10

The Spinning Room: Symbols and Storytellers

When a friend asked me recently who my ancestors were, I told her they were farmers, clock-makers, aristocrats, and scoundrels. I did not tell the truth. My ancestors were squirrels. How else could the members of my family have acquired such a passion for hiding things? Once my mother forgot where she’d hidden the family silver, as squirrels forget where they have buried their acorns. The loss of a dozen place settings was cause for inconvenience but not for alarm.

“They’re not lost,” she said. “They’re in the house.”

The place settings came to light when the piano tuner was summoned to find out why our piano rasped like a snare drum.

“You can’t imagine the number of people I know who hide their silver in the piano,” the tuner told her. “You’ve got to do better than that.”

My father hid nothing except his private tube of toothpaste, which he kept under the handkerchiefs in his bureau drawer. After brushing his teeth, he always rolled up the tube, neat as a window shade, for he could not bear to use the tube that the rest of us had squeezed and punched out of shape. But except for his toothpaste, it seemed he had nothing worth hiding. Or so I believed until some years after he died, when I was reading through the pocket diaries he kept for sixty years. Here are some representative entries:

April 2: Today it rained half an inch.

April 6: Today I walked downtown and back.

April 10: Temperature today 65°.

He was, I knew, a man of few words. No man ever had fewer words to say about his own wedding day than my father, who on that occasion wrote in his diary, “Today I married Marge Sheppard.”

To my mother he explained that he never put down anything personal. Years later I realized that in his brevity he too was a hider. There are two ways of hiding something in writing. You leave it out, or you disguise it. What is left out is lost. What is disguised is saved, but only for those who can see through the disguise. Nevertheless, disguises themselves can be very attractive. Parables, allegories, satires, and a good many fairy tales are disguises, for they contain ideas more complicated than the surface story that hides them.

When you hide something, you often return to find more than you hid. I learned this not from literature but from my favorite, all-purpose hiding place in the house where I grew up, my parents’ closet. On the upper shelves over the tops of the hangers I once found five purses, three heating pads, a roll of toilet paper, a foot massager, a framed picture of Jesus calling Lazarus from the tomb, five vacuum cleaner bags, a small Maypole, a humidifier, a box of cough drops, assorted eyeglasses, several cameras that did not work but were too attractive to throw away, and a dozen Mason jars.

But the only things my mother consciously hid in the closet were Christmas presents. My sister and I found them one year, to our great dismay. The next year I hid my presents there, and my sister, without anyone else’s knowledge, hid hers there as well. So when my mother went to the closet to fetch the presents she’d hidden for us, she found they had multiplied, in a sort of reversal of the parable of the talents. That is often the way with hiding places. What you hide suffers a sea change. What you find is not exactly what you hid.

I felt very much as my mother must have felt when I finished my last book for children, The Island of the Grass King. It tells of a child who travels to an enchanted island and rescues a king whose kingdom is an earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Because an imaginary island must be real before you can write about it, I took for my model the most enchanted island I knew: the one on which Shakespeare set The Tempest. Here magic and nature are inseparable—a natural abode of witches and magicians.

So I read Shakespeare and the sources he might have used to invent his island before I tried to invent mine. I wondered if my editor would ask me, Why hide literary allusions in a story for children, who probably won’t recognize them? She did not ask. But if she had, I would have answered that reading Shakespeare helped me to shape my own story and that the snatches of Shakespeare’s songs and speeches are part of the story I want to tell. And although the child reading my book won’t recognize them, I hope they will be obvious to a well-read adult reader. Children’s books should be big enough for children to grow into. When I grew up, I did not put my favorite children’s books away with other childish things. I enjoyed them on a different level. But in spite of the allusions I hid in my book, my purpose in writing was to entertain. I was writing an adventure story, not an allegory. Or so I thought when I sent it off to my editor.

She wrote back an enthusiastic letter, which included the various interpretations of the book given by her staff. One reader claimed that the trip to the island was a hallucination. The Grass King, of course, was marijuana. Another saw it as an allegory about the political conditions in Cuba. Nobody noticed Shakespeare. I was amazed. How did Cuba and marijuana get into my book? Because someone had found them, were they really there? How much came from craft, how much from inspiration, and how much from pure accident? And how consciously can a writer use symbols without becoming self-conscious and pedantic?

