The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (16 page)

Note (2002): I enjoyed the film of
The Fellowship of the Ring
immensely, and feel an awed admiration for the scriptwriters who got so much of the story and the
feeling
of the story into the brevity of a movie. I was sorry not to see the barrow-wight’s hand crawling towards Frodo, but they were very wise to leave out Tom—wise in all their omissions. Nothing was disappointing but the orcs, standard-issue slimy monsters with bad teeth, bah. I expected that the greatest difference between the book and the film might be a difference of pace;
and it is. The film begins at a proper footpace, an old man jogging along in a pony cart . . . but soon it’s off at a dead run, galloping, rushing, leaping through landscapes, adventures, marvels, and perils, with barely a pause at Rivendell to discuss what to do next. Instead of the steady rhythm of breathing, you can’t even catch your breath.

I don’t know that the filmmakers had much choice about it. Movie audiences have been trained to expect whiz-bang pacing, an eye-dazzling ear-splitting torrent of images and action leaving no time for thought and little for emotional response. And the audience for a fantasy film is assumed to be young, therefore particularly impatient.

Watching once again the wonderful old film
Chushingura
, which takes four hours to tell the (comparatively) simple story of the Forty-seven Ronin, I marveled at the quiet gait, the silences, the seemingly aimless lingering on certain scenes, the restraint that slowly increases tension till it gathers tremendous force and weight. I wish a Tolkien film could move at a pace like that. If it was as beautiful and well written and well acted as this one is, I’d be perfectly happy if it went on for hours and hours. . . . But that’s a daydream.

And I doubt that any drama, no matter how un-whiz-bang, could in fact capture the singular gait that so deeply characterises the book. The vast, idiosyncratic prose rhythms of
The Lord of the Rings
, like those of
War and Peace
, have no counterpart in Western theatrical writing.

So all I wish is that they’d slowed down the movie, every now and then, even just held still for a moment and let there be a rest, a beat of silence. . . .

THE WILDERNESS WITHIN

T
HE
S
LEEPING
B
EAUTY AND
“T
HE
P
OACHER
”
AND A
PS
ABOUT
S
YLVIA
T
OWNSEND
W
ARNER

This piece was written as a contribution to the anthology
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales
, edited by Kate Bernheimer in 1998. Francine Prose’s piece about the Sleeping Beauty, which I mention here, is also in that anthology. My story “The Poacher” can be found in my collection
Unlocking the Air.

Influence—the anxiety of influence—it’s enough to give you influenza. I’ve come to dread the well-intended question, “What writer or writers influenced you as a writer?”

What writer or writers didn’t? How can I name Woolf or Dickens or Tolstoy or Shelley without implying that a hundred, a thousand other “influences” didn’t matter?

I evade: telling the questioners they really don’t want to hear about my compulsive reading disorder, or changing the playing field—“Schubert and Beethoven and Springsteen have had a great influence on my writing”—or, “Well, that would take all night, but I’ll tell you what I’m reading right now,” an answer I learned from being asked the question. A useful question, which leads to conversation.

Then there was the book
The Anxiety of Influence.
Yes, I know who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf. Still I’m faintly incredulous when I hear that phrase used seriously. The book about being anxious because you learned things from other writers came out at the same time that
a lot of us were energetically rejoicing in the rediscovery and reprinting of older and earlier woman writers, the rich inheritance that had been withheld from all writers by the macho literary canon.

While these guys were over there being paranoid about influence, we were over here celebrating it.

Well, all right; if some authors feel threatened by the very existence of other, older writers, what about
fairy tales?
Stories so old they don’t even
have
writers? That should bring on a regular panic attack.

That the accepted (male) notion of literary influence is appallingly simplistic is shown (first—not last, but first) by the fact that it overlooks, ignores, disdains the effect of “preliterature”—oral stories, folktales, fairy tales, picture books—on the tender mind of the prewriter.

Such deep imprints are, of course, harder to trace than the effect of reading a novel or a poem in one’s teens or twenties. The person affected may not be conscious of such early influences, overlaid and obscured by everything learned since. A tale we heard at four years old may have a deep and abiding effect on our mind and spirit, but we aren’t likely to be clearly aware of it as adults—unless asked to think about it seriously. And the person affected may be deeply unwilling to achieve consciousness of such influences. If “seriousness” is limited to discourse of canonical Literature, we may well be embarrassed to mention something that some female relative read aloud to us after we’d got into bed in our jammies with our stuffed animals. Yet it may have formed our imagination more decisively than anything we ever read.

I have absolutely no idea of when I first heard or read the tale of the Sleeping Beauty. I don’t even remember (as I do for some stories) the illustrations, or the language, of a certain edition. I certainly read it for myself as a child in several collections, and again in various forms when I was reading aloud to my own children. One of those versions was a charming Czech-made book, an early example of the Pop-Up genre. It was good magic, the way the thorny paper rose hedge leapt up around the little paper castle. And at the end everybody in the castle woke, just as they ought to, and got right up off the page.

But when did I first learn that that was what they ought to do?

The Sleeping Beauty is one of the stories that I’ve “always known,” just as it’s one of the stories that “we all know.” Are not such stories part of our literary inheritance? Do they not influence us?

Does that make us anxious?

