Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Mori, the protagonist and narrator of the novel, has always seen and known the fairies. Though she’d like them to be Tolkien’s Elves, they aren’t gracious and powerful, but frustrated, marginal, somehow diminished. Some of them are probably ghosts. They are untamed, uncivilized, and unpredictable. They speak Welsh, mostly. They don’t answer to any name, but if asked properly they can grant wishes. They are like fragments of the Wild, surviving only where a trace of woodland survives, haunting whatever remains of the unhuman—old parks, preindustrial untilled places, forgotten roads out past the edges of towns and farms.

  Among Others does not, however, make the trite equation of Wilderness with Magic, for several quite commonplace-seeming human beings in the story also have supernatural powers. The knowledge of how to ask the fairies to grant a wish is one kind of magic, but there are others, some much nastier.

  Bringing supernatural events into ordinary modern life—in this case, Oswestry in 1979—isn’t an easy business for a novelist. The realists left us with the notion that “fantasy” is acceptable only when presented as about or for children. But there’s nothing inherently childish about the overlapping of the natural with the supernatural, and many novels written for adults even in the heyday of realism involve that overlap. The first that came to my mind was the subtle and charming Lady into Fox. In David Garnett’s story, as in many others, the supernatural element is simply there, not explained, not discussed—a good aesthetic ploy, for if it is discussed, the author has to tackle both plausibility and causality head on.

  Most fantasies evade both these great and very challenging opportunities to make the impossible plausible, to give magic accountability in a realistic setting and moral and emotional weight in a modern novel. Jo Walton accepts the double challenge and meets it with courage and skill. She shows how easily the effects of a magic spell can be seen and explained away as perfectly natural, and how every action that brings about real change must be paid for—a reciprocity as absolute in the world of Three Wishes as it is in the world of Newton’s Third Law.

  The narrative is the diary of fifteen-year-old Mori, but Mori as an adult is implicitly present, and this stereoptical vision greatly enriches the book. Mori writes with style and reads obsessively, mostly science fiction. Some readers of the novel will be floored by her critical comments, enthusiastic or disapproving, about authors they may never have heard of. This strikes me as only fair; since we no longer have a common literary culture many readers are floored by references to classical authors they’ve never been introduced to. Anyhow, given the chance, Mori devours Plato as eagerly as she does Heinlein or Zelazny. Her critical notes, delivered with the energetic conviction of her age, are a delight. I was glad to learn that T. S. Eliot is brill.

  Having suffered a lot of major damage, physical and psychic, Mori sees her reading as “compensatory.” In fact, books give her passion and her fierce intelligence their only access to larger realities of art and thought. Books are almost enough to get her through separation from everyone she has loved, the pain of a smashed pelvis, the suffocating pettiness of the girls’ boarding school that her three very respectable and very strange aunts have sent her to, and the uncanny attacks of an insane witch, her mother. But even reading fails her at last, and in search of some companionship, some human warmth in her life, she resorts to working magic.

  Among Others is a funny, thoughtful, acute, and absorbing story all through, but in the magic bits it is more than that. When Mori realises that perhaps her new friends did not choose to offer her friendship but were forced to do so by the spell she laid upon them, her moral anguish is that of anyone who honestly faces the responsibility of power; and it is not soon or easily resolved. The heart of the book is a scene in the Welsh hills where Mori obeys the fairies’ command to help the souls of the dead go into the darkness on All Souls Eve. In the crash that crippled Mori, her twin sister was killed, and the sister’s soul comes to the gate of darkness now and clings and clutches and will not let Mori let her go. In this passage, haunting in its reticence and its drama, all the anguish of loss and need gathers almost intolerably, and as in some old ballads the quiet, factual narration deepens the inexplicable experience, making strangeness real.