The first books that made me ask these questions were Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Lewis Carroll is a hider after my own heart. The house where he grew up had a loose floorboard in the nursery, under which later occupants found the treasures he hid there: a child’s white glove, a thimble, a left shoe, a fragment of a poem scrawled on a piece of wood. Glove, thimble, left shoe, poems—all these things turn up years later in the Alice books, where the author himself hides behind a pseudonym. Behind Lewis Carroll, storyteller, is the Reverend Charles L. Dodgson, logician and Oxford don.

Fortunately for us, Dodgson tells us something about how his books came to be written. It is well known that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began as a story told during a boating expedition to amuse the three daughters of the dean of Christ Church. “In a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy lore,” says Dodgson, “I … sent my heroine straight down a rabbithole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen afterwards.”¹ His ideas for stories, he claimed, would come of themselves like unlooked-for gifts. When a friend of Dodgson’s who was part of the expedition asked if this was an extemporaneous romance, Dodgson replied, “Yes, I’m inventing as we go along.”²

Alice Liddell, one of the three little girls, asked him to write the story down for her, and that very evening he returned to his rooms and began to record the adventures as well as he could remember them. Although the story was quickly told, it was not quickly written. Five months after the boating expedition that prompted the story, Dodgson noted in his diary, “Began writing the fairy-tale for Alice, which I told them July 4th going to Godstow—I hope to finish it by Christmas.” This version was called Alice’s Adventures Underground, and he did not finish it until February. “In writing it out,” he said, “I added many fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves upon the original stock; and many more added themselves when, years afterwards, I wrote it all over again for publication.… Sometimes an idea comes at night, when I have had to get up and strike a light to note it down … but whenever or however it comes, it comes of itself …‘Alice’ and the ‘Looking Glass’ are made up almost wholly of bits and scraps, single ideas which came of themselves.”³ He did not know when he wrote out the fairy tale for Alice that it would grow from eighteen thousand words to thirty-five thousand words before it was published. Much was added to the final version: the Mad Tea Party, parodies of the popular songs Dodgson had heard Alice and her sisters sing, parodies of the lessons their governess had inflicted on them. When he revised the original version, he cut out most of the private jokes, leaving only those allusions that served the artistic ends of a book intended to please not merely three little girls but readers of all ages.

Through the Looking Glass was also a long time in the making. “It will probably be some time before I again indulge in paper and print,” Dodgson wrote to his publishers. “I have, however, a floating idea of writing a sort of sequel to ‘Alice.’”⁴ The idea floated for three years. When Dodgson knew that Tenniel would be available to illustrate the new book, he set out to write it, drawing on the stories he had told the three little girls when he was teaching them chess. The problems of writing a text to be illustrated are unknown to most writers of adult fiction. Chapter Thirteen of Through the Looking Glass introduced the character of a wasp in a wig, which Tenniel declared he could not draw. “A wasp in a wig,” he informed Dodgson, “is altogether beyond the appliances of art.”⁵ The chapter was omitted from the book.

Some critics have read the Alice books as satire; others have called them allegories. The truth is, Dodgson set out to write neither. He did, however, write stories in which he hid ideas, people, and events familiar to him, though he did not do so in a systematic way. He also took his time writing down his stories, and time seems to have a great deal to do with how successfully a writer changes the parochial into the universal.

I learned the hard way how awful a story can be if you have not waited until it is ready to be written. Let me go back to my book, The Island of the Grass King. Four years ago I tried to write that book. It was meant to be a sequel to a collection of stories, Sailing to Cythera, about the adventures of a boy named Anatole. In The Island of the Grass King one of the characters is a pirate. To help me create that character, I read an enormous number of books on pirates. One of the scenes takes place in the sky. To help me describe the sky, I read a vast number of books on astronomy.

