The Christian Heaven used to be where we went when we died, if we did what we were told. If the Republic of Heaven is here, on this earth, in our lives, then what happens when we die? Is that all? Is that the end of everything for us? That’s hard to accept; for some people it’s the hardest thing of all. Well, our myth must talk about death in terms that are as true as they can be to what we know of the facts, and it must do what the Christian myth did, and provide some sort of hope. The myth must give us a way of accepting death, when it comes, of seeing what it means and accepting it; not shrinking from it with terror, or pretending that it’ll be like the school holidays. We cannot live so; we cannot die so.
We need a myth—we need a story—because it’s no good persuading people to commit themselves to an idea on the grounds that it’s reasonable. We can learn from religion: Christians, for example, have always known the importance of emotional, imaginative engagement. The phrase the leap of faith catches exactly what happens. It’s the leap itself which commits us; what involves the whole heart is the risk. A republic that’s only believed in because it makes more sense or it’s more reasonable than the alternative would be a pallid place indeed, and it wouldn’t last for long. What induces that leap of commitment is an emotional thing—a story. How much effect would the Bible have had for generations and generations if it had just been a collection of laws and logical propositions? What seized the mind and captured the heart were the stories it contains.
So if we are to see what a Republic of Heaven might look like we must look for evidence of it, as I’ve been suggesting, in the realm of stories. And I’ve said before (so I won’t spend too long on it here) that one place we can be certain of finding stories these days is in books that are read by children. One example of the kind of thing I mean is Peter Dickinson’s book The Kin (1998). There’s a myth of our origins which does a lot of what I’ve been suggesting is necessary.
Almost finally, a short warning. This myth I’ve been talking about, and these glimpses of the Republic of Heaven I’ve been trying to point out, are not luxuries. They’re not just a sort of intellectual plaything that jaded people can turn to for half an hour’s amusement. If we’re not deadly serious about the republic, we might remember that there are plenty of other people who are deadly serious about the Kingdom. Of all the dangers that threaten us at the beginning of the third millennium—the degradation of the environment, the increasing undemocratic power of the great corporations, the continuing threats to peace in regions full of decaying nuclear weapons, and so on—one of the biggest dangers of all comes from fundamentalist religion.
Matthew Arnold’s tide of Faith is coming back in, bringing all kinds of monsters with it. From the Christian conservatives in the United States to the Taliban in Afghanistan or the so-called Islamic State—these people are servants of the King, and they want to extend the Kingdom. Those of us who believe in the republic can’t afford to be half-hearted about it, because we have a fight on our hands.
But I’ll end by coming back to the children’s literature which I should have been talking about all the way through. Literature, or…whatever this is, anyway: a nursery rhyme. If the Republic of Heaven were to have an anthem, I can’t think of a better one than this:
Boys and girls come out to play,
The moon doth shine as bright as day.
This is a republic where we live by the imagination. Things are upside down and back to front and inside out, and still all right.
Leave your supper and leave your sleep,
And join your playfellows in the street—
Not in a private playground with security guards where some of us are let in and others are kept out, not in the park that closes its gates before the moon comes out, but in the street, the common place that belongs to everyone.
Come with a whoop or come with a call,
Come with a good will or not at all.
Like Emil, we must be cheerful and not go round with a face like a mourner at a funeral. It’s difficult sometimes, but good will is not a luxury—it’s an absolute necessity. It’s a moral imperative.
Up the ladder and down the wall,
A halfpenny loaf will serve us all;
You find milk, and I’ll find flour,
And we’ll have a pudding in half an hour.
We can do it. That’s the way it happens in the Republic of Heaven; we provide for ourselves. We’ll have a pudding, and a good nourishing one it’ll be too; milk and flour are full of goodness. And then we can play together in the bright moonlight till we all fall asleep.
THIS LECTURE WAS DELIVERED IN MARCH 2000. A VERSION OF IT APPEARED IN THE HORN BOOK, 1 NOVEMBER 2001.
The case of William Mayne raises the same sort of questions as the career of Eric Gill. Can we enjoy in any way at all the art or literature produced by a man who exploited children in a sexual way? I think we can, but our experience of it will be shadowed and complicated. Once we know about it, we can’t ignore it and we shouldn’t forget it. It’s one of the things we know.
Acknowledgements
BY THE AUTHOR
I am grateful to all the organisations that invited me to speak to them, and thus sponsored the pieces in this collection that were given as lectures or talks, and to the editors of the newspapers, journals and books where some of the other pieces were first published. My particular thanks go to David Fickling, whose generous insistence that it would be worth publishing them again overcame my idleness and reluctance to lift a finger and search them out, and especially to Simon Mason, whose skill, tact and industry vastly improved the raw material I found for him—some of it very raw indeed. What he did is a model of good and unobtrusive editing at its very best. My most long-standing gratitude goes to my readers, and to the publishers, booksellers, librarians and teachers who have brought my books to them over the years.
