“Her husband taken from her and killed on her wedding day”? Out of the question! Fond as the nobility and govenors may have been of hanging parties (though I suspect it has been exaggerated in the modern imagination), one would probably have quite a search to find historical precedent for the upper classes hanging outlaws as part of their wedding festivities. [N.B. I am no longer quite so sure about this point in 2001 as I was in 1984; of the next part of this paragraph, however, I do remain confident.] Surely it would be easier to find precedent for pardoning prisoners as part of the general celebration! And even if precedent could be found for hanging outlaws at wedding feasts, such behavior on the part of Sir Roger and Dame Alice would instantly negate the very sympathy we are trying to enhance for them! No way could we have them preparing to hang anybody on their wedding day. But not even Robin Hood would come into town or chapel, seize an enemy, take him out and string him up on his wedding day without some excuse of having a friend to rescue. And if he had some idea he was rescuing Dame Alice from an unwanted marriage, either she would disabuse him of the misapprehension before any great harm was done—or if it were not Robin Hood’s mistake and she really didn’t want to marry Sir Roger, bang! would go her reason for hating Hood.
Moreover, I think the whole hatred motivation is much sounder if Sir Roger and Dame Alice have already been married, with success and happiness, for some few years, so that their union has had time to ripen. Marriages in those days were more ofte for politics or convenience or social form than for romance. But a marriage that has proved happy after a period of some years, that would have been a solidly romantic thing.
I do think there must have been some romance connected with Dame Alice’s choice of husband, though, for she was proud of her undiluted Norman blood, yet willing to dilute it at last with Sir Roger even though (I strongly suspect) he had Saxon blood and apparently not any unusual amount of property to go with it. But for several reasons I do not want to drop more than hints of this. (a) To etch in an elaborate romance only to have it end in senseless tragedy goes against the grain. Far better, I think, to leave it as a happy marriage with only the vaguest hints how they got together in the first place. (b) If it were not foredoomed to a tragic end, it would provide the material for a whole novel in its own right. Developing it would threaten the main plot of the present novel.
I would consider putting in a few more words, tucked here and there into the existing chapters, about what a good marriage they had. Perhaps she could remember her own wedding day when thinking about Alan a Dale and Fair Eleanor. But I would not consider changing the chronology nor expanding the story of Dame Alice and Sir Roger into a length that would threaten to overbalance the plot.
The flashback passages describing Dame Alice’s and Sir Roger’s previous encounters with Robin Hood were drawn as faithfully as possible from the actual surviving Robin Hood ballads and were fitted into a chronology with the utmost care. I have tampered as far as I am going to tamper with those ballads by combining a few—the “Three Squires” with “Will Stutly,” for instance—and I regard the chronology as beyond improvement for the purposes of the present story.
It is difficult both to assimilate and to avoid the idea that your words suggest you want to see a romance between the sheriff and Hood on one hand, and a romance between her and Denis on the other. Please, please, be assured—sexual tension between the sheriff and Robin Hood was the last thing I wanted!! It would have been far too cheap, easy, and obvious. The little hint of Hood regarding the sheriff’s wife for a time as his “courtly lady” is in the old ballads and, as I recall, echoed in Howard Pyle’s version, but it is not a “romantic” relationship in the modern sense. It is the knightly, courtly ideal moved down a step or two on the social ladder, and very probably parodied a bit. Some “courtly” relationships may indeed have ended up physical as well. It is very far from demonstrated that all of them did; and I strongly suspect the ones that did end in the knight gaining his lady’s body thereby ceased being the “courtly idea” by that very act. We may have got the idea that courtly love was synonymous with physical love affairs because of Lancelot and Guinevere; but one can pull passages from Malory arguing both sides of the question whether or not their love was ever actually consummated, and concentrating on Lancelot is ignoring the many more knights of Arthur’s court who did take Guinevere as their courtly lady in the strictly platonic sense. No matter how Robin may reminisce, after they’ve both grown old, about sending the sheriff’s wife that palfrey, at the time it was more a joke than anything else on his side, and until her husband’s murder she regarded it in a jocular light. Certainly it was not a romantic overture from Robin to her in any sense suggesting a sexual liaison, nor did it exactly strain his finances when he had just stolen much more than its value from her husband and her.
