King Arthur

AWAY WITH THE FAIRIES

A talk given at the UK Federation of Children’s Books Group annual conference, Southwold, East Anglia, UK, in 2003

I was born into a long, tumultuous family history. A mixture of grand tragedy, thrilling romance, Grand Guignol horror and high farce, it was always more than a bit player in all of our lives. The dead jostled the living, in our understanding of the world; the mad, the bad, the sad, the brave, the good, the cruel, the powerful, the poor wore our features, and answered to our names. Passionate love and murder and suicide and treachery and madness and acts of courage and of cunning were all common currency in this history of ours, which crossed over often into the history of the countries my various ancestors lived in. And it continued to unfold in instalments action-packed, terrifying, ridiculous, disturbing and exciting by turns.

We were always in the midst of drama, some a direct result of the past, others new episodes that would in turn generate their own echoes, and it contines to this day. People to whom I've told even a fraction of the stories engendered by my family have said to me that one day, I must write them all down; and perhaps they're right. They're thrilled by it all; they say, No wonder you became a writer! But what often people fail to understand is that , for a child, and especially a child who tends to be more of an observer, such as young writers-en-herbe tend to be, such tumult can be fatal to peace of mind and even to the growing of separate identity. It can actually paralyse your faculties of observation and clarity, which you need in order to transform powerful emotions into good writing. In order to escape, to protect yourself, you can only retreat, at the risk of being labelled, noisily, a selfish dreamer, an emotionless blank, a weird changeling in the warm human world...

Perhaps I was just such a changeling. Perhaps my own destiny, as a child born to carry straight on with the quarrels and loves of a self-absorbed French family was irrevocably changed when first, I was born on the other side of the world, in Indonesia, a country where the spirit world is constantly invoked and accepted; then, second, because of ill health, I was left with my grandmother in France for four years, and did not see my parents in all that time; and third, I was then taken, at the age of five, to yet another new place, Australia, where I discovered another language, which eventually I was to adopt as my own, as loved as my maternal language. So from the first, you see, I was a border-dweller, a changeling at home yet not at home in different worlds.

Perhaps that is why I took so to the whole idea of fairyland, of the otherworld. The world beyond the wardrobe, in the cracks of the floor, through a river, across the sea, in the hollow tree, through the looking-glass: this world has often beckoned those like me. Whether we were escaping a horrible boarding-school, or painful memories, or family maelstroms, this world offered both space and time. It offered possibility. More than that, it offered the chance of transformation, so that one could re-emerge into the world re-invigorated, newly ready to cope, understand, and overcome.

Tolkien once spoke of the difference between escape and desertion, and pointed out that only gaolers fear escapees; and in that land beyond time and space and the constraints of mundane reality, countless children have found both consolation and armour against the slings and arrows of the world. As well, paradoxically, they have refound the world, with different features, a world both distanced through story and more immediately accessible, because it grows from the unconscious of dreams and visions.

When I was a child, one of my ways of coping with the interminable shouting matches, the transcontinental quarrels and coldnesses and just as passionate makings-up of the family, and the strict edicts of an authoritarian, brilliant,haunted, loved and feared father was to imagine myself elsewhere. I could look at a stone, or a piece of wood, or anything really, focus on it till I felt as if I could crack its essence, and emerge into that parallel reality I'd grown to love deeply in books of fairytales, legends, myths and fantasy. This was possible anywhere; but even more possible when we were back at our house in France, a place that with its nooks and crannies and secret places, hid many different passages to the otherworld. It was an actual physical reaction, this sensation of being in another world: a kind of dreamy dissolving of the limbs, a swimming of the head, and yet a great clarity of mind, and a delight that was piercingly sweet.

If I was lucky, Papa didn't notice me heading off yet again; if I was unlucky, I'd be jerked back to reality with a bellow, 'Sophie, where are you off to again! Don't you care about anything in the family!' I could never answer; because the fact was that I cared too much. Far too much, and it made me feel sick, full of curdled incoherences. I could never bring out the emotions in speech, only in writing; and in reading. Head down in a book, or nose up in the air, dreaming; bottom up, scribbling interminably: for me, stories were literally indispensable, as necessary as breathing. Away with the fairies, I could hold and control and understand and know. Outside it, I was at the mercy of forces, both personal and impersonal, which swept me into constant, yet unpredictable turmoil.

