PETER S. BEAGLE and “THE LAST UNICORN”

Recently I met and interviewed the esteemed fantasy writer, Peter S. Beagle. The occasion was a screening in Lawrence, KS of the 1982 film adaptation of his classic 1968 novel, The Last Unicorn.

The novel’s opening words are iconic: “The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.”

I had read the book many years ago and so am very familiar with its story of a young Magician, Schmendrick, and his friend, a Unicorn, who go on a quest to the Castle of King Haggard to find the truth of Magic and Mortality. While Magic and Mortality would seem to be mutually exclusive, as traditional fantasy has it, Beagle turns them on their heads, as it were. Here is a fairytale that ultimately celebrates the human state. The Unicorn, who is immortal, falls in love with a young knight and subsequently yearns for mortality. The apprentice Magician, like the Unicorn, is immortal, but gaining the secret of the Ultimate Magic renders him mortal: “Whatever can die is beautiful—more beautiful than a unicorn... “And what are their fates? To her regret, the Unicorn regains her immortality and spends eternity lamenting her lost love. The Magician attains his true Magic, but now finds growing old a bittersweet victory.

“We are in a fairy tale,” says Schmendrick, “and must go where it goes.”

 

Beagle’s lyric and singing prose limns the action with a magic spell of its own. For example, the very subject of Magic, and whence come its roots and meaning, is a very tricky thing to pull off—witness Ursula Le Guin’s triumph in her wonderful Earthsea series, where Magic derives its power from the Naming of Names. The lamentable Harry Potter books, on the other hand, skirt the sources of Magic entirely. It just is, and for the most part merely the agency of parlor tricks, with an assortment of clunky wands and flying brooms.

But savor Beagle’s comments on how Magicians work: “For only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to becomes something else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power.”

There’s frequently a raffish humor spicing the words. Consider Prince Lir, who falls hopelessly in love with the Unicorn’s human form. “As a hero,” drily observes the narrator, “he understood weeping women and knew how to make them stop crying—generally you killed something!“ And I love the comic threat of this wicked Magician’s incantation: “I’ll turn you into a bad poet with dreams.”

Meeting Mr. Beagle proved to be nothing short of inspiring. He wears his erudition, wit, and charm very lightly, tucked under his own Magician’s cloak, as it were.

I suppose writers like him, who spin out their fairytale worlds, even though fraught with the brimstone of gentle satire, must be always consigned to that dreaded category, “Young Adult.” And all the patronizing attitude that goes with it. If that deflects readers from investigating this book, as well as so many other tales that have followed, such as Unicorn’s sequel, The Two Hearts, and Tamsin, Folk of the Air, and A Fine and Private Place, that is regrettable. For everywhere in his work reside truths of the heart, however mixed and ambivalent they may be. “The sight of her makes me want to do battle with all evil and ugliness,” says the lovestruck swain, Prince Lir, “but it also makes me want to sit still and be unhappy.”

In the final analysis, The Last Unicorn, stands above its own story and bravely places its heroes and villains, its castles and dungeons, its Magic and its Mortality, in the context of a child’s toybox—the Magic Cabinet of our youth:

“She looked down on a pale paring of land where a toy man and woman stared with their knitted eyes at a clay bull and a tiny ivory unicorn. Abandoned playthings—there was another doll, too, half-buried; and a sandcastle with a stick king propped up in one tilted turret. The tide would take it all in a moment, and nothing would be left but the flaccid birds of the beach, hopping in circles.”

Note: My thanks to Travis Ashmore of the Last Unicorn Tour and, from the KU Center for the Study of Science Fiction, James Gunn, Kij Johnson, and Chris McKitterick for facilitating my interview with Peter S. Beagle.

JOHN RUSKIN AND “EFFIE GRAY”

JOHN RUSKIN

Poor John Ruskin. The renowned 19TH-century art critic and historian can’t catch a break. In MR. TURNER, he comes across as a haughty, pontificating, simpering jerk. Now, in EFFIE GRAY, he’s a cold and heartless pedant incapable of human love. Think of, respectively, the foolish scholar Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch and the chilly tyrant Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield.

