The Last Unicorn

by Peter S. Beagle

  It took her a while to understand that she was alive. It took me longer. She ran her tongue out first, panting and panting, looking so thirsty. We could hear a stream trickling somewhere close, and Molly went and found it, and brought water back in her cupped hands. Malka lapped it all up, and then she tried to stand and fell down, like a puppy. But she kept trying, and at last she was properly on her feet, and she tried to lick my face, but she missed it the first few times. I only started crying when she finally managed it.

  When she saw the unicorn, she did a funny thing. She stared at it for a moment, and then she bowed or curtseyed, in a dog way, stretching out her front legs and putting her head down on the ground between them. The unicorn nosed at her, very gently, so as not to knock her over again. It looked at me for the first time…or maybe I really looked at it for the first time, past the horn and the hooves and the magical whiteness, all the way into those endless eyes. And what they did, somehow, the unicorn’s eyes, was to free me from the griffin’s eyes. Because the awfulness of what I’d seen there didn’t go away when the griffin died, not even when Malka came alive again. But the unicorn had all the world in her eyes, all the world I’m never going to see, but it doesn’t matter, because now I have seen it, and it’s beautiful, and I was in there too. And when I think of Jehane, and Louli, and my Felicitas who could only talk with her eyes, just like the unicorn, I’ll think of them, and not the griffin. That’s how it was when the unicorn and I looked at each other.

  I didn’t see if the unicorn said goodbye to Molly and Schmendrick, and I didn’t see when it went away. I didn’t want to. I did hear Schmendrick saying, “A dog. I nearly kill myself singing her to Lír, calling her as no other has ever called a unicorn‌—‌and she brings back, not him, but the dog. And here I’d always thought she had no sense of humor.”

  But Molly said, “She loved him too. That’s why she let him go. Keep your voice down.” I was going to tell her it didn’t matter, that I knew Schmendrick was saying that because he was so sad, but she came over and petted Malka with me, and I didn’t have to. She said, “We will escort you and Malka home now, as befits two great ladies. Then we will take the king home too.”

  “And I’ll never see you again,” I said. “No more than I’ll see him.”

  Molly asked me, “How old are you, Sooz?”

  “Nine,” I said. “Almost ten. You know that.”

  “You can whistle?” I nodded. Molly looked around quickly, as though she were going to steal something. She bent close to me, and she whispered, “I will give you a present, Sooz, but you are not to open it until the day when you turn seventeen. On that day you must walk out away from your village, walk out all alone into some quiet place that is special to you, and you must whistle like this.” And she whistled a little ripple of music for me to whistle back to her, repeating and repeating it until she was satisfied that I had it exactly. “Don’t whistle it anymore,” she told me. “Don’t whistle it aloud again, not once, until your seventeenth birthday, but keep whistling it inside you. Do you understand the difference, Sooz?”

  “I’m not a baby,” I said. “I understand. What will happen when I do whistle it?”

  Molly smiled at me. She said, “Someone will come to you. Maybe the greatest magician in the world, maybe only an old lady with a soft spot for valiant, impudent children.” She cupped my cheek in her hand. “And just maybe even a unicorn. Because beautiful things will always want to see you again, Sooz, and be listening for you. Take an old lady’s word for it. Someone will come.”

  They put King Lír on his own horse, and I rode with Schmendrick, and they came all the way home with me, right to the door, to tell my mother and father that the griffin was dead, and that I had helped, and you should have seen Wilfrid’s face when they said that! Then they both hugged me, and Molly said in my ear, “Remember‌—‌not till you’re seventeen!” and they rode away, taking the king back to his castle to be buried among his own folk. And I had a cup of cold milk and went out with Malka and my father to pen the flock for the night.

  So that’s what happened to me. I practice the music Molly taught me in my head, all the time, I even dream it some nights, but I don’t ever whistle it aloud. I talk to Malka about our adventure, because I have to talk to someone. And I promise her that when the time comes she’ll be there with me, in the special place I’ve already picked out. She’ll be an old dog lady then, of course, but it doesn’t matter. Someone will come to us both.

