Connor: Which brings us to the summer of 1962, stage now set, and your first stab at The Last Unicorn.
Peter: “Stab” is a good description for it.
Connor: That’s the summer you and Phil left New York behind and headed north to the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. It was supposed to be an “artistic retreat.” Whose idea was that?
Peter: That was me. I was at loose ends. Just young and scrambled, with no idea what to do next. We rented this lovely two-room shack on a hillside in Cheshire, really one big room and a bathroom, kind of a guest cottage on property owned by friends of our parents. It was near North Adams, and not too far from Pittsfield. Phil would go out every day on his motor scooter—he’d bought one for himself by then—to work on this huge landscape he was painting. And me…well, after Viking rejected The Mirror Kingdom I was feeling less than confident. I just knew I had to be doing something, so when Phil came home every day I could claim that I was working too, not just sitting around all day playing guitar. The first thing I tried was a spooky story set in my own imaginary version of Berkeley, which I called Avicenna, but after a few pages I couldn’t figure out what I was doing. So I let it drop. Then out of nowhere an image came to me of a unicorn going somewhere, for some reason, with a companion I couldn’t see.
Connor: Just like that, snap—no trigger? No moment of inspiration?
Peter: I really can’t say where the image came from. It was just suddenly there. I’d read tons of fantasy and mythology from early childhood on, sure; and when I was a little kid my mother took me along to one of the elementary school classes she was teaching, where according to her I told all her students a story about unicorns. There was also a children’s book by Dorothy Lathrop that I had loved, The Colt from Moon Mountain, which was about a unicorn in Kansas, and when I was 17 I was given a painting of unicorns fighting bulls, done by a Spanish artist named Marcial Rodriguez who was married to my cousin. But I wasn’t conscious of any of those things at the time I got the mental picture I’m telling you about. I was just sitting there in Cheshire, deeply frustrated, and the unicorn came to me. I didn’t know anything about her at all, not who she was, or where she was going, or why, or who was traveling with her. Nothing. I only knew that I desperately needed to be working. So I started. For research I got on my motor scooter and drove over to the Pittsfield Library, where I looked up everything they had on unicorns and mythology. It wasn’t much, and in fact I really didn’t find anything I didn’t already know, except for an entry mentioning that a doctor named Olfert Dapper had seen a wild unicorn in the Maine woods in 1673. That captivated me—it didn’t say that he claimed to have seen it, but rather that he did see it, so I took a little note and eventually the good doctor wound up in The Last Unicorn’s dedication.
Connor: You also dedicated the book to Robert Nathan.
Peter: I had discovered Robert’s books when I was in college. I loved his books, and I still think that A Fine and Private Place owes a lot to his novel One More Spring, which had been published before I was born. But I didn’t meet Robert until years after I started in on that first incomplete version of The Last Unicorn.
Connor: The 85 pages you managed to write that summer have now been published in a limited collector’s edition called The Last Unicorn: The Lost Version, from Subterranean Press, and will be coming out again in a collection of backstage items from your career called The First Last Unicorn and Other Beginnings. It’s a startling read. That original version is almost completely different from the book everyone knows.
Peter: Very much so.
Connor: The unicorn is much the same. She’s still seeking all the missing unicorns in the world. There is still a singing butterfly, though his crazy-quilt spiel goes in a different direction. But that’s about all. Everything else is unfamiliar. The story is set in modern times—there are asphalt roads, and speeding automobiles, and the battered dragon who first tells the unicorn that she is the last or her kind complains of pigheaded policemen and having its tail run over by a truck. There’s no Mommy Fortuna or Midnight Carnival, no Molly Grue, no Red Bull, no Prince Lír or King Haggard. And there’s no Schmendrick. Instead of him, the unicorn’s traveling companion is a two-headed demon from Hell who has been kicked out for being both too traditional (one head) and a complete troublemaker (the other).
Peter: I had no plan. I was just following my instincts wherever they led, and drawing on what was around me. The way the demon’s two heads—I named them Webster and Azazel—jokingly snipe at one another was taken straight from the way Phil and I talked. But at 85 pages I hit a wall. I couldn’t go any further. When the summer was over and we returned to New York I put the unfinished manuscript away. I did show it to my parents, and to my agent Elizabeth, and I shared it with Enid in California. They were all very nice. No one rejected it or told me to abandon the idea. But I simply couldn’t figure out where to go from the point I stopped. It was a dead end.
Connor: You know my theory on this. I think there was a war in your head between the two different stories you were exploring. The unicorn was on a quest to find her lost fellows. That’s fine. Meanwhile the two-headed demon was on a quest as well, trying to start up his/his own Hell using a coal he’d stolen on the way out the door—a coal which all Hell is bent on getting back. That’s fine, too, but it’s hard to imagine unifying such different quests in a dramatically satisfying way. You could write one or you could write the other, but I don’t think there was room for both in a single book.
Peter: Which is probably why, years later, when I did come back to The Last Unicorn, the first thing I did was abandon the demon’s story entirely.
Connor: After this first attempt at The Last Unicorn crashed, what did you start on next?
Peter: I have no memory of writing any other fiction when we got back to New York.
