The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

ALL HAPPY FAMILIES

I used to be too respectful to disagree with Tolstoy, but after I got into my sixties my faculty of respect atrophied. Besides, at some point in the last forty years I began to question Tolstoy’s respect for his wife. Anybody can make a mistake in marriage, of course. But I have an impression that no matter whom he married Tolstoy would have respected her only in certain respects, though he expected her to respect him in all respects. In this respect, I disapprove of Tolstoy; which makes it easier to disagree with him in the first place, and in the second place, to say so.

There has been a long gap between the first and second places—years. But there was a period of as many years even before the first place, before I achieved the point of disagreement, the ability to disapprove. During all those years, from when I was fourteen or so and first read him, till I was in my forties, I was, as it were, married to Tolstoy, his loyal wife. Though fortunately not expected to copy his manuscripts six times over by hand, I read and reread his books with joy and zeal. I respected him without ever asking if or wondering whether he, as it were, respected me. When E. M. Forster, in an essay on Tolstoy, told me that he didn’t, I replied, He has that right!

And if E. M. Forster had asked, What gives him that right? I would have answered simply, genius.

But E. M. Forster didn’t ask; which is just as well, since he probably would have asked what I meant by genius.

I think what I meant by genius was that I thought Tolstoy actually knew what he was talking about—unlike the rest of us.

However, at some point, around forty or so, I began to wonder if he really knew what he was talking about any better than anybody else, or if what he knew better than anybody else was how to talk about it. The two things are easily confused.

So then, quietly, in my private mind, surrounded by the soft, supportive mutterings of feminists, I began to ask rude questions of Tolstoy. In public I remained a loyal and loving wife, entirely respectful of his opinions as well as his art. But the unspoken questions were there, the silent disagreement. And the unspoken, as we know, tends to strengthen, to mature and grow richer over the years, like an undrunk wine. Of course it may just go to Freudian vinegar. Some thoughts and feelings go to vinegar very quickly, and must be poured out at once. Some go on fermenting in the bottle, and burst out in an explosion of murderous glass shards. But a good, robust, well-corked feeling only gets deeper and more complicated, down in the cellar. The thing is knowing when to uncork it.

It’s ready. I’m ready. The great first sentence of the first chapter of the great book—not the greatest book, but perhaps the second greatest—is, yes, we can say it in unison: “All happy families are alike; unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way.” Translations vary, but not significantly.

People quote that sentence so often that it must satisfy them; but it does not, it never quite did, satisfy me. And twenty years ago or so, I began admitting my dissatisfaction to myself. These happy families he speaks of so confidently in order to dismiss them as all alike—where are they? Were they very much commoner in the nineteenth century? Did he know numerous happy families among the Russian nobility, or middle class, or peasantry, all of them alike? This seems so unlikely that I wondered if perhaps he knew a few happy families, which is not impossible; but that those few were all alike seems deeply, very deeply implausible. Was his own family happy, either the one he grew up in or the one he fathered? Did he know one family, one single family, that could, over a substantial period of time, as a whole and in each of its component members, honestly be called happy? If he did he knew one more than most of us do.

I’m not just showing off my sexagenarian cynicism, proud though I may be of it. I admit that a family can be happy, in the sense that almost all the members of it are in good health, good spirits, and good temper with one another, for quite a long time—a week, a month, even longer. And if we go into the comparative mode, then certainly some families are far happier than others, on the whole and for years on end—because there are so many extremely unhappy families. Many people I have talked with about such matters were in one way or another unhappy as children; and perhaps most people, though they stay deeply attached to their relatives and recall joyous times with them, would not describe their family as happy. “We had some real good times,” they say.

I grew up in a family that on the whole seems to have been happier than most families; and yet I find it false—an intolerable cheapening of reality—simply to describe it as happy. The enormous cost and complexity of that “happiness,” its dependence upon a whole substructure of sacrifices, repressions, suppressions, choices made or forgone, chances taken or lost, balancings of greater and lesser evils—the tears, the fears, the migraines, the injustices, the censorships, the quarrels, the lies, the angers, the cruelties it involved—is all that to be swept away, brushed under the carpet by the brisk broom of a silly phrase, “a happy family”?

And why? In order to imply that happiness is easy, shallow, ordinary; a common thing not worth writing a novel about? Whereas unhappiness is complex, deep, difficult to attain, unusual; unique indeed; and so a worthy subject for a great, a unique novelist?

Surely that is a silly idea. But silly or not, it has been imposingly influential among novelists and critics for decades. Many a novelist would wither in shame if the reviewers caught him writing about happy people, families like other families, people like other people; and indeed many critics are keenly on the watch for happiness in novels in order to dismiss it as banal, sentimental, or (in other words) for women.

How the whole thing got gendered, I don’t know, but it did. The gendering supposes that male readers have strong, tough, reality-craving natures, while feeble female readers crave constant reassurance in the form of little warm blobs of happiness—fuzzy bunnies.

This is true of some women. Some women have never experienced any glimpse of happiness in their whole life better than a stuffed fuzzy bunny and so they surround themselves with stuffed fuzzy bunnies, fictional or actual. In this they may be luckier than most men, who aren’t allowed stuffed fuzzy bunnies, only girls in bunny suits. In any case, who can blame them, the men or the women? Not me. Anybody who has been privileged to know real, solid, nonfuzzy happiness, and then lets some novelist or critic buffalo them into believing that they shouldn’t read about it because it’s commoner than unhappiness, inferior to unhappiness, less interesting than unhappiness,—where does my syntax lead me? Into judgmentalism. I shall extricate myself in silence.

The falseness of Tolstoy’s famous sentence is nowhere shown more clearly than in Tolstoy’s novels, including the one it’s the first sentence of. Dolly’s family, which is the unhappy one we are promised, is in my opinion a moderately, that is to say a realistically happy one. Dolly and her children are kind and contented, often merry together, and the husband and wife definitely have their moments, for all his stupid skirtchasing. In the greater novel, the Rostovs when we meet them might well be described as a happy family—rich, healthy, generous, kind, full of passions and counterpassions, full of vitality, energy, and love. But the Rostovs are not “like” anybody; they are idiosyncratic, unpredictable, incomparable. And, like most human beings, they can’t hang on to their happiness. The old Count wastes his children’s heritage and the Countess worries herself sick; Moscow burns; Natasha falls in love with a cold fish, nearly runs away with a cretin, marries and turns into a mindless brood sow; Petya is killed pointlessly in the war at sixteen. Jolly good fun! Fuzzy bunnies everywhere!

Tolstoy knew what happiness is—how rare, how imperilled, how hard-won. Not only that, he had the ability to describe happiness, a rare gift, which gives his novels much of their extraordinary beauty. Why he denied his knowledge in the famous sentence, I don’t know. He did a good deal of lying and denying, perhaps more than many lesser novelists do. He had more to lie about; and his cruel theoretical Christianity led him into all kinds of denials of what in his fiction he saw and showed to be true. So maybe he was just showing off. It sounded good. It made a great first sentence.

My next essay will be about whether or not I want to be told to call a stranger Ishmael.

THINGS NOT ACTUALLY PRESENT ON The Book of Fantasy AND J. L. BORGES

There are two books that I look on as esteemed and cherished greataunts or grandmothers, wise and mild though sometimes rather dark of counsel, to be turned to when my judgment hesitates. One of these books provides facts, of a peculiar sort. The other does not. The I Ching or Book of Changes is the visionary elder who has outlived fact, the ancestor so old she speaks a different tongue. Her counsel is sometimes appallingly clear, sometimes very obscure indeed. “The little fox crossing the river wets its tail,” she says, smiling faintly, or, “A dragon appears in the field,” or, “Biting upon dried gristly meat.” One retires to ponder long over such advice.

The other Auntie is younger, and speaks English. Indeed she speaks more English than anybody else. She offers fewer dragons and much more dried gristly meat. And yet A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, or the OED as she is known to her family, is also a Book of Changes. Most wonderful in its transmutations, it is not the Book of Sand, yet is inexhaustible; not an Aleph, yet all we have said and can ever say is in it, if we can but find it.

“Auntie!” I say, magnifying glass in hand, because my edition, the Compact Auntie, is compressed into two volumes of print no larger than grains of sand, “Auntie! Please tell me about fantasy, because I want to talk about a Book of Fantasy, but I am not sure what I am talking about.”

“Fantasy, or Phantasy,” Auntie replies, clearing her throat, “is from the Greek phantasia, lit. ‘a making visible.’” She explains that phantasia is related to the verbs phantasein, “to make visible,” or in Late Greek, “to imagine, have visions,” and phainein, “to show.” And she summarises the earliest meanings of the word fantasy in English: an appearance, a phantom, the mental process of sensuous perception, the faculty of imagination, a false notion, a caprice, a whim.

Then, though she eschews the casting of yarrow stalks or coins polished with sweet oil, being after all an Englishwoman, she begins to tell the Changes—the mutations of a word moving through the minds of people moving through the centuries. She shows how fantasy, which to the Schoolmen of the late Middle Ages meant “the mental apprehension of an object of perception,” that is, the mind’s very act of linking itself to the phenomenal world, came in time to signify just the reverse: an hallucination, or a phantasm, or the habit of deluding oneself. And then the word, doubling back on its tracks like a hare, came to mean the imagination itself, “the process, the faculty, or the result of forming mental representations of things not actually present.” Though seemingly very close to the Scholastic use of the word, this definition of fantasy leads in quite the opposite direction, often going so far as to imply that the imagination is extravagant, or visionary, or merely fanciful.

So the word fantasy remains ambiguous, standing between the false, the foolish, the delusory, the shallows of the mind, and the mind’s deep connection with the real. On this threshold it sometimes faces one way, masked and costumed, frivolous, an escapist; then it turns, and we glimpse as it turns the face of an angel, bright truthful messenger, arisen Urizen.

Since the compilation of my Oxford English Dictionary, the tracks of the word have been complicated still further by the comings and goings of psychologists. Their technical uses of fantasy and phantasy have influenced our sense and use of the word; and they have also given us the handy verb “to fantasise.” If you are fantasising, you may be daydreaming, or you might be using your imagination therapeutically as a means of discovering reasons Reason does not know, discovering yourself to yourself.

But Auntie does not acknowledge the existence of that verb. Into her Supplement (through the tradesmen’s door) she admits only fantasist, and defines the upstart, politely but with a faint curl of the lip, as “one who ‘weaves’ fantasies.” She illustrates the word with quotations from Oscar Wilde and H. G. Wells. Evidently she means that fantasists are writers, but is not quite willing to admit it.

Indeed, in the early twentieth century, the days of victorious Realism, fantasists were often apologetic about what they did, offering it as mere word weaving—fancywork—a sort of bobble-fringing to real literature, or passing it off as being “for children” and therefore beneath the notice of critics, professors, and dictionary makers.

Writers of fantasy are often less modest now that what they do is recognised as literature, or at least as a genre of literature, or at least as a subliterary genre, or at least as a commercial product. For fantasies are rife and many-colored on the bookshelves. The head of the fabled unicorn is laid upon the lap of Mammon, and the offering is acceptable to Mammon. Fantasy has, in fact, become quite a business.

But when one night in Buenos Aires in 1937 three friends sat talking together about fantastic literature, it was not yet a business.

Nor was it even known as fantastic literature when one night in a villa in Geneva in 1818 three friends sat talking together and telling ghost stories. They were Mary Shelley, her husband Percy, and Lord Byron—and Claire Clairmont was probably with them, and the strange young Dr. Polidori—and they told awful tales, and Mary was frightened. “We will each,” cried Byron, “write a ghost story!” So Mary went away and thought about it, fruitlessly, until a few nights later she had a nightmare in which a “pale student” used strange arts and machineries to arouse from unlife the “hideous phantasm of a man.”

And so, alone of the friends, she wrote her ghost story, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, which is the first great modern fantasy. There are no ghosts in it; but fantasy, as the OED observed, is more than ghoulie-mongering.

Because ghosts haunt one corner of the vast domain of fantastic literature, both oral and written, people familiar with that corner of it call the whole thing ghost stories, or horror stories; just as others call it Fairyland after the part of it they love best or despise most, and others call it science fiction, and others call it stuff and nonsense. But the nameless being given life by Frankenstein’s or Mary Shelley’s arts and machineries is neither ghost nor fairy; science fictional he may be; stuff and nonsense he is not. He is a creature of fantasy, archetypal, deathless. Once raised he will not sleep again, for his pain will not let him sleep, the unanswered moral questions that woke with him will not let him rest in peace.

When there began to be money in the fantasy business, plenty of money was made out of him in Hollywood, but even that did not kill him.

Very likely his story was mentioned on that night in 1937 in Buenos Aires when Silvina Ocampo and her friends Borges and Bioy Casares fell to talking, so Casares tells us, “about fantastic literature… discussing the stories which seemed best to us. One of us suggested that if we put together the fragments of the same type we had listed in our notebooks, we would have a good book.”

So that, charmingly, is how The Book of Fantasy came to be: three friends talking. No plans, no definitions, no business, except the intention of “having a good book.”

In the making of such a book by such makers, certain definitions were implied by the exclusion of certain stories, and by inclusion other definitions were ignored; so, perhaps for the first time, horror story and ghost story and fairy tale and science fiction all came together between the same covers. Thirty years later the anthologists enlarged the collection considerably for a new edition, and Borges suggested further inclusions to the editors of the first English-language edition shortly before his death.

