Connor: If we’re talking anachronisms, the biggest one in the book is in this very same sequence.
Peter: Ah, yes. “Have a taco.” That’s the one line people remember from The Last Unicorn when they don’t remember anything else, because it comes so much out of left field. That’s a 5:30 line.
Connor: Excuse me?
Peter: I’m a creature of habit. Back then I had an office cat who would literally herd me down to my office in the barn, harassing me until I got to work. Around 5:30 each day the cat would indicate that it might be all right to go up to the house for dinner. I was usually pretty tired by then anyway, because that damn animal always had me starting early, so I’d stop writing for the day. But every now and then one of those 5:30 lines, or images, or passages would come in, and I’d write whatever it was down and say “Okay, if I still like it tomorrow, it stays in.” The “have a taco” line was the last of a particular day’s work, and it cracked me up. But I thought “You’re not reliable. You’re hungry and eager to leave. Check it in the morning.” Well, when I looked at it the morning it still made me laugh, so it stayed in.
Connor: Where did Captain Cully’s name come from?
Peter: “Cully” is old, old, English low-class slang for “buddy.” It can also be just this side of “sucker.” I’ve always been fascinated by the connection that reality has to the legend that will eventually grow around it. Cully is very aware of this mechanism. He points out that Robin Hood is the myth, and he is the reality, which I have no doubt is perfectly true. I think that the original Robin Hood would be a lot closer to Captain Cully than Errol Flynn.
Connor: And Jack Jingly?
Peter: That I just made up. “Jack” is a classic name for outlaws in ballads, of course. Even Yeats uses it. And “Jingly” came to me for the sound of it. Then I elaborated on the idea to explain why he is called that.
Connor: Molly Grue. Did you see her coming in advance as a major character, or did she just step in when you got to the Greenwood?
Peter: I knew there had to be a Maid Marian figure. There was definitely no way around that. What I didn’t know was that I was about to be given, for my money, the best gift of the book. I’ve always said that if you stay with something long enough, and grind at it, and do the painful unfashionable stuff, sooner or later the muse or the gods will give you a gift. And in The Last Unicorn my gift was Molly. I’m very aware of it, because I certainly have no idea how I could otherwise have pulled off, in my mid-20s, that moment where Molly sees the unicorn for the first time.
Connor: And when you introduced her, there at Cully’s campfire, you didn’t know that was coming? You didn’t know she was going to be joining in the unicorn’s quest?
Peter: No. Like a lot of writers, my tombstone should probably read “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” I absolutely didn’t know she was going to be part of the quest, and I didn’t know that I was going to fall in love with her. Grue is a French slang word that actually means “crane,” like the bird—you’ll find it used in the phrase pied de grue, which refers to prostitutes walking up and down the sidewalk. The name came to me just that fast, Molly Grue, and I wasn’t thinking of the word “gruesome” at all, but rather the French slang’s sense of careworn cynicism and gawkiness. I’m sure I picked it up from the songs of Georges Brassens, the same way I have so many things. As for the Molly part, I’ve just always liked the name. I didn’t know anyone named Molly then.
Connor: Really? What about Molly Epstein?
Peter: Oh my god. That’s right. Molly Epstein, my favorite writing teacher in high school. “Jolly Molly,” we used to call her. Do you know I’ve never made that connection? But that must be it. It really must be it. When I wrote The Last Unicorn she was certainly the only Molly I’d ever met, and she was very important to me.
Connor: Since you were discovering things as you went, you must have been startled when the story twisted on you and Molly Grue announced that she was going along on the quest.
Peter: I was as startled as Schmendrick, and just as powerless to stop her.
Connor: The story fits together so neatly in the end that I find it hard to credit your claim that you were flying purely on instinct. For example: in the original 85-page fragment that you wrote, the Butterfly makes no mention of any Red Bull. In the version we all know today, he does…and then Mommy Fortuna makes references to the Bull and King Haggard, as do Molly and Captain Cully, each new mention giving the reader another clue or two towards the big picture. Are you telling me you added those things in later, after you found your way to Haggard’s castle?
