Reflections (35 page)

 

CB:
You've created a number of different universes and multiverses, some of which have several books set within them—the Chrestomanci books, for example, and the Dalemark series. In each case, the way the world is set up is quite distinct. Does that make a lot of difference to the kind of story you can tell, and to the kind of people who can inhabit that world?

 

DWJ:
It does. The extraordinary thing is what an enormous difference a very small change can make to a world and its inhabitants. It makes a totally different kind of story: if you were to set a Chrestomanci story in the Dalemark world, it would be quite different. The Chrestomanci world is more foursquare apart from anything else. More straightforward somehow.

 

CB:
Yes, I know what you mean. Dalemark is slightly more at an angle, isn't it?

 

DWJ:
Yes, it is. It's hard to express, but it ripples away sideways quite often. And there wouldn't be any room for gods, and Dalemark definitely needed gods.

 

CB:
True. I suppose there are gods in the Chrestomanci books, but in a way they're more . . . containable.

 

DWJ:
They are. They're the ones we're used to.

 

CB:
There's Millie, for a start!

 

DWJ:
Yes! But also they do go to church of a Sunday—though Gwendolen makes a riot of the church service. That was pure revenge actually, because when I was sent to boarding school we were marched off every Sunday—we had to wear gloves and hats and coats and all this Sunday stuff, and we were marched off in a crocodile, two by two, and we had to sit through all this incredibly boring church service. I spent my time grinding my teeth, and hating looking at crucifixes because they always make me feel terrible—I mean, fancy doing that to anyone!—and looking instead at the stained-glass windows, of which thank goodness there were many, and thinking, “Oh, if only they'd come alive and start running about.” And finally I was able to get them to do that in
Charmed Life
. And it was somehow revenge—I wouldn't call it therapeutic, but it was revenge for many hours of extreme boredom. Not to speak of chill, because churches were very cold in those days.

 

CB:
In an upstairs room in your house there's a drawer that's jammed shut, which is full of manuscripts. Who knows what treasures lie therein? But I do know there are quite a few stories that you've started and not finished for one reason or another. Perhaps they didn't want to be written then, or they petered out, or whatever. What proportion of stories that get started make it to the finishing line, and how many of them get put away, or recycled later, or cannibalized?

 

DWJ:
Some of them are cannibalized, but mostly it's like cod spawn. You know, masses and masses of sperm and eggs, and only a small school resulting. There's that massive drawer, but I think what's in there is mostly the first drafts of things that did work. I've got another drawer in my study, which is actually two drawers deep, which is stuffed with beginnings. And they're certainly not all there were, either. I must have chucked quite a few out. Some of them I got quite a long way through, actually, and suddenly realized this is not working, this is swimming away into a swamp, this is simply losing shape, this is something I can't finish in anything shorter than the size of the Bible—or else things that were just two pages long and seemed like a frightfully good idea, a sort of seminal idea, and then just hit the buffers. There was no way to go on with them, and most of the time I don't know why. I occasionally take them out and read them, and think, “What was I even remotely intending to do with this? Where was it supposed to be going?” Because of course you do have that kind of idea—and most of the time I do not know. I know when I wrote
Enchanted Glass
, which did come from that drawer of half-started things, I'm pretty sure I hadn't intended it to go like it did when I fished it out and continued from Chapter One, where it had stopped. But I can't tell you what makes them stop, I really can't.

 

CB:
Well, I'm delighted that so many of them made it to the end.

Two Family Views of Diana and Her Work

 

These two pieces were written by Diana's sons Colin and Richard after her death. They reflect on their mother's lasting legacy as a writer.

 

 

Fantasies for Children

Colin Burrow

 

This is the transcript of a fifteen-minute talk by Diana's son Colin Burrow that was broadcast on BBC Radio Three on July 4, 2011, as part of a series
The Essay: Dark Arcadias
. The series explored the history of an idea, and other contributors offered essays on topics as varied as “Wild Nature” and “The Depiction of Poverty in the Renaissance.”

 

M
y mother died earlier this year. She was the children's author Diana Wynne Jones. She wrote more than thirty novels. Some of them are set in mythical worlds, which have their own completely convincing mythologies and histories, all of which she made up. Others blend magic into our own world.
Dogsbody
, which appeared in 1975, was perhaps the book in which she really worked out what she wanted to do as a writer. In
Dogsbody
the dog star Sirius is banished from the heavens and is born on earth as a puppy. He becomes an extremely doggy dog, who can't resist either a bitch in heat or a dustbin. He is unmistakably modeled on our own family dog at the time, who was a serial Lothario and bin raider. Sirius the dog, though, also happens to be a celestial hero on a quest to recover a tool for mending the stars.

That fusion of the completely ordinary and the completely magical was entirely typical of my mother's way of writing. It was also how she looked at reality. Normality could never just be normality. So if she got caught in traffic on the M25 it was not because it's one of the busiest roads in Europe. It was because she had her own particular travel jinx.

