Reflections (11 page)

I think the reason that the heroic ideal had, as it were, retreated to children's books is that children do, by nature, status, and instinct, live more in the heroic mode than the rest of humanity. They naturally have the right naive, straightforward approach. And in every playground there are actual giants to be overcome and the moral issues are usually clearer than they are, say, in politics. I shall never forget the occasion when I was visiting a school as a writer and the whole place suddenly fell into an uproar because the school tomboy—a most splendid Britomart of a girl—had beaten up the school bully. Everything stopped in the staff room while the teachers debated what to do. They wanted to give the tomboy a prize, but decided reluctantly that they had better punish her and the bully too. They knew that if, as a child, you do pluck up courage to hit the bully, it is an act of true heroism—as great as that of Beowulf in his old age. I remember passing the tomboy, sitting in her special place of punishment opposite the bully. She was blazing with her deed, as if she had actually been touched by a god. And I thought that this confirmed all my theories: a child in her position is open to any heroic myth I care to use; she is inward with folktales; she would feel the force of any magical or divine intervention.

On the other hand, it is clear to me that children don't actually
demand
magical events in their reading. They differ as other people do. But it is a fact that all children's books that
endure
are fantasies of some kind. These seem to strike the deepest note.

Anyway, you must picture me in the seventies all set to write according to these discoveries. But there was a snag. In 1970, no boy would be seen dead reading a book whose hero was a girl. Children were then—and still are to some extent—rather
too
inward with the heroic tradition that heroes are male and females are either wimps or bad. Girls will read male-hero stories and (wistfully) identify, but not vice versa, not in 1970 anyway. I took this up rather as a challenge: I love a challenge. For instance, I made David in
Eight Days of Luke
a boy, but I put him in a situation with his relations that both sexes could identify with. In
Power of Three
, I provided Gair with a sister with apparently greater gifts, and the same in
Cart and Cwidder
; and I sneaked a female hero past in
Dogsbody
by telling the story from the dog's point of view. But a desire was growing in me to have a real female hero, one with whom all girls could identify and through that, all persons—a sort of Everywoman, if you like. This is the reason for the name Polly, when I eventually came to write
Fire and Hemlock
. The Greek
poly
means “more than one; many or much,” and this, as we shall see, has more than one significance for the book. Another thing I had also long wanted to do was to show children how close to the old heroic ideal they so often are. I'd had a stab at it in
Eight Days of Luke
, by using the days of the week and the Norse gods they were named after to indicate that the big things, the stirring events—the heroic ideal—were as much part of modern everyday life as Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are. But I knew that what I wanted to do
really
was to write a book in which modern life and heroic mythical events approached one another so closely that they were nearly impossible to separate. I also longed to base something on the ballad “Tam Lin,”
²
because that had one of the few Britomart-like heroes in folklore.

Meanwhile, feminism had become a force and was slowly changing the climate of opinion. I looked one day at a picture I own called
Fire and Hemlock
. It is a very peculiar picture, because sometimes there seem to be people in it and sometimes not. And I realized I was about to write the book. If anything sparked it off, it was probably the saying “Those whom the gods love die young.” (I often find my books are founded on a saying or proverb. The maddest is
Archer's Goon
, which is founded on a dire pun: “urban gorilla.”)
³
But there was another consideration. Janet, the hero of “Tam Lin,” behaves throughout like a woman and not like a pseudo man. I wanted a narrative structure which did not simply put a female in a male's place—and, oddly enough, the structure I came up with was no other than that great favorite, the
Odyssey
. I think that at least part of the reason for this is Penelope, who, as I said before, is in her way as tricksy as her husband: she clearly has a
mind
. And Odysseus is a thinking hero. I knew my story was going to be a journey of the
mind
to some extent, both for Polly and for Tom.

Now you must understand that I came to writing
Fire and Hemlock
not only with the
Odyssey
in mind. My head was awash with myths and legends, hundreds of them, and they
all
contribute, but there are three which underlie it principally. The most obvious, of course, are the ballads of “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer,” seen as parts of a whole. This gives the emotive aspect of the story: that of a foray into the supernatural world of the imagination to rescue the one you love (and this love is seen in the same way as Britomart's: as being the same as the heroic ideal). As to the second and third underlay, you must bear with me if I hold the third up almost to the end, but the second is the
Odyssey
, of course. The
Odyssey
accounts for the
shape
of the story, and the way it largely had to be told in flashback. For Homer's
Odyssey
starts in what we have to call present-day Ithaca, and when Odysseus himself finally appears, at least half of
his
story is in flashbacks. We find him disentangling himself from Calypso, a possessive nymph, then telling his story to the next people he meets: Nausicaa and her family. This gave me several elements. By association with Scheherazade, it made me see that Polly would be telling the story. It gave me Tom's recent divorce from Laurel. In addition, the witch Circe, when she lets Odysseus go, tells him he has to visit Hades first. This could be her way of saying “I'll see you in hell first!” but, since she is semidivine, it becomes literal truth and means “You'll have to pass through death first.” This ties in so wonderfully with the “tithe to hell” that the fairy folk have to pay in “Tam Lin” and gave me the ending of the book. It also gave me an important fact about Laurel: this way she has of bending the truth to her own ends. Put this together with the gift of true speaking the Queen gives Thomas the Rhymer, and you have Laurel's gift to Tom: that everything he imagines will come true. It is not only a hellish gift from a supernatural female; it is the mark of a particularly terrible type of woman—I'm sure we all know at least one such person—a woman who confuses fact and fiction impartially for her own ends. For Laurel is Circe as well.