  Jeanette Winterson: The Stone Gods

  2007

  It’s odd to find characters in a science-fiction novel repeatedly announcing that they hate science fiction. I can only suppose that Jeanette Winterson is trying to keep her credits as a “literary” writer even as she openly commits genre. Surely she’s noticed that everybody is writing science fiction now? Formerly deep-dyed realists are producing novels so full of the tropes and fixtures and plot lines of science fiction that only the snarling tricephalic dogs who guard the Canon of Literature can tell the difference. I certainly can’t. Why bother? I am bothered, though, by the curious ingratitude of authors who exploit a common fund of imagery while pretending to have nothing to do with the fellow authors who created it and left it open to all who want to use it. A little return generosity would hardly come amiss.

  The Stone Gods opens rather unfortunately with such meaningless flourishes as the “yatto-gram” and some fancy writing—“Eggs, pale-blue-shelled, each the weight of a breaking universe.” Most of that gets done with early on, and Winterson settles into telling her story, which is complex, interesting, and doom-laden. There is an excess at times of the device known to science-fiction writers as “As you know, Captain . . .” Realistic fiction, dealing with the familiar, seldom needs such a device, but imaginative fiction may have to explain what a hobbit or a light-year or a limbic pathway is; and so we get dialogue beginning, “Oh, Spike, you know the theory,” followed by a lecture on the theory. But even in the lectures Winterson’s tone is lively. Her wit varies from flashy to flashing, her highly mannered, crackling dialogue moves things right along, the surface of her tale scintillates. Underneath it, as in every fable telling us that the future will be much worse than we thought, things are deadly serious.

  “What is it about?”

  “A repeating world.”

  So the narrator Billie Crusoe tells us, talking about a book she’s picked up in the Tube, called The Stone Gods. So, yes, we are doing metafiction. And beyond that, it’s hard to discuss the story without entirely giving away the central conceit, which Winterson develops teasingly, gradually. Delayed revelation is an essential effect in the book, and I don’t want to spoil it. But since there are some apparently arbitrary initial confusions, I want to assure other readers that it does all add up. We will come to see the connections. We will understand why, from the interplanetary cataclysms of the first section, we are shifted so abruptly to the visit of Captain Cook’s ship to Easter Island, and from that taken suddenly to a near-future London, and also why certain characters have the same names though they don’t inhabit the same space-time.

  Some of these significantly hidden connections are made with truly charming inventiveness. In the first section, the reduction of the robot Spike to a mere head is grotesquely sad; in the last section, Spike’s existence as a mere head that doesn’t have its body is grotesquely funny, particularly when Spike succeeds, as I think no other detached head has, in having sex. And when Billie Crusoe finally finds her Man Friday, the ironic comedy is fine.

  At times Winterson seems to think poetical invention excuses fictional implausibility or incoherence. A farmhouse, with hearth fire, beside a willow-hung river complete with iris and moorhens, could not possibly exist in the terminally exhausted world of the first section. But since this image of the farm is essential to the book, it is essential that we be able to believe in it.

  Bursts of emotion may be forgivable, given the dire events recounted and predicted, but they may also be overwrought. I felt this particularly in the Easter Island section, the central section and hinge point of the book. The history of that island and its people, as it has been pieced together in recent years, is in itself so appalling, and so appallingly apt an image of human misuse
of our world, that it needs no heightening to make it hit home. But here it is all mixed up with a love story which is asked to carry far too much weight. Sentimentality, the product of a gap between the emotionality of the writing and the emotion actually roused in the reader, is very much a matter of the reader’s sensibility; to me, both the love stories in the book are distressingly sentimental.

  Still, despite the gaspy bits, the purple bits, and the lectures, The Stone Gods is a vivid cautionary tale—or, more precisely, a keen lament for our irremediably incautious species.

