Reflections: On the Magic of Writing

  The second reason I do not put my own childhood into things I write is that it was mostly too bizarre to use directly. In addition to the general madness of wartime and the eccentricity of my parents (my father’s meanness, for instance, caused him at one point to obtain me three lessons in Greek in exchange for my sisters’ much-loved doll’s house), there was the village where I spent the years from nine to adulthood. Everyone there was peculiar in some way, singly and interactively. Some people behaved like witches, other people frankly admitted that they were. A man sat in the church porch who said he went mad at full moon. The vicar preached Communism from the pulpit and people came in hobnailed boots from Great Dunmow specially to walk out in the sermon. There were passionate folklorists, hand weavers, adherents of William Morris, persons who were hippies long before hippies existed, and the girls were always getting pregnant. Someone made life-size working models of elephants. Everyone danced in the streets. German prisoners of war mingled with Polish displaced persons and London evacuees to cause a profusion of eccentricity, shortly augmented by the American airbase nearby. Also nearby was a colony of painters, one of whom did antivivisection naive art, and there were strange folk in outlying farmhouses either getting into debt or keeping boa constrictors and dragon lizards in their attics. The as-it-were conference center which my parents ran added to the general peculiarity, both by importing mad musicians and insane actors and causing myself and my sisters to have to live, as one of the guests described it, “in the margins of a dirty postcard,” and by employing a succession of local eccentrics. The gardener there had had a vision on the road to a nearby village, Sampford, in which an angel descended to him and told him always to go to chapel and never to join a trade union.

  It was only as a student that I realized that these things were not normal. It has taken me all these years to realize that some of the episodes from this lunatic place make very good stories in their own right; but I shall write them primarily for adults, not for children.

  But naturally a childhood like that has to be an influence somewhere. In a way, it lies behind everything I write, in that it has to expand your notions of what is credible and make you readier to believe that extremely odd things can happen. Enough of it was hilariously funny, too, to make me aware that humor is essential when things get wild. Oddly, the most insanely funny things were nearly always part of something intensely tragic (for instance, when my father lay dying to the sound of young men beating on our door shouting “We want women!”)2 and I came to the conclusion that the two states are, in fact, closely related and that fantasy—the times things go wild—is the connecting factor. For all this, the perpetual riot and mayhem in which we lived then was always like a brick wall cutting me off from anything truly imaginative. Life was too restless and pragmatic to give one a chance to think. I got glimpses of what was cut off from books. Among my few books was a volume of Arthur Mee’s The Children’s Encyclopaedia with a picture in it of a girl learning to play the piano. The piano was up against a brick wall, beyond which was a wonderful garden to which the girl had access only through strenuous endeavor. I actually cried when I first saw it, not only because my mother had forbidden music lessons on the grounds that I was not musical, but because it seemed exactly to describe my situation—and I could see no way to penetrate that wall.

  The queer thing was that the conference center did in fact possess just such a garden. It was known as the Other Garden. The garden that everyone saw was pleasant enough, though somewhat boringly laid out around a large square of grass. The Other Garden was quite different. It was like that garden in folktales where the king has counted all the apples. It was across a road, walled away from everyone, a blaze of manicured lawn leading to a tunnel of roses ending in an inlaid wood summerhouse, where espalier apple trees of types that are no longer grown surrounded plots of fruit, flowers, and vegetables.

  The bees had a plot of their own because they did not get on with the visionary gardener. Something about this garden caused him to build little shrinelike places in the wall niches and ornament them with posies and old Venetian glass.

  My father would not let anyone go there. He kept the large, old key to it in his pocket and it often took several days of pleading to get him to release it to me, grudgingly, for an hour or so. When I got there I simply wandered, in utter bliss. I talked to the bees, who never once stung me, although they pursued the visionary gardener once a week, in clouds, and occasionally turned on my father too; I ate apples; I watched things grow; and I never once connected it with the garden in the piano-playing picture, though that was more or less what it was. I remember I did try to connect it with The Secret Garden. I dragged a copy of that past the censor, with my mother saying, “Oh very well then, read it if you must, but remember it’s nothing but sentimental nonsense!” and tried, in a puzzled way, to lay it alongside the Other Garden. But the Other Garden had nothing to do with sentimental nonsense. I couldn’t make it out.

  I see now that the two gardens of the conference center came to represent to me the activities of the two sides of the human brain, the first concerned with day-to-day living and the second with all creative needs. But I put it to myself more in terms of enchantment as opposed to the mundane.