It is an idiosyncratic selection, completely eclectic; in fact it is a wild mishmash. Some of the stories will be familiar to most readers, others are exotic and peculiar. A piece we might think we know almost too well, such as “The Cask of Amontillado,” regains its essential strangeness when read among works and fragments from the Orient and South America and distant centuries, by Kafka, Swedenborg, Yeats, Cortazar, Akutagawa, Niu Chiao, James Joyce…. The inclusion of a good many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers, especially British ones, reflects, I imagine, particularly the taste of Borges, himself a member and perpetuator of the international tradition of fantasy that included Kipling and Wells.

Perhaps I should not say “tradition,” since it has no name as such and little recognition in critical circles, and is distinguished in college English departments mainly by being ignored. But I believe there is a company of fantasists that Borges belonged to even as he transcended it, and that he honored even as he transformed it. As he included these writers in the Book of Fantasy, we may see it as a notebook of sources and affiliations and elective affinities for him and his fellow editors, and for their generation of Latin American writers, which preceded the ones we call magical realists.

By saying that fantasy is for children (which some of it is) and dismissing it as commercial and formulaic (which some of it is), critics feel justified in ignoring it all. Yet looking at such writers as Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, Philip K. Dick, Salman Rushdie, José Saramago, it is possible to believe that our narrative fiction has for years been going, slowly and vaguely and massively, not in the wash and slap of fad and fashion but as a deep current, in one direction—towards rejoining the “ocean of story,” fantasy.

Fantasy is, after all, the oldest kind of narrative fiction, and the most universal.

Fiction as we currently think of it, the novel and short story as they have existed since the eighteenth century, offers one of the very best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Fiction is often really much more useful than lived experience; it takes much less time, costs nothing (from the library), and comes in a manageable, orderly form. You can understand it. Experience just steamrollers over you and you begin to see what happened only years and years later, if ever. Fiction is much better than reality at providing useful factual, psychological, and moral understanding.

But realistic fiction is culture-specific. If it’s your culture, your decade, fine; but if the story takes place in another century or another country, reading it with understanding involves an act of displacement, of translation, which many readers are unable or unwilling to make. The lifeways, the language, the morals and mores, the unspoken assumptions, all the details of ordinary life that are the substance and strength of realistic fiction, may be obscure, uninterpretable to the reader of another time and place. So writers who want their story to be understood not only by their contemporary compatriots but also by people of other lands and times, may seek a way of telling it that is more universally comprehensible; and fantasy is such a way.

Fantasies are often set in ordinary life, but the material of fantasy is a more permanent, universal reality than the social customs realism deals with. The substance of fantasy is psychic stuff, human constants: situations and imageries we recognise without having to learn or know anything at all about New York now, or London in 1850, or China three thousand years ago.

A dragon appears in the field….

American readers and writers of fiction may yearn for the pure veracity of Jewett or Dreiser, as the English may look back with longing to the fine solidities of Arnold Bennett; but the societies in and for which those novelists wrote were limited and homogeneous enough to be described in a language that could seriously pretend to describe, in Trollope’s phrase, “the way we live now.” The limits of that language—shared assumptions of class, culture, education, ethics—both focus and shrink the scope of the fiction. Society in the decades around the second millennium, global, multilingual, enormously irrational, undergoing incessant radical change, is not describable in a language that assumes continuity and a common experience of life. And so writers have turned to the global, intuitional language of fantasy to describe, as accurately as they can, the way “we” live “now.”

So it is in so much contemporary fiction that the most revealing and accurate descriptions of our daily life are shot through with strangeness, or displaced in time, or set upon imaginary worlds, or dissolved into the phantasmagoria of drugs or of psychosis, or rise from the mundane suddenly into the visionary and as simply descend from it again.

So it may be that the central ethical dilemma of our age, the use or nonuse of annihilating power, was posed most cogently in fictional terms by the purest of fantasists. Tolkien began The Lord of the Rings in 1937 and finished it about ten years later. During those years, Frodo withheld his hand from the Ring of Power, but the nations did not.

So it is that Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities may serve as a better guidebook to our world than any Michelin or Fodor’s.

So it is that the magical realists of South America, and their counterparts in India and elsewhere, are valued for their revelatory and entire truthfulness to the history of their lands and people.

And so it is that Jorge Luis Borges, a writer in a marginal country, a marginal continent, who chose to identify himself with a marginal tradition, not the mainstream of modernist realism that flowed so full in his youth and maturity, remains a writer central to our literature.

His own poems and stories, his images of reflections, libraries, labyrinths, forking paths, his books of tigers, of rivers, of sand, of mysteries, of changes, are everywhere honored, because they are beautiful; because they are nourishing; and because they fulfill the most ancient, urgent function of words (even as the I Ching and the Oxford English Dictionary do): to form for us “mental representations of things not actually present,” so that we can form a judgment of what world we live in and where we might be going in it, what we can celebrate, what we must fear.

READING YOUNG, READING OLD Mark Twain’s Diaries of Adam and Eve

Every tribe has its myths, and the younger members of the tribe generally get them wrong. My tribal myth of the great Berkeley Fire of 1923 went this way: when my mother’s mother-in-law, who lived near the top of Cedar Street, saw the flames sweeping over the hill straight towards the house, she put her Complete Works of Mark Twain in Twenty-Five Volumes into her Model A and went away from that place.

Because I was going to put that story in print, I made the mistake of checking it first with my brother Ted. In a slow, mild sort of way, Ted took it all to pieces. He said, well, Lena Brown never had a Model A. As a matter of fact, she didn’t drive. The way I remember the story, he said, some fraternity boys came up the hill and got her piano out just before the fire reached that hill. And a bearskin rug, and some other things. But I don’t remember, he said, that anything was said about the Complete Works of Mark Twain.

He and I agreed, however, that fraternity boys who would choose to rescue a piano and a bear rug from a house about to be engulfed by a fiery inferno might well have also selected the Works of Mark Twain. And the peculiarity of their selection may be illuminated by the fact that the piano ended up in the fraternity house. But after the fire or during it, Lena Brown somehow rescued the bear rug and the Complete Works from her rescuers; because Ted remembers the bear; and I certainly, vividly remember the Complete Works.

I also remain convinced that she was very fond of them, that she would have rescued them rather than her clothes and silver and checkbook. And maybe she really did. At any rate, when she died she left them to the family, and my brothers and I grew up with them, a full shelf of lightweight, middle-sized books in slightly pebbly and rather ratty red bindings. They are no longer, alas, in the family, but I have tracked down the edition in a library. As soon as I saw the row of red books I said Yes! with the startled joy one would feel at seeing an adult one had loved as a child, alive and looking just as he did fifty years ago. Our set was, to the best of my knowledge, the 1917 Authorized Uniform Edition, published by Harper & Brothers, and copyright by the Mark Twain Company.

The only other complete works I recall around the house was my great-aunt Betsy’s Dickens. I was proud of both sets. Complete works and uniform editions are something you don’t often see any more except in big libraries, but ordinary people used to own them and be proud of them. They have a majesty about them. Physically they are imposing, the uniform row of bindings, the gold-stamped titles; but the true majesty of a complete works is spiritual. It is a great mental edifice, a house of many mansions, into which a reader can enter at any of the doors, or a young reader can climb in the windows, and wander about, experiencing magnanimity.

My great-aunt was very firm about not letting us get into Dickens yet. She said nobody under eighteen had any business reading Dickens. We would merely misunderstand him and so spoil the pleasure we would otherwise take in him the rest of our lives. She was right, and I am grateful. At sixteen, I whined till she let me read David Copperfield, but she warned me about Steerforth, lest I fall in love with him as she had done, and break my heart. When Betsy died she left me her Dickens. We had him re-bound, for he had got a bit shabby traveling around the West with her for fifty or sixty years. When I take a book from that set I think how, wherever she went, she had this immense refuge and resource with her, reliable as not much else in her life was.

Except for Dickens, nobody told us not to read anything, and I burrowed headlong into every book on the shelves. If it was a story, I read it. And there stood that whole row of pebbly red books, all full of stories.

Obviously I got to Tom Sawyer very soon, and Huck Finn; and my next-older brother, Karl, showed me the sequels, which we judged pretty inferior, critical brats that we were. After The Prince and the Pauper, I got into Life on the Mississippi, and Roughing It—my prime favorite for years—and the stories, and the whole Complete Works in fact, one red book after another, snap, munch, gulp, snap, munch, gulp.

I didn’t much like the Connecticut Yankee. The meaning of the book went right over my head. I just thought the hero was a pigheaded, loudmouthed show-off. But a little thing like not liking a book didn’t keep me from reading it. Not then. It was like Brussels sprouts. Nobody could like them, but they existed, they were food, you ate them. Eating and reading were a central, essential part of life. Eating and reading can’t all be Huck and corn on the cob, some of it has to be Brussels sprouts and the Yankee. And there were plenty of good bits in the Yankee. The only one of the row of red books I ever stuck at was Joan of Arc. I just couldn’t swallow her. She wouldn’t go down. And I believe our set was lacking the Christian Science volume, because I don’t remember even having a go at that. If it had been there, I would have chewed at it, the way kids do, the way Eskimo housewives soften walrus hide, though I might not have been able to swallow it either.

My memory is that it was Karl who discovered Adam’s and Eve’s Diaries and told me to read them. I have always followed Karl’s advice in reading, even after he became an English professor, because he never led me astray before he was a professor. I never would have got into Tom Brown’s School Days for instance, if he hadn’t told me you can skip the first sixty pages, and it must have been Karl who told me to stick with Candide till I got to the person with one buttock, who would make it all worthwhile. So I found the right pebbly red book and read both the Diaries. I loved them instantly and permanently.

And yet when I reread them this year, it was the first time for about fifty years. Not having the Complete Works with me throughout life, I have over the years reread only my favorites of the books, picked up here and there, and the stories contained in various collections. And none of those collections contained the Diaries.

This five-decade gap in time makes it irresistible to try to compare my reading of the Diaries as a child with my reading of them now.

The first thing to be said is that, when I reread them, there did not seem to have been any gap at all. What’s fifty years? Well, when it comes to some of the books one read at five or at fifteen, it’s an abyss. Many books I loved and learned from have fallen into it. I absolutely cannot read The Swiss Family Robinson and am amazed that I ever did—talk about chewing walrus hide!—but the Diaries give me a curious feeling of constancy, almost of immortality: because they haven’t changed at all. They are just as fresh and surprising as when I read them first. Nor am I sure that my reading of them is very different from what it was back then.

I will try to follow that then-and-now response through three aspects of the Diaries: humor, gender, and religion.

Though it seems that children and adults have different senses of humor, they overlap so much I wonder if people don’t just use the same apparatus differently at different ages. At about the age I first came on the Diaries, ten or eleven, I was reading the stories of James Thurber with sober, pious attention. I knew they were funny, that grown-ups laughed aloud reading them, but they didn’t make me laugh. They were wonderful, mysterious tales of human behavior, like all the folktales and stories in which people did the amazing, terrifying, inexplicable things that grown-ups do. The various night wanderings of the Thurber family in “The Night the Bed Fell Down” were no more and no less strange to me than the behavior of the Reed family in the first chapter of Jane Eyre. Both were fascinating descriptions of life—eyewitness accounts, guidebooks to the world awaiting me. I was much too interested to laugh.

When I did laugh at Thurber was when he played with words. The man who came with the reeves and the cook who was alarmed by the doom-shaped thing on top of the refrigerator were a source of pure delight to me, then as now. The accessibility of Mark Twain’s humor to a child surely has much to do with the way he plays with language, the deadpan absurdities, the marvelous choices of word. The first time I ever read the story about the blue jay trying to fill the cabin with acorns, I nearly died. I lay on the floor gasping and writhing with joy. Even now I feel a peaceful cheer come over me when I think of that blue jay. And it’s all in the way he tells it, as they say. The story is the way the story is told.

Adam’s Diary is funny, when it is funny, because of the way Adam writes it.

Now that is a pure Mark Twain tour de force sentence, covering an immense amount of territory in an effortless, aimless ramble that seems to be heading nowhere in particular and ends up with breathtaking accuracy at the gold mine. Any sensible child would find that funny, perhaps not following all its divagations but delighted by the swing of it, by the word numskull, by the idea of putting fish in the bed; and as that child grew older and reread it, its reward would only grow; and if that grown-up child had to write an essay on the piece and therefore earnestly studied and pored over this sentence, she would end up in unmitigated admiration of its vocabulary, syntax, pacing, sense, and rhythm, above all the beautiful timing of the last two words; and she would, and she does, still find it funny.

Twain’s humor is indestructible. Trying to make a study of the rhythms of prose last year, I analysed a paragraph from “The Jumping Frog”—laboring over it, dissecting it, counting beats, grouping phrases, reducing it to a mere drum-score—and even after all that mauling, every time I read it, it was as fresh-flowing and lively and amusing as ever, or more so. The prose itself is indestructible. It is all of a piece. It is a living person speaking. Mark Twain put his voice on paper with a fidelity and vitality that makes electronic recordings seem crude and quaint.

