious were made manifest in this bizarre city. When I came to England, I set about as a Science-Fiction writer using the techniques of Surrealism to remake contemporary Western Europe (and the United States, by proxy) into something consonant with the landscapes of wartime Shanghai. I assume that explains everything! Q: What''s your own internal perception of your obsessions, after you write about them (as opposed to before)? Is it therapeutic in any way? JGB: Do I feel better for it? I know that if I don''t write--a lot of writers will say this and it''s true . . . if I don''t write for a couple weeks, say, while I''m on holiday, I begin to feel edgy in a way that people are supposed to feel if they''re not allowed to dream. I''ve always assumed that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is a sort of necessary part of the way the central nervous system functions. This separates the imaginative writer from the realistic, naturalistic writer in a very important sense.

Please Wait