  “Is this why you made use of myths and folktales so often?” people will now ask. Only up to a point. One thing the existence of the Other Garden made plain to me is certainly that there are times when everyday life echoes or embodies traditional stories. These are more frequent than most people think. Anyone who does not believe this ought to ask themselves how often they have felt like Cinderella. And it was with this in mind that I wrote Eight Days of Luke very early on, using the days of the week, which have the names of deities hidden in them and yet are presented to us on a daily basis, to try to express how the ancient and chthonic things are in fact nearly always present to everyone. But I do this kind of one-to-one correspondence fairly rarely. For one thing, the immense and meaningful weight of all myths and most folktales could drag a more fragile, modern story out of shape; for another, I do not find I use these things. They present themselves, either for inclusion or as underlay, when the need arises; so that you can have, at one end of the scale a book like Wilkins’ Tooth where the solution is from “Puss in Boots” (or “Rhinegold”), or at the other end of the scale, one like Fire and Hemlock, where, once I had conceived the idea of founding the story on that of Tam Lin, about ninety other myths and folktales proceeded to manifest, in and out all the time, like fish in dark water. The beauty of such tales is that the weight they carry is only to be grasped intuitively. They cause readers to grasp far more than the surface meaning, but they combine with that surface meaning more easily and successfully than anything else, even for those who do not know the story in question. (Fire and Hemlock goes down rather well in Japan, where myths are not the same.)

  The other wonderful thing about myth and folktale elements is that nearly every story is in segments, which can be taken apart and either recombined or included on their own. In this form they carry the same weight, but their meaning often alters. I first grasped this at the age of about eleven, when I was allowed to read a scholarly book when I was ill (“But don’t you dare get it crumpled!”), which was mostly sixteen versions of the same Persian folktale—the one where the younger prince fetches the princess from the glass mountain—placed in such an order that, as the details of the story altered, you watched it changing from one sort of narrative (the trial of strength and valor) to another (the test of character), while the outline of the story itself never changed. This kind of thing fascinates me. When I was a student I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his series up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid). I sat there obdurately despite all his mumbling and talking with his face pressed up to the blackboard, forcing him to go on expounding every wee
k how you could start with a simple quest narrative and, by gradually twitching elements as it went along, arrive at the complex and entirely different story of Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale”—a story that still contains the excitement of the quest narrative that seeded it. What little I heard of all this was wholly fascinating.

  “How do you think of the characters in your books?” They come partly from life. A friend recently said that all the adult characters in my books struck her as completely mad, and I suppose this is because most of the adults I knew as a youngster behaved as if they were precisely that. Though I have never yet found a niche in a book for either Professor Tolkien or the visionary gardener, I have not despaired of finding one for both in the end. Those that I do draw from life, I use sparingly, one per book usually, to ensure that the other people, who come from my head, will behave as real people would. The majority are, you might say, made up, and these are of two kinds: those I have known for a long time and who have been kicking their heels in the corridors of my brain, waiting for the right narrative to go into, and the ones who suddenly present themselves, as entire people, because of the logic of the book. It is, I find, essential to know real and made-up both as well as you would know your own siblings. One reason for knowing them that well is that you then need not describe them in any detail: if you know them that well, they come over. But the main reason is that they are, after all, the flesh and blood of the story, the ones the things happen to, or who make things happen. So they have to be capable of being changed by what goes on, as people would change. You have to know their tricks of speech and the way they stand or walk, the way their hair grows, as well as you know the inward minds of them—or better, because I find they often surprise me by acting autonomously out of inward impulses I have not learned. The way different people behave in difficult conditions has always fascinated me. The second book I wrote (in twelve exercise books) was largely devoted to a group of people who got separated into smaller groups, and then to exploring these smaller groups, each of which surprised and fascinated me by developing a group dynamic I had not expected. The one I expected to make the decisions did not always do so. By the time I had written THE END in the twelfth exercise book, I knew all of them so well that I could draw pictures of them in characteristic attitudes.

  Now we are nearer to answering the question I always get asked most irritably: “Why did you choose to write fantasy? Why magic?” Aside from the fact that much of my early life was like fantasy, I suppose the answer has to be that I learned its value from not having it, or at least not having it in books very much. There were glimmerings, just enough to set up a craving of the kind you have when you are seriously deficient in some vitamin and, oddly enough, nothing I wrote in those exercise books was fantasy. I did not think it was allowed. Fantasy was “sentimental nonsense.” I was, for instance, forbidden to read the chapter in The Wind in the Willows called “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” but of course guiltily did so and discovered in it something consonant with the Other Garden. They were both that extra thing, something beyond the usual. It took me years to understand that all the matters dealt with in fairy tales or myths (magic) and the deeper workings of the imagination are both functions of the right lobe of one’s brain, and therefore are capable of overlaying and reinforcing one another. This seems to be true whether you are simply speculating about what happens if you stumble while wearing seven-league boots,3 or conducting your protagonist on a journey of the spirit to the underworld. The magic leads to the exercise of the imagination and then the imagination supplies further meaning to the apparently magic events. At its simplest, magic can be considered as a metaphor, or as functioning in the same way as metaphor. In Witch Week, it begins as precisely that, with the burning of witches standing for the persecution of people who differ from the supposed norm, but I hope it then goes on to be more, because almost every character eventually turns out to be a witch. It should then become a way of saying “Think this through.” This, it seems to me, is the best intellectual function of magic in fantasy. You start out by saying “What if this or that seemingly impossible thing were so . . .” and then following through the logic of it. The fact that it has been put in terms of magic (or impossibility) has distanced the problem (which may actually be one painfully near to most children, like secret fears or racial difference) so that it can be walked around, followed through, and if possible, solved in some way. To use magic by itself as a solution is merest cheating. The problem has to be restated in equivalent magical terms and then linked with the minds and actions of people in such a way that a solution can be worked out in human terms as well. Then, because magic is the matter of myths and folktales, the problem becomes exciting rather than painful or intractable and the imagination is available to come to grips with the problem.