I wonder if this is why we trust him, even though he lets us down so often. Lapses such as the silly stuff about Niagara in Adam’s Diary—evidently worked in to make it suit a publication about the Falls—would make me distrust most writers. But Mark Twain’s purity is unmistakable and incorruptible, which is why the lapses stick out so, and yet are forgivable. I have heard a great pianist who made a great many mistakes in playing; the mistakes were of no account because the music was true. Though Mark Twain forces his humor sometimes, always his own voice comes back, comes through; and his own voice is one of hyperbole and absurdity and wild invention and absolute accuracy and truth.

So all in all my response to the humor of the Diaries is very much what it was fifty years ago. This is partly because a good deal of the humor is perfectly childish. I mean that as praise. There is no meanness in it, no nudging and winking, nothing snide. Now, as then, I find Adam very funny, but so obtuse I often want to kick him rather than laugh at him. Eve isn’t quite as funny, but I don’t get as cross with her, so it’s easier to laugh.

I read the Diaries before I had any personal interest, as you might say, in gender. I had noticed that there were males and females and had learned from a useful Germanic book how babies occurred, but the whole thing was entirely remote and theoretical, about as immediately interesting to me as the Keynesian theory of economics. “Latency,” one of Freud’s fine imaginative inventions, was more successful than most; children used to have years of freedom before they had to start working their hormones into the kind of lascivious lather that is now expected of ten-year-olds. Anyhow, in the 1940s gender was not a subject of discussion. Men were men (running things or in uniform, mostly), women were women (housekeeping or in factories, mostly), and that was that. Except for a few subversives like Virginia Woolf nobody publicly questioned the institutions and assumptions of male primacy. It was the century’s low point architecturally in the Construction of Gender, reduced in those years to something about as spacious and comfortable as a broom closet.

But the Diaries date from the turn of the nineteenth century, a time of revolutionary inquiry into gender roles, the first age of feminism, the period of the woman suffrage movement and of the “New Woman”—who was precisely the robust and joyously competent Eve that Mark Twain gives us.

I see now in the Diaries, along with a tenderness and a profound delicacy of feeling about women, a certain advocacy. Mark Twain is always on the side of the underdog; and though he believed it was and must be a man’s world, he knew that women were the underdogs in it. This fine sense of justice is what gives both the Diaries their moral complexity.

There was an element of discomfort in them for me as a child, and I think it lies just here, in that complexity and a certain degree of self-contradiction.

It is not Adam’s superiority of brains or brawn that gives him his absolute advantage over Eve, but his blockish stupidity. He does not notice, does not listen, is uninterested, indifferent, dumb. He will not relate to her; she must relate herself—in words and actions—to him, and relate him to the rest of Eden. He is entirely satisfied with himself as he is; she must adapt her ways to him. He is immovably fixed at the center of his own attention. To live with him she must agree to be peripheral to him, contingent, secondary.

The degree of social and psychological truth in this picture of life in Eden is pretty considerable. Milton thought it was a fine arrangement; it appears Mark Twain didn’t, since he shows us at the end of both Diaries that although Eve has not changed much, she has changed Adam profoundly. She always was awake. He slowly, finally wakes up, and does her, and therefore himself, justice. But isn’t it too late, for her?

All this I think I followed pretty well, and was fascinated and somewhat troubled by, though I could not have discussed it, when I read the Diaries as a child. Children have a seemingly innate passion for justice; they don’t have to be taught it. They have to have it beaten out of them, in fact, to end up as properly prejudiced adults.

Mark Twain and I both grew up in a society that cherished a visionary ideal of gender by pairs: the breadwinning, self-reliant husband and the home-dwelling, dependent wife. He the oak, she the ivy; power his, grace hers. He works and earns; she “doesn’t work,” but keeps his house, bears and brings up his children, and furnishes him the aesthetic and often the spiritual comforts of life. Now at this latter end of the century, the religio-political conservative’s vision of what men and women do and should do is still close to that picture, though even more remote from most people’s experience than it was fifty or a hundred years ago. Do Twain’s Adam and Eve essentially fit this powerful stereotype, or do they vary it significantly?

I think the variations are significant, even if the text fudges them in the end. Mark Twain is not supporting a gender ideal, but investigating what he sees as real differences between women and men, some of them fitting into that ideal, some in conflict with it.

Eve is the intellectual in Eden, Adam the redneck. She is wildly curious and wants to learn everything, to name everything. Adam has no curiosity about anything, certain that he knows all he needs to know. She wants to talk, he wants to grunt. She is sociable, he is solitary. She prides herself on being scientific, though she settles for her own pet theory without testing it; her method is purely intuitive and rational, without a shadow of empiricism. He thinks she ought to test her ideas, but is too lazy to do it himself. He goes over Niagara Falls in a barrel, he doesn’t say why; apparently because a man does such things. Far more imaginative and influenced by the imagination than he, she does dangerous things only when she doesn’t know they’re dangerous. She rides tigers and talks to the serpent. She is rebellious, adventurous, and independent; he does not question authority. She is the innocent troublemaker. Her loving anarchism ruins his mindless, self-sufficient, authoritarian Eden—and saves him from it.

Does it save her?

This spirited, intelligent, anarchic Eve reminds me of H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, an exemplary New Woman of 1909. Yet Ann Veronica’s courage and curiosity finally lead her not to independence but to wifehood, seen as the proper and sufficient fulfillment of feminine being. We are ominously close to the Natasha Syndrome, the collapse of a vivid woman character into a brood sow as soon as she marries and has children. Once she has won Adam over, once the children come, does Eve stop asking and thinking and singing and naming and venturing? We don’t know. Tolstoy gives us a horrible glimpse of Natasha married; Wells tries to convince us Ann Veronica is going to be just fine; but Mark Twain tells us nothing about what Eve becomes. She falls silent. Not a good sign. After the Fall we have only Adam’s voice, puzzling mightily over what kind of animal Cain is. Eve tells us only that she would love Adam even if he beat her—a very bad sign. And, forty years later, she says, “He is strong, I am weak, I am not so necessary to him as he is to me—life without him would not be life; how could I endure it?”

I don’t know whether I am supposed to believe her, or can believe her. It doesn’t sound like the woman I knew. Eve, weak? Rubbish! Adam’s usefulness as a helpmeet is problematical, a man who, when she tells him they’ll have to work for their living, decides “She will be useful. I will superintend”—a man who thinks his son is a kangaroo. Eve did need him in order to have children, and since she loves him she would miss him; but where is the evidence that she couldn’t survive without him? He would presumably have survived without her, in the brutish way he survived before her. But surely it is their interdependence that is the real point?

I want, now, to read the Diaries as a subtle, sweet-natured send-up of the Strong Man–Weak Woman arrangement; but I’m not sure it’s possible to do so, or not entirely. It may be both a send-up and a capitulation.

And Adam has the last word. “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.” But the poignancy of those words is utterly unexpected, a cry from the heart. It made me shiver as a child; it does now.

I was raised as irreligious as a jackrabbit, and probably this is one reason Mark Twain made so much sense to me as a child. Descriptions of churchgoing interested me as the exotic rites of a foreign tribe, and nobody described churchgoing better than Mark Twain did. But God, as I encountered him in my reading, seemed only to cause unnecessary complications, making people fall into strange postures and do depressing things; he treated Beth March abominably, and did his best to ruin Jane Eyre’s life before she traded him in for Rochester. I didn’t read any of the books in which God is the main character until a few years later. I was perfectly content with books in which he didn’t figure at all.

Could anybody but Mark Twain have told the story of Adam and Eve without mentioning Jehovah?

As a heathen child I was entirely comfortable with his version. I took it for granted that it was the sensible one.

As an ancient heathen I still find it sensible, but can better appreciate its originality and courage. The nerve of the man, the marvelous, stunning independence of that mind! In pious, prayerful, censorious, self-righteous Christian America of 1896, or 1996 for that matter, to show God as an unnecessary hypothesis, by letting Eve and Adam cast themselves out of Eden without any help at all from him, and really none from the serpent either—to put sin and salvation, love and death in our own hands, as our own, strictly human business, our responsibility—now that’s a free soul, and a brave one.

What luck for a child to meet such a soul when she is young. What luck for a country to have a Mark Twain in its heart.

THINKING ABOUT CORDWAINER SMITH

A pen name is a curious device. Actors, singers, dancers use stage names for various reasons, but it seems that not many painters or sculptors or composers make up their name. If you’re a German composer named Engelbert Humperdinck who wrote the opera Hansel and Gretel, you don’t do anything about your name, you just live with it, till a hundred years later some dweeb singer comes along and filches it because he thinks it’s cute. If you’re a French painter named Rosa Bonheur, you don’t call yourself Georges Tristesse; you just paint horses and sign “Rosa” large and clear. But writers, especially fiction writers, are always making up names. Do they confuse themselves with their characters?

The question isn’t totally frivolous. I think most novelists are aware at times of containing multitudes, of having an uncomfortably acute sympathy for Multiple Personality Disorder, of not entirely subscribing to the commonsense notion of what constitutes a self.

And there is a distinction, normally, between “the writer” and “the person.” The cult of personality erases this difference; with writers like Lord Byron and Hemingway, as with actors or politicians, the person disappears in the glare of the persona. Publicity, book tours, and so on all keep the glare focused. People line up to “meet the writer,” not realising that this is impossible. Nobody can be a writer during a book signing, not even Harlan Ellison. All they can write is “To Jane Doe with best regards from George Author”—not a very interesting story. All their admirers can meet is the person—who has a lot in common with, but is not, the writer. Maybe nicer, maybe duller, maybe older, maybe meaner; but the main difference is, the person lives in this world, but writers live in their imagination, and/or in the public imagination, which creates a public figure that lives only in the public imagination.

So the pen name, hiding the person behind the writer, may be essentially a protective and enabling device, as it was for the Brontë sisters and for Mary Ann Evans. The androgynous Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell hid Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë from a publicity that might offend their small community, and also gave their manuscripts a chance to be read with an unprejudiced eye by editors, who would assume them to be men. George Eliot protected Mary Ann Evans, who was unrepentantly living in sin, from the dragon of social disapproval.

I think one can assume that these personae also allowed the writers a freedom from inner censors, internalised shames and inhibitions, notions of what a woman “should” write. The masculine pen name, oddly enough, frees the woman author from obedience to a masculine conception of literature and experience. I think James Tiptree Jr. undoubtedly gave Alice Sheldon such freedom.

But with Sheldon we come to another aspect of the pen name: the already public figure who wants or needs a different persona for a different kind of work.

I don’t know if there was any actual professional need for Sheldon to be Tiptree; would she have lost a job or come under governmental suspicion if she’d published her stories under her own name? My guess is that her need for the pen name was primarily and intensely personal. She needed to write as somebody other than who she “was.” She had led a highly successful career as a woman, but as a writer she needed, at least at first, to present herself, perhaps even to herself, as a man. She found her alter ego on the label of a jar of marmalade. She slipped into the impersonation very comfortably, writing not only stories but letters as James Tiptree Jr., who became a beloved, treasured penfriend to many people. When she began to want to publish as a woman she used only half of her own name, calling herself Raccoona Sheldon (a name that troubles me, because the invented half is so grotesque that it seems a self put-down). Finally, when they blew her cover, she essentially stopped writing. It looks as if the name/mask, whether masculine or feminine, was above all an enabler to her, an escape route from a public self that could not or would not write, into a private self that was all writer.

So how about Professor and Colonel Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger—what was Cordwainer Smith to him? From here on I rely completely and gratefully on the researches of John J. Pierce, the prime authority on Linebarger/Smith’s life and writing. In his fine introduction to The Rediscovery of Man, Pierce tells us that Linebarger published his book on psychological warfare under his own name, but his first two novels (Ria and Carola) as Felix C. Forrest. Then, “when people found out who ‘Forrest’ was, he couldn’t write any more.” (That sounds like Sheldon.) Pierce goes on: “He tried a spy thriller, Atomsk, as Carmichael Smith, but was found out again. He even submitted a manuscript for another novel under his wife’s name, but nobody was fooled.” Using your wife’s name as an alias implies, to me, not only a very good-natured wife, but a very imperative need for a mask. It also implies a quite extraordinary indifference to what is so often of immense importance to a man: that he be perceived, always and totally, as a man.

My guess is that the pen name he finally settled on may have been necessary to save his dignity as an academic and an expert on grave matters, but was equally important to him because it allowed him psychic freedom. Dr. Linebarger had to be respectable and responsible and had to guard his tongue. Cordwainer Smith wrote skiffy and babbled whatever he pleased. The Doctor used his knowledge discreetly to counsel Chiang Kai-shek and advise politicians and diplomats. Mr. Smith let that knowledge out in the open to please the common folk who read popular fiction, and to serve art. Paul was a man. Cordwainer was men, women, animals, a cosmos.

Splitting the personality in this way might signify in most people that they were a bit daft; but all the writers I’ve been talking about were notably effective people in both incarnations, flesh and paper. Still, their paper selves, having long outlived the “real person,” might well ask, Which of us can claim to be real?

After all, fiction writers make a reality of words.

The arts of writing all begin in playing with words, wallowing in them, revelling in them, being obsessed by them, finding reality in them. Words are the mud this mudpie’s made of. Some writers are cool and masterful and never get their hands dirty, but Cordwainer Smith got muddy from the toes to the top of the head.