The obituaries all said nice things about her work, though I'm not sure they got her quite right. Most of them said that Diana Wynne Jones was the person who made Harry Potter possible. This is probably true, but she would hate to be remembered like that. She had a very low view of J. K. Rowling. Because my mother read English at Oxford while Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were lecturing there, the obituaries also said that they were the main influence on her writing.

Lewis and Tolkien played their parts, but the biggest literary influence on Diana Wynne Jones was, I think, a woman: E. Nesbit, whose books Mum read to us from a very early age. E. Nesbit was described by Bernard Shaw as “an audaciously unconventional lady.” She smoked cigarettes and cut her hair short. She was a Fabian and a socialist and had a very odd love life. Her children's books wove together sand fairies and ginger beer, magic and experiences from her own life in a way that anticipates the mixture of magic and reality in a lot of contemporary children's fiction.

She was the main spirit behind Diana Wynne Jones's fiction. In my mother's best novel,
Fire and Hemlock
—which retells the story of “Tam Lin,” but which is also about her own love for my father—the heroine, Polly, is sent a series of children's books which her admirer Thomas Lynn says nobody should grow up without reading. They include E. Nesbit's
Five Children and It
and
The Treasure Seekers
. When Thomas sends her
The Lord of the Rings
a bit later on, it's something of a disaster, since Polly starts to imitate Tolkien in her own writings, and Thomas tells her off for doing so.

Writing for children is often regarded as escapist, and fantasy in general is often sneered at as the simplest kind of utopian fiction. You create a world in which everything works out, as if by magic, and that's the end of it: Arcadia without darkness or death. Children's writing and fantasy in the line descended from E. Nesbit is not at all like that. E. Nesbit had an unhappy childhood. She often directly wrote about people she knew in her fiction. And her most utopian writing—particularly her late work
The Magic City
—is not simply escapist. It imagines a new and better world because of what is wrong with the present one. E. Nesbit created a kind of children's fiction which was always aware of the bad things it was trying to escape
from
—fathers in prison, or parents who are absent, or worlds that are wrecked. As a result her followers, including Diana Wynne Jones, created a kind of fantasy which does not simply run away into ideal or magical worlds, but which uses those ideal worlds to work out real problems from their own lives. This can make the worlds they describe serious and dark.

“Dark” is perhaps an odd word to use of Diana Wynne Jones's writing, since it is full of fun. Where else could you find a description of a griffin going to the vet, or indeed of a griffin cracking its way out of an egg? But her books are profoundly serious despite the jokes. They are quite consistently driven by rage against unfairness. Very often characters in her novels discover that they are being manipulated or controlled by people who have no right to do so, and they cry out (as my mother did, rather often and usually at high volume), “That's not
fair
!”

Diana Wynne Jones repeatedly embodied evil in people who are unfair in one particular way. She hated exploiters, people who tried to suck the magic and vitality from others. In
Charmed Life
, the central character Eric has a sister who steals his magic and stops him believing in himself. In
The Dark Lord of Derkholm
, a magical world parallel to our own is having the magic stolen from it by a cold entrepreneur who organizes fantasy tours through the countryside. He holds the whole world by the purse-strings: dragons are losing their luster, the Wizard's University is under threat, and the whole of Arcadia is being wrecked by commercial exploitation.

This sounds like a tract for our own times, though
The Dark Lord of Derkholm
was written in 1998. And it suggests that children's fiction about alternative worlds can be partly about politics. Diana Wynne Jones's magical worlds don't grow from politics in the sense of government policy or levels of taxation. They're much more about the politics of the spirit. Her books repeatedly represent acts of rebellion against anything or anyone that makes people ordinary and gray when they could be imaginative and alive.

Much of that comes from E. Nesbit. Some of it also comes from the poet Shelley, whom Diana Wynne Jones much admired. But her fiction was also underpinned by a profound sadness which was all her own. Many of Diana Wynne Jones's heroes and heroines are writers. Almost all of these have problems. Some have their words stolen by evil magicians who use them in nefarious magical ways (this happens in
Archer's Goon
as well as in
Fire and Hemlock
). Others have to give up the things they love in order to make the world better. The narrator of
The Homeward Bounders
is called Jamie. He discovers that a group of demons are playing an elaborate war game with the fates of all the worlds and all the people on them. For finding this out, he is ejected from his own world and is condemned to go seeking his home from universe to universe. Eventually, when he has given up all hope, he leads a rebellion against the demons who are destroying and exploiting the universes. The price of his victory is that he has to wander through the worlds for eternity on his own. It's from this position of profound loss that he relates his story.

In
Fire and Hemlock
, the heroine Polly also writes stories, and she eventually discovers that she can only win her true love back from the ice-cold queen of the fairies by giving him up. Repeatedly in the fiction of Diana Wynne Jones, a writer is a person who has to give up everything, and go through despair, in order to set other people free.