  Stefan Zweig: The Post Office Girl

  2009

  Artists work so hard, expending themselves with such unselfregarding energy, that it seems unfair to demand of them that they also be sick. But the nineteenth-century notion that genius is illness laid the onus of malaise on artists, particularly writers and composers. Before long, if you didn’t poison your teenage brain with absinthe or withdraw to a cork-lined room, you were expected at least to indulge in alienation, alcoholism, bullfights, or suicide. German and Austrian artists started with an unfair advantage, in that their whole society was fairly toxic. Mahler, Richard Strauss, Thomas Mann, even Rilke: men of immense talent immersed in a cultural neuroticism, a wooing of perversity, disease, and death. Now, at this distance, their work appears stronger as it yields less to the mystique of hypersensitivity, ceases to swoon over the sick hero-self, and reports with sober clarity on their keen perceptions of a world out of balance. Mann’s story “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” the tiniest of household dramas, catches an entire historical moment in a few vivid, tender pages. On a larger scale, with a darker palette but comparable emotional power and control, Stefan Zweig’s novel The Post Office Girl tells us a dark fairy tale of Austria in 1926.

  The book is an anomaly in Zweig’s work. His fame was based on highly “psychological” biographies and to a lesser extent on novels written in a high-strung, rather overwrought style. The Post Office Girl was not published, perhaps not finished, during his lifetime. Evidently he wrote most of it in the thirties, took the manuscript with him when he fled Nazism to Brazil, and was perhaps still working on it there before he killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife in 1942. Forty years later it was published in German, and now, thirty years after that, in English.

  There is nothing dated about it. It strikes no self-conscious poses; the language is straightforward, precise, delicate, and powerful. The flow of the story, now lingering, now fast and lively, is under perfect control. A postmodern reader expecting linear exposition and descriptive passages to lead to “old-fashioned” resolution is in for a shock. Perhaps because the book is a work in progress, perhaps because Zweig’s conception of it was essentially ambiguous, there is no closure at all. The moral desolation of the novel is unsparing, accurate, and absolute. It is far beyond cynicism. It is as irrational and unanswerable as Dostoyevsky.

  The story begins in a dreary Austrian village, where Christine, whose bourgeois family fell into poverty during the First World War, barely supports her sick mother through her soulless job in the post office. Suddenly comes a telegram from the aunt who went to America before the war—and Christine is transported to the magical world of a luxury hotel in the Alps, where wishes she never knew she had are granted before she makes them. This long section of the book is marvelously written, bright as mountain air, vivid with delight. But the delight begins to be excessive, verges on hysteria. And so the reversal comes—again, wonderfully told, unforgettably real. Back down into the ashes, Cinderella.

  And there she meets her Prince, Ferdinand, a bitter, bad-luck veteran of a lost war and a Siberian prison camp. Where can these two make a life together or find a life worth living?

  Christine’s world consists of irreconcilable extremes—hopeless need, obscene wealth—and she, wildly volatile and helplessly impressionable, is tossed between these extremes with no chance of establishing selfhood. The villagers, even the kind, ugly schoolteacher who adores her, are hopelessly coarse, cowardly, and humdrum; loathing them, she behaves as they do. In the Alpine hotel, the wealthy guests live solely for the immediate gratification of physical pleasure; adoring them, she learns within a day to behave as they do. There is no middle way in her world. There is no middle class. What Lao Tzu called “the baggage wagon” is simply not there. Nobody has a profession, they merely scrabble after money. Nobody looks beyond self or has the faintest spiritual striving or intellectual interest. All that, it seems, was burned away by the war and the dreadful postwar years of inflation and famine. Christine exists in an unspeakable poverty of mind and spirit.

  Is this deprivation, this absence, what made Hitler possible: the void that Nazism filled? Missing from Christine’s world is the immense and apparently unremarkable middle element of life, the moderation of the middle class, whose ethical standards she follows by rote, but without any standard of intellectual or spiritual honesty to support the muddled, ordinary decency that adolescents rage at, sophisticates sneer at, saints surpass, and warriors, if they can, destroy.

  The ultimate goal of war is to make slaves. Ferdinand the ex-soldier/ex-prisoner knows that. He knows he has been not only permanently damaged but permanently enslaved. At the end of the story he plans a desperate effort with Christine to escape the bondage they both live in. But at what cost? Perhaps they can buy justice, but can they steal freedom? What I see in their future, if they have any—and I don’t want to see it, because after all Christine is so vulnerable, so pitiable, so likable—is the two of them standing wide-eyed and enthusiastic amid vast massed crowds, screaming Heil, Heil, Heil. But that is only what I see. What you may see, the author of this beautiful, risk-taking novel leaves up to you.The Hope of Rabbits: A Journal of a Writer’s Week

  Hedgebrook is a writers’ retreat with a difference: it accepts only women. As Gloria Steinem said of it, it’s not a retreat, it’s an advance.

