The View from the Cheap Seats (38 page)

O
nce upon a time, back when animals spoke and rivers sang and every quest was worth going on, back when dragons still roared and maidens were beautiful and an honest young man with a good heart and a great deal of luck could always wind up with a princess and half the kingdom—back then, fairy tales were for adults.

Children listened to them and enjoyed them, but children were not the primary audience, no more than they were the intended audience of
Beowulf,
or
The Odyssey
. J. R. R. Tolkien said, in a robust and fusty analogy, that fairy tales were like the furniture in the nursery—it was not that the furniture had originally been made for children: it had once been for adults and was consigned to the nursery only when the adults grew tired of it and it became unfashionable.

Fairy tales became unfashionable for adults before children discovered them, though. Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, to pick two writers who had a lot to do with the matter, did not set out to collect the stories that bear their name in order to entertain children. They were primarily collectors and philologists, who assembled their tales as part of a life's work that included massive volumes such as
German Legends, German Grammar
and
Ancient German Law
. And they were surprised when the adults who bought their collections of fairy tales to read to their children began to complain about the adult nature of the content.

The Grimms responded to market pressure and bowdlerized enthusiastically. Rapunzel no longer let it slip that she had been meeting the prince by asking the witch why her belly had swollen so badly that her clothes would not fit (a logical question, given that she would soon be giving birth to twins). By the third edition, Rapunzel tells the witch that she is lighter to pull up than the prince was, and the twins, when they turn up, turn up out of nowhere.

The stories that people had told each other to pass the long nights had become children's tales. And there, many people obviously thought, they needed to stay.

But they don't stay there. I think it's because most fairy tales, honed over the years, work so very well. They feel right. Structurally, they can be simple, but the ornamentation, the act of retelling, is often where the magic occurs. Like any form of narrative that is primarily oral in transmission, it's all in the way you tell 'em.

It's the joy of panto. Cinderella needs her ugly sisters and her transformation scene, but how we get to it changes from production to production. There are traditions of fairy tales.
The Arabian Nights
gives us one such; the elegant, courtly tales of Charles Perrault gives us a French version; the Grimm brothers a third. We encounter fairy tales as kids, in retellings or panto. We breathe them. We know how they go.

This makes them easy to parody. Monty Python's “Happy Valley,” in which princes fling themselves to their deaths for love of a princess with wooden teeth, is still my favorite send-up. The
Shrek
series parodies the Hollywood retellings of fairy tales to diminishing returns, soon making one wistful for the real thing.

A few years ago, on Father's Day, my daughters indulged me and let me show them Jean Cocteau's
La Belle et la Bête
. The girls were unimpressed. And then Belle's father entered the
Beast's castle, and we watched special effects of people putting their hands through walls and film being played backwards, and I heard my daughters gasp at the magic on the screen. It was the thing itself, a story they knew well, retold with assurance and brilliance.

Sometimes the fairy-tale tradition intersects with the literary tradition. In 1924, the Irish writer and playwright Lord Dunsany wrote
The King of Elfland's Daughter,
in which the elders of the English kingdom of Eld decide they wish to be ruled by a magic lord, and in which a princess is stolen from Elfland and brought to England. In 1926, Hope Mirrlees, a member of the Bloomsbury set and a friend of T. S. Eliot, published
Lud-in-the-Mist,
a quintessentially English novel of transcendent oddness, set in a town on the borders of Fairyland, where illegal traffic in fairy fruit (like the fruit sold in Christina Rossetti's poem “Goblin Market”), and the magic and poetry and wildness that come with the fruit from over the border, change the lives of the townsfolk forever.

Mirrlees's unique vision was influenced by English folktales and legends (Mirrlees was the partner of classicist Jane Ellen Harrison), by Christina Rossetti and by a Victorian homicidal lunatic, the painter Richard Dadd, in particular his unfinished masterwork, an obsessively detailed painting called
The Fairy-Feller's Master-Stroke
—also the subject of a radio play by Angela Carter.

With her astonishing collection of short stories
The Bloody Chamber,
Carter was the first writer I encountered who took fairy tales seriously, in the sense of not trying to explain them or to make them less or to pin them dead on paper, but to reinvigorate them. Her lycanthropic and menstrual Red Riding Hood variants were gathered together in Neil Jordan's coming-of-age fantasy film
The Company of Wolves
. She brought the same intensity to her retelling of other fairy tales, from “Blue
beard” (a Carter favorite) to “Puss in Boots,” and then created her own perfect fairy tale in the story of Fevvers, the winged acrobat in
Nights at the Circus
.