  The excitement generated by magic is incalculable and should never be underestimated. It is of the same order as creativity.

  “But what value has fantasy? Don’t you end up with people who do not know fantasy from reality?” The short answer to that second question is another question: Why do lie detectors work? The longer answer is twofold, part personal, part general. Recall my muddle over Germans giving us Twyford. I really did not know which part of this was fantasy and which reality. It was solved for me by an episode from Mary Poppins Comes Back (this book got past the censor by being a present from my godmother) in which Mary Poppins and her charges visit a circus that is the Milky Way, presided over by the Sun as Ringmaster, with Saturn as a melancholy clown (which puzzled me for the next five years until I learned of the rings of Saturn and saw that these were the ruff round the clown’s neck) and the signs of the zodiac as performing animals. The episode was rescued from whimsy first by the cast uniting to assert they were all of the same substance—“child and serpent, star and stone”—and subsequently by the discovery that Mary Poppins had a sunburst burn on one cheek where the Sun had kissed her. None of Kipling’s learning-and-forgetting here. I almost instantly recognized that my muddle was the same order of thing as this episode, truths presented in a shape they did not really have, personifications and similes acquiring the status of fact. The muddle dissolved, not only painlessly but in a gust of delight at the marvelous thing P. L. Travers had done. I am willing to bet that most good children’s stories have inadvertently performed the same sort of cure for many children, many times. They show you the way your mind works. And, as I hoped to point out when I gave an account of my muddle in the first place, when your mind works in this way, it is closely allied to all sorts of creativity.

  Fantasy is a very important part of the way your mind works. People trot out as a truism that man is a tool-making animal, but nobody pauses to think that before a caveman could make a stone ax or an obsidian arrowhead, he had to imagine it first. “What if I lashed this luckily shaped hunk of stone to this sturdy stick? Would it help me divide this tree into usable bits?” The caveman might actually laugh here at the idea of dividing a tree up at all. And the same sort of half-incredulous “What if?” applies to the most abstruse piece of engineering, except that here the laughter will be subsumed into a sort of keen enjoyment of the chase: “Nobody has done this before, but I’m going to do it all the same. What if I . . . ?” Man, before anything, is a problem solver. We have evolved practically requiring to enjoy solving problems, and foremost among our means of doing so is the half-joking “What if?” of fantasy. One of the mythical Treasures of Britain was a thermos flask, conceived long before it was possible to make one. And of course it is fun, solving something. Look at Archimedes, rushing outside dripping and shouting. Naturally we enjoy fantasy.

  There is an extension of this fun-function. We also enjoy daydreaming—fantasizing, as they call it. In some daydreams, our problems are simply miraculously solved. Here, we recognized the problem and lowered the level of pain from it. Nobody solved anything while worried and hurting. That is one part of fantasizing. The other part is the actual practicing of situations in our heads.
Reading a book constructed on these lines is only an augmented form of this. Both prepare you for a version of the situation in actuality. Without either, you really do not find it easy to distinguish the credible from the unbelievable, the obscene from the silly joke. I always think it is significant that the generation that trained my mother to despise all fantasizing produced Hitler and two world wars. People confronted with Hitler should have said, “He’s just like that villain I imagined the other night,” or “He’s as mad as something out of Batman,” but they couldn’t, because it was not allowed.

  “Why do I write for children?” There is one good reason. I would hope to encourage some part of one generation at least to use their minds as minds are supposed to be used. A book for children, like the myths and folktales that tend to slide into it, is really a blueprint for dealing with life. For that reason, it might have a happy ending, because nobody ever solved a problem while believing it was hopeless. It might put the aims and the solution unrealistically high—in the same way that folktales tend to be about kings and queens—but this is because it is better to aim for the moon and get halfway there than just to aim for the roof and get halfway upstairs. The blueprint should, I think, be an experience in all the meanings of that word, and the better to make it so, I would want it to draw on the deeper resonances we all ought to have in the other side of our minds. For me, those resonances will have something to do with the Other Garden, but I am willing to hope—or even to believe—that if I get the book right, I might actually provide these resonances for those who did not happen to have such a garden. I have anyway always hoped to write a truly memorable book, one that you go back to the beginning of and start rereading as soon as you get to the end, one that you think of in subsequent years as the one that really pointed you in the way you wish to go. I still don’t think I have done it. That’s life. Halfway to the moon. But on what I have done, I would not really like to set an age limit. I am always delighted when aunts and grandfathers write to me, saying their nephew/granddaughter has just introduced them to, say, Howl’s Moving Castle, and they couldn’t put it down.