  Gender segregation, like any segregation, is open to question as to its motives. I attended a women’s college that was embedded like a seed pearl in a gigantic male oyster. I taught at Mills and Bennington, and many times at the great writing workshop The Flight of the Mind, and I attended or taught at many mixed-gender schools and workshops. My judgment is based on experience. I hold it self-evident that so long as we live in a man’s world, as we still do, women have a right to create enclaves of learning or work where, instead of obeying or imitating what men do and want, women can shape what they do, how they do it, and why they do it, in their own way and on their own terms. No enclave is the whole reality, no exclusivity is entirely rightful, but when a great injustice prevails, any opportunity of counteracting it, undoing it even temporarily, is justified. Intellect and art have been so wholly owned by men, and that ownership so fiercely maintained, that no woman can assume society will simply grant her a rightful share in them. Many women still find it difficult, even frightening, to name themselves thinkers, makers, to say I am a scholar, a scientist, an artist. A place where such fear has no place, and a period of time given purely to doing one’s own work, is for many men a perfectly reasonable expectation, for many women an astounding, once-in-a-lifetime gift.

  The six cottages of Hedgebrook, in a beautiful farm-and-forest on the coast of Whidbey Island, north of Seattle, have offered that gift to many of us. (If you want to know more about it, the website is Hedgebrook.org.) I was kindly invited there over twenty years ago to come for a month. I chose to go only for a week. I had never been at any kind of writer’s colony before, never wanted to—a room of my own in my own house had always seemed quite enough. But I was curious, now, about what this one would be like, and the timing was good. I had been having intimations of a new story that felt as if it might be a long one, a novel or at least a novella. What would it be like to work on it all day every day for a week, without any distractions, without grocery shopping or house cleaning or making dinner—alone for twenty hours a day or more?

  What follows is the record I kept of what it was like.
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  This diary and the novella were written in bound notebooks, possibly the last long pieces of prose I composed entirely by hand. I don’t want to rant about the suppression of teaching cursive writing in American schools, but I’m very glad I was taught it. Remembering writing outdoors at Hedgebrook and elsewhere, I think about the humane pace of longhand, and how one is constantly looking away from the notebook at things around it, near or far, changing position as one sits, doodling in the margin while working out a transition, half-consciously noticing the slant of the sunlight, the advance of shadows, the color of the sky: fully absorbed in the work, and yet open to the surrounding world, as we are not when working at a computer screen. A good pen or pencil and a well-made notebook are a genuine climax technology: simple, sustainable, fixable, lasting, and extraordinarily adaptable. It seems a pity to throw it entirely away by omitting to teach people how to use it, simply because a new, wonderful, and infinitely less sustainable technology has come along. I hate to think of a writerly great-grandchild silenced in the midst of a story by the failure of her power source, dumb as an unplugged machine. Well, she’ll swear, and find a pencil, and start laboriously printing, and presently reinvent cursive. Nothing, not even our incalculable wrongheadedness, can keep human beings from telling stories.

  DAY 1. 20 April 1994.

  12:30 pm.

  I am sitting in bright sunlight on the little front porch of Cedar Cottage at Hedgebrook. Linda picked me up at the Alexis in Seattle and drove me here, crossing on the Mukilteo ferry—silky water; a sea lion catching a fish and then playing about; fog low on the mainland, hiding the Cascades behind us; but as we approached Whidbey Island the snowy Olympics stood above the clouds, and there is no fog here on the island. The sun’s hot, brilliant on the grass, making the shadows of the trees all round very dark. A tiny, dusty lizard under the porch wants to come out into the sunlight, but is scared of me.