When I was growing up, I wanted to read something that was unapologetically a fairy tale, and just as unapologetically for adults. I remember the delight with which, as a teenager, I stumbled across William Goldman's
The Princess Bride
in a North London library. It was a fairy tale with a framing story which claimed that Goldman was editing Silas Morgenstern's classic (albeit fictional) book into the form in which it was once read to him by his father, who left out the dull bits—a conceit that justified telling adults a fairy tale, and which legitimized the book by making it a retelling, as all fairy stories somehow have to be. I interviewed Goldman in the early 1980s, and he described it as his favorite of his books and the least known, a position it kept until the 1987 film of the book made it a perennial favorite.

A fairy tale, intended for adult readers. It was a form of fiction I loved and wanted to read more of. I couldn't find one on the shelves, so I decided to write one.

I started writing
Stardust
in 1994, but mentally timeslipped about seventy years to do it. The mid-1920s seemed like a time when people enjoyed writing those sorts of things, before there were fantasy shelves in the bookshops, before trilogies and books “in the great tradition of
The Lord of the Rings
.” This, on the other hand, would be in the tradition of
Lud-in-the-Mist
and
The King of Elfland's Daughter
. All I was certain of was that nobody had written books on computers back in the 1920s, so I bought a large book of unlined pages, and the first fountain pen I had owned since my schooldays and a copy of Katharine Briggs's
Dictionary of Fairies
. I filled the pen and began.

I wanted a young man who would set out on a quest—in this case a romantic quest, for the heart of Victoria Forester,
the loveliest girl in his village. The village was somewhere in England, and was called Wall, after the wall that ran beside it, a dull-looking wall in a normal-looking meadow. And on the other side of the wall was Faerie—Faerie as a place or as a quality, rather than as a posh way of spelling
fairy
. Our hero would promise to bring back a fallen star, one that had fallen on the far side of the wall.

And the star, I knew, would not, when he found it, be a lump of metallic rock. It would be a young woman with a broken leg, in a poor temper, with no desire to be dragged halfway across the world and presented to anyone's girlfriend.

On the way, we would encounter wicked witches, who would seek the star's heart to give back their youth, and seven lords (some living, some ghosts) who seek the star to confirm their inheritance. There would be obstacles of all kinds, and assistance from odd quarters. And the hero would win through, in the manner of heroes, not because he was especially wise or strong or brave, but because he had a good heart, and because it was his story.

I began to write:

           
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart's Desire.

           
And while that is, as beginnings go, not entirely new (for every tale about every young man there ever was or will be could start in a similar manner), there was much about this young man and what happened to him that was unusual, although even he never knew the whole of it.

The voice sounded like the voice I needed—a little stilted and old-fashioned, the voice of a fairy tale. I wanted to write a story that would feel, to the reader, like something he or she had
always known. Something familiar, even if the elements were as original as I could make them.

I was fortunate in having Charles Vess, to my mind the finest fairy artist since Arthur Rackham, as the illustrator of
Stardust,
and many times I found myself writing scenes—a lion fighting a unicorn, a flying pirate ship—simply because I wanted to see how Charles would paint them. I was never disappointed.

The book came out, first in illustrated and then in unillustrated form. There seemed to be a general consensus that it was the most inconsequential of my novels. Fantasy fans, for example, wanted it to be an epic, which it took enormous pleasure in not being. Shortly after it was published, I wound up defending it to a journalist who had loved my previous novel,
Neverwhere,
particularly its social allegories. He had turned
Stardust
upside down and shaken it, looking for social allegories, and found absolutely nothing of any good purpose.

“What's it
for
?” he had asked, which is not a question you expect to be asked when you write fiction for a living.

“It's a fairy tale,” I told him. “It's like an ice cream. It's to make you feel happy when you finish it.”

I don't think that I convinced him, not even a little bit. There was a French edition of
Stardust
some years later that contained translator's notes demonstrating that the whole of the novel was a gloss on Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress,
which I wish I had read at the time of the interview. I could have referred it to the journalist, even if I didn't believe a word.

Still, the people who wanted fairy tales found the book, and some of them knew what it was, and liked it for being exactly that. One of those people was filmmaker Matthew Vaughn.

I tend to be extremely protective when it comes to adaptations of my work, but I enjoyed the screenplay and I really like the film they made—which takes liberties with the plot all over the place. (I know I didn't write a pirate captain performing a can-can in drag, for a start . . .)