Don't think though that my childhood was horrid. It wasn't; it was full of richness and beauty and love and happiness and laughter, too. My parents gave me wonderful things, wonderful experiences, and all of us seven siblings are very close, and though scattered around the world, stay in very close contact. But all the negatives were there, too, in exactly the same grandiose quantities as the positives. My childhood both inspired me immensely, I believe, and also wounded me. I suppose that's true of all of us writers; we begin with a gift, and a curse. A wound, and a blessing. It made me both naturally contrarian, resisting fiercely all authoritarian control, and also deeply conservative, wanting to engender a sense of peace and calm and harmony for my own children(you'll have to ask them if I, and my husband, succeeded in this!) But what it didn't do was immure me in fairyland; unlike Tam Lin but like Thomas the Rhymer, I feel like I can move in and out of the perilous kingdom, the enchanted realm, and bring back news of it, but also avoid its more hidden traps.

For fairyland also has its dangers—very great dangers indeed. Shakespeare reminded us of that, when he tells us that the 'madman, the lover and the poet' all have entered into the land beyond. Each is transformed by his entry into fairyland; but the madman never leaves. He forgoes the earth for the shadow beyond, the reflection. Equally, though, those who have neither shadow or reflection are either the dead, or the profoundly alienated. The otherworld is necessary for this world, and vice versa. And as I grew up, I realised that in fact most people understood this, and shared in it. We mightn't all call this otherworld by the same name, or people it with the same inhabitants, but it existed for every human being, even those who claimed not to dream. Far from being a dereliction of reality, the otherworld was in fact its true companion. Inner and outer world must be woven together in order for human growth to occur; it was the tension between them, the thorn under the skin, the splinter of glass in the heart, that perhaps made creativity possible at all. Fantasy was the realism of the soul, I understood.

And this understanding made me realise that I could live in both; could sneak in and out of fairyland without getting caught by the thought police, whilst also taking part fully in the world. I could be both of the crazy, wild family saga of my people, whilst also being myself; I could escape into the land beyond, but also take tour parties—or readers, if you like!-- with me as their guide. Though in years of writing, I've written many different kinds of books, the ones that have as their setting in that land beyond, or the borderlands between it and the world of the everyday, are the ones that are dearest to me. They are the ones that make me feel both lightfooted and surefooted; that let my spirit soar, that lead me both to felicities of language and of story, that enable a particular essence to emerge without the need for any effort of persuasion. And they are the books of mine which readers have most loved, which I get the most letters, poems and pictures about..

And so to a short discussion of my recent books. With Carabas, and Clementine, two of my books which have been recently published in the UK, after initial publication in Australia, I explored the French fairytale tradition, which is at the wellspring of a great deal of my work.The mixture of the worldly, the magical, humour and enchantment which is characteristic of the French fairytale lends a light touch which often hides very serious things indeed. This atmosphere pervades both books. As well, I like to mix in different elements, for I believe that surprise and discovery are the most worthwhile plums in the pudding. In Carabas, I used the mysterious, funny and seemingly rather amoral story of Puss in Boots, and the weirdly compelling, short evocation in Genesis of a race of half-angels, half-humans called the Nephilim, along with folk tales of the Devil and what temptation really represents—and how inhumanity can happen. As well, the France of the young Louis XIV was an important part of the whole. Clementine, meanwhile, is set partly in the 18th, partly in the 19th centuries, and based both on the story of Sleeping Beauty, and the results of revolution, both political and industrial, to the traditional culture of Europe. With each book, I tried also to evoke the feeling of the time, as well as the timelessness of fairytale.

With my new book, The Tempestuous Voyage of Hopewell Shakespeare, the first of my books to be originated here in the UK, I moved into another of my great loves: Shakespeare, and in particular, the fantastical elements of his work. Shakespeare looms so large on the cultural map of Anglophones, his shadow is so enormous, that not all that many writers have dared do to his work what the Bard himself did all the time to others--plunder plots, pinch a bit of spice here, a touch of fairy dust there, a whisk of gossamer here, a riot of wordplay there, a character's name, a myth here, and stir it all into the pot. And what seems to me as one of the most characteristic of Shakespearean traits: his love of fantasy, his mischievous use of folklore, of fairytale, of legend and magic, his use of parallel history, of what-might-have-been, is often not touched on at all. And yet it's just so much fun!

