DanielHandler playing the accordion, which he sometimes does when he is not writing.
I’ve been going crazy all day trying to find an article that I read back in 2004 in which Daniel Handler, the author who wrote the Unfortunate Events books under the pen name Lemony Snicket, talks about his philosophy of life. I was reminded of it recently when I heard Handler interviewed on television, talking about what he had written for OccupyWriters.com.
My wife and I each spent too much time searching for it, but I finally found the article, or if not the article, one very close to it. It ran in the British newspaper The Express, which is obviously not where I read it. But at any rate, this is his story:
So how does Handler explain his warped imagination? Born into a solid middle-class Californian family, the son of an accountant and a college dean, Handler says his dark themes were influenced by his Jewish roots, an early understanding of the Holocaust and a love of opera.
His father just managed to escape the Nazis by leaving Germany in 1938. As a child Handler was told “terrible stories about people who didn’t make it, and those crucial moments when you have to figure out if now is the time to leave or not”.
After describing this to his class, Handler’s teacher remarked that his father had been “very brave”.
“I ran home to tell him because he didn’t get called ‘brave’ often, being a certified public accountant. And he said to me: ‘Do you think I was braver than the ones who didn’t make it?’
“That’s a really good question because the answer is, of course, no.
You don’t get out of that kind of trouble because you’re brave, you get out because you are lucky. The way you behave has absolutely no bearing on the way you’ll end up.”
The knowledge that the world could go horribly wrong, no matter how kind and good you may be, gave Handler a loathing for the kind of children’s literature that sets out to teach moral lessons. “Any book where the bully turned out to be a nice person after all, or the mean teacher softened at the end, or where a villain was defeated through a triumph of integrity rather than a triumph of, you know, good strong chains, made me angry because I never saw that sort of thing go on in real life.”
Gill Sain, “The Secret Life Behind Lemony Snicket; It’s a Publishing Phenomenon that this Week Hits the Big Screen — But Who is the Creator of these Bleak Children’s Stories? The Express, Dec. 14, 2004, pg. 33.