I read too much. I had the trappings of characters but not the characters themselves. I had the details of a setting but not the story to give it significance. Innocent of these weaknesses, I wrote the first fifty pages and sent them to my editor. She was appalled but polite. There are some things that cannot be conveyed over the telephone or in a letter. She invited me to meet her in her office in New York. I agreed. This meant finding a babysitter for the day and riding for two hours on a train that always broke down both coming and going. When my editor heard the obstacles I had overcome to keep our appointment, she could scarcely bring herself to deliver her message. The writing was abysmal. All the reports of the readers agreed. How, asked one, could anyone capable of writing Sailing to Cythera have written so badly?

The next morning I took up a copy of Sailing to Cythera and asked myself, What did I do so effortlessly in this book that I failed to do in the second? Effortlessly—that was the secret. I had not written Sailing to Cythera out of months of research. I had written out of the memories of my own childhood. When I was a child, I greatly admired the wallpaper in a restaurant to which I was sometimes taken as a reward for memorizing a difficult piano piece. It showed shepherds and shepherdesses dancing under willow trees, courting under rose arbors, and piping to one another across flocks of immaculate white sheep. Whenever I saw that idyllic country, I wanted to walk on that grass and hear those birds, rare as nightingales and twice as beautiful. Perhaps all fairy tales are really ways of making impossible wishes come true. As I could not go into the wallpaper myself, I sent my character into it, where he learned a little about magic and a lot about love.

Years after the restaurant had been converted into a pizza parlor, I was a student at the University of Michigan; I was dozing in an art history lecture when there flashed across the screen the very country that the wallpaper had imitated so badly. The painting was The Embarkation for Cythera by the eighteenth-century French painter Antoine Watteau. It showed a party of aristocrats preparing to set sail for the island of Cythera, named for the goddess of love. The art history instructor called these people pilgrims, and he drew our attention to the autumnal light, the sunny distances, and a great many other things that I have now forgotten. How long ago I first saw that painting, and how little I thought of it afterward! But when I wanted to describe what things looked like on the other side of the wallpaper, the painting came back to me.

Remembering this, I looked again at my disastrous fifty pages. They had come into the world trailing clouds of research; they were born of other people’s books, not my own experience. So I put The Island of the Grass King away and wrote instead a book about a girl who plays baseball, and to the best of my knowledge there isn’t a symbol in it. Not a trace of satire, not a smidgen of allegory. I forgot about the book I’d wanted to write and couldn’t.

But the wonderful thing about failures in writing is, although you forget them, they do not forget you. Left alone, they assume their proper shape. Like children who survive all their parents’ plans for them, they grow up in their own way. They return, not when you call them, but when some trivial episode wakes them.

The story I had wanted to write in The Island of the Grass King returned two years later when I was polishing my mother’s silver, those forks and teapots so often lost in the corners of our house. I was polishing a coffeepot whose handle was a griffin with a tail that twined around the spout and somewhere along the way burst into leaves. Half the pot was bright from my diligence. The other half was dark, and I could not make out the design at all. It was as if one side were awake and the other side asleep, and so it is with us, I thought; we spend half our lives doing things and the other half dreaming about them. Outside the rain began to fall, though the sun was shining, and my mother said, “Rain and sun together! The devil is beating his wife.”

And I remembered, suddenly, the wise woman of my childhood whom I believed caused both weather and seasons: Mother Holle. I first met her in one of Grimm’s fairy tales, and I did not know that her name means hell in German. I only knew that she lived under the earth and that she sometimes hired mortal girls to help her with her housework. Their chief duty was to shake out her featherbeds, for this shaking of feathers below caused snow to fall on the surface of the earth. From this memory sprang the three wise women who run the world in The Island of the Grass King. The first is the Maker; she makes all the creatures, and as the old ones wear out, she makes new ones. The second is the Mender; she keeps everything in repair, and she heals the torn and broken. The third is the Breaker, who destroys whatever the Mender cannot save.

So out of that odd recollection grew the finished version of my book. My reading on pirates and astronomy was there, but it had got so mixed up with my own memories that what came forth was quite different from either. With children’s books, as with adult books, writing is a matter of words and silence, of pounding the material into submission and letting go of it, of trying to finish so many pages a day while telling yourself that you have all the time in the world. It’s important to keep in mind the story you want to write. But it is even more important to forget it. Kafka understood this when he told a friend why an artist’s material “must be worked on by the spirit.”⁶ The writer not only gathers experience, he masters what is experienced.