BY THE EDITOR
All books are collaborative. This book exists because of cover and interior design by Laurence Denmark of Webb and Webb, an original concept by Ness Wood, cover art by John Lawrence, copyediting by Sue Cook, proofreading by Julia Bruce, picture permissions arranged by Jane Smith, text permissions arranged by Connie Robertson, index by Christine Shuttleworth, additional image scanning and balancing by Paul Duffield, production and design management by Alison Gadsby and production control by Rachel Woodforde. Special thanks go to Anthony Hinton, who, as the in-house editor, has liaised with all the above, solving problems along the way, and has kept the book to its schedule with wonderful efficiency. David Fickling has been the book’s guiding spirit from the beginning. But, above all, my thanks go to Philip for the essays themselves, and for the opportunity to work with him on them, a hugely enjoyable and stimulating experience.
Permissions
We are very grateful to all of Philip Pullman’s publishers, including but not limited to Scholastic, Penguin Random House, Canongate, and Oxford University Press for their kind permission to reproduce extracts from his own work, both text and images, within the essays in this collection.
* * *
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We are also grateful to the following for their kind permission to reproduce copyright material used within these essays:
Magic Carpets
Leon Garfield: extract from The Pleasure Garden (Kestrel, 1976), used by permission of the Estate of Leon Garfield c/o Johnson & Alcock Ltd.
The Writing of Stories
Robert Frost: lines from “The Road Not Taken” from The Collected Poems of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem (Vintage, 2013), used by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
Mark Turner: extract from “Image Schemas” in The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (OUP, 1998), used by permission of Oxford University Press.
P. G. Wodehouse: extract from Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen (Barrie & Jenkins, 1974), copyright © P. G. Wodehou
se 1974, used by permission of the Estate of P. G. Wodehouse c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.
Heinrich von Kleist
Heinrich von Kleist: extract from “On the Marionette Theatre” from Hand to Mouth and Other Essays, introduced and translated by Idris Parry (Carcanet, 1981), used by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
Paradise Lost
Michael Burgesse after John Baptist Medina, for Book XII of Paradise Lost—Image provided by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge.
The Origin of the Universe
George Orwell: extract from Animal Farm (Penguin Classics, 2000) copyright © George Orwell 1945, used by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell, c/o A M Heath & Co. Ltd.
The Path Through the Wood
Mulefa Visualization © Eric Dubois
Robert Frost: lines from “The Road Not Taken” from The Collected Poems of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem (Vintage, 2013), used by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
Children’s Literature Without Borders
Richmal Crompton: extract from Still William, Book 5 in the William series (Macmillan Children’s Books, 2016), copyright © Richmal Crompton 1925, used by permission of United Agents LLP on behalf of Catherine Massey and Edward Ashbee.
Let’s Write It in Red
Peter Bogdanovich (ed.): Who the Devil Made It? (Knopf, 1997), copyright © 1997 by Ivy Moon Company, extracts of conversations with Allan Dwan, Fritz Lang and Howard Hawks used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Leon Garfield: extract from The Pleasure Garden (Kestrel, 1976), used by permission of the Estate of Leon Garfield c/o Johnson & Alcock Ltd.
Janni Howker: extract from The Nature of the Beast (Walker, 1996), copyright © Janni Howker 1985, used by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ, www.walker.co.uk.
Heinrich von Kleist: extract from “On the Marionette Theatre” from Hand to Mouth and Other Essays, introduced and translated by Idris Parry (Carcanet, 1981), used by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
Charles Rosen: extracts from “The Great Inventor,” a review of Bach and the Patterns of Invention by Laurence Dreyfus, The New York Review of Books, 9 Oct 1997, used by permission of The New York Review of Books.
Wallace Stevens: lines from “The Name of the Jar” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Faber, 2006), used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
Epics
Jane Smiley: extract from Preface to The Sagas of Icelanders (Penguin, 2001), Preface copyright © Jane Smiley 2000, used by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
As Clear as Water
James Merrill: extract from “The Book of Ephraim” from The Changing Light at Sandover: A Poem (Atheneum, 1980), copyright © 1980, 1982 by James Merrill, used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet—Alamy/Archivart/Édouard Manet/Bar at Folie-Bergère 1882. (Also refers to the image in the colour section.)
“And When Did You Last See Your Father?” by William Frederick Yeames—And When Did You Last See Your Father? (Colour litho), Yeames, William Frederick (1835–1918) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images. (Also refers to the image in the colour section.)
Wallace Stevens: lines from “The Man with the Blue Guitar” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Faber, 2006), used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
Poco a Poco
The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer—Johannes Vermeer/Milkmaid 1657–1658/Google Art Project/Rijksmuseum.