Peter: No, I was always leading towards Haggard and the Bull, certainly. But I was also sort of deliberately painting myself into a corner to see how my imagination would be stimulated to get out of it. I’ve done that.
Connor: Back to names. Hagsgate. Drinn. Prince Lír and King Haggard….
Peter: Hagsgate comes from Haggard, obviously: it’s named that because it’s the way you go to get to Haggard’s castle. But the town was there before Haggard came to this country, and it probably had a different name before he did. Town names can change. Drinn is just one of those names you pick when you are trying to select the right syllable, and it had the perfect sound for the gag I wrote about Drinn’s money calling to him from Schmendrick’s purse. “Haggard” I knew about because on the one hand it is a particular look, but on the other hand it is also a falconer’s term. It’s what you call an undomesticated hawk, a bird that knows the rudiments but is not reliable. If you fly a haggard, you might never see it again, it might go back to the wild. The thing about Haggard is that I’ve never really been able to see him as a villain. There’s enough of him in my own character that I’ve always felt sorry for him. That speech of his about knowing that nothing was worth the investment of his heart, and he was always right, so he was always old? That’s one of those three-quarters truths I recognize. As for Lír, his name was a double surprise. I have a distinct memory of sprawling across my bed and going down a long list of one-syllable names that I’d scribbled out—I knew the prince’s name had to be one syllable—and when I finally came on Lír I liked the sound. But what I didn’t realize, even though I should have, given how much mythology I’d read, was that I was borrowing the name of one of the greatest of Celtic sea gods, Llyr. And I certainly hadn’t thought it through to the realization that when he eventually succeeded his adoptive father he would become King Lír, echoing Shakespeare.
Connor: I left one out. Mabruk, Haggard’s first magician?
Peter: Mabruk is one of my very few Arabic words. It’s the Arabic counterpart of the Hebrew phrase mazel tov. It means “congratulations,” and I just thought it sounded good for a magician. Never throw a word away simply because it’s in another language. You never know when it might be useful.
Connor: Since you really weren’t plotting ahead in a clear-cut fashion, at what point did you realize that the unicorn was going to be turned into a human woman?
Peter: I’m not sure. I know I figured it out before the scene with the Red Bull’s attack, but how much before I can’t tell you. That’s one reason the book was such an incredible task, such a nightmare to write, the fact that I planned almost nothing. I was basically praying that it if I paid close enough attention, the book itself would tell me the story.
Connor: You have said that you didn’t know until quite late in the process where the unicorns were.
Peter: That’s true.
Connor: And yet when the Lady Amalthea and Schmendrick and Molly Grue come to Haggard’s barren throne room for the first time, you have Amalthea staring out at the sea; and when she answers Haggard’s demand to know what she is looking at, Haggard responds “Ah, yes, the sea is always good. There is nothing I can look at for very long, except the sea.”
Peter: I still didn’t know the unicorns were there when I wrote that scene. I was just beginning to establish the relationship between the characters, faking my way throu
gh that castle, as unsure of what I was doing as at any other moment in the book.
Connor: So when did you know where the unicorns were?
Peter: It took a long time to figure that out. The run-down house we were living in was in the Santa Cruz hills, near enough to the ocean, and when I wasn’t writing I spent a lot of time looking at landscapes—sometimes to try and get a sense of the unicorn’s forest, sometimes to just imagine the places she was traveling through. A good bit of the time I spent staring at the ocean, watching the surf coming in. During one of those beach sessions, around the point where I’d written the cat saying that the unicorns were “near and far, far and near…” I began to think “it has to be the sea; there’s no other place.” I know that I skipped the passage where the unicorns come out of the sea when I first got to it. I went on through to the end instead, and then came back and wrote the climax of the book.
Connor: When did you write the witch’s curse? Back during the Hagsgate chapter?
Peter: Yes.
Connor: So you didn’t change that.
Peter: No, that was there.
