Reflections (12 page)

 

[. . .] I think that the river

Is a strong brown god [. . .]

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

And piece together the past and the future,

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

The future futureless, before the morning watch

When time stops and time is never ending [. . .]

 

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing [. . .] ?
⁵

 

I turned the sound down on Eliot after that until Polly remembers what it was she did to lose Tom and put them both in Laurel's power. Now here I must remind you of my childhood discovery that all heroes are likely to make one horrible mistake. On the human level, Polly's mistake is to behave like her mother, with possessive curiosity, and spy on Tom. On the mythical level, it throws the story back to the tragedy and failure of Hero and Leander, with which the story started. This unjustified curiosity, which leads the hero to spy on his or her partner, is a motif in dozens of folktales—“East of the Sun and West of the Moon” being the one which is mentioned in the book. Here the young wife sees her husband in his true shape in the night, and loses him. This summary will no doubt remind you all of a much better-known story—the story which is, in fact, the third underlying myth in
Fire and Hemlock
—the story of Cupid and Psyche. Now from long before C. S. Lewis this was a myth of the human soul in search of a beloved ideal, which is what Tom has now become for Polly. Tom in fact has Cupid's attributes, although few people seem to notice. When my British publisher was unable to see this, I simply asked her, “Who is mostly blind and goes to work with a bow?” and she said, “Oh, I
see
!” But, to go back to human terms, and Polly's loss of Tom, people
do
lose sight of their ideals quite often in adolescence and young adulthood—they tend to see life as far too complex and come up with the idea that things are only real and valid if they are unpleasant or boring. The myth of Cupid and Psyche is certainly about this. Or, as Eliot says: “human kind/Cannot bear very much reality,”
⁶
and the defense is to deny the imagination any reality at all. But the story of Cupid and Psyche is not mentioned in the book on purpose, because Cupid and Psyche are both in their own ways gods, not heroes—and anyway it always seems to me that powerful stories like that one always pull their weight better for only being hinted at.

Once Polly knows she has lost Tom, her quest becomes more urgent. So the narrative moves back to the present time, just as it does in the
Odyssey
, and becomes traditionally heroic in that Polly finds that she can call for help on those she has helped in the past. This includes the one she nearly misses because it is too close to her: Fiona. This sort of thing may be a traditional motif, but it does also happen in real life—you can be very blind to people close to you, both for good or evil. Polly has accepted Seb in the same blind way. But at last, having called in her debts and made her heroic act of memory, Polly sets out to retrieve her mistake. Now here I found I had to leave the tradition represented by Janet in “Tam Lin,” because it was precisely by hanging on to Tom and being overcurious that Polly had lost him. Anyway, she has already done her hanging on as a child. It was clear to me that the only redress she could make was the reverse of possessiveness—complete generosity—generosity so complete that it amounts to rejection. She has to love Tom enough to let him go—hurtfully. This is the only way she can harness Tom's innate strength of character, and only when hurting can he summon the full force of the fire—which is to some extent physical passion and to an even greater extent the true strength of the heroic world of the imagination Polly and Tom have built together. But Tom has to do it himself. He has depended on Polly too much.

This is where I turned the sound up again on the
Four Quartets
. Polly has to take the same road that T. S. Eliot describes in
his
quest:

 

In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

 

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.
⁷

 

But I was talking about everyday life as much as Eliot was. I was also following the
Odyssey
, where Odysseus does at last come home, to a partnership and a personal relationship. And I wanted to indicate, however briefly, that though a relationship was possible between Polly and Tom, such a relationship is only likely to be maintained through continuing repeated small acts of heroism from both. This is what I tried to do in the coda—where the structure of the
Odyssey
most remarkably echoes what Eliot has to say:

 

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.
⁸

 

Thank you.

A Talk About Rules

 

Diana Wynne Jones was a popular speaker at science fiction and fantasy events. In 1995 she was invited to appear as the guest of honor at Boskone, the annual convention run by the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA) in Boston, Massachusetts.

Diana's 1995 collection
Everard's Ride
was published by NESFA Press as part of its program to honor special guests. The following is her guest of honor address at Boskone 1995.

 

 

I
am very glad to be here at Boskone. I really thought I wasn't going to make it. First I didn't seem to be able to stop having to go to hospital—there will be a book before long giving my frank opinion of most doctors, which is not high—and then there were the airline tickets. Reasonably enough, my ticket was in the name of Diana Wynne Jones and Chris Bell's called her Chris Bell.
¹
The trouble was, both our passports were in our married names, which are not the same. But I had been there before. You have to go to the office and argue, I told Chris blithely. The airline won't let you travel on a ticket that isn't the same as your passport, so you get them to change the name on the ticket. So we took the morning off from working on the
Encyclopedia of Fantasy
for John Clute
²
and went to the office and asked them to change our names on the tickets. “Can't be done,” they said. Nonsense, said we, and we argued. We persuaded. We talked for half an hour. And it still couldn't be done. The Rules forbade it on that kind of ticket. Half an hour later, it still couldn't be done and we gave up and came home. But Chris refused to be beaten and tried another way round. She rang the passport office and asked if they could change our passports instead. “Oh yes, easily,” they said.

