Fact and Fiction

I was born in 1936, the year Ballet Shoes was published, and from the time I was very small I was encouraged to listen to stories. I began as a listener, and then, since I wanted to join in that particular chorus, I put together stories of my own as I have already mentioned, telling them aloud to walls and trees. Because I couldn't write, back then, I learned them by heart, as away of containing them, but I went on to become a reader, and very shortly after that learned to write and began to set them down in notebooks complete with titles and a few illustrations. I began as a listener, became a teller, then a reader and then a writer in that order. Later still I became a librarian, which in some ways is the ultimate result of this evolutionary process, since a lot of library work is concerned with orderly containment. (But I must advise you to beware a little of my description of myself which is automatically starting to gather the elements of a romantic story around it.)

Being a librarian forces you to think a lot about truth and to pretend you have got over any confusions you might ever have had about it. You have page 10 a book, it has to go in some particular physical place in the library shelves. It can't really be both here and there. Even if you have a big enough book grant and can afford to buy two copies of the same book and put it in two different places, a book like The Endless Steppe, say, is not quite the same story in the non-fiction shelves as it is in the fiction—where it was rather more likely to be read in our library at least. If you are a librarian (allowing for the general advice we get about putting a book where it is going to be looked for and best used), you have fiction on one side of the library and non-fiction on the other. Ask a child the difference between fiction and non-fiction and the child will often answer that non-fiction is true and fiction is not true. 'That's right,' we say. 'Fiction is not true and non-fiction is.' But sophisticated writers and readers often dispute this simple division, and I'm sure that there must be many librarians like me ... librarians who suddenly find themselves staring around wildly at their library walls (all that knowledge, all that emotion, all that astonishment! What am I doing here at the intersecting focus of all these great fields? I am trying to shelve it!), their own sense of reality terminally eroded by service for others. Making books available in the most sensible way makes us aware that in serving one function we are distorting others. We are standing astride the line of a great dislocation.