As for what you call “her dependance on Denis, her grooming him as a possible successor” to her husband—bullshit! She regards him in the light of a son or nephew. She loves him as such, but in no way is she dependant on him. If I haven’t succeeded in getting across the image of Dame Alice as a fully competent sheriff, chatelaine, and administrator in her own right, the book is obviously a complete failure. She does not need to groom a successor to Sir Roger, and if she did, it certainly would not be a youth almost young enough to be her son in fact as well as in affection!! If she’d had any notion of marrying again, it would have been to her old, grizzled captain Sir Hugh, not to Denis. Yes, Denis sees her as his courtly lady—again, in the strict platonic sense, for she is the nearest person to a mother he has known—but I said somewhere in so many words that she did not encourage this attitude; and when she says near the end, “I am your liege lord. Midge is your lady,” she speaks with a sense of relief that at last she has a reason to spell it out so plainly.
As for Midge. I have always been aware that by rewriting the whole story from her point of view we could probably produce a salable romance in the Harlequin tradition. I would rather not sell it at all.
The hints of Midge’s sex are there all along: her beardlessness, Denis waking to think briefly that she resembles an angel, her slightness in comparison to Much, Little John’s amusement when Denis inquires about her as Much’s “brother,” Much’s avoiding the use of a personal pronoun when answering why they call her Midge, the smallness of her Adam’s apple, the deft delicacy of her hands, the way she avoids being around when they give Denis a chance to perform his bodily functions, the way he studies her back as she walks away from him. If, with all this, your friend was surprised, then I feel I accomplished what I set out to do. Giving Midge’s sex away to the reader at once would make the whole thing nothing but another “heroine disguised as boy” tale. Midge is not so much going disguised as a boy, as doing what Joan of Arc was to do a little later: psychologically warding off rape and romantic attacks. Denis sees a boy because he expects to see one. So does the reader. Plenty of people look androgynous or “unisex” as it is, and many more of us would look so if our garments, social roles, and everything else were not geared to the ideal of emphasizing the differences. Most of our actors and actresses, at least the ones who get the leading roles, are chosen for being so obviously male or female that a performer playing a part which requires “disguising” as a member of the other sex—like Rosalind in As You Like It—can usually be spotted a mile off. If this were universally the case in actual life, how could so many successful cross-gender impersonations be on record? I wanted Midge’s sex to come as a type of O. Henry “surprise ending,” except that it comes in the middle. Moreover, granted the stage and film tradition mentioned above, were I to tell the reader right away that Midge is a girl, the reader would think Denis incredibly dunderheaded for not seeing it at once. But if I were to let Denis in on the secret at once, we would lose the effect of his wanting friendship with Midge before any overt romantic feelings develop. I think this basis of friendship first, then romance, is essential if the reader is not to come away with a subconscious feelin
g that such an oddly matched marriage is doomed from the start.
Besides, face it, there is nothing ingenious or original about this plot. It is purely a children’s game of capture and escape. I believe that pulling out such prepared surprises as Midge’s sex are necessary to keep it moving along. As it stands, I think it has enough such surprises, and strong enough motivation for the characters to do what they do, that the straightforward, simple plot becomes a vehicle for something new and different. Do things like giving Midge’s sex away at the outset and creating romantic triangles between Dame Alice, Sir Roger, and Robin Hood, or Dame Alice, Midge, and Denis, and the whole thing collapses into something so utterly trite that I wouldn’t even want to sign my name to it.
