When in the autumn of 1969 it was first decided that I should write this book, I had little idea that 34 years would elapse before it was finished. To spend half a lifetime writing a single book is obviously ridiculous, and my first debt is to all those people during the decades between who, when told that I was working on a book on ‘the basic plots of storytelling’, greeted the idea that anyone should attempt such a project with such enthusiasm. Their warm response gave me more encouragement than they can have known; even though, as the years went by, not a few began to express a suspicion that, like Dr Casaubon’s ‘key to all mythologies’, my efforts would never see the light of day.
The idea for the book originated when I was working on a book called The Neophiliacs, analysing the changes which had taken place in English life in the 1950s and 1960s. By the time this was published in October 1969 I had already seen enough of the unconscious patterns underlying the way in which we imagine stories to wish to explore them more systematically. At dinner with my then-agent Diana Crawfurd, in a long-vanished restaurant off Buckingham Gate, we agreed that I should follow that impulse; and I set to work, knowing that my first task would be to read through a wide variety of stories, to see how the idea might develop.
The following year I gave a talk on Hamlet and the underlying pattern of Tragedy at my old school, Shrewsbury, and parts of that lecture have been incorporated into Chapter 30 as the oldest surviving chunk of the book’s final text. Within 18 months, having filled a pile of notebooks with synopses, I had completed a first draft outline of ‘the seven basic plots’, already recognising two general principles on which it would be advisable to choose examples to illustrate the theme.
Firstly, to convey the ‘universality’ of these recurring patterns behind storytelling it would be necessary to include as wide a range of story-types as possible, from myths and folk tales, through the plays and novels of ‘great literature’, to the Hollywood films, thrillers and science fiction of the present day. But, secondly, to prevent the argument becoming clogged with endless obscure plot-summaries, it would be desirable wherever possible to use stories which were already familiar to the greatest number of potential readers. This would means keeping in general within the Western cultural tradition of storytelling, only mentioning instances outside it where this was necessary to underline the ubiquity of a particular theme.
One enormous debt I owed at this early stage was to the Penguin Classics series, launched in 1944 by E. V. Rieu whose translation of the Odyssey was a particular inspiration for this book, and co-edited at this time by Betty Radice (who, as it happened, had written me a very generous letter about The Neophiliacs). More than 300 of these volumes have lined the shelves around my desk throughout the writing of this book, ranging all through the ages from The Epic of Gilgamesh to the novels and plays of the nineteenth century. Without the easy access to world literature they made possible, it would have been infinitely harder to carry out the basic groundwork for this project (just as, decades later, it would have been difficult to track down detailed summaries of many films without the blessings of the Internet).
It soon became clear that my first draft was only an inadequate overture. Through the 1970s I was having to get more closely to grips with how far the symbolism of storytelling derived from archetypal structures within the human unconscious, and here I benefited hugely from reading through the works of Jung; although I could already see that a proper understanding of stories might make it possible to develop his intuitive approach to the workings of the psyche into something rather more systematically structured than the form in which he had left it. By the end of that decade I was well into a second draft, enough to begin discussing the book with potential publishers, one of whom, Richard Cohen, was to remain tirelessly encouraging for several years.
Only when this draft itself became bogged down in chaotic detail did I finally start again on what was to be the third and final draft. Athough this emerged with painful slowness, by the end of the 1980s I had completed the introductory chapters on the ‘seven basic plots’ (constituting most of Part One of the final version), foolishly thinking that I had almost finished the book. One particular benefit of these years was the opportunity to study in detail just how my two young sons took to being told stories, watching out for what it is, particularly in early years, which first draws us all into the world of storytelling, and what are the patterns a child is unconsciously looking for. But at the end of this second decade, I had no idea how much work was still to come.
By the mid-1990s what was originally a single concluding chapter had developed into the whole of Part Two, deciphering the basic symbolic language from which stories are constructed; and I was now aware that a further huge section of the book would be required to deal with the immense change which has come over storytelling in the past 200 years. Fortunately it was at this time that, again with profound gratitude, I could at last transfer the book onto a computer screen. Until now, to allow for endless modification of the text, every page had had to be typed not once but in many cases scores of times. Now, like many authors, I was liberated by the electronic revolution in a way which made one wonder how we all managed to write books before.
By the end of the 1990s I could at last begin to see how the book should develop towards its conclusion with Part Four. I was now halfway into Part Three, dealing with the changes in storytelling in the past two centuries, when I ran into a mental block in having to cope with writing about Proust (whose Remembrance of Times Past was at the time being hailed on all sides as ‘the greatest novel of the twentieth century’). Once surmounted, this proved to be the final logjam. The remainder of Part Three emerged with gratifying speed, including the exhilaration of writing the chapter on Oedipus and Hamlet, which incorporated material first drafted for that school lecture 30 years earlier.
By now, as I approached the final chapters, relating our capacity to imagine stories to the ‘real world’, I was relieved to realise that it would really have been difficult to complete a book dealing so intimately with the patterns of human psychology at any earlier stage in my life. For years I had been frustrated by how long it all seemed to take (another author might have got there much sooner). But I had needed those years of experience of the world to puzzle out some of the deeper riddles presented by storytelling, in a way which earlier would not have been possible. By the time I came to its concluding chapters this project had taken half my time on earth, which might to anyone seem excessive. But at least, with all its imperfections, the project was now complete.
Inevitably through all those years countless people have made comments or suggestions which, often without their knowing it, have proved invaluable in helping to shape a thought or to provide an example or quotation which appears in the final text. I cannot do justice to them all, but in particular I would like to thank the following:
Richard Ingrams (for drawing my attention to the quotation from Boswell’s life of Dr Johnson which stands at the beginning of the book); Sara Meyer (for giving me The Golden Ass); Tony and Jill Jay; Barry Fantoni; Andrew Osmond; Christine Stone (for widening my horizons); Bennie Gray; Mary Booker; Arianna Stassinopoulos; Professor Robert Donington; Dr Anthony Stevens; Christopher Hogwood (for drawing my attention to the shortcomings of Amadeus); Robert McCrum; Richard Cohen; Anne Baring; Hella Adler; my sons Nicholas and Alexander Booker (for all they taught me without realising it); Robert Temple; Esther Eidinow (for her paper on the origins of hubris); Sir Laurens van der Post; Patricia Ashby; Sir Laurence Whistler; Charlie Paton (for giving me The Voices of Marrakesh); Ian Hislop; Richard North (not least for The Terminator); Helen Szamuely; Anna Duda; Ed Howker (who was first to read the final draft); John Gibbens; and finally my patient, if battered, publisher Robin Baird-Smith.
Among too many other duties neglected during the years of my preoccupation with the book were those I owed to my godchildren. Very belatedly I now offer it to them as containing something of what I should have passed on to them in other ways: Tom Winnifrith, Sam Eidinow, Toby Baring, Sam Holden, David Jay, Honor Baldry, Eleanor Percival, Storm Boyle and Tom Bishop.
My final debt is to Valerie, for allowing me to sit for years in the peace of my study, happily lost in a struggle I still cannot quite believe is over.