“Don’t tell me this is the way it’s got to be!” she shouted. “Tell me there’s more to my life than this book!”
The magician folded his hands over his chest, unmoved. If to be admitted I had to accept the magician’s version of my life, then I would go back the way I came. But now I saw that the front door had vanished and the only door open to me led into the garden itself. The magician turned his back on me for an instant, and I jumped up and fled through the door.
The garden was as formal as that in my aunt’s picture: a maze of hedges, beds of herbs, long walks under wisteria arbors. But hers was empty and this one was full of people. I knew from their clothes that some had come here a long time ago. Those old men in Greek togas—how many hundreds of years had they wandered these paths? That handsome woman in flowered brocade skirts and a farthingale—what was she looking for? Weren’t we all looking for the same thing, the way out?
Far behind me I could hear the magician beating down bowers and running through rosebeds, shouting, “You have not been admitted! You have not been admitted!” Suddenly I spied two familiar figures ahead of me, Martin and Alice Provensen, who in our waking lives had just finished the illustrations for our book A Visit to William Blake’s Inn.
“If we don’t hurry, the magician will catch us,” I said.
“If we don’t look back,” said Alice, “the magician won’t catch us.”
A high, smooth wall let us know we had reached the back boundary of the garden; reason has its limits. Against the wall leaned an old ladder, which was not even suitable for apple picking; the rungs were broken.
“Let’s put our feet where the rungs were,” suggested Martin.
My common sense said, What nonsense! But my uncommon sense whispered, If a fool persists——
One by one, under our feet, the rungs healed themselves and grew whole enough to hold us. Now we stood on top of the wall. Facing us was an angel so tall that we brushed the hem of its gown like grasshoppers.
“You are free,” said the angel. It pointed over trees and fields, to the far-off world-town we’d started from, sparkling on the horizon. Sunlight slanted from its sleeve, touched down in the world-town. On that broad road of sunlight we slid like children playing, all the way back to the beginning.
* Attery: Venomous, poisonous. (C.E.D.)
12
The Rutabaga Lamp: The Reading and Writing of Fairy Tales
Before I learned to read, I thought all people were divided into two sorts: explorers and dreamers. I had a clear image in my mind of both, and I still remember the source of that image. Two weeks before Christmas, my Sunday school teacher gave us little canisters in which we were to put money for the poor. Painted on these curious banks were the three wise men. I supposed it was for these three indigents that we were saving, and I thought it very odd that men so wise should be reduced to taking alms from children.
But it was easy to see why they were poor. They had spent all their money on expensive clothes, gifts, and travel. They had, I was sure, prudent wives waiting for them at home in leaf-brown hoods and homespun gowns, three wise women who would never get their pictures on banks, because, like the wise women in fairy tales, they would never travel to the far corners of the earth and bring back tales of adventure. The wise women of the fairy tales are not tourists. They travel invisible roads. Their journeys are inward: their destinations belong to the uncharted territory of dreams. Because these places are not found on maps, the stories about them are called fantasies. I imagined that wise men wrote geographies and histories of real places. They were the explorers. Wise women wrote fantasies and fairy tales. They were the dreamers.
The more I read, the more I understood that the best writers are both explorers and dreamers. And nowhere is this truer than in the stories we call fairy tales. I have always thought of fairy tales as one of the highest forms of truth, like parables, or the koan which, repeated and taken to heart, help Zen monks along the road to enlightenment. Their truth is hidden, and therein lies their power.
I remember my first encounter with this sort of truth. Once upon a time, if I had been asked to describe an egg, I would have said “An egg is hard and smooth and fragile on the outside, but inside you will find a yellow yolk and a white, which isn’t white but a sort of pale slippery yellow.” Hard. Smooth. Fragile. Yellow. White. The egg has vanished. I have covered it with labels. I can see it no longer and can give you no further account of it.
What shattered these labels for me was a riddle. The egg was the answer, yet knowing the answer did not keep me from enjoying the riddle:
In marble walls as white as milk,
Lined with a skin as soft as silk,
Within a fountain crystal-clear,
A golden apple doth appear.