Well, it wasn't actually
easy
. We had to order new passports and fill in forms that didn't have a section for what we wanted to do, but it got done. And all along the absurdity of it was exasperating—that it was easier to change your passport than an airline ticket! Rules! The whole thing about Rules increasingly exasperated me. While I worked on the encyclopedia, I kept discovering Rules in fantasy that had no business being there. Camels going through the eyes of needles in all directions. Or failing to get through, or getting stuck halfway. So many things you weren't supposed to do. So out of this exasperation I have decided to talk a bit about the Rules people insist on in various forms of writing.

There are a lot of Rules and they keep changing. Nobody knows who does the changing—everyone blames somebody else: publishers, librarians, teachers, reviewers, writers themselves, readers. But it is a fact you have to live with if you write, particularly if you write fantasy of any sort. There are Rules, and people—some people somewhere—keep changing the Rules and moving the goalposts. And when the goalposts are moved to wherever people want them at that moment, they look as if nothing will ever move them again.

When I started writing (writing with a view to getting published, that is), back in the very late 1960s, the goalposts looked fixed. They seemed immovable. There were Rules for everything, most of which had been in place since my own childhood.

For a start, the Rules said fantasy was strictly for kids. The only known fantasy for adults was
The Lord of the Rings
—and you should just imagine the trouble reviewers who thought of themselves as sane and adult had handling that in the fifties! There was this man—he seemed to get stuck with reviewing Tolkien, when he had far rather review what the Rules said were mainstream books (these were about angry young men at newly founded universities). And this man had been very patient with Book I of
The Lord of the Rings
, very patient, and accepted the fact that Hobbits, Elves, and Dwarves might wish to set out on foot in winter in order to destroy a ring. He wasn't sure, but he thought it was an allegory, and that made him much happier: it wasn't really about Hobbits, see, but something else entirely, possibly angry young men at newly founded universities. Then he got Book II. And Ents. Walking trees—he just could not take walking trees! I never saw how he reviewed
The Return of the King
—possibly he didn't, possibly he gave up journalism. It was just too much to be asked to read something that was properly only for children.

Now, to be fair, this Rule that fantasy is only for kids represents a huge advance on the Rules in my mother's day. When my mother was a small girl, around 1908–9, she was addicted to fairy stories—any story that began “Once upon a time” and went on to talk about princes and princesses and magic. These, in those days, were so much despised that you could almost only get them as little booklets printed on cheap paper and sold for two coppers at the slush end of the news agent's. But she saved up her pennies and she bought one booklet a month—and read and reread them avidly. Until the day her father caught her reading them. He was furious. He punished her. Then he took all the booklets away and burned them. He said they were not about real facts and so they would destroy her mind, and he forbade her ever to read such things again. And she obeyed him. He died soon after, which kind of fixed it for her.

I never met my grandfather—for which I am rather glad. I don't think we'd have got on. And I have often thought that his attitude, and the attitude of my mother's generation that received and obeyed the prohibition of their parents—is not unconnected with the fact that these two generations were responsible for two world wars.

Be that as it may, things had loosened up a little by the time I was a child. Thanks largely to E. Nesbit, fantasy was established firmly as kids' business. My mother, of course, was carefully shielded from Nesbit, and she took care to shield me. I only read Nesbit when I was an adult. But the goalposts had moved all the same. My generation was allowed fantasy, even magic, provided it was simply improbable. This means talking animals in situations that were harmless and jolly. This meant Winnie-the-Pooh—but not the last chapter of
The House at Pooh Corner
, because that chapter began to impinge on serious things like love and memory and the value of fantasy, and everyone knew the Rule: fantasy is for children and therefore not serious. It must not affect the child who reads it in any way. I was forbidden to read that last chapter—or not only forbidden: told that it was—well—not quite nice, that it was boring, that I wouldn't understand it, that it was silly. This is the way that the Rules most often get themselves enforced. In the same way, I was allowed
The Wind in the Willows
but prohibited from reading the chapter titled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” or the chapter about the old Sea Rat. Those were about numen and mystery and poetry, for heaven's sake! And highly undesirable. Needless to say I sneaked and read these things, feeling both guilty and bewildered.

But I never got to read the Narnia books, which were coming out all the time I was in my early teens. They were withheld as not quite nice too because they were about something—and hush! The Something was God.

Actually I knew all about books that were About Something. Nine-tenths of such few books we had, my sisters and I, were about instructing you morally, thinly disguised as a story. We saw through that instantly, and heartily despised this practice. We had the longest shelf in our bookcase devoted to such books—it was labeled by me in large letters:
GODDY BOOKS
—and none of us read them more than once. I suppose I should be grateful that C. S. Lewis was withheld because he would certainly have gone straight into that shelf and there is rather more to him than that. But I am not grateful. Not in the least.