I remember when it first struck me that Shakespeare, for all the evaluation of him as the greatest writer and understander of the human heart who ever lived, would have problems these days being categorised as worthy or literary, because of his extensive use of fantasy. Now, we are used to making the Tolkienesque distinction between 'fancy'--taken to be sugary, whimsical, superficial stuff, the sort of imagination that conjures up pretty fairies clothed in pink gossamer, or magic as a kind of otherworldly sweet shop--and 'real' fantasy, taken to be 'serious', based on myth rather than whimsy. But I think that in Shakespeare's case--and indeed in many other cases--such a distinction is a false one, and barking up the wrong tree.

There is no intrinsic reason why a 'fanciful' notion such as a tiny fairy called Cobweb, whose touch heals wounds, should not coexist with the elemental, mythical notion of a King and Queen of the fairies whose quarrels make the whole of Nature, as well as the human world, out of joint. No reason why a dancing spirit called Ariel should not be both a mischievous sprite who would not be out of place in Narnia, say, and the ambivalent, deeply moving representative of human ambiguity. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that a touch of that fancy, that whimsy, that lightness, is in fact an inextricable part of the best, most satisfying and timeless deep fantasy. The great children's classics--and children's literature is where fantasy moves most naturally and easily, and timelessly, in post-industrial times--have that amazing combination, a lightness of touch, which makes them evergreen, a breath of spring, like Shakespeare's fantasies do.

Shakespeare was a changeling, a border-crosser, by nature. His work and personal background straddle transitions of all kinds; religious, social, cultural, economic. Rural-born and bred, yet a Londoner later, possibly a cradle Catholic forced, like the rest of his family, to conform to the new faith, ambivalent in his politics, his allegiances, even perhaps his sexuality, his presence in his works is that of a creature of not one world but several, moving in and out of them with ease and pleasure, but also with a sense of loss, a mourning for rootedness and certainty. His spirit is, perhaps, most like Puck's; both of the inner and outer worlds, an inbetweener who can see both worlds clearly, but whose price for mobility is a kind of eternal exile from peace of mind. His fantasy lodges in the mind and heart because it expresses that ambivalence so well, both the joy and the sorrow of it; the double gift and curse that is the lot of those who have been given entry to the otherworld. He was writing to please audiences, and also to please himself. Yet mysteriously, it is that very particularity which has made him universal.

As a non-anglophone, as someone whose native language indeed is French, the traditional rival to English, I had little idea of the idolatry in which Shakespeare was held until I was in high school. Though we lived mostly in an English-speaking country, Australia, my very French parents were determined to create a little island of Frenchness at home in what they saw as an Anglo-Saxon sea. Reverence for Shakespeare certainly did not figure in that, but because of the love of my parents for legend, folktale, fairytale and traditional lore in general, and because they are people for whom religious and spiritual things mean a great deal, unconsciously, I was being prepared not for the intellectual exercise of Shakespeare, the anxiety-making perception of his lonely originality, but for his storytelling and folkloric and spiritual sides, the aspects of him which were communal, populist, uncertain, even unfashionable.

Indeed, my first real introduction to Shakespeare was as a songwriter, because my music-lover of a father had bought a record of songs from Shakespeare's plays, sung by the counter-tenor Alfred Deller. I knew those songs by heart long before I knew the plays they came from; they were light, folkish, strangely addictive songs, with words I could easily understand, and whose context I did not even think about. Later, in high school, I was introduced to the plays themselves, by a wonderful English teacher called Mrs Leaf, and never looked back. Shakespeare influenced me profoundly, and his insights and understandings were present in a lot of my work. But going directly into sourcing stories in Shakespearean fantasy took me a little longer.

I had written one other Shakespearean fantasy before I wrote The Tempestuous voyage of Hopewell Shakespeare. That was Cold Iron, published in Australia in 1998, based on a Midsummer Night's Dream and the English fairytale, Tattercoats. It was a pleasure to write, a thrill, though I was still feeling my way. But in Hopewell, I feel I've really hit my stride. Writing it was a felicitous, thrilling experience, the first draft written at top white-hot speed, over three blissful, exciting, and unnerving weeks. I felt very strongly the sense of naturalness, of things clicking in, of experience and imagination combined, which makes of writing such a wonderful and scary thing. Somehow, in that atmosphere, in the inventive language and no-windows-on-men's-souls of the Elizabethan period, something really deep in me was being released. Inner and outer life were meshing perfectly, through the characters of Hopewell himself, his friends, his enemies, and the magical, disturbing journey to the otherworld itself, that would transform all their lives. Just as such journeys had transformed mine, forever.