I believe that for most writers there are three kinds of stories. The first is the story that you choose to write and that you believe you understand. The second is the story that chooses you, and where it comes from you don’t know, for the material seems to have been worked on out of your sight and hearing. The third is the story that starts out as the first kind and ends up as the second. What you know is changed into more than you know. When the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was asked to explain a poem he had written, he excused himself with the remark, “Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.”⁷

An example of this peculiar transformation is Hans Christian Andersen’s story, “The Nightingale,” about a little wild bird who saves the life of the emperor of China. When the emperor falls ill, she sings so beautifully that even Death is enchanted and persuaded to give up his victim for a song. But until that moment of triumph, the emperor prefers the music of an artificial nightingale because it is obedient and predictable. The story was inspired by real people. Jenny Lind, the opera singer who became known in this country as “The Swedish Nightingale,” is the singer taught by nature. The artificial nightingale is the singer taught by tradition. For Andersen, this meant the Italian opera company that lived at the Danish court. Although real people stand behind this story, it is not an allegory, for the message it carries is independent of them. C. S. Lewis’s distinction between myth and allegory describes what the greatest writers of fantasy have always done. “Into an allegory a man can only put what he already knows; into a myth he puts what he does not yet know and would not come to know in any other way.”⁸

How can a writer set out to write what he does not yet know? For many writers such stories are triggered by accidents. If Alice Liddell had not asked for a story, would Dodgson have written Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? A great many books for children started out as stories told to children when the writer wasn’t particularly worried about structure, characters, plot, or niceties of style. I believe that being asked for a story can bring familiar material together in unfamiliar ways, whether the one asking is a child or an editor.

In the case of one of my favorite books, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the one asking for a story was an adult. While Saint-Exupéry was having lunch with his publisher in a New York restaurant, he began doodling on the tablecloth. His publisher asked him what he was drawing.

“Oh, nothing much,” answered Saint-Exupéry. “Just a little fellow I carry around in my heart.”

“Now look, this little fellow—what would you think of making up a story about him … for a children’s book.”

So Saint-Exupéry agreed to try it. The character of the little fellow had had plenty of time to get worked on by the spirit. Saint-Exupéry had first drawn him when he was a little fellow himself and had gone on drawing him on menus, letters, and scraps of paper, in all sorts of disguises. Although Saint-Exupéry had not written books for children, he loved those that hid ideas more serious than the plots that concealed them. In one of his notebooks he writes, “Reread children’s books, entirely forgetting the naive part which has no effect, but noting all along the prayers and concepts carried by this imagery.”⁹ Fairy tales have taught nearly all the great writers of fantasy how to work with symbols.

It’s no surprise that many writers of stories for children heard fairy stories long before they heard the word symbol. So did many of us, and so it will always be, as long as there are grown-ups to tell stories and children to ask for them. Of all the writers for children whose imaginations were fed on fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen was surely one of the most fortunate. The place where he heard fairy tales has long since vanished from our world, yet for centuries it was one of the great storehouses of folk literature. This was the spinning room, where women sat spinning at their wheels and working together during the long winter. To make the time pass more pleasantly, they told each other stories. The brothers Grimm assure us that many of the stories brought together in their Household Tales were perfected in the spinning room before being set down for our entertainment.

The spinning room Andersen visited was attached to a hospital in Odense, where his grandmother worked as a grounds keeper. The spinners were the local paupers. They listened to the tales that the boy Andersen composed for them and gave him their stories in return. “And thus,” says Andersen, “a world as rich as that of the Thousand and One Nights was revealed to me.”¹⁰

I like to imagine that I have found my way to that room where stories as well as wool are spun. By the light of a candle an old woman is spinning, but it isn’t wool she winds on her wheel. She is spinning straw into gold, so I know that this is the lady whom Andersen called his muse, his wise woman, the bringer of fairy tales. Her name is Anonymous. Her wheel hums, her shadow looms large on the wall. I like to imagine that our conversation goes something like this:

ANON: So you want to write a story that means something. A story with symbols in it. In this place we learn by doing. Tell me a story.

ME: Give me some ideas for a story, please.

