Angel in the Parlor (33 page)

“It's not taken a chill, I hope,” said the footman.

“No, no,” said the nurse. “But Elfhame strikes cold at first.” She took off the swaddling clothes, wrapped the baby in gossamer, shook pollen powder over it to abate the human smell, and carried it to Queen Tiphaine, who sat in her bower. The Queen examined the baby carefully, and said he was just what she wanted: a fine baby with a red face and large ears.

“Such a pity they grow up,” she said. She was in her seven hundred and twentieth year, so naturally she had exhausted a good many human babies.
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Once you begin to see human lives from the point of view of nonhumans, you are on your way to writing
The Lord of the Rings
and doing away with the human altogether. Who knows better than Tolkien the pitfalls here? “Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say
the green sun,
” he points out. But “to make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible … will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.”
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Fairies, princesses, wizards. The writer who wants to make them his own takes none of the traditional characters and motifs for granted. Take, for example, the good fairy godmothers who bring so much happiness to the kind and virtuous. Are they happy themselves? Thackeray's sketch of the Fairy Blackstick in
The Rose and the Ring
holds the conventional duties of good fairies up to the light of common sense, with amusing results:

Between the kingdoms of Paffagonia and Crim Tartary, there lived a mysterious personage, who was known in those countries as the Fairy Blackstick, from the ebony wand or crutch which she carried; on which she rode to the moon sometimes, or upon other excursions of business or pleasure, and with which she performed her wonders.

When she was young, and had been first taught the art of conjuring by the necromancer, her father, she was always practising her skill, whizzing about from one kingdom to another upon her black stick, and conferring her fairy favours upon this Prince or that. She had scores of royal godchildren; turned numberless wicked people into beasts, birds, millstones, clocks, pumps, bootjacks, or other absurd shapes; and in a word was one of the most active and officious of the whole College of fairies.

But after two or three thousand years of this sport, I suppose Blackstick grew tired of it. Or perhaps she thought, “What good am I doing by sending this Princess to sleep for a hundred years? by fixing a black pudding on to that booby's nose? by causing diamonds and pearls to drop from one little girl's mouth, and vipers and toads from another's? I begin to think I do as much harm as good by my performances. I might as well shut my incantations up, and allow things to take their natural course.” … So she locked up her books in her cupboard, declined further magical performances, and scarcely used her wand at all except as a cane to walk about with.
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And the boons that fairies bestow on those they love; are they really so desirable? Jay Williams shows the logical consequences of a reward often given to good girls: every time you speak, gold will fall from your lips:

The floor was covered with gold pieces which had piled up against the door like a drift of yellow snow. Four bright gold pieces fell from her mouth and clinked to the floor.

The girl clapped her hand to her forehead and said, “Drat!”

Another gold piece dropped from her lips. She took down a large pad that hung on the wall and began writing busily on it. Marco and Sylvia came and looked curiously over her shoulders.

“I am Roseanne. Welcome,” the girl wrote. “As you see, I have something of a problem. Some time ago, I saved the life of the good fairy Melynda. As a reward, she said to me, ‘My child, since you are poor but kind, a gold piece shall fall from your mouth with every word you speak.' … I'm sorry about the floor. I had some friends in for a party last night, and I haven't had a chance to sweep up yet.”
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How much can you tinker with the traditional fairy tale before it changes into something else? It's easy to tell why a fairy tale has gone wrong, harder to tell why it has gone right. It's easy to see why George Cruikshank failed to improve on Grimm's fairy tales when he rewrote them twenty years after he illustrated the first English edition. Cruikshank, now a confirmed teetotaler, assures his readers that at Cinderella's wedding “the King gave orders that all the wine, beer, and spirits in the place shall be collected together, and piled upon the top of a rocky mound in the vicinity of the palace, and made a great bonfire of on the night of the wedding …
¹⁶

Dickens, who admired Cruikshank the illustrator did not admire Cruikshank the editor. “In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected,” he observes. “… Whoever alters them to suit his own opinions … appropriates to himself what does not belong to him.”
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What would Dickens think of Anne Sexton's retelling of Cinderella in
Transformations,
her collection of Grimm's tales retold as poems? For those unacquainted with this book, I give two stanzas from “Cinderella”:

Once

the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed

and she said to her daughter Cinderella:

Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile

down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.

The man took another wife who had

two daughters, pretty enough

but with hearts like blackjacks.

Cinderella was their maid.

She slept on the sooty hearth each night

and walked around looking like Al Jolson.

Her father brought presents home from town,

jewels and gowns for the other women

but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.

She planted the twig on her mother's grave

and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.

Whenever she wished for anything the dove

would drop it like an egg upon the ground.

The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the ball, as you all know.

It was a marriage market.

The prince was looking for a wife.

All but Cinderella were preparing

and gussying up for the big event.

Cinderella begged to go too.

Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils

into the cinders and said: Pick them

up in an hour and you shall go.

The white dove brought all his friends;

all the warm wings of the fatherland came.

and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.