  I hope it’s them, those two. A unicorn is very nice, but they’re my friends. I want to feel Molly holding me again, and hear the stories she didn’t have time to tell me, and I want to hear Schmendrick singing that silly song:

  Soozli, Soozli,

  speaking loozli,

  you disturb my oozli-goozli.

  Soozli, Soozli,

  would you choozli

  to become my squoozli-squoozli…?

  I can wait.

  A Conversation With Peter S. Beagle

  Connor Cochran: When The Last Unicorn came out in 1968, it was your third published book. I’d like to put it in context by starting earlier than that, so let’s go back to your first novel, A Fine and Private Place.

  Peter S. Beagle: I always think of that as my “state of grace” book. When I look at it now, I see a lot of things that are wrong with it technically, and I see mistakes I’d never make today…and yet, somehow, I got away with it.

  Connor: I know that you wrote A Fine and Private Place in college, when you were only 19 years old, and that you sold it to the Viking Press when you were 20. I know that when copies first landed in bookstores you were off spending a year in Europe, following graduation from the University of Pittsburgh. But what happened after the book was published and you came home to New York?

  Peter: That was the fall of 1960. I didn’t get to spend a great deal of time at home because my agent had put me up for a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and to my utter shock they accepted me. So shortly after coming back I was on my way out again. I have very clear memories of landing at the airport in San Francisco, looking around, and thinking “Well, here I am in California and it really is sunny, just like the pictures. Now I have to get to Palo Alto. Where’s the subway?”

  Connor: I presume you eventually gave up looking for a subway. Who was your agent?

  Peter: Elizabeth Otis, who was also John Steinbeck’s agent and Harper Lee’s agent. Steinbeck was her first client; she’d literally gone into business in 1929 with him, back when he was just a guy who had never sold a book, not a world-famous Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner. I was recommended to Elizabeth by the poet-anthologist Louis Untermeyer, and his wife Bryna Ivens, who was fiction editor of Seventeen magazine. A couple of years before, when I was 14 or 15, I’d sent a story in to Seventeen. The magazine didn’t buy it, of course, but Bryna thought it was interesting and decided to track me down‌—‌something I’d accidentally made difficult by forgetting to put a return address on the envelope. Luckily for me the Bronx postmark was readable, and in those days all the Beagles in the borough were related to one another. She called the first one listed in the phone book and pretty soon she found me.

  Connor: Your short story must really have been something. That’s not a typical reaction to get from a magazine editor.

  Peter: I don’t really remember it now‌—‌I think it might have been a Western with some fantasy elements. What matters is that Bryna and Louis took me under their wing and introduced me to all the people they knew. I was just a kid in high school and I was meeting Norman Mailer, and Charles G. Jackson‌—‌he wrote The Lost Weekend‌—‌and even Arthur Miller and his brand-new bride, Marilyn Monroe, who never took her eyes off Miller and smelled wonderful. They also introduced me to Elizabeth, who took me on as a client when I was 17. We became so close that she was practically another aunt. Elizabeth loved young writers, and she spent a good deal of time with me, taking me out to lunch, looking at my latest story or poem or wha
tever I’d come up with. She knew I was still a long way from being someone she could sell, but she treated me like a real author anyway. That was very important.

  Connor: It wasn’t that long before you went pro. You placed a couple of stories during your first years in college, and Elizabeth sold A Fine and Private Place for you right away once you finished it.

  Peter: She looked out for me, is what she did. I remember that Doubleday made the first bid, but Elizabeth, who was a bit of a proper lady, waited and didn’t accept it. She didn’t think Doubleday was the right house for a very young writer. She wanted a bid from Viking instead, because she thought they’d be more serious about the book and about me. And somehow she got it. Elizabeth usually found a way to get her authors what she wanted. I certainly would never have been a Stegner Fellow without her. It would never even have occurred to me to apply.

  Connor: What was the Stegner Fellowship like?

  Peter: First thing on the list was just getting to the University! It took me forever, that first day, to find my way to Palo Alto, and ultimately to Stanford Village, which was old Army housing from the ‘40s that had long since supposed to be destroyed, but hadn’t been. They were stashing foreign students there, and odd people like me. As for the Fellowship itself, which began with a big outdoor welcoming reception, the class that year was remarkable for who was in it‌—‌it’s been written about more than once. A few years ago I actually got interviewed for a doctoral dissertation all about our group.