No doors there are to this stronghold,
Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.1
When I first heard riddles, I soon realized that I did not need to know the answer to enjoy the riddle. Indeed, not until I grew up did I learn that one of my favorite poems was a riddle for snow:
White bird featherless
Flew from paradise,
Pitched on the castle wall;
Along came Lord Landless,
Took it up handless,
And rode away
to the King’s white hall.2
But now I hear somebody ask, “What have riddles to do with fairy tales? Where are the fairies, the wizards, the witches?” To answer, I must borrow a definition of fairy tales from Tolkien, who takes pains to distinguish between fairy, meaning elf, and fäerie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. “Fäerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic,” he explains. “And though it keeps elves, dragons, and trolls, it also holds the sun and moon, the earth and sea, and ourselves, when we are enchanted. A fairy story, says Tolkien, is “one which touches on or uses Fäerie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy.”3
Though children read fairy tales, fairy tales are not only for children. The brothers Grimm took their tales from German peasant women who took them from each other. A hundred years before the publication of those tales, Charles Perrault, a French academician at the court of Louis XIV, published—under his son’s name—Tales of my Mother Goose. The frontispiece to the 1697 edition shows an old woman warming herself at the hearth and telling stories to a young child. Who is this old woman? The child’s grandmother? A peasant nurse? “If she were a peasant Nanny, rather than a blood grandmother, she must have remained forever a stranger to everyone in the household but the children …,” suggests one critic. “No wonder such old women appear in their own tales as creatures from another world …”4
Perrault’s book set the women at court writing fairy tales, not only for children, but for each other, to be read in the salons. Madame de Sévigné mentions in a letter that she spent the evening listening to fairy tales with great pleasure.5 “If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults,” says Tolkien, who did not develop a taste for fairy tales until after he was grown up. “They will, of course, put more in and get more out than children can.”6
Certainly many of the literary fairy tales published in Europe during the nineteenth century are for adults. Both Hans Christian Andersen and George MacDonald wrote fairy tales for adults as well as for children. Charles Dickens adds the subtitle, “A fairy tale of home” to his adult story, “The Cricket on the Hearth.” E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Golden Flower Pot” is subtitled “A Fairy Tale of Our Time,” yet the only tale by Hoffman most children know today is “Nutcracker and the King of Mice” and few know it except as a ballet. And in our own time, who reads James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold? Children or their parents? Or both?
Since I have always assumed that fairy tales are as necessary to both children and adults as dictionaries, I was much surprised to receive a letter from a former student at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, asking
if the fairy tale was dead. She writes as follows:
I have been informed that what I have to offer the world is unpublishable. Blanket statement to cover all fairy tales. Told in this case by an agency (paid in cold hard cash) who advertises that they solicit picture book manuscripts.… If it is true that fairy tales … are unpublishable, then I had better know it now. And give the whole thing up.
That’s the way my mind runs—to gnomes and fairies, witches and warlocks, with side trips to the ancient gods.… It has occurred to me that if the agency is right, I am as extinct as the dodo.… Please, please tell me, is “Little Red Riding Hood” all there is?
The best way to answer her question, I thought (for I did not know her work), was to ask Barbara Lucas, who was then editor of children’s books at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the publisher of two of my favorite fantasies for children, The Little Prince and Mary Poppins. And very soon I realized how different an editor’s point of view is from a writer’s.
“Fantasy represents the worst of several thousand manuscripts we get a year,” she told me. “People put some consideration into writing an adult book, but they’ll sit down and write a children’s book on a rainy afternoon. They think writing for children is easy. It’s the hardest thing in the world.”
Why, I wanted to know, do so many of these manuscripts fail?
“Fantasy is very structured,” she answered. “You introduce your main character. You show who the leading characters are and what they want to achieve. You make your promises and you follow through. You’ve got to have your audience believe that those characters are never going to get what they want. And then, either they get what they want, or they get what turns out to be better.”
That sounded to me like good advice for the writer of realistic fiction. Surely there were problems peculiar to fantasy.
“Most people don’t understand fantasy,” said Barbara. “They think it is an exercise for stream-of-consciousness. They confuse two things: fantasy and to fanatisize. Fantasy has to be rooted in logical, familiar things. First you have to get your reader comfortable. Along the journey you’ve got to have things connect, to make the journey meaningful. Otherwise there’s no point of reference.”
“Do you think more adults than children read fantasy?” I asked, remembering how many of my favorite writers for adults have tried their hand at fairy tales.
“Adults love fantasy,” answered Barbara. “They help to keep it alive. Most children are TV bred. Watership Down was submitted as a children’s book and sent upstairs. If we want to get both markets for a book, we market it as an adult book and let it filter down. If we market it as a children’s book, adults won’t buy it.”
And what advice did she have for the student from Bread Loaf?
“She should study the market,” replied Barbara.
Market? I had a lunatic image of bookshelves lined with carrots and cauliflowers. I thought of rainbows fading into ticker tape, of stocks rising and falling on the invisible backs of gnomes. When I write a book, I never think of the market for it. But though our views differed, Barbara and I agreed on one thing: the more fairy tales you’ve read, the more skill you bring to writing your own. The best writers of fairy tales have always had a deep knowledge of the stories handed down by our ancestors, like a thread binding us to some innocent part of ourselves that might otherwise be lost.
I reread the letter. “Is ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ all there is?” How could I answer this writer? Should I tell her to read Perrault’s Tales of My Mother Goose, in which “Little Red Riding Hood” was first published? Would it not be better to ask, Why has Little Red Riding Hood endured so long? What in that simple story moved Charles Dickens to confess that Little Red Riding Hood “was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.”7
Perrault’s stories are witty and elegant versions of traditional fairy tales. Over and over we recognize the traditional motifs: the quest, the animals who offer advice, the witch who hurts the hero, the wise woman who helps him. When my students use these motifs, they often apologize for their stories. A story can’t be good, they fear, if it is not original. They forget that writing, like many other things, can be both original, and traditional. When I go to a wedding, I do not judge the occasion a paltry affair because the bride walked down the aisle on her father’s arm in the last wedding I attended, and therefore the wedding is not original.