Language evidently intoxicated him and sometimes controlled him; rhymes, particularly, and the rhythms of sentences. Golden the ship was—Oh! Oh! Oh! That’s the last line, and the title, of one of his stories. I have a baseless, unverifiable, perhaps totally mistaken conviction that the line came before the story: that the story grew out of, unfolded from, was compelled to exist by, an unexplained, unattached fragment of language, seven words that took hold of his mind and rocked it and wouldn’t let him be until he had made a box of meaning that would hold them: Golden the ship was—Oh! Oh! Oh!

This kind of thing is part of his peculiar magic. He knows a powerful phrase or word when he finds one, and uses and repeats it powerfully. I suspect the “Instrumentality” was very little but a word at first, a grand word, which as he used, repeated, explored, explained it, turned out to contain in itself much of the wonderful, semicoherent “future history” of the stories and the novel. The Instrumentality of Mankind—it is a suggestive, complex, multiplex kind of phrase, a Mother Lode phrase that keeps leading to the high-grade ore.

Sometimes I think the words get away from him. The story “Drunkboat” is Arthur Rimbaud getting high on absinthe getting Cordwainer Smith high on Le Bateau ivre and sailing out across the galaxy. It’s a tour de force. But it’s full of awfully bad verse.

Lord Crudelta, in the story, quotes this as an example of words remaining long after their referents are gone, laboriously explaining that an aoudad was an ancient sheep and that he doesn’t know what ham and turkey were, but that children have sung the song for “thousands of years.” Well, I don’t believe it. No sane child would sing that for five minutes. I think Cordwainer Smith had that stupid aoudad/how dad rhyme in his head and couldn’t get it out, and it overcame his better reason and forced itself into the story.

When you let words take you over, as Rimbaud and Smith did, you relinquish control to a sometimes dangerous extent. You can’t keep the stupidities and inconsequentialities out, the way a tight-control writer can; you’re on a wild ride and you have to take what comes. What comes may be treasure and may be junk. I find much of “Drunkboat” overwritten, straining for effect, starting with its rather pompous claims to fame: “Perhaps it is the saddest, maddest, wildest story in the whole long history of space.”… “We know his name now. And our children and their children will know it for always.” And the story is full of obsessive jingles, “Baiter Gator” and “ochre joker” and so on, which weaken what should be a stunning effect when Rambo/Rimbaud bursts into a wild flood of rhyming speech. There are too many one-sentence paragraphs, italics, and other heavy devices to show significance. And yet, and yet… what a wonderful image, the man swimming, swimming slowly through spacetime, reaching through the walls, seeking his Elizabeth…. And the recurrent characters, Sir-and-Doctor Vomact, the Lord Crudelta (whose Italian name means what Lord Jestocost’s means in Russian), the Instrumentality itself. “Drunkboat” is a wild jungle of language, grotesque, deformed, obstructive, energetic, vividly alive.

I seem to be impelled to discuss stories that I don’t particularly like, instead of the ones I love, such as “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” “Mark Elf,” “A Planet Named Shayol.”

A Smith story that I have always resisted, kept my distance from, is “Think Blue, Count Two.” When I reread it some while ago for consideration for the Norton Book of Science Fiction I saw again what I’d disliked—a pretty girl, blue-eyed, called “doll” and “kitten,” a plot that teases by threatening sadism but dodges the threat by rather implausible means, and a sentimental ending where the doll-kitten goes off with the deformed sadist, now miraculously cured and tamed. A very very romantic story, plunging (as romanticism will) from sappy sweetness to sick cruelty, with not much actual humanity in between. When it came to choosing for the Norton Book, I wanted “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” which uses these characteristic Smithian themes in a story that is not excessively, but magnificently, romantic—a beautiful, powerful story. When my coeditors argued for other choices, I whined. I wanted “Alpha Ralpha” in that book the way I wanted Fritz Leiber’s “The Winter Flies” in it—passionately—because to me they are uniquely valuable, unsurpassed explorations of regions of fiction that are still unfamiliar, still New Found Lands.

Well, so, then I reread “Think Blue” again for this paper. I did so looking for evidence, as it were, of what I don’t like in Smith. Served me right.

What I found was that I had misread and underestimated the story shamefully. Indeed the heroine-doll-kitten seems the typical malefantasy girl, virginal, beautiful, defenseless, with “no skill, no learning, no trained capacities,” no threat to nobody, no sir. She’s being used to hold the crew together during a long voyage; she has “Daughter Potential,” that is, every man will want to protect her, she will keep everybody alive “for her sake.” However, in case things get really bad, she has another protection aboard, in the form of one of Smith’s unforgettable inventions, a cube of laminated mouse brain.

The mouse does protect her, through the projection of various fantasies, which I no longer find as implausible as I did, because I now see that in fact she is protectable. She is not the inevitable victim I took her for. Veesey has strength and courage; she meets the danger posed by her psychotic male companions with stoicism: “Life’s life, she thought, and I must live it. Here.” Her reaction to her own Daughter Potential is stoical endurance—“Is it child again? she thought to herself.” She’s a woman, not a child, and she knows it if they don’t. (She is, in fact, remarkably like some of Dickens’s much-ridiculed heroines, Lizzie Hexam, Amy Dorrit, Florence Dombey, who, though the male characters see them as childish, and many readers follow suit, are in fact strong, courageous, adult women, survivors against all odds.) She is childlike only in the depth of her innocence. At the most frightening moment she asks the rapist, “Is this what crime is, what you are doing to me?” But the allegory is of an Innocence stronger than Experience—of a genuinely inviolable soul.

And the sick bits, I now realise, are not self-indulgent, as so much literary rape and torture is. Trying to say something seriously about who men are, what their chief problem may be, Smith found these were the images to say it with—the necessary vocabulary.

The apparitions summoned by Sh’san to save Veesey from the men and the men from themselves are much more complicated and psychologically tricky than I had thought. Since they bring about the happy ending, they can partake in high comedy; and they do, especially the last one, the ship’s captain:

This reality-shifting also contains one of Smith’s central and to me most fascinating themes: that of the animal as savior. The engineer who created the cube imprinted his own personality in it, the minds of the girl and the two men create the apparitions, the girl’s imprinted call for help switches on the voltage that activates the cube—but the saving energy lies, finally, in the brain of a dead mouse.

The mouse is worth remembering.

It’s easy to remember Smith’s great Underpeople savior figures—D’joan the dog woman, the pure sacrificial figure; E-tele-keli, man and eagle, who flies deep under Old Earth; and of course, threading her way like a wandering red flame through the stories and the novel, C’mell the girlygirl, all woman and all cat.

In stories where animal and human are mixed in the way Smith mixed them, the human body dominating but possessing animal characteristics, the effect is usually horrible or pitiful: the Minotaur or the awful creatures of Dr. Moreau’s island.

Here is B’dikkat, the cattle-person of Shayol, Smith’s version of the Minotaur:

The mixture is very strange and not horrible at all; the bull and the man are each there, blended but uncontaminated, with their own nature and their own beauty.

When human and animal can mix so completely, they are, by implication, the same. An identity has been asserted.

In Norstrilia, the eponymous setting of Smith’s one novel, an immortality drug, stroon, or the santaclara drug, is made from the exudations of enormous, sick sheep. The countryside is dotted with these sheep, big as airplane hangars, immobile, diseased. By their endless dying they furnish untold wealth and eternal life to their human owners.

Animal sacrifice is a very widespread human custom. The little dead mouse, the dying sheep of Norstrilia, may be seen as animal sacrifices to ensure human welfare. But the Underpeople’s suffering and their sacrifice in the person of D’joan extend and enlarge the theme. It is unmistakably a human sacrifice—also a fairly widespread human custom. D’joan’s life points to Joan of Arc, of course, and behind that, to the humiliation and death of Jesus.

The “Old Strong Religion,” one of Smith’s fine phrases, is mentioned in several stories, but he never does much with it. In a way it would seem more appropriate if the Old Strong Religion were, not Christianity as it evidently is, but Buddhism. The Compassionate Buddha can be incarnate as any creature, as a mother tiger, as a little jackal, as a bird, as a mouse. Smith does not share the Judeo-Christian exclusive focus on one species, the exclusion from sacredness of everything but the human. His stories say that the death of an animal counts the same, weighs the same, as the death of a human. That animal and human are equally sacred. That salvation can lie in the death of a dog, as in the death of a god.

This is pretty subversive stuff. Smith’s attitude towards authority is complex. He loves to tell us about people who are immensely powerful and supernally rich—the Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality, the Misters and Owners of Norstrilia, such as the boy who bought Old Earth. Linebarger’s familiarity with the corridors of power must have fed this fascination, and also fueled Smith’s visions of people in power who learn to be worthy of their power, who become just, compassionate, and wise. Their wisdom leads them to subvert their own orderly, static, perfect society, to reinvent freedom, ordaining the Rediscovery of Man, when “everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.”

But wisdom, compassion, and justice fail them when it comes to the Underpeople. Here they still have something to learn. Here the Judeo-Christian division still obtains. The Underpeople are nonpeople, they have no rights, no souls, they are things that exist to serve Man. Like any machine or slave, if useless or rebellious they are to be destroyed. At this point, in this division, lies the ethical crux of Smith’s strongest stories.

“Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” serves well to illustrate the themes. In a corridor under the earth (the twelve-mile-high Earthport and the deep underground are recurrent, contrasted loci) the narrator Paul and his Virginia are threatened by a monstrous, Dr. Moreauish, drunken version of the bull-man. They are saved from it by a woman, who tells them, “Come no closer. I am a cat.” When Paul thanks her and asks her name, she says, “Does it matter? I’m not a person.”

Paul has reacted to her as to a beautiful woman, but Virginia feels “dirtied” by even this contact with an Underperson. At the end, high on the ruined boulevard in the sky, C’mell tries again to save them both. Virginia, horrified that a cat-girl might actually touch her, tries to avoid her and falls to her death. Only Paul, who saw her as human, can be saved. And the reason she wanted to save them was that Paul—unthinkingly, instinctively—had stopped another man from crushing the eggs of some birds.

There is, of course, much more to the story, a marvelously complex one; but at the heart of it is this motif, a familiar one from our secular mythology, our folktales. The girl who saves the ant from the spider’s web is saved in turn by the ants, who do her impossible task for her; the prince who sneers at the wolf in the trap is lost in the forest, but the prince who frees the wolf inherits the kingdom. The theme is pagan, entering Christianity only with St. Francis. It is a profound element of Buddhism, Jainism, and other Asian religions; and the sense of the interdependence of human and animal is fundamental to the native religions of North America.

Smith was touching a deep chord here, one that is not often struck in realistic fiction. Science fiction is specifically suited to this theme, since its central subject is the interaction of the human with the nonhuman, the known/self with the unknown/other. The durable and mysterious power of Cordwainer Smith’s stories is not a matter only of their exuberant language and brilliant invention and hallucinatory imagery; there is a deep ground to them, a moral ground, lying in his persuasive conviction of the responsibility of one being for another. “Thought I, is that all there is to good and bad?”

Note: Cordwainer Smith’s works, published in paperback, are at any given moment mostly out of print. Among them are the story collections You Will Never Be the Same, Space Lords, Stardreamer, and various combinations of pieces of what never quite became a finished novel, published under the titles The Planet Buyer, Quest of the Three Worlds, and Norstrilia.

STRESS-RHYTHM IN POETRY AND PROSE

Movement is the first word. Rhythm is a mode of time.

Like time, rhythm can be imagined as linear, events seen as beads strung along a line of intervals, or cyclical: the line becomes a circle, a necklace of beads. Or if the event is singular, the interval can be seen as a circle always coming round to it again: for instance, year as interval, birthday as event….

Identical intervals make a regular rhythm. The more irregular the intervals are, the more alike the events have to be for any rhythm to be recognised.

Rhythm is a physical, material, bodily thing: the drumstick hitting the drumhead, the dancer’s pounding feet. Rhythm is a spiritual thing: the drummer’s ecstasy, the dancer’s joy.

Beginning to consider the rhythms of writing, my mind wandered about among the world’s beats: the clock, the heart, the interval between the last meal and the next meal, the alternation of day and night. Trying to understand how and why writing is rhythmical, I thought about mechanical, biological, social, and cosmic rhythms; about the interplay of bodily rhythms with social regularities; about the relation of rhythm and order, rhythm and chaos.

One way to start thinking about such things is to try to listen to your own body’s beat.

Many kinds of meditation begin, and some go on, by concentrating your awareness on breathing, nothing but breathing. You sit and you pay attention, full attention, constant attention, to your breath as it goes in your nostrils and comes out. When your attention wanders, you gently bring it back to your nose and the sensation of breathing. In… out… in… out… To sit and be fully aware of the air going in and out of your nose and nothing else, this sounds really stupid. If you haven’t tried it, try it. It is really stupid. Nothing your intellect can do can help you do it. This must be why so many people for so long have used it as a way towards wisdom.

Rhythm is pulsation. So is life. If they want to know if you’re still alive, they feel for your pulse, no? Find your pulse where you can feel it easily and attend to it, its evenness and irregularities. Heartbeat changes a lot, it’s seldom metronomically even for long.

And also, attend to the interval between beats, thinking of the pulse as a boundary between intervals. Event and interval, like figure and ground, can be reversed.

Walking is a lovely beat. Just walking. Runners like a fast pounding beat, a high stress-rate. That’s fine. But it’s also pleasant to walk, just walk, in awareness of the steady, subtle, ever-changing rhythms of walking.