  Connor: Who was in the session with you?

  Peter: An amazing gang. I admit that at times I felt completely overwhelmed. There was Larry McMurtry, the first friend I made there, known now for Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show and the screenplay to Brokeback Mountain. He was a only a couple of years older than I was, and really talented. He wrote most of Leaving Cheyenne during our session. There was a 25 year-old Ken Kesey, at that point working on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There was Judith Rascoe, who was the niece or great-niece of a very influential critic named Burton Rascoe; Judith went on to write stories and some very good screenplays. There was a Scottish guy named Robin MacDonald, whose wife, Joanna Ostrow, was Bronx Jewish like me. Robin was the one with the fellowship, but Joanna turned out to be the real writer. She would sit in on the class and years later, after the class was long over, she published an excellent novel called In the Highlands Since Time Immemorial. There was Chris Koch, an Australian writer whose best-known work over here is probably The Year of Living Dangerously. He started that one while he was at Stanford. But my closest friend in the class was Gurney Norman, from Hazard, Kentucky. Gurney and I took to each other immediately. As we’ve often said, he was my first redneck and I was his first City Jew. We used to sit up nights comparing childhoods. We’re still in touch today. In fact, I visited him in Kentucky a few years ago and wrote all about it in the forward to The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche, my first collection from Tachyon Publications.

  Connor: How long did the Fellowship run?

  Peter: Now it’s a two-year session, but back then it only lasted one. We had two six-month semesters, each run by a different visiting writer. During the first half, while Malcolm Cowley ran the class, nobody missed anything. Every time Malcolm lectured, the room was so full that people were literally sitting on the sills of the open windows, or leaning in through them. Not only did Malcolm know stuff, but if he could help you, he would. Of course, if you could figure out a way to do the story on your own, that was also fine‌—‌Malcolm’s ego was not tied up in this, just so long as the story worked.

  Connor: He sounds like an extraordinary teacher.

  Peter: He was a fine writer and editor, too‌—‌without Malcolm Cowley, Viking would never have published Jack Kerouac, and William Faulkner might have been completely forgotten. I was very fond of Malcolm. I didn’t have a beard in those days, just a moustache, and so did he. We used to walk over the campus together, talking, with me mostly asking questions, and a time or two we were taken for father and son.

  Connor: That year was the start of many big changes in your life. You discovered California, where you now live, and in particular you fell in love with Berkeley. You met a lot of people who would eventually be important to you.

  Peter: Yes. Chief among them Enid, the woman who became my first wife. Her then-husband was in the psychology graduate program at Stanford. I noticed even back then that while the people I met in Berkeley were supposed to be wild, crazy proto-hippies, beatniks, whatever you want to call them…it was the people in that Stanford psychology program that were seriously crazy. There was a good deal of madness, drinking, and mate-trading going on. Somewhere in there I got involved with Enid, who had two daughters from her two marriages. And of course I wrote a lot.

  Connor: You were working on your second novel. The one that’s never been published.

  Peter: I called it The Mirror Kingdom‌—‌don’t ask me to explain why, because the title didn’t make any sense. Titles have never been my strong suit. The book was very long, very serious, and very autobiographical: a coming-of-age story about a young American musician playing blues and folk songs in a club in Paris. I’d done something like that myself, a little bit, though mostly what I was doing while in France was trading‌—‌I’d teach the French guys stuff from the States, and they’d teach me the lyrics and chords to this or that Georges Brassens song. However, since I always tend to allow my characters to be really good at something I’d like to do properly, such as playing guitar or cooking, in The Mirror Kingdom I made Walker, my book’s protagonist, pretty special as a singer and performer. I wrote that novel about three times while I was at Stanford, trying to make it work, trying to be what I imagined a writer was supposed to be according to what I was hearing and reading in class, and then I submitted it to Viking as a possible follow-up to A Fine and Private Place. They passed‌—‌immediately‌—‌and I buried the manuscript for the next 40 years, until you dug it out of my filing cabinet. I still think burial was the right thing to do.