Adding insult to injury, check out the advertising in the latter film: his image is absent, supplanted by actresses Dakota Fanning as the titular Effie and producer/actress Emma Thompson as her kindly and sympathetic friend, Lady Eastlake...

It’s as if the once-celebrated Ruskin (1819-1920), the most influential critic and art historian of his day, unequalled master of prose, skilled draughtsman, prominent social thinker, educator and philanthropist, and champion of J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelite painters has been rudely erased from the public record. How ironic, therefore, it is that the most celebrated image we have of him was a full-length portrait painting executed in 1853 by the very man who later married Effie and had eight children by her.

All we can glean today, apparently, in the first instance, is that his support of Turner and the Pre-Raphaelite movement was a corrupt and opportunistic posture; and, in the second, that he was an impotent monster who subjected his young wife, Effie Gray, to six years of a loveless marriage, leaving her a virgin before the marriage was annulled on grounds their sexual union was never consummated.

Far be it for me to defend Ruskin on these particular issues. On that score, much controversy remains as to what exactly happened on the Ruskins’ wedding night and subsequent weeks and months. Was Ruskin impotent at all; or, as biographer Wolfgang Kemp wonders, was he privately appalled at what he felt were the ”base” realities of a woman’s menstruation and body hair; or was he going to inordinate extremes to avoid the risk of pregnancy? The most carefully balanced and fair-minded assessment of the situation can be found in Suzanne Facence Cooper’s admirable novel-length study, Effie (2010), the nominal basis for the film. More questions surround the circumstances of the marital split: Was Ruskin taken by surprise when Effie sued for an annulment, as this new film proposes? Or did Ruskin himself stage-manage the split by none-too-subtly throwing Effie into the embrace of his Pre-Raphaelite friends, hoping to avoid personal embarrassment and sue for divorce on grounds of her adultery, as in the BBC series, DESPERATE ROMANTICS. (The fact remains that at the annulment she was indeed pronounced a virgin.)

What’s hard to understand on all counts is how a person of Ruskin’s humanitarian efforts, critical stature, and worldly sophistication—yes, sophistication—could have been either so confused or so stupid or so cruel as to find himself in such a wretched society scandal.

Meantime, I wonder at my own naiveté in suggesting that Ruskin should be remembered for other things. Examine his strange and troubled childhood, which transpired under the sternly manipulative and possessive control of his parents. Consider: If his gaze at women and marriage was wary and sometimes averted, his regard for Nature was unflinching. He launched an important aesthetic charge in demanding that the artist of the day get his head out of the clouds and cultivate “an attentive gaze [that] would reveal in every object the most varied facets and subtle gradations of motion and form. To perceive this was a science in itself, a science prior to aesthetics and to any kind of theoretical exercise. “ As a teacher at Oxford he tried to integrate practical and theoretical art studies. He was a champion of the working class and preached a “gospel of labor”; as a privileged person of independent wealth, he demanded direct social action from those high on the social hierarchy; and single-handedly he wrote a monthly newspaper for more than a decade addressed to the “Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain” (which became his book, Fors Clavigera). And almost alone among his contemporaries he sounded the alarm at the imminent neglect and destruction of the world’s architecture and art treasures by the mechanical push of the Industrial Revolution. His book The Stones of Venice, was a “desperate last-ditch effort to defend and preserve the past against the destructive tide of the present.”

Yes, none of the above makes for the sort of blood-and-thunder gothic thriller, or perversely compelling character study the movies prefer. Admittedly, if any more Ruskinian movies are to come, there are other personal irregularities on erotically pathetic display in Ruskin’s unfortunate relationships with other child-women, before and after the affair with Effie Gray. He joins his countrymen William Hazlitt, James M. Barrie, and Lewis Carroll in that regard. We can only turn away, in dismay, or, at the least, a measure of compassion.

But can we not give the man this due? Can we not afford some respect the person who once cried out: “The worst of me is that the Desire of my Eyes is so much to me. . . To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one.”