This illustrates another major Rule of that time: that fantasy was to be used only to instruct you morally. People really didn't think it was right that kids should just enjoy a book. It had to teach you something too. By the time I was ready to start writing (for publication, that is), folk were a bit leery of God. God was too heavy or something. Most books preached on about how to Do Good in Community, with a sideways glance at How to Be a Better Person. Or they were books about Growing Up. You know. Growing Up was putting away games and fun and above all anything that smacked of Let's Pretend, and was going out into the Real World a grimmer and a duller person.

You cannot imagine how my kids hated that kind of book—or perhaps you can. Nobody likes to feel got at. Very outspoken my kids were about it too, far worse than my sisters and I were. “Why can't books be funny?” they wanted to know. But there was a Rule around at that time that fantasy in particular was not funny. Funny books were very slender. They were labeled “Humor”—for humor, read “Whimsy.” That was the only kind you were supposed to have.

These Rules—that you shouldn't enjoy fantasy and that it should give moral instruction—seem to me to have been made up to excuse the writing of fantasy by people who still felt guilty over the prohibitions of my grandfather's generation. They made it All Right, you see, these Rules. Then somebody (mysterious unknown somebody) came up with an even better Rule. This was that children's books were allowed only to deal with Problems. You took a social problem—parents divorcing, mother a nymphomaniac, father drunk or gay (or both), brother on drugs, child crippled or bullied, a moron in the family, epilepsy, poverty (but only if you were stuck for a problem; poverty was too easy)—and you wrote about this Problem in stark, distressing terms. Then—this is the Rule—you gave it to the child with that problem to read. The child was supposed to delight in the insight and to see his own parents (or brother or disability) as a joyful challenge.

This Rule is still in force today. People truly believe in it—and this is despite the obvious question that Jill Paton Walsh once asked: if you were divorcing, what would you think of the person who made you read
Anna Karenina
? But it didn't truly bother me at that time. I had been looking for ways to break all these Rules without appearing to break them. And this problem Rule gave me a way to slide in. I sat down and wrote
Eight Days of Luke
(which was actually written about a year before anything else I had published). In it the boy, David, had problems—not very acute ones by the standards of the Rule, but they would pass. And I knew the problems were real, because David's relations were real people I had had to live with one unending school term, and I couldn't wait for the chance to make them funny as well as horrible.

My newly acquired agent sent the book to the Oxford University Press. Who sent it straight back again on the grounds that children were not allowed to strike matches.
³

Ouch. I had forgotten all the other minor Rules. These were:

 

1. That children in books were not allowed to do or think anything a nineteenth-century child was forbidden.

2. Adults in children's books could do no wrong, unless they were baddies, in which case a dutiful writer must get them killed off at the end of the book, even if they had only stolen the silver spoons.

3. That adults did not have characters—although you were allowed one comic adult per book on condition he/she spoke dialect and called the central child “Master” or “Miss.” I hate dialect. It gets in the way. If there is a need for dialect, you can render it quite easily by reproducing the rhythm of that form of speech. Then you don't need to bother with silly spellings.

4. You did not raise the nasty matter of sex, however indirectly. The elderly dragon lady at OUP had spotted the shocking fact that Astrid has an affair with Thor and put my agent through the third degree about it, demanding to know if that meant David was gay. This Rule lasted surprisingly long. In the late seventies, the writer of
Watership Down
offered in my hearing to take a man outside and punch his face in for daring to include the words “children's books” and “sex” in the same sentence.

5. Above all, you must not allow any magic in the book to become serious. It must not affect or change the life of the child protagonist. This last Rule, oddly enough, made
Eight Days of Luke
extremely hard to get published. When I did find a publisher, they postponed the book for two years because they were afraid it would be accused of Satanism. Then they gave it an extremely lurid cover because they thought it was so controversial.

 

This was in the late sixties, early seventies. Fortunately for me, around this time the place filled with people who were either breaking the Rules too, or at least making sure they got thoroughly stretched. Some of these had been going a while—Joan Aiken, Leon Garfield, Susan Cooper, Peter Dickinson, John Christopher. Others, like Robert Westall, Ann Lawrence, Penelope Farmer, Penelope Lively, Tanith Lee, got into print about the same time as I did. There were many others. The Rules couldn't seem to stand up against such numbers. For a while, they just went away.

Probably this was because the time was ripe, but I don't think that was the whole of it. There was fertilization from elsewhere. For a long while, another form of fantasy had been growing and flourishing outside the Rules, mostly in America. It was called science fiction. The science part was because it based its fantasy on proven scientific facts such as that Mars and Venus are habitable by humans, that galactic empires are possible, or that faster-than-light travel could happen any day now. I had been an avid reader of SF for years, and I can vouch for the degree of cross-fertilization in my case. Science fiction is full of ideas (not all of them proven and scientific)—fine new ideas—and moreover the best of it is consummately well written. I would take a bet that if we were to take a scientific time trip to the future and go where they are studying twentieth-century literature, we'd find the professors ignoring so-called mainstream fiction and concentrating on the wonders performed by science fiction. But, from my point of view, probably the main and most liberating fact about SF is that the Rules were quite different. In fact, in the early period—the 1940s—the Rules were changing once a week, to the extent that you could sometimes think they didn't exist.