At the opening of the book, Polly, as well as Tom, is in thrall to this woman. She had to perform a strenuous and truthful act of memory to break that thralldom. This in itself is intended to be an act of heroism akin to Odysseus confronting the sirens. But as a girl, one would expect Polly to be in the role of Penelope—and she is, by and large, in that Tom ranges the world, while Polly stays at home—but there is another hero in the
Odyssey
, Odysseus's son, the young, naive Telemachus. Polly takes the role of Telemachus on herself when she first meets Tom, by naming herself Hero; and this begins a long series of heroic roles that both she and Tom adopt. Polly does this semiknowingly at age ten, because she knows instinctively that her only contact with him that Laurel cannot break is that of the imagination. At ten, children are good at knowing such things. Polly first expresses this knowledge in the naive made-up story of Tan Coul and his friends, with herself as assistant hero. As she grows older and recognizes the complexity of life, the naive make-believe becomes more and more marginal, so that as she searches for her ideal in a new form, she takes on a whole series of heroic roles. She is Gerda in “The Snow Queen,” Snow White, Britomart, St. George, Pierrot, Pandora, Andromeda, and Janet from “Tam Lin” and many more, in a sort of overlapping succession.

Tom appears to cling to the role of Odysseus, which he takes on himself with the letter about the giant in the supermarket. Anyone reading that section closely may have noticed that the giant has only one eye, like Polyphemus the Cyclops. But in fact Tom loses that role to Polly around the time he meets his alter ego in the hardware shop and becomes in turn Leander, Kay kidnapped by the Snow Queen, the Knight of the Moon, Artegal, Bellerophon, Prometheus/Epimetheus, Harlequin, Perseus, Orpheus, and of course Tam Lin. He and Polly are continually swapping active and passive roles and sharing the part of Odysseus between them.

Now the way I did this was something else I learned from Spenser. Spenser's allegory ranges from large, overt personifications (pride is a woman called Pride who lives in a palace with a filthy backyard) to relationships so subtle that it is sometimes hard to call them allegory. And at other times the allegorical role is shared about among many characters, each of whom is some aspect of it. I tried to do the same with the heroic personifications and actions of Polly and Tom to find some way, you see, to call on the magical or god-guided aspect of all heroic careers. So sometimes I made the action overtly supernatural and sometimes so close to mundane factualness as to be indistinguishable from everyone's ordinary acts. And sometimes halfway between the two.

In order to organize this, I found that the narrative moved in a sort of spiral, with each stage echoing and being supported by the ones that went before. I had to work very hard in the final draft to make sure that echoes were not repetitions, because at the same time I was establishing another set of resonances that had to be hidden in the same spiral. These were directly concerned with gods and the supernatural. All the female characters are arranged in threes, with Polly always at the center. There are Nina (who is silly), Polly (who is learning the whole time), and Fiona (who is sensible); there are Granny, Polly, and Ivy, old, young, and middle-aged respectively. The first threesome may not strike people as significant, but taken along with the second, I hope it begins to suggest the Three Formed Goddess, diva triforma. Toward the end of the book, Granny takes on the role of Fate and Wisdom quite overtly, shearing fish and explaining the riddle of the ballad of “Tam Lin.” Laurel is of course an aspect of this goddess. Consequently, the most important threesome is Laurel, Polly, Ivy. Ivy is the mundane parasitical version of Laurel, very green and clinging—Laurel as the Lorelei in suburbia, if you like. And Polly, make no mistake, is intended to be an aspect of Laurel too—Laurel as Venus and the Fairy Queen—but she is the aspect that appears not in “Tam Lin” but in “Thomas the Rhymer,” the good and beloved Queen that Thomas first mistakes for the Virgin Mary and then submits to. The adventures Polly and Tom have together fairly carefully echo this second ballad. I did this not out of perverseness but because of what I had learned from Spenser, through Britomart, of the Christian contribution to the heroic ideal: that the deity is for everyone. There is God
in
all of us as well as
with
us. It follows that the major part of a hero's quest is to locate that deity within and to live up to its standards. And if the hero is female, it also follows that the deity is likely to be female too.

(If anyone wonders about the male characters, yes, they are surreptitiously arranged in the same way.)

You will probably be thinking by now that I had a rich mix and a complex structure to control. This is true. You may also be wondering about the third underlying myth that I mentioned. Before I come to this myth, however, I have to mention another factor. I needed a conscious, organizing overlay to this narrative. As you can probably see by now, it could well have run out of control without one. And, unlike the mass of myths and folktales in the story which came surging into the narrative almost unbidden, this had to be in my conscious control. The organizing overlay I chose was T. S. Eliot's
Four Quartets
. This, on a purely technical level, gave me a story divided into four parts and featuring a string quartet. It also gave me the setting and atmosphere for the funeral Polly gatecrashes in Hunsdon House:

 

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Toward the door we never opened

Into the rose garden. [. . .]

 

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate,

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush? [. . .]

 

So we moved [. . .]

Along the empty alley, into the box circle,

To look down into the drained pool.

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly [. . .]
⁴

 

Chapter 2 is full of echoes from “Burnt Norton.” The vases come from here. I chose the poem because it combines static meditation with movement in an extraordinary way, to become a quest of the mind away from the Nothing of spiritual death (Hemlock in my book), toward the fire which is imagination and redemption—the Nowhere of my book. A heroic journey from Nothing to Nowhere is what Polly takes.

Though I was always aware of Eliot's poem as an overlay, I only, as it were, turned the sound up on it from time to time. I kept it low until the Bristol section after this initial
forte
, where Polly—now in the role of Snow White, Eurydice, and Britomart—is turned out, lost and looking down into the River Avon.