Connor: Which suggests that your subconscious was pointing you at the sea all along. Do you think there was any sneaky connection deep in your mind between the unicorns being in the surf and that moment in The Lord of the Rings when Frodo is saved at the Ford of Bruinen? The flood that sweeps away the Ringwraiths does take the form of great horses.
Peter: I definitely wasn’t thinking about that. Tolkien’s sequence was all about magic, illusions, a reshaping of the water. I was looking for where you’d hide real unicorns.
Connor: I know that the Red Bull was directly inspired by the painting that Marcial Rodriquez gave you when you were a teenager. But what about the other characters we meet in Haggard’s castle, like the talking skull and the cat?
Peter: The cat, honest to God, happened to be asleep on my desk when I got to that point. I just wrote her in, although I changed her gender. If she hadn’t been on my desk I’m quite sure there would be no cat in the story at all. And the “wine that drinks itself” riddle the cat tells Molly is one of those bits I mentioned where I just made stuff up, hoping I’d be able to solve it later…which I always did, though I was usually as surprised as anyone by the answers. The riddle finally came together when the whole family traveled to Albuquerque to spend Christmas with Enid’s parents. They had a grandfather clock in their house, and I remember sitting and staring at it for a long time, almost hypnotized, until an image came to me of Amalthea and her friends passing through the clock. As for that whole business about when the clock strikes the right time, that comes from something that happened to me when I was six or seven years old. I was on the subway with my father. It was very crowded and loud, and we couldn’t hold a conversation, so I was just thinking. And suddenly I understood something, or it seemed to me that I did, which was that New Year’s Day was entirely arbitrary. It didn’t have to be January 1st. There would still be the same number of days in a year no matter when you started, so you could pick your own New Year’s Day if you wanted to. When I realized that I leaned forward and shouted, to my father, over the rumble of the train, “Happy New Year!” And my father, being my father, just smiled at me and said “Happy New Year” right back.
Connor: You say the book was a nightmare to write. Do you remember finishing it?
Peter: Vividly. I have a couple of friends who still live in Santa Cruz, Jim Houston and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who are both excellent writers. They are probably best known for Farewell to Manzanar, which is about Jeanne’s experience of the Japanese-American internment camps in World War II. Back then Jim had just finished the manuscript of his second novel, and had given it to me to read. My own writing had not been going well. I was frankly close to giving up on The Last Unicorn again, even though I had a contract for it from Viking by that point, and I knew that if I read Jim’s book I was going to be completely paralyzed. So I put the manuscript up on a shelf and used it to bribe myself into continuing. “You can read this when you’re done, and not a moment before.” I remember finishing the last sentence of the first draft on an unbearably hot night, then coming out of the back bedroom and announcing to my wife and kids “All right, it’s done. I’m finished. I’ll read you the last chapter later, but right now I’m taking a shower.” Then I showered, put on a bathrobe, and immediately picked up Jim’s manuscript.
Connor: After you completed your second draft and polish, and sent The Last Unicorn off to your agent, did you have any worries about how it would be received? After all, Viking had passed on your previous novel, which had certainly been more obviously “literary.” Now you were delivering something quite unusual, especially in the context of publishing circa 1968. Fantasy in the late ‘60s was the province of children’s books and the literary ghetto of science fiction, not the mainstream press. You had also succeeded in your goal of making the book both a fairy tale and a parody of the form, which had to be even more confusing. That was six years before William Goldman’s The Princess Bride pulled off the same trick. Nobody was talking about “metafiction” then—fiction about fiction, fiction playing with the form and making self-referential commentary. In fact, the three books most often credited with officially launching metafiction as a critically-recognized form, instead of the occasional tricksy sport—John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Robert Coover’s The Babysitter, and William H. Gass’s Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife—all came out slightly after The Last Unicorn did.
Peter: None of that ever occurred to me or worried me, perhaps because with A Fine and Private Place I’d already started out with a fantasy that was reviewed as a mainstream book. And Viking didn’t seem to care, to their credit. What I was mainly worrying about was when the second half of the advance money would show up. It’s like Broadway composer Richard Rodgers being asked which came first, the words or the music, and saying immediately “the check.”