Francine Prose’s article on the Sleeping Beauty elegantly demonstrates, by the way, that we
don’t
know the stories we think we’ve always known. I had the twelfth fairy and the whole spindle business clear in my mind, but all that after-the-marriage hanky-panky was news to me. As I knew it, as most Americans know it, the story ends with the prince’s kiss and everybody getting ready for the wedding.

And I wasn’t aware that it held any particular meaning or fascination for me, that it had “had any influence” on me, until, along in my sixties, I came on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s evocation of the tale in a tiny poem (it is in her
Collected Poems
):

The Sleeping Beauty woke:

The spit began to turn,

The woodmen cleared the brake,

The gardener mowed the lawn.

Woe’s me! And must one kiss

Revoke the silent house, the birdsong wilderness?

As poetry will do, those words took me far beyond themselves, straight through the hedge of thorns, into the secret place.

For all its sweet brevity, the question asked in the last two lines is a total “revisioning” of the story, a subversion of it. Almost, it revokes it.

The pall of sleep that lies upon the house and grounds is supposedly the effect of a malicious spell, a curse; the prince’s kiss that breaks the spell is supposed to provide a happy ending. Townsend Warner asks, was it a curse, after all? The thorn hedge broken, the cooks growling at their porridge pots, the peasants laboring again at their sowing or harvesting, the cat leaping upon the mouse, Father yawning
and scratching his head, Mother jumping up sure that the servants have been misbehaving while she was asleep, Beauty staring in some confusion at the smiling young man who is going to carry her off and make her a wife—everything back to normal, everyday, commonplace, ordinary life. The silence, the peace, the magic, gone.

Really, it is a grand, deep question the poet asks. It takes me into the story as no Freudian or Jungian or Bettelheimian reduction of it does. It lets me see what
I
think the story is about.

I think the story is about that still center: “the silent house, the birdsong wilderness.”

That is the image we retain. The unmoving smoke above the chimney top. The spindle fallen from the motionless hand. The cat asleep near the sleeping mouse. No noise, no bustle, no busyness. Utter peace. Nothing moving but the slow subtle growth of the thorn bushes, ever thicker and higher all about the boundary, and the birds who fly over the high hedge, singing, and pass on.

It is the secret garden; it is Eden; it is the dream of utter, sunlit safety; it is the changeless kingdom.

Childhood, yes. Celibacy, virginity, yes. A glimpse of adolescence: a place hidden in the heart and mind of a girl of twelve or fifteen. There she is alone, all by herself, content, and nobody knows her. She is thinking:
Don’t wake me. Don’t know me. Let me be. . . .

At the same time she is probably shouting out of the windows of other corners of her being,
Here I am, do come, oh do hurry up and come!
And she lets down her hair, and the prince comes thundering up, and they get married, and the world goes on. Which it wouldn’t do if she stayed in the hidden corner and renounced love marriage childbearing motherhood and all that.

But at least she had a little while by herself, in the house that was hers, the garden of silence. Too many Beauties never even know there is such a place.

Townsend Warner’s lines haunted my mind for some while before I realised that her question had led me not only into the folktale of the Sleeping Beauty but into a story I had to write about it. In this case, the influence was almost direct. I am not anxious about it in any way. I am cheerfully grateful.

My story is called “The Poacher.” Its title describes exactly what I, the author, was doing: poaching on the folktale’s domain. Trespassing, thieving. Hunting. Tracking down something that happened in the place where nothing happens.

In my story a peasant boy lives at the edge of a forest where he poaches and gathers a very poor living for himself, a nasty father, and a gentle stepmother. (I find reversing stereotypes a simple but inexhaustible pleasure. The stepmother is not much older than he is, and there is a sexual yearning between them that can find no solace.) He discovers the great hedge where it cuts across a far part of the forest. This impenetrable, thorny, living wall fascinates him. He keeps going back to it, exploring along it. When he realises that it forms a circle, a complete defense of something within it, some
other place
, he resolves to get through it.

As we know from the tale, the magic hedge is yards thick, yards high, and regrows two razor-thorned shoots for every one that’s cut, so anybody trying to get through it gives up pretty soon. The twelfth fairy’s spell decreed that it would stand for a hundred years. Only when the hundred years are up will a certain prince appear with a certain sword, which will cut through the monstrous tangle like a hot knife through butter.

Our peasant boy doesn’t know that, of course. He doesn’t really know anything. He is dirt poor and ignorant. He has no way out of his life. There is no way out of his life. He starts trying to cut through the hedge.

And he keeps it up for years, with the poor tools he has, slowly, slowly defeating the ever-regrowing vitality of the thorn trees, pushing a narrow, choked opening through the trunks and branches and endless
shoots and tangles, doggedly returning and returning; until at last he gets through.

He does not break the spell; that is what the prince will do. He has broken
into
the spell. He has entered it.

It is not he who will revoke it. Instead, he will do what the prince cannot do. He will enjoy it.

He wanders about the fields and gardens inside the great hedge wall, and sees the bee sleeping on the flower, and the sheep and cattle sleeping, and the guardians asleep by the gate. He enters the castle (for in the tale as I knew it, Beauty’s father is the king of the realm). He wanders among the sleeping people. My poacher says then, “I knew already that they were all asleep. It was very strange, and I thought I should be afraid; but I could not feel any fear.” He says, “I knew I trespassed, but I could not see the harm.”