Angel in the Parlor (32 page)

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 onions 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.”

What happened to them there reminds me of the fairy tales in which the youngest son sets off down the road to make his fortune, and it is always the right road, for he meets those who offer to help him, and if he follows it far enough he meets the princess he must rescue and the troll he must rescue her from. The road is more than a road; it is his destiny. In my uncle's history, however, destiny is not mentioned. He writes:

Mrs. Hedlund's relatives were supposed to meet them there, but none were to be found. A Norwegian who was ready to start home with an empty wagon, offered them a ride as far as he was going, which was a little village by the name of Cold Springs. There they rented a little house by the roadside where they could watch for their relatives. They remained there more than a week, before the expected relatives arrived.…

The mansion into which they were cordially invited by their relatives was an underground cellar, the very best and only habitation in their possession. While in St. Paul, they had secured some good warm clothing and shoes, so with plenty of ammunition they were able to secure deer and other game … For lighting purposes they hollowed a large rutabaga for a lamp, filled it with skunk oil, with a strip of rag for a wick. That winter they cut logs and built a small log house.

Like all fairy tales, the story has a happy ending. Mr. Hedlund opened a gun shop and earned enough money to build a comfortable home and raise a large family. My great-uncle adds, “I was lucky enough to marry one of his fine daughters.”

This was my first introduction to Mrs. Hedlund. It would not be accurate to say I forgot her, yet I ceased to think of her after I put down my uncle's book. And so she fell asleep in the dark cellars of my mind, taking her rutabaga lamp with her. And over the years, the storeroom that hid her filled up with myths and fairy tales, goddesses and witches and wise women. And Mrs. Hedlund, living among them, took on their light and their look, as partners in a long and happy marriage are said to resemble one another. When she turned up many years later in the fairy tale I asked my husband to read, her root cellar had become an enchanted place and she herself was as ancient as the old woman so often celebrated in nursery rhymes:

There was an old woman lived under the hill
,

And if she's not dead, she lives there still.

Only the rutabaga lamp remained unchanged, casting its light both on the cellar in my uncle's history and the dwelling that my dreaming had made of it. Thank goodness that did not change. How could I show the imaginary house if not by the natural light of the rutabaga lamp? How can we see an imaginary world except by the light of this one?

If you could hold the rutabaga lamp to one of the oldest stories in the world, that of the human child stolen by the fairies, you would find as many tales in that plot as there are people to tell them. Among modern versions I've always admired Mary Lavin's “A Likely Story.” To her, the lamp shows, first of all, the everyday world of country Ireland. It shows her the pump in the village, the gloss of a blackbird's wing, the bread cooling on the window sill in the morning, the clatter of rain on a tin roof. The fairies who lure the boy Packy from his home are as natural as the birds, the bread, and the rain. And why should they be otherwise? As Tolkien points out, “it is man who is … supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom. The road to fairyland is not the road to heaven; not even to Hell …”
¹⁰

Perhaps the failure to see fairyland is a human failure, for which a good writer can atone by describing it with loving attention to detail. Of the little man in green who kidnaps the boy Packy, Lavin says that “his shoes … were so fine his muscles rippled under the leather like the muscles of a finely bred horse rippled under his skin.” While showing us the beauty of the other world, she shows us the beauty of this one. For Packy, everything rare is weighed against the commonplace and found wanting. In the fairy's chambers under the earth, he sees gold basins and ewers and pails. The fairy tells him the advantages of gold utensils. “Nothing ever gets cracked down here; nothing ever gets broken.” Packy is unimpressed:

Not that he thought it was such a good idea to have cups made of gold. When you'd pour your tea into them, wouldn't it get so hot it would scald the lip off you?

One day in the summer that was gone past, he and the Tubridys went fishing on the Boyne up beyond Rathnally, and they took a few grains of tea with them in case they got dry. They forgot to bring cups though, and they had to empty out their tin-cans of worms and use them for cups. But the metal rim of the can got red hot the minute the tea went into it, and they couldn't drink a drop. Gold would be just the same?

But in fact, there were no cups at all it appeared.

“One no longer has any need for food, Packy,” said the little man, “once one has learned the secret of eternal youth!”

“You're joking, sir!” said Packy, doubtful. At that very minute he had a powerful longing for a cut of bread and a swig of milk.
¹¹

Most of the traditional changeling stories show the fairy world through human eyes. But what if we look at the human world through the eyes of the fairies? Sylvia Town-send Warner's novel
Kingdoms of Elfin
opens at the moment of kidnapping. No praise of rustic pleasures here; her fairies are more at home in the court than in the country. Though fairies are invisible to mortals, she knows that they must not be invisible to readers. Rain and oak, birch and fir, heath and hill, wind and fire—of such familiar stuff are their lives made. Enchantment begins in the commonplace:

When the baby was lifted from the cradle, he began to whimper. When he felt the rain on his face, he began to bellow. “Nothing wrong with his lungs,” said the footman to the nurse. They spread their wings, they rose in the air. They carried the baby over a birchwood, over an oakwood, over a firwood. Beyond the firwood was a heath, on the heath was a grassy green hill. “Elfhame at last,” said the nurse. They folded their wings and alighted. A door opened in the hillside and they carried the baby in. It stared at the candles and the silver tapestries, left off bellowing, and sneezed.