Granting that Robin Hood and his men, except for Will Stutely, came off rather better in the finished product than I had intended to make them, they are still indisputable murderers, not only of Sir Roger but of a number of Nottingham bystanders. I make the point that, until Robin and his men become murderers, Sir Roger and Dame Alice are willing enough to let them poach deer—unlike the sheriff in most modern versions, my lawkeepers are not tyrants. Like manor lords who understand the often-ignored duties of their class to the peasants, they set out tables and feast the populace several times a year. Stutely is a murderer who deserves to be executed, by the standard of those times even if many modern-day people [N.B. including myself!] argue against the death penalty. In trying to hang him, Sir Roger does no more than his duty, as then understood, for the good of society in general. How much clearer can I make it than I have made it, without descending into the purest purple melodrama, that in this version Robin Hood and his gang are the sinners in the Stutely incident? In his study, J. C. Holt makes the point that Robin Hood needs no other reason to be against the sheriff than that Hood is an outlaw and the sheriff stands for law and order. Now I make the point that the opposite is also true, and the sheriff needs no other reason to be against Robin Hood than that Hood is an outlaw. Despite this, I spelled it out that the bloody violence between Dame Alice and Robin Hood started only after Hood murdered her husband and many people of Nottingham in rescuing this scoundrel Stutely.
If, with all this, the reader still sides with Robin Hood, then that is just accepting the “tradition” like pablum, unthinkingly. Indeed, this “tradition” of Saint Robin Hood seems to be very new, probably no older than Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which appears to have set in the modern mind the unshakable idea that the whole thing took place in the reign of Good King Richard (Hah! he spent six months of his ten-year kingship in England, where his main concern for the people seems to have been impoverishing them to raise money for his junket to the Holy Land and then impoverishing them a second time to raise money for his ransom when he was so stupidly foolheady as to go touring around an enemy’s country; and, in between, he and the “noble” Saladin massacred hostages at each other in the Holy Land) and Bad King John (till I finish reading Alan Lloyd’s Maligned Monarch, I will hold off summarizing his career; but Magna Carta has long looked to me like an attempt by the nobles to keep the king from fulfilling his feudal function of protecting the common people from said nobles).
Go back to the Robin Hood ballads, and it is often by no means so very clear who the “good guys” are. While it seems true that the sheriff is always a “baddie,” sometimes he is one of the comic foil type, like Jackie Gleason’s “Smoky” to what’s-his-name’s “Bandit,” I suppose, though I avoid those movies. But why does Robin spare him in so many ballads if he was really seen as all that bad by the ballad-singers and their audiences? One version has been recorded of “The Three Squires” in which the sheriff turns them over free at Robin’s show of strength, and thus avoids being hanged himself. Getting away from the Robin vs. Sheriff ballads, many have been preserved in which Hood himself seems to be the bad guy. There is one, for instance, in which some peddlers defeat Robin and his chief henchmen not only ignominiously, but downright nastily, presumably to the cheers and laughter of the audience. In another—one of my favorites—Robin, Scarlet, and John encounter three foresters who stand and fight so well that they would defeat the outlaws if Robin did not call quits by inviting them to a friendly drinking bout in the nearest tavern: a far cry, this, from the modern tradition in which everyone who is on the sheriff’s or King John’s side is automatically fodder for the slaughter. There is a ballad in which, far from “giving to the poor,” Robin gets downright mean to a apparent beggar (who, however, defeats him). There is another—included in Song of Robin Hood, too!