T’ai chi walking is interestingly rhythmical. I learned to do it thus: You’re barefoot. You stand still for a while. On an inbreath, lift one foot and move it forward. Set it down as you breathe out. The other foot will naturally begin to rise, but its full rise and movement forward must wait for the inbreath. It comes softly down on the outbreath. Meanwhile, the first foot is ready for the inbreath…. You aren’t going to get very far, walking this way. I used to fall over quite a lot when I first tried it. To keep your balance it helps to set the whole foot down at once, lightly, not striking down heel first, and to be aware of the touch of foot on ground and the touch of ground on foot. This is very low stress-rate walking. It’s a form of meditation, because you can’t think about anything else while doing it.

Meditation is a word often used to mean “thinking” but as I understand it, it means not thinking, which is much harder than one would think. In any case, all the meditative practices I know offer an immediate awareness of bodily and other rhythms.

I apologise for the didactic tone of this section. The subject of language rhythms has a technical vocabulary, and as with all such jargons, some words need explaining. The technical word for the beat in language (spoken or written) is stress. There are unstressed languages, but English is a language that uses stress.

ENGlish is a LANGuage that Uses STRESS.

Some syllables get said harder than others. That’s “stress.”

Every English word spoken by itself has at least one stressed syllable, even if it only has one: (WHEN?) Many words, however, when used in sentences, receive no stress: the, of, in, a, when… (when USED in SENtences). In normal speech, a stress occurs every few syllables.

(Note: Most of us discovered as children that if you repeat any word aloud, such as the word syllable—syllable syllable syllable syllable syllable—or even your own name, it will begin to sound funny and then become meaningless, having been reduced by repetition to pure sound and rhythm, which is all it “really” is. This is important.)

Poetry and prose differ in the frequency and the regularity of stresses.

Frequency: In poetry, there is often only one unstressed syllable between stressed ones, and seldom more than two (thus: TUM ta TUM, or TUM ta ta TUM, but seldom TUM ta ta ta TUM). Prose often has three or even four unstressed syllables between stressed ones.

In other words, in poetry the intervals are shorter; or, in other other words, in prose the intervals are longer.

If you say more than four unstressed syllables in a row you are likely to find yourself mumbling. That’s what mumbling is.

SYLLables in a ROW—that’s four. SYLLables in an unexPECted ROW—that’s six, and it is so mumbly that in reading it aloud we’re likely to put in a substress, perhaps on the “un” of “unexpected,” to give it a bit of a beat so that it’s easier to say.

Both as readers and as speakers, we want the stresses to occur fairly often, we resist long intervals. We don’t really like mumbling.

Regularity: A regularly repeated pattern of stress/unstress, a regular beat, in language, is called meter. Meter belongs to poetry. To poetry alone.

Within the realm of poetry, free verse does not have meter. But the stress-count of free verse is high, and it sneaks in a lot of semiregular, sort-of-metrical patterns.

Prose does not have meter. Prose scrupulously avoids any noticeable regularity or pattern of stresses. If prose acquires any noticeable meter for more than a sentence or so (just as if it rhymes noticeably), it stops being prose and becomes poetry.

This is the only difference between prose and poetry that I have ever been certain of.

English meter in the earliest days was “accentual,” which means people just counted how many stresses per line. The metrical unit in such poetry is the line or the half-line. Each unit has the same number of stresses; but there is no set number of syllables in the line and no set arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables. Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf reproduces the four-stress line that breaks into two half-lines:

By Chaucer’s day, English poets had taken to counting syllables along with stresses, and to thinking of the line as divisible into feet. Some poets still argue that you can’t put English stockings onto Greek or Latin feet, but most find the concept of the metric foot a useful one. All who do agree that the foot that goes the farthest in English has two syllables, the first unstressed, the second stressed: ta TUM—the iamb.

That line from Chaucer is iambic pentameter, “five-beat iambic.” English poetry has over the centuries favored this particular meter. (It has been suggested that this may be because five heartbeats relate to a comfortable breathing rate, so that iambic pentameter fits nicely with the living-breathing-speaking voice.)

Metrical poetry has a regular pattern, yet many, many lines of poems in iambic pentameter do not actually go,

(or as it’s usually written,

—a dash for the unstressed syllable, a stroke for the stressed syllable, and a slash to separate the feet).

The pattern is endlessly varied by “substituting” feet—a TUM ta here, a ta ta followed by a TUM TUM, an unstressed syllable dropped or added. (All these variant feet have names of their own—trochee, pyrrhic/spondee, anapest.) The innate stresses of the words, manipulated by the syntax, play against the demand of the regular beat, setting up a syncopation, a tension between expectation and act, which is surely one of the essential ploys of art.

Here are three lines of Shakespeare, who was, no question about it, good at this sort of thing:

If you force a pure iambic/ten-syllable line pattern onto these lines you’ll get:

Clearly this won’t do. “Of” and “the” are not stressable words. Besides, we aren’t rocking in a rocker, we’re reading poetry. The natural stress of the words within the sentence, and the syntactical phrases or meaning-groups they fall into, are in active tension with the ideal pattern. They fit it, yet they fight it.

I’d speak the lines more or less this way:

This puts only three stress-beats in the first line, with three unstressed syllables in a row. The second line is regular except for its extra final syllable. The third uses the two-foot variation of two unstressed followed by two stressed syllables.

The poetic heart never follows the metronome. The rhythm of these lines is complex, subtle, and powerful, and that power comes from its syncopation with the ideal or underlying regular pattern.

The first of these lines also demonstrates why the idea of the foot will always be problematic in English. My scanning of it above would give:

that is, five feet, iambics alternating with pyrrhics; but reading it as I would speak it aloud, I scan it into three elements or phrases that are not usefully describable as feet at all:

So I introduce here the idea of “bars.” When I scan either poetry or prose by reading it aloud and listening for the beats, I find it falls into short syntactical groups, which I call bars. I mark them with a vertical slash: |. The intervals between bars may be very slight, or even imperceptible if one is reading or speaking very fluently, but I think they exist; I think they clarify both the thought and the emotion, and are as essential to the rhythm of the poetic line or sentence as stress is. But I’m not certain anybody else would agree with me, or would mark off the bars as I do, so I simply mention it, and hope someone, sometime, who knows more about the subject will tell me what they know.

The line is a vexed subject in modern poetry. Many poets argue for reading poetry aloud without any pause at all at the end of lines. But it seems to me the line is part of the pattern, the rhythm, of the poem. In reading free verse, if the voice gives no indication, however slight, of the line end, the hearer cannot know where it is. This reduces the lines to mere typography. The regularity of metrical verse may signal the ear where a line ends, but still it needs some support from the voice. Speaking Shakespeare is a constant compromise between the natural run-on of the voice in dialogue and the beat of the pentameter lines that underlies it. If in search of natural tone the actor completely ignores the lines, the poetry is being read as prose.

Here’s a wonderful example of what a poet can do with line: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool:”

And another from John Donne:

The syntactical phrases break out of the pentameter lines, creating a strong tension. The technical name for a phrase that runs over into the next line is enjambment. It is a form of syncopation.

What happens to the rhythm and to the meaning if we take the enjambments out of “We Real Cool”?

No, I can’t go on. We can also desecrate Donne’s quatrain by following the syntax and abandoning the pentameter: the same words exactly, but without the rhythmic tension given by enjambment:

Not only is the structure weakened by the loss of the emphatic rhymepattern, but the tense, powerful beat of the lines has gone flabby.

I did not desecrate Brooks and Donne only to show the power of the line in poetry, but also as an indication of why poets may seek strict, formalised patterns to work in. The observation of a pattern, even an arbitrary pattern, can give strength to words that would otherwise wander bleating like lost lambs.

This is why it can be harder to write prose than to write poetry.

Free verse has no regular meter; but there are stress-patterns in most free verse, just as there are often plenty of rhymes and other rhythmic devices, though not in predictable places. Finding the flexible, changing patterns in free verse is a matter of listening intently, using your own ear to catch the poet’s beat.

For example, in Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” you’ll find the hypnotic, gentle beat of that title line recurring, here and there, changed and varied, throughout the long poem: TUMtata TUMta / TUMtata TUMta….

Free verse that avoids stress patterns and doesn’t use the line end as a pause may compensate by other rhythmic devices, other kinds of pattern and recurrence. One is the regular repetition of lines or parts of lines. Left to its own devices, English poetry seems to do this only in refrains; but it has imported exotic forms, such as the sestina and the pantoum, which not only set up a pattern by strict repetition, but control the range of emotion and meaning by restricting the choice of words.

The ideal of free verse is that the poem itself will find/create its own internal pattern, as unpredictable and inevitable as any fir tree, any waterfall.

Tentatively, I propose the following statement: There are two elements to stress-rhythm in prose: first, actual syllabic stresses; second, syntactical phrases or word groups, following syntax, punctuation, sense, stress, and breath. These groups are what I call “bars.”

By reading a passage of prose aloud you will hear both the syllabic stresses and the slight pauses or rise-and-fall of intonation that break the sentence into bars. Almost certainly none of us will read or hear or “scan” it in the same way. That doesn’t matter. Prose has a whole lot of latitude.

The thing to remember is that good prose does have a stress-rhythm, subtle and complex and changing though it may be. Dull prose, clunky narrative, hard-to-read textbook stuff, lacks the rhythm that catches and drives and moves the reader’s body and mind and heart.

There are no rules for finding and feeling the rhythm of prose. It is a gift, but it is also a learnable skill—learned by practice. Probably the best practice is reading out loud. You know how an uncomprehending reader reads out loud, a scared fourth-grader, stumbling and missing the beats? A poor reader can’t dance to the prose.

But the best reader can’t make lame prose dance.

The only rule of prose “scansion” I know is: listen to what you are reading (or writing) as closely as you can, listen for its beat, and follow your own ear. There is no right way. The way that sounds right to you is the way. (Tao Rules, OK?) Don’t worry if you mark the stresses differently at different readings. Don’t worry if others disagree.

Don’t WORry if OTHers disaGREE

DON’T WORry if OTHers DISagree

Don’t WORry if OTHers DISaGREE

With repetition and emphasis, a regular beat tends to establish itself. My last reading of that casual prose sentence, with just a wee bit of elision, is iambic tetrameter. We are rhythmical animals. But prose refuses to give us predictability. If in prose one sentence is an iambic tetrameter, all you can predict is that the next one won’t be. True prose rhythm is always just ahead of us, elusive, running ahead, leading us on.

Prose rhythm is made up of many elements, repetitions of sound, parallels in syntax and construction, patterns of imagery, recurrences of mood, but just now I am sticking to the stress, the brute beat of it.

I think that if Virginia Woolf (in the quotation that opens this book) is right, that style is all rhythm—and I think that she is right, and that yes, she is profound—then even just the brute beat of a sentence might tell you something about what the sentence is and does. Do certain kinds of prose have certain characteristic stress-rhythms? Do authors have a characteristic beat of their own?

What follows are some very crude and simple investigations into the stress-rhythms of some bits of prose narrative. Mostly I just wanted to find out what would turn up if I counted the stresses. I had some expectations. I thought I might find clear, immediate differences in the stress-rhythm of different types of prose. And I wondered if I would find measurable differences in the stress-rhythms of different authors.

What I am counting here are oral stresses. These are the rhythms of the voice—not of silent reading, which is a mysterious activity far too fleet and delicate for my coarse net. It is my strong belief, however, that all prose worth reading is worth reading aloud, and that the rhythms we catch clearly in reading aloud, we also catch unconsciously when reading in silence.

As there are no rules of scansion in prose, anybody’s opinion is as good as anybody else’s. My method consists of reading the sentences aloud; the second or third time through, I start marking the stresses (an accent mark over stressed syllables).

In many cases you will probably disagree with where I put the stresses. I probably do too. Also, there are (alas) degrees of stress. Some are unmistakable, TUM! some are arguable, TUM; some are weak, a substress, a mere tumlet to get one through a long series of tatas. I may or may not mark these feeble ones. There are many inconsistencies. I have been over these samples many times, but have never arrived at a final judgment in many places; my mind will never be easy about some of my decisions. Anyhow, if you haven’t already skipped this section, you can disagree with me by striking out my stresses and putting in your own.

The selection of samples is whimsical. I picked writers whose style interested me and whose books were handy at the moment, and let my finger fall on a passage without any real selection, though I did avoid passages with back-and-forth dialogue. “The Three Bears” is included as an oral touchstone. Twain, Tolkien, and Woolf are here because I admire them as stylists. The textbook was chosen because it is a well-written one, not a horrible example of academic mumble. Darwin is here because I wanted some good mid-Victorian narrative, Austen because I wanted some good pre-Victorian narrative. Stein is here because I thought she’d come out wildly different from all the others, which she didn’t.

The stresses are indicated by bold type.

The pauses or subdivisions I call bars are indicated by a vertical slash. A slash means a minimal pause or change of voice quality, a double slash indicates a longer pause. Longer pauses mostly coincide with punctuation, and indeed punctuation is almost always a guide to phrase grouping. In marking these bars, again my decisions were made reading aloud, not silently.