Cartoon for the New Yorker by Wallace Morgan—Wallace Morgan The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank.
Christmas Carollers by Charles Addams—1946 Charles Addams, Renewed 1973 with permission Tee and Charles Addams Foundation.
A sequence of photographs showing movement by Eadweard Muybridge—Getty/ Eadweard Muybridge.
Belshazzar’s Feast by Rembrandt—Belshazzar’s Feast c.1636–38 (oil on canvas), Rembrandt Harmensz. Van Rijn (1606–69) / National Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images. (Also refers to the image in the colour section.)
A Scene from The Forcibly Bewitched by Francisco Goya—Alamy/Artepics/Francisco de Goya, The Bewitched Man, 1798.
The Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca—Alamy/FineArt/ Piero della Francesca/ Baptism of Christ, 1450. (Also refers to the image in the colour section.)
Embleme for the Month of May by George Wither—Housed at: Internet Archive/University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/Digital Copy: No Additional Rights.
Allegory of Grammar by Laurent de La Hyre—Alamy/Painting/ Laurent De la Hyre/ Allegorical Figure of Grammar, 1650.
La Source by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres—The Source, 1856 (oil on canvas), Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique (1780–1867) / Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images.
Detail of The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer—Johannes Vermeer/Milkmaid, 1657–1658/ Google Art Project/ Rijksmuseum.
T. S. Eliot: lines from “The Waste Land,” Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (Faber, 1974), used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
The Classical Tone
Original UK edition cover of Tom’s Midnight Garden—Philippa Pearce/ By permission of Oxford University Press.
T. S. Eliot: lines from “Four Quartets: Burnt Norton,” Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (Faber, 1974), used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
Philippa Pearce: extracts from Tom’s Midnight Garden (OUP, 2000), copyright © Oxford University Press 1958, used by permission of Oxford University Press.
Reading in the Borderland
The Convalescent by Gwen John—The Precious Book, c. 1916–1926 (oil on canvas laid on panel), John, Gwen (1876–1939)/Private Collection/Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images. (Also refers to the image in the colour section.)
A Man Reading in the Garden by Honoré-Victorin Daumier—The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource/Scala/Honoré-Victorin Daumier, 1866.
The Living Room by Balthus—Balthus, Le salon (The Living Room), 1942, oil on canvas, Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence, 114.8x146.9 cm.
Learning to Read and Write by Deng Shu—Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford/Deng Shu.
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich—Alamy/Pictorial Press Ltd/Caspar David Friedrich, 1818.
Cover of The Pleasure Garden, illustration by Fritz Wegner—Viking Press/Penguin Random House/Leon Garfield, 1976. (Also refers to the image in the colour section.)
Illustration from The Picts and the Martyrs by Arthur Ransome—From “The Picts & the Martyrs: Not Welcome at All,” first published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd and in the United States by permission of David R. Godine Inc. ©Arthur Ransome, 1943.
Illustration from The Exploits of Moominpappa by Tove Jansson—©Tove Jansson, 1968, Moomin Characters™.
Illustration by Richard Kennedy for A Hundred Million Francs—Penguin Random House by Paul Berna/Illustration by Richard Kennedy c/o daughter Rachel Ansari.
Illustration from the original French edition of Le Cheval Sans Tête (The Horse Without a Head)—Bodley Head/Illustrator Pierre Dehay/Penguin Random House.
Illustration from The Little Grey Men by “B.B.”—David Higham/B.B. (Denys Watkins-Pitchford)/Oxford University Press.
Rupert Bows to the King from Rupert by Alfred Bestall—Rupert Bear/ Alfred Bestall/Classic media now NBC Universal/DreamWorks group & Express Newspapers. (Also refers to the image in the colour
section.)
Illustration by Thomas Henry for William Again—William Again/ Richmal Crompton /Illustration by Thomas Henry/ Published by George Newnes Ltd.
“Pony Hütchen went from one to the other pouring out delicious hot chocolate” by Walter Trier—Atrium Verlag, Zürich 1935/Walter Trier.
“The newspaper men asked Emil a great number of questions” by Walter Trier—Atrium Verlag, Zürich 1935/Walter Trier.
Lyra by Peter Bailey for the Folio Society—Illustration from The Folio Society edition of Northern Lights/His Dark Materials © Peter Bailey 2008 www.foliosociety.com.
Lyra making sense of the alethiometer by Peter Bailey for the Folio Society—Illustration from The Folio Society edition of Northern Lights/His Dark Materials © Peter Bailey 2008 www.foliosociety.com.
Leon Garfield: extract from The Pleasure Garden (Kestrel, 1976), used by permission of the Estate of Leon Garfield c/o Johnson & Alcock Ltd.
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