Connor: Really? Nothing at all?
Peter: Mainly I was working myself up to tell my parents about Enid and my son Dan, who by then had been born. During the summer in the Berkshires I had taken a break to fly west and see all of them, Enid and Dan and Enid’s two girls, Victoria and Kalisa. That was the trip that made me realize that this woman and these kids were my responsibility. All honor and credit to my folks: when they heard the news they neither disowned me nor had major heart attacks—not even when I said I was leaving New York to join Enid in California, or that I was going to make the trip on a motor scooter. Phil and I drove our scooters all over New York that winter, getting used to these new German Heinkels we’d bought, and breaking in the whole notion of traveling. When we weren’t out on the road we’d sit for hours playing guitar, or watching Maverick, or playing cards, or just fantasizing about what life was going to be like when I was a successful novelist and he’d broken through as a painter. We both wanted to go, but I wanted to go before he did.
Connor: You finally left in April of 1963, and after reaching California you weren’t writing fiction at all, just nonfiction articles for magazines like Holiday and the Saturday Evening Post, plus the cross-country scooter trip memoir that eventually became your second published book, I See By My Outfit. Why the big change?
Peter: I had an instant family to feed, and no idea how to do that, so thank goodness for Harry Sions at Holiday. He wasn’t the only magazine editor to give me assignments, but he was the first. I was learning how to write to a deadline, to length limitations, and to do it for money. The check I got for the Holiday serialization of I See By My Outfit—which they published in abridged form as “A Long Way To Go”—kept us going for nearly a year. Money went a lot farther back then.
Connor: You finally did return to fiction, by once again picking up The Last Unicorn.
Peter: That didn’t happen until several years after I moved to California. Late 1965, I think. It was Enid’s doing. She simply wanted to know the rest of the story. I hadn’t even talked about it in a long time, but I did start talking about i
t with her, and by and by I got started again. I began by throwing out nearly everything—all I saved were parts of the first chapter.
Connor: That’s fairly radical.
Peter: It was necessary. The two-headed demon went, along with his coal from Hell. And since I had decided to make the book both a fairy tale and a spoof on fairy tales, the whole idea that the unicorn’s adventure was happening in modern times had to go. Which meant cutting the dragon, since the point of that character had been the comic irony of his unfortunate encounter with the 20th Century. By the time I was done, only seven or eight pages remained from the original 85. The old road hadn’t led anywhere; I had to go back to the start and find a new path…and let me tell you, every memory I have of what came next, with very few exceptions, is painful. It was nothing but struggle. It was Sisyphus pushing that damn rock up the hill, only to have it roll back down again. I worked and worked at it, mostly in a back bedroom, keeping an ear open for the two smaller children, Dan and Kalisa, in case they needed company or had gotten into trouble…and every now and then I’d lay off if a magazine job came along, because that was practical cash and we needed it. People imagine that writing The Last Unicorn was an enchanted voyage, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings, but this was not the case. It took me close to two years, and it was hard every step of the way.
Connor: You told me once that in this second pass you were deliberately emulating other writers.
Peter: Very consciously so. They were all people that Phil and I loved—James Stephens, T. H. White, Lord Dunsany, the James Thurber of The Thirteen Clocks and The White Deer. We knew these books very nearly by heart, and we’d throw lines from them at each other constantly. We used to play a kind of double solitaire called “Steal the Bundle,” and one of us would snatch up a mess of cards and gloat over them, at which point the other would say “Quiet please, you gleaming thief.” And the usual reply would be another other Thurber standard we used, “We all have our flaws and mine is being wicked.” The problem was that all these writers we loved were dead. We’d already had all of their work that we were ever going to get. So I wanted to write the kind of book that might have existed if all of them were alive now and writing together.
Connor: Examples, please?
Peter: When the dialog in The Last Unicorn occasionally slides into rhyme, that’s Thurber. The anachronisms, those come from T. H. White. The points where I’m simply letting language flow for its own sake, more than anything that is James Stephens. And the sprinkling of songs and lyrics is the one debt I feel I owe to Tolkien. I liked the way he did it in The Lord of the Rings, and I wanted to do that too. They were always fun to write, probably the only real joy I ever felt in the process. I played games with the songs—consider the fact that the lady blue jay’s lullaby was deliberately written to fit the melody of “My Favorite Things.” There are several old private jokes in the book. The butterfly’s speech goes back to that cabin in Cheshire. I can look at it and pinpoint things that were cracking Phil and me up that summer. “You don’t get no medal” means absolutely nothing to anybody, except that it’s the punch line of a mildly dirty joke about Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip which we kept telling people. Then there’s a line, a fragment of a line, “where once he could not go,” which is a phrase from a beautiful old folk song that Phil and his girlfriend Joan used to sing together.
Connor: And the Dunsany influence you mentioned? I don’t really see that.
Peter: Dunsany was a great namer. He knew very clearly that if you could pick the right name for a place or a character, you could suggest an entire culture. It’s like Japanese brush painting—five, six, seven brushstrokes in a precise manner, and there’s a bird in the reeds, or somebody fishing.