A star still falls, a boy still promises to bring it to his true love, there are still wicked witches and ghosts and lords (although the lords have now become princes). They even gave the story an unabashedly happy ending, which is something people tend to do when they retell fairy tales.

In
The Penguin Book of English Folktales
, we learn that mid-twentieth-century folklorists had collected an oral story and never noticed it was actually a retelling and simplification of a strange and disturbing children's story written by the Victorian writer Lucy Clifford.

I would, of course, be happy if
Stardust
met with a similar fate, if it continued to be retold long after its author was forgotten, if people forgot that it had once been a book and began their tales of the boy who set out to find the fallen star with “Once upon a time,” and finished with “Happily ever after.”

A version of this was originally published in the October 13, 2007, issue of the
Guardian
. A slightly altered version was included in the program book for the 2013 World Fantasy Convention in Brighton.

T
heodor Kittelsen (1857–1914) was the greatest painter of trolls there ever was. He was a Norwegian recluse who drew and sketched water trolls and mountain trolls and strange, mad-eyed hill-sized trolls with pines growing on their backs. He lived on an island in the Norwegian Sea, two hours away by horse and (in the winter) sledge from the nearest town.

And when he heard that another artist had said that he too was going to be drawing trolls, Kittelsen is reputed to have said, “He? Sketch trolls? He has never seen a troll in his life.”

Which makes sense, of course. The reason that Kittelsen drew such remarkable trolls was that he saw them. Just as the reason Arthur Rackham drew such sublime fairy creatures, such strange and gnarly tree-creatures, such grotesque gnomes, was that he saw them.

And the reason that Charles Vess draws such astonishing things, such beautiful things and such strange things, the reason that he draws all manner of fairy creatures and boggarts and nixies and witches and wonders so very well, is simple.

He sees them. He draws what he sees.

I have known Charles Vess for a decade (or less, I confess I've forgotten—say nine years, I guess).

This is how to spot the herbaceous or lesser spotted Charles Vess: he has an easygoing, gentle smile and he has, no kidding
and in all honesty, a twinkling sort of glint in his eyes. I've seen it. His manner is quiet and reserved, and he is extremely polite. Anyone with all four of those characteristics is probably Charles Vess, assuming that he can also paint like a demon.

He likes really fine single-malt scotches. I just mention this in passing, and not to encourage anyone reading this to buy Charles a really good single-malt scotch (anything over ten years old should be fine).

I love working with Charles. It's easy.

He's a good person to spend time with. The first time we got together to talk about
The Books of Magic,
which we were going to do together, we went up to Galleon's Lap, the Enchanted Place in the Hundred Acre Wood (it's actually called Gill's Lap when you're outside of the Milne books) and just sat around in the heather up where the pine trees blow, and looked at the trees, and talked about what we were going to be doing. About rivers of blood, and the old ballads, and little houses on chicken legs. And sometimes we didn't chat at all, we just sat.

He's the finest audience in the world. When you read to him, he chuckles. Honest-to-god chuckles. When I was writing
Stardust,
at the end of each chapter I'd phone Charles up, and I'd read him what I'd written (occasionally apologizing on the way for not being able to read my own handwriting) and whenever I got to a good bit, he'd chuckle. It was wonderful.

I wound up writing things just because I wanted to see what he would paint.

Charles is someone who is doing what he loves.

He is an optimist, in the broadest sense of the word. Charles lives in a
good
world.

He's not an unrealistic optimist, though. He's sensible. When we won the World Fantasy Award for best short story, in Tucson in 1991, Charles missed it. He was playing table tennis. This is because he knew that we wouldn't win (well, it was about as
likely as our being elected joint deputy Pope), so he went off to do something sensible instead. (That we won is beside the point in this anecdote.)

This summer Charles's wife, Karen, was very seriously injured in a car accident. She's spent the last several months undergoing surgery, and in rehab learning how to walk and operate her body once more.

The last time I saw Charles I asked him how he was doing.

“Mostly I'm grateful,” he said, like one of those guys in those heartwarming articles in
Reader's Digest
. Only this was for real. “There are people in her rehab who had the same injuries as Karen who are going to spend the rest of their lives in wheelchairs. She's going to be able to walk again. We're really lucky.”

And he meant it. He is a remarkable man, in many ways.

Charles Vess lives in rural Virginia. Also he lives in Faerie. He draws what he sees.

This was originally written for the program book for TropiCon XVII, 1998. Charles, I am glad to say, continues to twinkle. Karen Vess, I am even happier to say, made an almost complete recovery.