In the Stein passage, punctuation is an urgent necessity; without it the words would fall into a mumble-jumble in which the reader would be hopelessly lost. I had no hesitation in marking the Woolf passage, which to my ear fell inevitably into its brief, melodious elements. I dithered endlessly over the Austen, finding it as hard to chop into bits as a river flowing. Every time I look at it again I mark it differently. This scansion by bars is an even more subjective matter than stress-scansion, and you may find it quite useless. To me it serves to show visually some elements of the rhythmic structure of the prose—the triple patterning of the folktale, and sometimes a hint of metricality, the “bar” becoming a “foot.” Also it shows visibly whether the passage uses mostly short, discrete phrases, or longer, more fluid ones, or a mixture and variety.

The passages are of one hundred syllables to the dagger (anything past the dagger is not counted). I wanted the samples to be of the same length so I could count and compare various elements.

Sentences: 3

Bars: 13

Words: 79

Words of one syllable: 61

— of two syllables: 15

— of three syllables: 3 (counting “middle-sized” as one word; if it is counted as two words there are no words of more than two syllables)

There are two series of 3 unstressed syllables, one broken by a bar line (a comma).

There are four series of 3 stressed syllables. (These TUM TUM TUMs are mostly connected with ponderous Papa Bear, while Mama and Baby Bear get a lighter beat.)

Stresses: 49

Sentences: 4

Bars: 19

Words: 85.5

Words of one syllable: 72

— of two syllables: 11 (10.5)

— of three syllables: 3 (I count “rat-tarriers” as one word; “thish-yer” and “couldn’t” are each two one-syllable words conventionally combined in spelling, or unconventionally in the case of “thish-yer,” so that the ratio of monosyllables could go even higher. “Calc’lated” is a four-syllable word cut down to three.)

There are three series of 3 unstressed syllables, but each series is divided by a bar line (comma or period), so mumbling is neatly avoided.

There is one series of 3 stressed syllables.

Stresses: 44

Sentences: 4 plus a paragraph break

Bars: 15

Words: 72

Words of one syllable: 45

— of two syllables: 24

— of three syllables: 2 (“towards” in Tolkien’s English is one syllable, but “evening,” which I count as two, might be three)

The single series of 3 unstressed syllables is divided by a bar line (comma).

I mark one series of 3 stresses, “came down quickly,” which might be disputed, as might my series of 4, “rose Bree hill barring”—to my ear these phrases do not break down into lighter and heavier stresses, but insist on being read with a strong, even beat. Also questionable is my reading “a dark mass against misty stars,” where “against” is deprived of its normal stress by—to my ear!—the overriding rhythm of the phrase.

Stresses: 47

Sentences: 6 plus a paragraph break

Bars: 24

Words: 75

Words of one syllable: 53

— of two syllables: 19

— of three syllables: 3

There are two series of 3 unstressed syllables, one broken by a bar line (period).

The unusual series of 7 stressed syllables with only 1 unstressed syllable in it is marked clearly to be stressed by the comma and semicolons (“stalks, silver; pink; gold; splashed; streaked; pied”). It probably raises the stress-count in this selection higher than Woolf’s norm. Stresses: 47

Sentences: 3

Bars: 10

Words: 52.5

Words of one syllable: 25

— of two syllables: 14.5

— of three syllables: 9

— of four syllables: 2

— of five syllables: 1

— of seven syllables: 1

There are seven series of 3 unstressed syllables, one divided by a bar line, and two series of 4 unstressed syllables.

There are no series of over 2 stresses.

Stresses: 33

Sentences: 1

Bars: 10

Words: 72

Words of one syllable: 55

— of two syllables: 9

— of three syllables: 9 (I count “generally” as three syllables, “general” as two, “preference” as two; this may be quite wrong for the way Austen would have said the words.)

There are six series of 3 unstressed syllables, one broken by a bar line, and one series of 4 unstressed syllables.

There are no series of more than 2 stresses.

(Note the assonance of the first four stressed syllables. Prose can get this close to rhyme without its being noticeable as anything more than a pleasantly musical quality.)

Stresses: 34

Sentences: 1

Bars: 13

Words: 77

Words of one syllable: 58

— of two syllables: 15

— of three syllables: 1

— of four syllables: 2

There are four series of 3 unstressed syllables, three series of 4 unstressed syllables (one broken by a bar line [comma]), and one series of 5 unstressed syllables, broken by a bar line (comma).

There are no series of more than 2 stresses.

(The delicate, humorous metricality of the final phrase “fly like the wind away,” is certainly deliberate, involving also a poetic inversion and alliteration.)

Stresses: 35

Sentences: 2

Bars: 10

Words: 76

Words of one syllable: 59

— of two syllables: 10

— of three syllables: 7 (all the same word, “happening”)

There are five series of 3 unstressed syllables and one series of 4, broken by a bar line (comma).

There are no series of more than 2 stresses, and only two series of 2.

That the stresses almost all occur singly gives the sentences a peculiar, rocking gait. A fairly consistent three-foot metric beat based on “happening” continues with “wife has a” and is then replaced by a different beat beginning with the double stress “wife having.” Given these semiregular beats, the repetition of words, the repeated rhyme “cow /now,” and the alliteration on “h,” this passage is probably best regarded as possibly a poem, anyhow not exactly prose. But the stress count is much the same as in my other, narrative samples.

Stresses: 38

Judson Jerome, in Poetry: Premeditated Art, a useful and interesting book, says that poetry averages 40 to 60 stresses per 100 syllables, while prose averages about 20 to 40. My samples of prose run higher than that. He says that the maximum number of nonstressed syllables between stresses in poetry, on average, is 0 to 2, while in prose it’s 2 to 4, while the maximum possible number of unstressed syllables in a row is 6 to 7. I’ve seldom found even four unstressed syllables in a row occurring in good prose.

Here’s my count of how our prose samples vary in the number of stressed syllables, and some other counts and comparisons, which I find fascinating and you may wish to sink deep in the Sea of Unread Statistics.

Per 100-syllable sample:

Number of stresses, most to fewest:

— “Three Bears,” Woolf: 48

— Tolkien: 47

— Twain: 44

— Stein: 38

— Darwin: 35

— Austen: 33

— Craig: 32

Number of words, most to fewest:

— Twain: 85.5

— “Three Bears:” 79

— Darwin: 77

— Stein: 76

— Woolf: 75

— Austen, Tolkien: 72

— Craig: 52.5

Number of sentences, most to fewest:

— Woolf: 6

— Twain, Tolkien: 4

— “Three Bears,” Craig: 3

— Stein: 2

— Darwin: 1

— Austen: 1

Number of bars, most to fewest:

— Woolf: 24

— Twain: 19

— Tolkien: 15

— “Three Bears,” Darwin: 13

— Craig, Austen, Stein: 10

Number of one-syllable words, most to fewest:

— Twain: 72

— “Three Bears”:62

— Stein: 59

— Darwin: 58

— Austen: 55

— Woolf: 53

— Tolkien: 45

— Craig: 25

Two-syllable words, most to fewest:

— Tolkien: 24

— Woolf: 19

— Darwin, “Three Bears,” Craig: 15

— Twain, Stein: 10

— Austen: 7

Three-syllable words, most to fewest:

— Austen: 10

— Craig: 9

— Stein: 7

— Woolf, Twain, “Three Bears”: 3

— Tolkien: 2

— Darwin: 1

Words over three syllables:

— “Three Bears,” Austen, Stein, Woolf, Twain, Tolkien: 0

— Darwin: 1 of four syllables

— Craig: 4, 2 of four syllables, 1 of five, 1 of seven.

Various interesting factoids emerge:

• that Virginia Woolf and “The Three Bears” have the same stress-count;

• that Mark Twain uses more one-syllable words than a folktale;

• that in even a readable textbook more than half the words are polysyllables;

• that Woolf writes the shortest sentences of the lot and Austen the longest;

• and so on.

The samples are far too small and the method of counting stresses too subjective for any conclusions at all to be drawn. That Jane Austen’s stress-count is almost the same as that of the textbook is, however, a good indication that merely counting stresses is not going to give us any solid indications of the quality—in all senses—of the prose.

None the less I found it an interesting and worthwhile exercise, the simple doing of which intensified and refined my awareness of the rhythms of prose.[1]

Long Prose Rhythms

Stress-units are the smallest elements of prose rhythm, and the most purely physical. The frequency of stressed syllables and the handling of the beat so that it’s neither jerky nor monotonous are essential elements of the character of the prose sentence.

Thus the sentence itself, as I tried to show in my analyses of passages above, is a rhythmic but never regularly rhythmic element of prose.

Other elements of prose rhythm are vastly longer and larger, and far more elusive.

Rhythm is repetition. In a prose narrative, which must “move” with the events it tells, what can be repeated without losing the narrative impulse? What events can recur (of course with variations) to form the long rhythmic patterns of narrative?

Recurrent events in a narrative have to do with sound (the words, phrases, sentences) and they have to do with meaning (the content of the words—images, described actions, moods, themes).

There is repetition, much more repetition, even in very sophisticated narrative, than one might expect.

Repetition of Words or Phrases

Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts offers a simple, straightforward example of the repetition of a phrase throughout a long narrative. An amateur pageant is being performed outdoors, with some recorded music, and the old phonograph hidden in the bushes keeps going “Chuff… chuff… chuff….” The chuffing of the phonograph, varied slightly in the wording, recurs as a refrain throughout a whole section of the book. It seems insignificant, but it’s so effective that when the phonograph stops, you miss it—in a sense, a whole new rhythm is set up by the lack of that repetition.

Another kind of repetition is a characteristic phrase, a character tag; in David Copperfield, for instance, Mr. Micawber’s ever-hopeful “in case anything turns up.” Having a character say the same thing often enough that you come to wait for it can be a mechanically humorous contrivance; but Dickens is not a mechanical writer, and when the Micawbers are on the brink of ruin, the repetition darkens humor into irony, sympathy, and pain. Fiction can take a trivial event or even a single word and repeat it in different contexts, changing and deepening its meaning every time, and intensifying the structure of the narrative.

This is worth thinking about. In school we got red circles on our paper for saying “repetition” four times in one paragraph. We’re taught to avoid unintentional repetition of words or phrases. So we may have come to feel distrust or disdain for repetition as a device. But the power of deliberate repetition in a narrative is both great and legitimate.

Repetition of Images, Actions, Moods, and Themes

The next essay in this book is a study of the rhythmic structures in a chapter of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It continues the investigation of what these rhythmic structures may be and do. To sum it up very briefly: I found that many of the events and scenes, though each is vivid and particular, repeat or will be repeated by other events and images within the chapter and throughout the book, relating all the parts of the story by alluding back to or foreshadowing events, scenes, images, movements, relations, acts, responses, moods. Every part of the chapter is part of the pattern of the whole chapter, and the greater whole, the book, is immensely self-referential, largely through semirepetition, variations on the same themes.

I think this is how a well-written narrative works—through endlessly complex rhythmic correspondences. Its coherence is established by inner references and backward-looking or forward-looking semirepetitions. If they are pure repetitions, adding no new vision or emotion, the story loses narrative drive (pure repetition is better suited to ritual than to narrative). If the rhythms become predictable, the coherence of the story is mechanical. But if the repetitions vary, echoing and foreshadowing others with continuous and developing invention, the narration has the forward movement we look for in a story, while maintaining the complexity and integrity proper to a living creature or a work of art: a rhythmic integrity, a deep beat to which the whole thing moves.

RHYTHMIC PATTERN IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS

Since I had three children, I’ve read Tolkien’s Trilogy aloud three times. It’s a wonderful book to read aloud or (consensus by the children) listen to. Even when the sentences are long, their flow is perfectly clear, and follows the breath; punctuation comes just where you need to pause; the cadences are graceful and inevitable. Like Dickens and Virginia Woolf, Tolkien must have heard what he wrote. The narrative prose of such novelists is like poetry in that it wants the living voice to speak it, to find its full beauty and power, its subtle music, its rhythmic vitality.

Woolf’s vigorous, highly characteristic sentence rhythms are surely and exclusively prose: I don’t think she ever uses a regular beat. Dickens and Tolkien both occasionally drop into metrics. Dickens’s prose in moments of high emotional intensity tends to become iambic, and can even be scanned: “It is a far, far better thing that I do/than I have ever done.” The hoity-toity may sneer, but this iambic beat is tremendously effective—particularly when the metric regularity goes unnoticed as such. If Dickens recognised it, it didn’t bother him. Like most really great artists, he’d use any trick that worked.

Woolf and Dickens wrote no poetry. Tolkien wrote a great deal, mostly narratives and “lays,” often in forms taken from the subjects of his scholarly interest. His verse often shows extraordinary intricacy of meter, alliteration, and rhyme, yet is easy and fluent, sometimes excessively so. His prose narratives are frequently interspersed with poems, and once at least in the Trilogy he quietly slips from prose into verse without signalling it typographically. Tom Bombadil, in The Fellowship of the Ring, speaks metrically. His name is a drumbeat, and his meter is made up of free, galloping dactyls and trochees, with tremendous forward impetus: Tum tata Tum tata, Tum ta Tum ta…. “You let them out again, Old Man Willow! What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!” Usually Tom’s speech is printed without line breaks, so unwary or careless silent readers may miss the beat until they see it as verse—as song, actually, for when his speech is printed as verse Tom is singing.