—in which Robin casually suggests putting an arrow into an old woman they see scurrying away in the distance, because she looks as if she might be a witch. Even in the famous “Robin Hood and Little John,” John has to remind our “noble” Robin that it isn’t fair play to shoot an arrow into a man who carries only a quarterstaff. In the “Geste of Robin Hood,” when the people of Nottingham see what looks like Robin Hood and his band advancing on the town, do they cheer, as they would in an Errol Flynn version? No! All of them, young and old, rich and poor, children and lame folk and women, run helter-skelter for the safety of the town wall, because they are terrified of this ruffian and his men. And this in a version that is largely on Robin Hood’s side! Guy of Gisborne invariably appears as one of the worst villains in the modern retellings, but there seems to be some evidence that originally he was the outlaw(?) hero of his own cycle, so that ancient ballad might have been a duel of equals in relative goodness as well as in strength and courage, and an alternate version or two might, I think, have existed in which Guy defeated Robin, or in which they made up like Conan and Red Sonja or like Lancelot and Tristram. So very much of what we swallow in modern versions is 19th and 20th century overlay! I tried to strip most of it away, but to pontificate about it in the text itself would not be very artistic. Look, however, at what I did put into the text: Hood and his men murder the (vice) sheriff, terrorize unarmed churchmen, beggar merchants. According to modern definition, they are in effect torturing Denis mentally when not physically from the moment they catch him—neither he nor they see it like that, but modern readers presumably ought to, with all the publicity and protests about such things. Then Hood sentences Denis to death on a pretext very few readers could think justified: for all his outward charm and charisma, Robin Hood has no depth of philosophy or charity, and, indeed, the true reason he is so willing to execute Denis (though there was no way I could spell it out any plainer without shattering point of view) is that, even as Robin Hood prides himself on being more pious than the churchmen and more courteous than most of the knightly class, so Denis has shown himself more truly pious than Robin and at least Robin’s equal in courtesy. My version of Robin Hood would be horrified, no doubt, to get a glimpse of his subconscious motivation; but deep down where he does not consciously recognize it, he cannot stand the idea that so much virtue as resides in Denis should be loyal to Hood’s enemy. Well, as I say, that last we can’t get in without breaking the text’s p.o.v. But I truly think I’ve put enough in very clearly that this Robin Hood should show up as a very tarnished “hero” to any reader who can lay aside the Errol Flynn glamor and read the tale with an open mind.
With all this, one sympathetic Sheriff of Nottingham has appeared in recent years: Robert Shaw’s wonderful portrayal in “Robin and Marian.” Some years before that, there was another sympathetic Sheriff of Nottingham in—of all places!—a Bugs Bunny comic book (unfortunately not in my collection) which had Bugs going back in time. There are also comic treatments of Robin Hood around—not only the Muppets’; but John Cleese’s in “Time Bandits,” and others, I am sure. [N.B. In the years between 1984 and 2001, we got Mel Brooks’ marvelous “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” which manages simultaneously to spoof Errol Flynn’s and Kevin Costner’s versions.] While somewhat off the subject, the case of Wiley Coyote vs. Beep-Beep suggests to me that there are a lot of people out there who are quite ready to side with “the villains” given even less pretext than provided in my stor
y.
I may, of course, be entirely off the ball. You may be in the right on every point except the idea of Dame Alice somehow being somebody’s vice-sheriff before her marriage (and I would even concede that if you could show me some historical precedent similar to that for a woman as hereditary sheriff).
All I can say is, I fear you’d better send the ms. back and I’ll put it away and find out how I feel about it in about five years from now, because I am not going to make the changes you ask for at this time. I had thought this was easily the finest thing I’ve ever written, just as it stands. But obviously I fell flat on my face. You missed most of the things I was doing, and where I did succeed in getting across the effect I’d wanted, you interpreted it as a weakness. I’ve done readings from it at SF cons, both of the first chapter and of the flashback chapter combined with the epilogue, and gotten very favorable responses; but SF audiences are not the same as the book-buying public. I’m very disappointed, but at this point I really would rather not sell it at all than make the kind of changes you want. A few years ago a smallzine editor asked me to make “just a few minor changes” in one of my stories—changes that would have required me to change the mindsets of my characters, the culture in which they had grown up, my own philosophy as palely reflected in the story, and most of its plot! I’m sure they sincerely thought they wanted “just a few minor changes,” but I withdrew the story rather than make those changes, and sold it last year, as I had written it, to Marion Zimmer Bradley for Swords and Sorceresses.
The Gallows in the Greenwood Page 17