No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,

you have no clothes and cannot dance.

That's the way with stepmothers.
¹⁸

Has Sexton meddled with what does not belong to her? No. She grinds no axes, preaches no sermons. Let no one be deceived by her comic tone; the poems start from a deep understanding of fairy tales and a respect for the dark pools of consciousness from which they rise. Between the peasant grandmother and the poet who calls herself Dame Sexton lie Jung, Freud, and the magic of modern science.

When I took my son to see a Walt Disney movie called
The Cat from Outer Space,
I was struck by how much science fiction has borrowed from the fairy tale. A cat from a far planet arrives in a spaceship that looks very much like a crystal ball. The cat understands our language, and by means of thought transference, it makes its wishes known without speaking. A jeweled collar gives it the power to fly. Like the clever animals in the fairy tales, this space-age descendant of Puss-in-Boots helps the hero and confounds the villain. To the hero it gives the words he needs to run the spacecraft. Though they are a jargon of technology and mathematical formulae, they sound magic to children, who do not understand them. The power of science is ours when we understand its laws. But the power of abracadabra—what has that to do with laws and logic? To be told that abracadabra is a corruption from a Hebrew phrase that means “I bless the dead”—what power does that give you but the power of faith that the dead are alive and no mathematical formula on earth can tell us how?

Science fiction often carries the same spiritual truths that fairy tales have always carried. But science belongs to a universe of cause and effect, of laws that we could understand if only we were clever enough. Magic, on the other hand, is man's way of confronting a mystery that is beyond human understanding. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and wither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John, 3:8). When science masquerades as magic, it may give us spiritual lies such as this one, which recently caught my eye in a toy shop. On a box that claimed to hold Snow White's talking mirror was written the following:

Snow White's

Talking Mirror

ages 3½ to 10

It's a Real Mirror

But just tilt it and

MAGICALLY

Snow White's Face

Appears

and she really

TALKS TO YOU

Snow White says

6 different phrases.

Advertised on TV.

Requires 1 C cell and 3 D cell.

Batteries not included.

If magic is only in the eye of the beholder, then to God, magic and science are indistinguishable. But to a child who touches a switch on one wall and causes a light to shine in the next room, surely electricity is magic. Out of such a maze of innocence the Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola, who has written so vividly about his sojourns among ghosts, has invented a television-handed ghostess. As her name indicates, her hand is a television set that shows the narrator events in far places. The magic mirror in traditional fairy tales did no less. Of the narrator's encounter with this ghostess, Tutuola writes:

I was hearing on this television when my mother was discussing about me with one of her friends.… So as I was enjoying these discussions the television-handed ghostess took away the hand from my face and I saw nothing again except the hand.… I told her again to let me look at them.… Immediately she showed it to me my people appeared again …
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When Tutuola wrote
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,
he had not yet seen television. Those who do not believe in the miracles of magic will speak of the miracles of science, forgetting that the rising of the sun is a miracle until you learn to take it for granted. “Try to be one of the people,” says Henry James, “on whom nothing is lost!”
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I must confess that when choosing marvels, I prefer ghosts to fairies, terror to beauty. I believe the chipmunk in Randall Jarrell's
The Bat Poet
speaks for lovers of fantasy as well as poetry when he says, “It makes me shiver. Why do I like it if it makes me shiver?” One of my favorite ghost stories,
A Christmas Carol,
has always seemed to me so flawlessly written that I was much surprised to learn it had its beginnings in a much less successful ghost story. To read “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” published as Chapter 24 in
The Pickwick Papers,
and then to read what Dickens made of the same material in
A Christmas Carol
is to understand how a great writer uses traditional material to shape his own vision.

Before Ebenezer Scrooge came Gabriel Grub, the sexton who keeps Christmas so badly that he is willing to dig a grave on Christmas Eve. “Who makes graves at a time when all the other men are merry?” calls the chief goblin. “We know the man with the sulky face and grim scowl, that came down the street to-night, throwing his evil looks at the children …”
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The goblins carry him to hell and show him edifying scenes from everyday life, and he hears his own life judged: “men like himself, who snarled at the mirth of cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth …”
²²
Gabriel Grub repents, leaves his village, and returns many years later as “a ragged, contented, rheumatic old man.”

Throughout the story Grub has neither a personal past nor idiosyncrasies by which we can remember him. “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” is the story of the Cheerless Man rather than a particular person, and for that reason Dickens can draw what moral he pleases; it does not arise from the changed life of Grub. “… as Gabriel Grub was afflicted with rheumatism to the end of his days, this story has at least one moral, if it teaches no better one—and that is, that if a man turns sulky and drinks by himself at Christmas time, he may make up his mind to be not a bit the better for it …
²³

Seven years later Dickens reshapes the cheerless man's repentance into the selfish man's journey to find the love of his fellow man. Grub's graveyard has given way to Scrooge's counting-house, and the sights, smells, and sounds have a local habitation and a name: London.

Once upon a time—of all good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his countinghouse. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement-stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already: it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of neighboring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every clink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.
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