If the peasant grandmother who first told Little Red Riding Hood—and Little Red Riding Hood herself has many different names—could listen to a few of the stories written by the writers who claim they are writing fairy tales, how astonished she would be! First of all, she would see no connection between her art and those fanciful failures of which Andrew Lang writes, “they always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and appleblossoms.… These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach and succeed. At the end, the little boy or girl wakes up and finds that he has been dreaming.”8 Who knows better than our peasant grandmother that fairy tales are moral but not moralistic, instructive but not didactic? At some of our best-known fairy tales she would shake her head in bewilderment and murmur, “How things have changed! In my time, the fairies never came to christenings. Why, you could frighten them off with the Lord’s prayer! Tell, me, do people still turn into beasts and beasts into people? Are there still ghosts and spirits and wishing caps? And do you still tell stories of kings and queens and princesses? And have you made these things your own, as I made them mine when I told my stories?”
To make them your own; that is the difference between the archetype and the stereotype in fairy tales. The stereotype starts and ends in abstraction. Of the stereotype we say, “I’ve seen that before” and we tire of it. But of the archetype we say, “Where have I seen you before? Was it in a dream we met?” The archetype begins in experience. Before it becomes impersonal, it is intensely personal. And this transformation, from the personal to the impersonal, from the particular grandmother to the archetypal wise woman, involves as much waiting as willing.
It is a long journey from what we know because we’ve lived it to what we know because we’ve invented it. I made that journey backward, from story to source, when I asked my husband to read the manuscript of a fantasy novel for children, Uncle Terrible.* He read in silence until he met a character whom all the animals in the world called Mother. At her waist she wears the cord of life and the cord of death, and every morning she sings the song of strong knots to keep them together. She runs an inn for animals under a cemetery. Seen in the right light—or the right dark—the shadows cast by the gravestones are her windows:
The windows, which kept the odd shape of the stones themselves, looked right down into Mother’s house. The shadow of an angel gave Anatole a clear view of the living room.… The lamp on the great round table was carved from a rutabaga, and the oil in the lamp threw such an amber light on the floor that the rushes scattered there seemed washed in honey.
And here is Mother herself:
A giant of a woman was striding toward them. The face that smiled out of her sunbonnet was as lumpy and plain as a potato. She wore corn shucks gathered into a gown, over which shimmered an apron of onion skins. Through her bonnet poked antlers that branched out like a tree, and at the end of every branch danced a flame, which lit the ground before her. She was carrying a laundry basket, and every now and then she threw out a handful of snowdrops which vanished as soon as they touched the ground. A thin glaze of frost sparkled in their place.
My husband put down the manuscript.
“Where,” he said, “did you find her?”
I did not know. Had I found her in fairy tales? I have long loved the character of the wise woman in the old stories. Yet my wise woman was not borrowed from these. She took her shape from my work and my wishes. I have gathered corn shucks into dolls, toted laundry baskets, scattered snowdrops, and peeled onion
s and longed for a gown such as onions wear, of some shiny pale gold silk, thinly striped with green. But had I found her or had she found me?
More miraculous than any fairy tale is the significance of the detail that can start a story going. Henry James recalls a dinner party in which the lady beside him made “one of those allusions, that I have always found myself recognizing on the spot as ‘germs.’ The germ, wherever gathered, has ever been for me the germ of a ‘story,’ and most of the stories straining to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as minute and wind-blown as that casual hint … dropped unwillingly by my neighbor.”9
The germ from which my wise woman grew was the lamp, carved long ago from a rutabaga by my immigrant ancestors to light their first home in the new world. I never saw the lamp. But I heard about it from a great-uncle, who, after retiring from his job as a salesman in St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote a family history, which he published at his own expense. Uncle Oscar did not care for fairy tales. Every year I gave him the same book for Christmas: the updated edition of the World Almanac. To converse with my uncle was to learn the number of deaths caused by tidal waves since 1807 or who won the championship in softball for the slow pitch for any given year. He called his book The Tales of Two Eyes and Ears for Seventy Years, and in his preface he announced that he would tell the truth and nothing but the truth. “This book relates to incidents that I have seen, or that were told to me in my boyhood days,” he wrote. “The names of characters, dates, and locations are true to the best of my knowledge.”
The rutabaga lamp lit a small corner of the chapter called “Honeymoon trip from Sweden to America by Mr. John Martinson, born in Fagelsjo, Helsingland 1842 and Miss Anna Halverson, bom in Sveg, Jamtland 1842.” It unfolds the story of how a young man and his bride, both twenty-five years old, sail from Sweden to New York; of how Mr. and Mrs. Martinson lose their name because too many Swedes named Martinson have already arrived; of how they receive new names and how they leave the immigration sheds as Mr. and Mrs. John Hedlund; of how they make their way by train and by riverboat to St. Cloud, Minnesota, which, says my uncle, “was the end of the line.”
Angel in the Parlor Page 24