As Tom is a cheerfully archetypal fellow, profoundly in touch with, indeed representing the great, natural rhythms of day and night, season, growth and death, it’s appropriate that he should talk in rhythm, that his speech should sing itself. And, rather charmingly, it’s an infectious beat; it echoes in Goldberry’s speech, and Frodo picks it up. “Goldberry!” he cries as they are leaving. “My fair lady, clad all in silver green! We have never said farewell to her, nor seen her since that evening!”

If there are other metric passages in the Trilogy, I’ve missed them. The speech of the elves and noble folk such as Aragorn has a dignified, often stately gait, but not a regular stress-beat. I suspected King Théoden of iambics, but he only drops into them occasionally, as all measured English speech does. The narrative moves in balanced cadences in passages of epic action, with a majestic sweep reminiscent of epic poetry, but it remains pure prose. Tolkien’s ear was too good and too highly trained in prosody to let him drop into meter unknowingly.

Stress-units—metric feet—are the smallest elements of rhythm in literature, and in prose probably the only quantifiable ones. A while ago I got interested in the ratio of stresses to syllables in prose, and did some counting.

In poetry, by and large, one syllable out of every two or three has a beat on it: Tum ta Tum ta ta Tum Tum ta, and so on…. In narrative prose, that ratio goes down to one beat in two to four: ta Tum tatty Tum ta Tum tatatty, and so on…. In discursive and technical writing the ratio of unstressed syllables goes higher; textbook prose tends to hobble along clogged by a superfluity of egregiously unnecessary and understressed polysyllables.

Tolkien’s prose runs to the normal narrative ratio of one stress every two to four syllables. In passages of intense action and feeling the ratio may get pretty close to 50 percent, like poetry, but still, except for Tom, it is irregular, it can’t be scanned.

Stress-beat in prose is fairly easy to identify and count, though I doubt any two readers of a prose passage would mark the stresses in exactly the same places. Other elements of rhythm in narrative are less physical and far more difficult to quantify, having to do not with an audible repetition, but with the pattern of the narrative itself. These elements are longer, larger, and very much more elusive.

Rhythm is repetition. Poetry can repeat anything—a stress-pattern, a phoneme, a rhyme, a word, a line, a stanza. Its formality gives it endless liberty to establish rhythmic structure.

What is repeatable in narrative prose? In oral narrative, which generally maintains many formal elements, rhythmic structure may be established by the repetition of certain key words, and by grouping events into similar, accumulative semirepetitions: think of “The Three Bears” or “The Three Little Pigs.” European story uses triads; Native American story is more likely to do things in fours. Each repetition both builds the foundation of the climactic event, and advances the story.

Story moves, and normally it moves forward. Silent reading doesn’t need repetitive cues to keep the teller and the hearers oriented, and people can read much faster than they speak. So people accustomed to silent reading generally expect narrative to move along pretty steadily, without formalities and repetitions. Increasingly, during the past century, readers have been encouraged to look at a story as a road we’re driving, well paved and graded and without detours, on which we go as fast as we possibly can, with no changes of pace and certainly no stops, till we get to—well—to the end, and stop.

“There and Back Again”: in Bilbo’s title for The Hobbit, Tolkien has already told us the larger shape of his narrative, the direction of his road.

The rhythm that shapes and directs his narrative is noticeable, was noticeable to me, because it is very strong and very simple, as simple as a rhythm can be: two beats. Stress, release. Inbreath, outbreath. A heartbeat. A walking gait—but on so vast a scale, so capable of endlessly complex and subtle variation, that it carries the whole enormous narrative straight through from beginning to end, from There to Back Again, without faltering. The fact is, we walk from the Shire to the Mountain of Doom with Frodo and Sam. One, two, left, right, on foot, all the way. And back.

What are the elements that establish this long-distance walking pace? What elements recur, are repeated with variations, to form the rhythms of prose? Those that I am aware of are: Words and phrases. Images. Actions. Moods. Themes.

Words and phrases, repeated, are easy to identify. But Tolkien is not, after all, telling his story aloud; writing prose for silent, and sophisticated, readers, he doesn’t use key words and stock phrases as storytellers do. Such repetitions would be tedious and faux-naive. I have not located any “refrains” in the Trilogy.

As for imagery, actions, moods, and themes, I find myself unable to separate them usefully. In a profoundly conceived, craftily written novel such as The Lord of the Rings, all these elements work together indissolubly, simultaneously. When I tried to analyse them out I just unraveled the tapestry and was left with a lot of threads, but no picture. So I settled for bunching them all together. I noted every repetition of any image, action, mood, or theme without trying to identify it as anything other than a repetition.

I was working from my impression that a dark event in the story was likely to be followed by a brighter one (or vice versa); that when the characters had exerted terrible effort, they then got to have a rest; that each action brought a reaction, never predictable in nature, because Tolkien’s imagination is inexhaustible, but more or less predictable in kind, like day following night, and winter after fall.

This “trochaic” alternation of stress and relief is of course a basic device of narrative, from folktales to War and Peace; but Tolkien’s reliance on it is striking. It is one of the things that make his narrative technique unusual for the mid–twentieth century. Unrelieved psychological or emotional stress or tension, and a narrative pace racing without a break from start to climax, characterise much of the fiction of the time. To readers with such expectations, Tolkien’s plodding stress/relief pattern seemed and seems simplistic, primitive. To others it may seem a remarkably simple, subtle technique of keeping the reader going on a long and ceaselessly rewarding journey.

I wanted to see if I could locate the devices by which Tolkien establishes this master rhythm in the Trilogy; but the idea of working with the whole immense saga was terrifying. Perhaps some day I or a braver reader can identify the larger patterns of repetition and alternation throughout the narrative. I narrowed my scope to one chapter, the eighth of volume 1, “Fog on the Barrow Downs”: some fourteen pages, chosen almost arbitrarily, though I did want a selection with some traveling in it, journey being such a large component of the story. I went through the chapter noting every major image, event, and feeling-tone and particularly noting recurrences or strong similarity of words, phrases, scenes, actions, feelings, and images. Very soon, sooner than I expected, repetitions began to emerge, including a positive/negative binary pattern of alternation or reversal.

These are the chief recurrent elements I listed (page references are to the George Allen & Unwin edition of 1954):

• A vision or vista of a great expanse (three times: in the first paragraph; in the fifth paragraph; and on page 157, when the vision is temporal—back into history)

• The image of a single figure silhouetted against the sky (four times: Goldberry, page 147; the standing stone, page 148; the barrow-wight, page 151; Tom, pages 153 and 154. Tom and Goldberry are bright figures in sunlight, the stone and the wraith are dark looming figures in mist)

• Mention of the compass directions—frequent, and often with a benign or malign connotation

• The question “Where are you?” three times (page 150, when Frodo loses his companions, calls, and is not answered; page 151, when the barrow-wight answers him; and Merry, on page 154, “Where did you get to, Frodo?” answered by Frodo’s “I thought that I was lost” and Tom’s “You’ve found yourself again, out of the deep water”)

• Phrases describing the hill country through which they ride and walk, the scent of turf, the quality of the light, the ups and downs, and the hilltops on which they pause: some benign, some malign

• Associated images of haze, fog, dimness, silence, confusion, unconsciousness, paralysis (foreshadowed on page 148 on the hill of the standing stone, intensified on page 149 as they go on, and climaxing on page 150 on the barrow), which reverse to images of sunlight, clarity, resolution, thought, action (pages 151–153)

What I call reversal is a pulsation back and forth between polarities of feeling, mood, image, emotion, action—examples of the stress/release pulse that I think is fundamental to the structure of the book. I listed some of these binaries or polarities, putting the negative before the positive, though that is not by any means always the order of occurrence. Each such reversal or pulsation occurs more than once in the chapter, some three or four times.

darkness/daylight

resting/traveling on

vagueness/vividness of perception

confusion of thought/clarity

sense of menace/of ease

imprisonment or a trap/freedom

enclosure/openness

fear/courage

paralysis/action

panic/thoughtfulness

forgetting/remembering

solitude/companionship

horror/euphoria

cold/warmth

These reversals are not simple binary flips. The positive causes or grows from the negative state, and the negative from the positive. Each yang contains its yin, each yin contains its yang. (I don’t use the Chinese terms lightly; I believe they fit with Tolkien’s conception of how the world works.)

Directionality is extremely important all though the book. I believe there is no moment when we don’t know, literally, where north is, and what direction the protagonists are going. Two of the wind rose points have a pretty clear and consistent emotional value: east has bad connotations, west is benign. North and south vary more, depending on where we are in time and space; in general I think north is a melancholy direction and south a dangerous one. In a passage early in the chapter, one of the three great “vistas” offers us the whole compass view, point by point: west, the Old Forest and the invisible, beloved Shire; south, the Brandywine River flowing “away out of the knowledge of the hobbits”; north, a “featureless and shadowy distance”; and east, “a guess of blue and a remote white glimmer… the high and distant mountains”—where their dangerous road will lead them.

The additional points of the Native American and the airplane compass—up and down—are equally firmly established. Their connotations are complex. Up is usually a bit more fortunate than down, hilltops better than valleys; but the Barrow Downs—hills—are themselves an unlucky place to be. The hilltop where they sleep under the standing stone is a bad place, but there is a hollow on it, as if to contain the badness. Under the barrow is the worst place of all, but Frodo gets there by climbing up a hill. As they wind their way downward, and northward, at the end of the chapter, they are relieved to be leaving the uplands; but they are going back to the danger of the Road.

Similarly, the repeated image of a figure silhouetted against the sky—above seen from below—may be benevolent or menacing.

As the narrative intensifies and concentrates, the number of characters dwindles abruptly to one. Frodo, afoot, goes on ahead of the others, seeing what he thinks is the way out of the Barrow Downs. His experience is increasingly illusory—two standing stones like “the pillars of a headless door,” which he has not seen before (and will not see when he looks for them later)—a quickly gathering dark mist, voices calling his name (from the eastward), a hill which he must climb “up and up,” having (ominously) lost all sense of direction. At the top, “It was wholly dark. ‘Where are you?’ he cried out miserably.” This cry is unanswered.

When he sees the great barrow loom above him, he repeats the question, “angry and afraid”—“‘Where are you?’” And this time he is answered, by a deep, cold voice out of the ground.

The key action of the chapter, inside the barrow, involves Frodo alone in extreme distress, horror, cold, confusion, and paralysis of body and will—pure nightmare. The process of reversal—of escape—is not simple or direct. Frodo goes through several steps or stages in undoing the evil spell.

Lying paralysed in a tomb on cold stone in darkness, he remembers the Shire, Bilbo, his life. Memory is the first key. He thinks he has come to a terrible end, but refuses to accept it. He lies “thinking and getting a hold on himself,” and as he does so, light begins to shine.

But what it shows him is horrible: his friends lying as if dead, and “across their three necks lay one long naked sword.”

A song begins—a kind of limping, sick reversal of Tom Bombadil’s jolly caroling—and he sees, unforgettably, “a long arm groping, walking on its fingers towards Sam… and towards the hilt of the sword that lay upon him.”

He stops thinking, loses his hold on himself, forgets. In panic terror, he considers putting on the Ring, which has lain so far, all through the chapter, unmentioned in his pocket. The Ring, of course, is the central image of the whole book. Its influence is utterly baneful. Even to think of putting it on is to imagine himself abandoning his friends and justifying his cowardice—“Gandalf would admit that there had been nothing else he could do.”

His courage and his love for his friends are stung awake by this imagination: he escapes temptation by immediate, violent (re)action: he seizes the sword and strikes at the crawling arm. A shriek, darkness, he falls forward over Merry’s cold body.

With that touch, his memory, stolen from him by the fog-spell, returns fully: he remembers the house under the Hill—Tom’s house. He remembers Tom, who is the earth’s memory. With that he recollects himself.

Now he can remember the spell that Tom gave him in case of need, and he speaks it, calling at first “in a small desperate voice,” and then, with Tom’s name, loud and clear.

And Tom answers: the immediate, right answer. The spell is broken. “Light streamed in, the plain light of day.”

Imprisonment, fear, cold, and solitude reverse to freedom, joy, warmth, and companionship… with one final, fine touch of horror: “As Frodo left the barrow for the last time he thought he saw a severed hand wriggling still, like a wounded spider, in a heap of fallen earth.” (Yang always has a spot of yin in it. And Tolkien seems to have had no warm spot for spiders.)

This episode is the climax of the chapter, the maximum of stress, Frodo’s first real test. Everything before it led towards it with increasing tension. It is followed by a couple of pages of relief and release. That the hobbits feel hungry is an excellent sign. After well-being has been restored, Tom gives the hobbits weapons, knives forged, he tells them rather somberly, by the Men of Westernesse, foes of the Dark Lord in dark years long ago. Frodo and his companions, though they don’t know it yet, are of course themselves the foes of that lord in this age of the world. Tom speaks—riddlingly, and not by name—of Aragorn, who has not yet entered the story. Aragorn is a bridge figure between the past and the present time, and as Tom speaks, the hobbits have a momentary, huge, strange vision of the depths of time, and heroic figures, “one with a star on his brow”—a foreshadowing of their saga, and of the whole immense history of Middle Earth. “Then the vision faded, and they were back in the sunlit world.”

Now the story proceeds with decreased immediate plot tension or suspense, but undecreased narrative pace and complexity. We are going back towards the rest of the book, as it were. Towards the end of the chapter the larger plot, the greater suspense, the stress they are all under, begin again to loom in the characters’ minds. The hobbits have fallen into a frying pan and managed to get out of it, as they have done before and will do again, but the fire in Mount Doom still burns.