Connor: Let’s talk about character names, then. Your readers have been speculating about them for decades. When the unicorn becomes human, and Schmendrick calls her the Lady Amalthea—where did that come from?
Peter: It’s funny about the names, because at the time they just came to me, and mostly I didn’t realize why they were appropriate until later. Amalthea sounded good, and I had some vague recollection that it came from Greek mythology—it’s the name of the goat who nursed the infant god Zeus when he was being hidden from his father, who wanted to eat him. This wise goat fed the baby, sheltered him, and played with him. But at the time I decided to use the name, I’d forgotten the rest of the story—that when Zeus got older and was acquiring his full godly strength he became too much for the goat to romp and wrestle with, and at some point he accidentally broke off one of her horns. He was immediately apologetic, of course, and turned the broken-off horn into the cornucopia—the Horn of Plenty. But Amalthea only had one horn from then on, so in a real sense she was the first unicorn.
Connor: What about Mommy Fortuna and Rukh? Are those as resonant?
Peter: Fortuna is an old name out of mythology. She was the Roman goddess of fortune, the personification of luck. There’s also a mythical character named Fortunatus who had a purse that was always full of gold coins, no matter how many were taken out. He came to a bad end, as I recall. And Mommy just struck me as a funny, anachronistic name for a witch. She’s probably more of a 20th-century character than anyone else in the book because all that really matters to her is success in show business terms. Mommy Fortuna wants to be famous, which she has never managed, and she knows why she’s never managed it—she’s not very good. As she says, “trudging through the universe, hauling my homemade horrors, do you think that was my dream when I was young and evil?” Everybody has dreams, even sloppy witches. As for where Rukh’s name came from, I can’t honestly say, except that it’s the Indian word that Kipling used to describe India’s thick jungle in the first story featuring Mowgli. It had a nice guttural sound which stayed with me and seemed to fit the character. I did try to give him some individuality: he’s never liked Schmendrick and he’s joyous at the chance to officially get his hands on his throat, but that’s about it. He was just needed, and he’s got some of the better passages, short as his tenure is.
Connor: Rukh is also one of the variant spellings for roc, the giant bird out of Persian mythology that could supposedly lift an elephant with a single claw. That’s an ironic connection, given what happens to Rukh when the harpy gets loose. And a little amusing as well, since Roc is the American imprint that publishes The Last Unicorn. What about Schmendrick?
Peter: Long before I went back to The Last Unicorn, I used to tell bedtime stories to the children. For my older daughter I made up the adventures of Schmendrick, the world’s worst magician. There were two meanings to his name. It was a parody of the comic strip character Mandrake the Magician, of course, but it was also a word from Yiddish. In that language a schmendrick is somebody out of his depth, the boy sent to do a man’s job, someone who has expanded to the limits of his incapacity. Which was terribly appropriate given Schmendrick’s eternal boyhood at the point we meet him in the story. I tended to get hung up in those days—on a word, a line, a paragraph—and I got stuck for nearly a month at the Midnight Carnival. I knew that the unicorn had to meet someone important, but I had no idea who it should be. For weeks. Then Schmendrick walked into the book and I did my usual “moron, idiot, the answer was staring you right in the face all this time, of course!” I seemed to know Schmendrick well, with his mixture of compassion, frustration, and envy, and his desperate fear that he’d be condemned to be immortal by never reaching his real power.
Connor: Had you already written the unicorn’s capture by Mommy Fortuna before you decided to use Schmendrick?
Peter: Yes.
Connor: So the sequence at the end of chapter one, when Mommy Fortuna and Schmendrick and Rukh come upon the sleeping unicorn together, that’s not how you originally wrote that?
Peter: No, I went back and put Schmendrick into that. By the way, the name of the wizard that Schmendrick was apprenticed to, Nikos? That’s another private refer
ence. At the time I was reading a lot of books by a Greek author named Nikos Kazantzakis, and I know the name of Schmendrick’s master comes right out of my fascination with the man’s work. He was remarkably skillful, so it was appropriate to give his name to a master magician. I still like Kazantzakis a lot. He wrote Zorba the Greek and Freedom or Death and The Last Temptation of Christ, and an incredible sequel to The Odyssey—you have to be Greek to write something like that.
Connor: The next significant batch of characters you introduce in the book are the outlaws of the Greenwood—Captain Cully, Jack Jingly, Willie Gentle, and of course Captain Cully’s kind-of girlfriend, Molly Grue.
Peter: Part of that was certainly a parody of Robin Hood, but there was more to it. This was the time of the American folk music boom. There were a lot of 18 year-old Jewish kids heading off into the Appalachian Mountains, lugging big tape recorders with them, to hunt down variant versions of this or that 16th-century Scots-Irish ballad. Everybody was being Alan Lomax. I was very aware of that. I can remember hearing somebody trying to describe a particular singer, saying, with real earnestness, “He’s so pure that he’s almost authentic.” That stayed with me, and I was thinking of it when I had Captain Cully insist that Willie Gentle sing one of the many songs Cully has written about himself, pointing out that “You’ll need the practice one day when you’re field-recorded.” Pure anachronism, and directly from that early-to-mid-’60s Berkeley/Greenwich Village folk music period.
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