Angel in the Parlor (31 page)

CHILD:
Maybe it's a carrot tree.

MOTHER:
You know carrots don't grow on trees. Now, what's wrong with the train?

CHILD:
Nothing.

MOTHER:
You don't see it? The train has wings. Choochoo trains don't have wings.

I felt sure the child knew the right answer, but who among us would not like to see a carrot tree or ride a train with wings? And I thought of the child Stephen in
A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man,
who muses on red roses and white roses, cream and pink and lavender roses. “But you could not have a green rose,” he tells himself, adding wistfully, “But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.”
³⁶

Perhaps among the roaring shillilies and the pappasnippigoo on my aunt's postcard, a green rose is growing. I've never been to the Garden of Nonsense to see for myself. But one night I dreamed myself in a very different garden, and persisting in my folly, like the fool in Blake's proverb, I woke a little wiser. Since the dream took the shape of a story, let me tell you the story.

Once upon a time at the edge of town grew a garden about which I knew nothing except that some called it the Garden of Reason and I was forbidden to go there. Eve conversing with the serpent was not more curious than I, and I headed straight for the garden the first chance I got. The gatekeeper was a magician, and the gatehouse was his cottage. He let me into the house and told me I must wait to be admitted but I might sit at his table and drink a cup of tea while I waited. This I declined to do, as the table was cluttered with papers and dirty dishes, and I could not find a clean cup. Suddenly a young woman rushed in, clutching a book and pounding the title with her fist: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SHEILA HOROWITZ.

“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.”