They travel on. They walk, they ride. Step by step. Tom is with them and the journey is uneventful, comfortable enough. As the sun is setting they reach the Road again at last, “running from South-west to North-east, and on their right it fell quickly down into a wide hollow.” The portents are not too good. And Frodo mentions—not by name—the Black Riders, to avoid whom they left the Road in the first place. The chill of fear creeps back. Tom cannot reassure them: “Out east my knowledge fails.” His dactyls, even, are subdued.

He rides off into the dusk, singing, and the hobbits go on, just the four of them, conversing a little. Frodo reminds them not to call him by his name. The shadow of menace is inescapable. The chapter that began with a hopeful daybreak vision of brightness ends in a tired evening gloom. These are the final sentences:

These few lines of straightforward narrative description are full of rapid reversals: darkness/lights twinkling—downhill/up again—the rise of Bree-hill/the village under it (west of it)—a dark mass/misty stars—a fire/the night. They are like drumbeats. Reading the lines aloud I can’t help thinking of a Beethoven finale, as in the Ninth Symphony: the absolute certainty and definition of crashing chord and silence, repeated, repeated again. Yet the tone is quiet, the language simple, and the emotions evoked are quiet, simple, common: a longing to end the day’s journey, to be inside by the fire, out of the night.

After all, the whole Trilogy ends on much the same note. From darkness into the firelight. “Well,” Sam says, “I’m back.”

There and back again…. In this single chapter, certain of the great themes of the book, such as the Ring, the Riders, the Kings of the West, the Dark Lord, are struck once only, or only obliquely. Yet this small part of the great journey is integrally part of the whole in event and imagery: the barrow-wight, once a servant of the Dark Lord, appears even as Sauron himself will appear at the climax of the tale, looming, “a tall dark figure against the stars.” And Frodo defeats him, through memory, imagination, and unexpected act.

The chapter itself is one “beat” in the immense rhythm of the book. Each of its events and scenes, however vivid, particular, and local, echoes or recollects or foreshadows other events and images, relating all the parts of the book by repeating or suggesting parts of the pattern of the whole.

I think it is a mistake to think of story as simply moving forward. The rhythmic structure of narrative is both journeylike and architectural. Great novels offer us not only a series of events, but a place, a landscape of the imagination which we can inhabit and return to. This may be particularly clear in the “secondary universe” of fantasy, where not only the action but the setting is avowedly invented by the author. Relying on the irreducible simplicity of the trochaic beat, stress/unstress, Tolkien constructs an inexhaustibly complex, stable rhythmic pattern in imagined space and time. The tremendous landscape of Middle Earth, the psychological and moral universe of The Lord of the Rings, is built up by repetition, semirepetition, suggestion, foreshadowing, recollection, echo, and reversal. Through it the story goes forward at its steady, human gait. There, and back again.

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 The Sleeping Beauty and “The Poacher” and a PS About Sylvia Townsend Warner

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):

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.”

He’s hungry, as he has been all his life. “The venison pastry that the chief cook had just taken out of the oven smelled so delicious that hungry flesh could not endure it. I arranged the chief cook in a more comfortable position on the slate floor of the kitchen, with his hat crumpled up for a pillow; and then I attacked the great pie, breaking off a corner with my hands and cramming it in my mouth. It was still warm, savory, succulent. Next time I came through the kitchen, the pastry was whole, unbroken. The enchantment held. Was it that, as a dream, I could change nothing of this deep reality of sleep?”

So he stays there. He has always been alone, that is nothing new; and now he is not hungry. Not even sexually, for he shares a sleeping peasant girl with her sleeping lover, and she smiles with pleasure in her sleep, and there is no harm in it, for the spell holds: nothing can be changed, or broken, or hurt. What more can he desire?

Speech, perhaps, which he never had much of in his old life either. Here there is no one to answer if he speaks; but he has vast leisure, time without end, and so he teaches himself to read. He reads the princess’s book of fairy tales. He knows then where he is. Perhaps he knows what more there is to desire.

He knows who the princess is. “I knew that she, she alone in all the castle, might wake at any moment. I knew that she, alone of all of them, all of us, was dreaming. I knew that if I spoke in that tower room, she would hear me: maybe not waken, but hear me in her sleep, and her dreams would change.” He knows that to break the spell, all he need do is move the spindle in her hand so that its tip does not prick into her thumb. “If I did that, if I moved the spindle, a drop of red blood would well up slowly on the delicate little cushion of flesh above the joint. And her eyes would open. Her eyes would open slowly; she would look at me. And the enchantment would be broken, the dream at an end.”

My story, like Townsend Warner’s poem, merely asks a question. It does not alter anything. All will go on as told. The prince will come; his kiss will wake his virgin bride. I and my poacher had no desire to change the story. We were both just glad to get into it. To be there, awake.

Thinking about it now, I believe that the tale is as impregnable and unassailable as its hedge of thorns. We can play variations round about it, imagine peasant trespassers, or rapist princes, happy or unhappy endings, as we please. We can define it; we can defile it. We can retell it to improve its morality, or try to use it to deliver a “message.” When we’re done, it will still be there: the place within the thorn-hedge. The silence, the sunlight, the sleepers. The place where nothing changes. Mothers and fathers will read the tale to their children, and it will have an influence upon those children.

The story is, itself, a spell. Why would we want to break it?

POSTSCRIPT (2003):

I want to take this opportunity to pay a little further tribute to Sylvia Townsend Warner, whom I had the great good fortune to meet. When we were in England in 1976, our friend Joy Finzi knew how much I admired Sylvia’s work, and thought she might enjoy meeting me. So, after talking me up a bit, I imagine, and giving Sylvia some of my poems, she drove me to the cottage on the river in Dorset where Sylvia had lived for many years, first with her lover Valentine Ackland, then alone. The place is marvelously described in her letters and turns up in several of her stories. It was a sort of a naiad of a house that seemed to be only partly above water, with bits of beautiful, muddy, unkempt garden, and the murmur of the river all around it. We had a cup of tea in a sort of sunroom at the front of the house. Antiquities from Valentine’s antiques shop still stood or lay about here and there, or possibly they were part of the furniture. Sylvia smoked more or less continuously, as she had done for sixty years or so, and it was impressive to see the golden-brown walls of the interior rooms, which had been white; smoke varnish lay so thick on the glass of the pictures that you couldn’t make out the pictures. Of course, some of it may have been wood smoke from the fireplaces, too, in that dank place. Sylvia was old, and tired, and reserved, and kind, and keen as a splinter of diamond. She said she liked one of my poems, “Ars Lunga,” which is about being a storyteller, and since then I have liked that poem better myself. I asked her about one of her stories, which I had read long ago in the New Yorker and had forgotten the name of, about a nice English family on a picnic. At the end of the story, a stranger sees them: one of them is wearing a bloodstained Indian shawl, two of them are in eighteenth-century costume, the father is sitting on the ground listening to an enormous music box, while the mother approaches with a bird cage. All this has come to seem perfectly reasonable to us, as it does to the family, because we know why it is so, but the stranger does not, and the reversal of viewpoint is revelatory and ravishingly funny. Sylvia smiled happily at my description and said, “Oh yes I do remember that,” but she couldn’t remember what it was called either, or where I could find it. No wonder. She had published nine volumes of stories (and this is not in any of them; it is “A View of Exmoor,” in the posthumous collection One Thing Leading to Another). She also published seven novels, of which Lolly Willowes is perhaps still the most amazing, though I love The True Heart and The Corner That Held Them as well. Her last major work was a stunning biography of T. H. White. Her poetry has been collected at last, her brilliant letters and her heartbreaking journal have been published. I think she is still esteemed at something like her worth in her own country, though she seems largely forgotten here, where most of her stories were first published. I hold it one of the dearest honors of my life that I knew her for an hour.

OFF THE PAGE: LOUD COWS A Talk and a Poem About Reading Aloud

What happened to stories and poems after the invention of printing is a strange and terrible thing. Literature lost its voice. Except on the stage, it was silenced. Gutenberg muzzled us.

By the time I got born the silence of literature was considered an essential virtue and a sign of civilisation. Nannies and grannies told stories aloud to babies, and “primitive” peoples spoke their poems, poor illiterate jerks, but the real stuff, literature, was literally letters, letterpress, little black noiseless marks on paper. And libraries were temples of the goddess of silence attended by vigilant priestesses going Shhhh.

If you listen to the first Caedmon tape of poets reading, which was a landmark, you’ll hear T. S. Eliot going adduh, adduh in this dull grey mutter, and Elizabeth Bishop going gnengnengne in a low flat whine. They were good poets who’d been taught poetry was to be seen not heard, and thought the music in their verse should be a secret between the poet and the reader—like the music that people who know how to read music hear when they read a score. Nobody was playing the music of poetry out loud.

Until Dylan Thomas. You know the Caedmon tape of him reading at Columbia in 1952? I was there at that reading, and you can hear me—in the passionate silence of the audience listening to that passionate voice. Not a conspiracy of silence, but a participatory silence, a community collaboration in letting him let the word loose aloud. I left that reading two feet above the ground, and it changed my understanding of the art forever.

So then there were the Beat poets, all posing and using and screwed up by testosterone, but at least audible, and Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which from the title on is a true performance piece that will not lie down quietly on the paper and be good. And ever since then, our poets have been noisy. Now God knows there are too many open-mike readings in the world; but better drivel at an open mike than silence from a closed mouth. And we have the voices of all recent poets on tape, so we can hear their word on their breath, with their heartbeat in it. Whereas of the greatest English writer of the twentieth century we have one tiny BBC recording: about ninety seconds of Virginia Woolf’s voice reading a little essay. But in it you hear an invaluable hint of the rhythm that she said was where all the words began for her, the mysterious rhythm of her own voice.

It wasn’t till the seventies, I think, that publishers realised they could sell more books by sending the author to two hundred cities in eight days to sign them—and then realised that people like not only to see the author sit and grin and write its name, but also to hear the author stand up and read its story. So now you here in Berkeley have Black Oak and Cody’s, and we in Portland have Powell’s and the Looking Glass, and Seattle has Elliott Bay Books running two readings a day every day of the week, and people come. They come to be read to. Some of them want books signed and some of them want to ask weird questions, but most of them want to be read to. To hear the word.

One reason I think this is a restoration of an essential function of literature is that it is reciprocal: a social act. The audience is part of the performance. A lecture isn’t reciprocal, it’s a talking-to. There were professors at Harvard when I was there who would give you a C if you breathed during a lecture. But the hush during a performance is alive and responsive, as at the theater. Nothing kills a play like a dead audience. This response is recognised and called for in all oral literatures. Zunis listening to a narrative recital say a word, eeso, meaning yes, OK, about once a minute and whenever appropriate. In oral cultures generally, kids are taught to make these soft response-noises; if they don’t, it’s assumed they weren’t listening and they’re sent out in disgrace. Any Baptist preacher who doesn’t hear Yes Lord! and Amen! pretty often knows he’s lost the congregation. In poetry readings, big groups or small, the convention is mostly a little soft groan or hahh at a striking line or at the end. In prose readings the response convention is even subtler, except for laughter, but there are audible responses which the reader counts on just as the actor does.

I learned that once for all at a reading I did in Santa Barbara. They had no lights on the audience, so I was facing this black chasm, and no sound came out of it. Total silence. Reading to pillows. Despair. Afterwards the students came around all warm and affectionate and said they’d loved it, but it was too late, I was a wreck. They’d been so laid back or so respectful or something they hadn’t given me any response, and so they hadn’t been working with me; and you can’t do it alone.

It was men who first got poetry off the page, but the act was of great importance to women. Women have a particular stake in keeping the oral functions of literature alive, since misogyny wants women to be silent, and misogynist critics and academics do not want to hear the woman’s voice in literature, in any sense of the word. There is solid evidence for the fact that when women speak more than 30 percent of the time, men perceive them as dominating the conversation; well, similarly, if, say, two women in a row get one of the big annual literary awards, masculine voices start talking about feminist cabals, political correctness, and the decline of fairness in judging. The 30 percent rule is really powerful. If more than one woman out of four or five won the Pulitzer, the PEN/Faulkner, the Booker—if more than one woman in ten were to win the Nobel literature prize—the ensuing masculine furore would devalue and might destroy the prize. Apparently, literary guys can only compete with each other. Put on a genuinely equal competitive footing with women, they get hysterical. They just have to have their voices heard 70 percent of the time.

Well, when feminism got reborn, it urged literary women to raise their voices, to yell unladylikely, to shoot for parity. So ever since, we have been grabbing the mike and letting loose. And it was this spirit of hey, let’s make a lot of noise that carried me into experimenting with performance poetry. Not performance art, where you take your clothes off and dip yourself in chocolate or anything exciting like that, I’m way too old for that to work at all well and also I am a coward. But just letting my own voice loose, getting it off the page. Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.

I read this piece, “Loud Cows,” on tape at first but then didn’t know what to do with the tape, so I do it live; and it’s never twice the same, and though it has been printed, it really needs you, the audience, to be there, going eeso, eeso! So I’ll end up now by performing it, in the hope of sending you away from this great conference with the memory of seeing an old woman mooing loudly in public.