That's a profoundly strange idea. And anyone who saw Diana Wynne Jones actually writing a book would be particularly amazed by it. When she wrote she was a picture of complete happiness: she would sit with a cigarette in one hand and a pen in the other, a dog or a cat at her feet, and coffee nearby. She regarded the people and the worlds she created with real love. When she signed away the film rights to
Howl's Moving Castle
so that Hayao Miyazaki could make it into a wonderful animation, she said she felt like she was selling her characters into slavery. And yet clearly she regarded the process of imagining new and magical worlds as an exercise in loneliness so profound that it was almost a kind of sacrifice.

Many of the obituaries of Diana Wynne Jones dwelled on her early life—or rather her early life as she described it in “Something About the Author.” This tells how she was brought up in the village of Thaxted in Essex. Thaxted was through the 1920s and beyond a center for communism, Morris dancing, hand-thrown pots, and eccentric living. She always said how much she hated the village, but her particular brand of utopian fiction is actually quite hard to imagine without that bizarre social and political background. Her autobiography also says that Diana Wynne Jones and her sisters spent much of their childhood living on their own in an annex with a concrete floor, where they were deprived of books, and were neglected by their parents. Her mother repeatedly called her a clever but ugly delinquent. Her sisters don't remember their childhood in the same way. I wasn't there, so I can only say that she needed to remember her childhood in this way, even if that wasn't quite how it was.

There is no doubt that this gives her fiction its characteristic darkness. Old women and failed mothers do not fare well in her stories. The central character of
Black Maria
is an elderly suburban lady of high respectability. She turns out to be a witch who uses magic to control a whole town full of zombielike conformist men. This particular witch is clearly based on my grandmothers. They are represented so cruelly that one of Diana Wynne Jones's own characters might well cry out, “It's not fair” if they read about them.

My mother's mother was herself a formidable woman. She grew up in a very modest background in Sheffield. She became a scholarship girl, went to Oxford, and transformed herself into a speaker of impeccably cultivated BBC English. She probably did not much want to be a mother. She certainly could be cruel, and very much liked to be admired by men. She runs through my mother's novels like a dark base note: she's there in the wicked Witch of the Waste in
Howl's Moving Castle
, who turns the young Sophie into a crone and who preserves her own beauty by magic. There is no doubt that my grandmother is the principal reason why Diana Wynne Jones's Arcadias are so dark, and why her fictions so often associate imaginative children with lonely defiance and with sadness.

One of the most obvious but most profound truths about fiction is that it does not paint things as they are. Fiction is often, as a result, not fair. People who make up imaginative worlds—Arcadias, utopias—often do so because they feel wronged, or because they feel that there is something wrong with the world around them. Fiction allows them to create a world with its own set of values, in which punishments can be handed out according to the rules of the imagination and emotion rather than the rule of law. People who knew Dante, and who saw him put people whom he hated into his representation of hell, probably had exactly the same response as I do to some of my mother's writing. Diana Wynne Jones used fiction partly to create worlds which were happier and more equal than our own, but she could also use fiction to take revenge on people she felt had injured or offended her.

I liked my grandmother, and I got punished for this in several of my mother's books. When I was a teenager I listened to The Doors and did a lot of photography. No doubt in my mother's eyes I was a chilly kind of thing. In
Fire and Hemlock
there is a chilly public schoolboy called Sebastian who likes The Doors and photography. He also happens to be in league with the glamorous and un-aging Queen of the Fairies, with whom he tries to erase the heroine's memories and perform a human sacrifice.

Well, thanks, Mum. But fiction is not meant to be fair. My mother needed to tap some of her darkest experiences in order to write, and she gave moral values to different characters according to a profoundly idiosyncratic emotional language. Her fictional worlds were not straight transcriptions of the world she saw, but of the world she felt. And she said what she felt about people more readily in fiction than she did in person.

I'm a literary critic by profession, and most of the people I write books about—Milton, Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare—lived around four centuries ago. It's therefore particularly odd for me to read my mother's novels and see at once where so much of the fiction comes from. My old dog Lily is effectively the hero of
House of Many Ways
, for example. This gives me a quite different perspective on the poems and plays I think about in my day job. Many of the writers I work on created dark Arcadias of one kind or another—pastoral or fantastical worlds which are marred by some problem. It's often said by literary critics that Shakespeare and Sidney and Spenser and Milton created Arcadian and pastoral fictions in order to reflect on their own worlds. If those Arcadias are dark—if kings are no good, or if queens are evil, if life in the forest becomes violent—critics usually end up saying that it's because Sir Philip Sidney (or whoever it might be) didn't like the foreign policy of Elizabeth I. We say that because we know a fair bit about the foreign policy of Elizabeth I, but we don't know much about the intimate lives and aversions of authors from that period. I learned many things from my mother and her books, but perhaps the principal thing I learned was that dark Arcadias, like all fictions, almost certainly come from places in the imagination which are very private. Fictions are so closely tied up in the lives and the emotions of their creators that readers—even the author's own children—can only see by glimpses where they really came from.