  Connor: You also turned out at least one astonishing piece of short fiction while you were a Stegner Fellow. The Atlantic Monthly published it in 1963, and it has been reprinted dozens of times since‌—‌“Come Lady Death.”

  Peter: That happened during the second semester. Our teacher for that half of the year was the Irish writer Frank O’Connor. He was a splendid writer who, like all the famous writers of his generation, had traveled widely and knew everybody. He was very charming, very handsome‌—‌I remember that he tended to dress in a southwestern style, with a bolo tie‌—‌and he was also one of the most dogmatic people I have ever met. Certainly the most dogmatic teacher ever, at least since the fourth grade. On O’Connor’s first day in class he ran down a list of tropes and types and genres and writers he didn’t want anything to do with, and very nearly managed to alienate everybody in the class…which he knew perfectly well, but he was what he was and he couldn’t quite stop it. I was cool, watching him tread on everybody else’s toes, until he got around to what he called the difference between story writing and story telling, and his insistence that all writers did either one or the other. I was in my Isak Dinesen phase, completely in love with her work, and wanted to know where she would fall in this categorization. He said he couldn’t exactly speak to that, because she bored him so much that he’d never finished one of her stories…at which point I started skipping classes, as so many others had been doing since O’Connor took over. But one day when I did come in, Judy Rascoe‌—‌I think it was Judy‌—‌read a beautiful little fantasy story, set in Mexico, which O’Connor brutally trashed because it was a fantasy. I was so angry that I holed up with friends in Berkeley‌—‌on Channing Way, I could still find the house‌—‌and wrote “Come Lady Death” in about a day and a half. I wanted to write a fantasy he just couldn’t find any fault with. Then I submitted it to the class.

  Connor: …And?

  Peter: O’Connor read it out loud, in his best
Abby Theater reading‌—‌he’d directed there at one point, and had a fine dramatic voice for this sort of thing, so he gave it the works. And I do think the class was at least held by it. Then when he was finished he looked around at everybody and said, in the same declarative voice, “This is a beautifully-written story. I don’t like it.” And that was that‌—‌that was O’Connor, right there. By the end of the semester he very nearly had a mutiny on his hands. Which he knew, and he told Stegner about it, but he didn’t know any other way to be. He was a strange man, O’Connor. I remember going to a lecture of his one time. He had all his charm working, everything going, telling stories, commenting on Irish literature…he held the audience spellbound, literally in his hand, for something like an hour and a half. And then he ran ten minutes over and blew it. His bitterness and frustrations, all the things that really riled him, began to come out in those last ten minutes, and when they did he lost everyone in the room. I’ve always taken that as a lesson, when I speak in public: get off the stage early, rather than too late.

  Connor: Once the Fellowship was over you headed back to New York. How long after you got home did you find out that Enid, who was getting divorced, was pregnant and that you were the father?

  Peter: It wasn’t very long at all. And obviously it gave me a lot to think about, trying to figure out what to do. I spent that winter partly in New York, and partly in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I had friends that I’d met in Berkeley. I got a job in Ann Arbor working as a janitor in student housing. It was the most horrendous winter I’d ever spent. I thought I knew about winters from New York, but Michigan was a different matter. It was a Canadian winter, and all I had to get around on was my motor scooter. That was tough. I admit it: the weather finally forced me back to New York. But in the spring of 1962, after things warmed up, I traveled back to Ann Arbor to collect my scooter. My childhood buddy Phil Sigunick went along with me for company, and we drove back to New York together on the one machine. I remember that particularly because there was this one cop who stopped us… Phil had a driver’s license, but all I had was an international license that I’d gotten when I was in Europe, and the cop didn’t think that was enough for us to be bopping around in his jurisdiction. He said that Phil would have to drive. But Phil knew nothing about scooters at that point. He had never driven one in his life. So there we were, the two of us, late at night, going round and round in a parking lot, me trying to teach Phil how to handle the clutch and the throttle at least well enough to get us out of this guy’s bailiwick.