Connor: What happened when the book finally came out?
Peter: Not a whole lot. People think it was a bestseller and got rave reviews from the beginning, but that’s not true. The reviews were quite mixed, and at least one that I remember was the great bomb of my career. Front page of the Chicago Tribune Book Review, that was—the reviewer hated everything about The Last Unicorn. That was an interesting experience, because I had always wondered what I would feel like when something that completely negative happened…and in fact I felt nothing at all. It was as though he were reviewing someone else’s work, not mine.
Connor: I’ve read all the reviews from that period. My favorites are the people who had said nasty things about A Fine and Private Place back in 1960, but now downplayed The Last Unicorn by saying things like “Beagle’s newest will never be recognized as the modern classic his first novel was…”
Peter: The moral of that story is summed up in one of the few truly wise things Ernest Hemingway ever said. He told a young writer not to pay any attention to book reviewers, one way or the other, because if you believe them when they tell you you’re good, you will believe them when they tell you that you’re bad.
Connor: Given that the Viking hardcover didn’t sell very well, how do you feel about the fact that a truly mint copy with your signature can now command at least $1,000 on the collector’s market?
Peter: One of the ways my father prepared me to face the world was to instill in me a sense of irony, so mostly I feel a mix of amazement and amusement. And I wish I had one!
Connor: You do. It’s only semi-mint, though, so it only cost me $300 to add it to your archive.
Peter: The thing is, that’s product we’re talking about. That’s a thing, an object. The book is something else than that. It is what it is, it is what it always was, and you have to remember that when I was through with it, I hated it. When I was through with it I thought “I just managed to get to the end, okay, they’ll publish it, maybe there will be some money…but Lord, I don’t ever want to think about this ag
ain.” And people don’t believe that, but it’s so. It took me a year and a half, maybe two years, before I could even look at it properly, to thumb back through it and think “Maybe it’s not as bad as all that.”
Connor: The book might well have vanished and be completely unremembered today, except for what happened in February 1969.
Peter: Yes. That’s when Ballantine Books published it and A Fine and Private Place as the first two titles in their Ballantine Adult Fantasy line of paperbacks. They had lovely covers by Gervasio Gallardo, and being the launch for the line brought them a good deal of attention.
Connor: Even with that boost, the real credit goes to one man.
Peter: As far as I can see, Jim Beauchamp did it all single-handed. He was Ballantine’s West Coast sales rep, and he fell in love with both books, but especially with The Last Unicorn. He pushed it everywhere he went, all over his territory, and if he suddenly called me to ask if I could come down to this or that bookstore and sign copies, or talk with the owner, I went. His faith in the book was so overwhelming, and he put in so much effort, that I really think he made the difference. It caught on and has been selling steadily ever since. For nearly four decades I’ve felt like I owed him big time.
Connor: The next big step in terms of The Last Unicorn’s impact and spread has to be the animated film version, which came out in 1982. How did that happen?
Peter: One day a producer named Michael Chase Walker came into my life, and he wanted to make a movie out of The Last Unicorn. It would have to be animated, of course. In those pre-CGI days there was no possible way to do it in live-action. Michael was a red-haired, blue-eyed hustler—hustling being a good and necessary character trait in a film producer—and we got on very well: I think we amused each other. And he was dogged about The Last Unicorn. He managed to come up with the option payments, and when it came time to buy out the book, he found the money. It wasn’t much by today’s standards, but at that time it was the biggest check I’d ever seen. I didn’t quite know where he was taking the property, or who he was pitching it to, but I’ve dined out since on the story of how he finally confessed to me that he’d made a deal with Rankin-Bass. I was utterly contemptuous of the company. To me they were Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and they’d just done a godawful Return of the King and a Hobbit I didn’t like at all. I actually snapped as straight as you could when sitting in a VW Bug, banging my head on the roof—Michael was driving me to the Burbank Airport at the time—and screamed at him “Rankin and Bass! Why the hell didn’t you just go all the way and sell it to Hanna-Barbera?” And Michael just looked at me with immense sadness and said “They were next.”
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