ANON: Story first, ideas later. Set off on your story as if you were taking a journey. “There was once upon a time a soldier who for many years had served the King faithfully, but when the war came to an end he could serve no longer because of the many wounds which he had received. The King said to him: ‘You may return to your home, I need you no longer, and you will not receive any more money, for he only receives wages who renders me service for them.”¹¹ Now see how far I’ve taken you in two sentences?

ME: You haven’t told me where the war happened or who the king was.

ANON: No, and I’m not going to, either. It’s true that my stories are full of bears and wolves, water and wine, sun and moon, sea and stars—all palpable things of this world. But my stories are not of this world. I show life from the inside, as dreams do, and for that reason I leave out a great many details. Now, tell me a story.

ME: There was once upon a time——

ANON: Wait a minute. Why imitate me? I don’t make up stories, I only pass them on. I gave you the soldier. Now you give him a personality. But don’t muddle the story with details of what he had for supper or who his parents were. Just let me see him and hear him. Do you remember a fairy tale called “The Tinder Box”? My old friend Hans Andersen wrote it. He didn’t like the way I told the story. Too bare, he said. So he started his story this way:

Left, right! Left, right! … Down the country-road came a soldier marching. Left, right! Left, right! … He had his knapsack on his back and a sword at his side, for he had been at the war, and now he was on his way home. But then he met an old witch on the road. Oh! she was ugly—her lower lip hung right down on her chest. “Good evening, soldier,” she said, “What a nice sword you’ve got, and what a big knapsack! You’re a proper soldier! Now I’ll show you how to get as much money as you want!” “Thank you very much, old dame!” said the soldier.¹²

ME: That old witch moves pretty fast. They haven’t even been introduced yet.

ANON: You think that’s fast? Listen to the scene where he chops her head off:

So he cut off her head …… There she lay! But the soldier tied up all his money in her apron and made a bundle of it, to go on his back. He put the tinder-box in his pocket and went straight on into the town.¹³

I told that part to a gentleman who visited me some years ago—now what was his name? I believe he called himself “K.”

ME: Not Franz Kafka?

ANON: That was the man. When I told him that part, he shook his head gravely. “There are no bloodless fairy stories,” he sighed. “Every fairy story comes from the depths of blood and fear.”¹⁴ He was right. But he failed to notice one thing. Though the witch loses her head, not a drop of blood is spilled. But you look—disappointed. Don’t you like the story?

ME: It’s very entertaining. But I was hoping for a story with a deeper meaning.

ANON: All fairy tales have deeper meanings. Tell me, what happens in fairy stories? Witches turn people into beasts. Love turns them human again. And that should remind you, my dear, that for all our human accomplishments, we too can be turned into beasts. We can kill each other like the beasts of the field, but we can save each other as well. When you read a fairy tale, isn’t it remarkable how much you recognize? Fairy stories are like rituals. What is a ritual but a simple act that stands for a more complicated one? Sit down. Let me tell you a story.¹⁵ Once upon a time there lived a king who had three daughters. Now it happened that he had to go out to battle, so he called his daughters and said to them, “My dear children, I am obliged to go to the wars. During my absence be good girls and look after everything in the house. You may walk in the garden and you may go into all the rooms in the palace, except the room at the back in the right-hand corner.” Now, what’s going to happen?

ME: His daughters will go into that room.

ANON: Oh, you’ve heard this story?

ME: No. But it sounds familiar.

ANON: It’s the story of the Garden of Eden, it’s the loss of paradise without God and the serpent. And thereby hangs the tale. Well, the girls got bored and one day they did indeed enter the room and found nothing it it but a large table on which lay an open book. The first girl stepped up to the book and read, “The eldest daughter of this king will marry a prince from the east.” The second daughter stepped forward and read, “The second daughter of this king will marry a prince from the west.” But the youngest daughter did not want to go near the book. Why not?

ME: Because the youngest is always obedient and virtuous?

ANON: Right again. But why is the youngest always obedient and virtuous? Because in the world of magic, innocence is a virtue. A worldly man does not share his last crust of bread with a beggar. He has bills to pay, he has promises to keep. But the innocent—and it is easier to believe that the hero is innocent if he is young—takes no thought of the morrow. He lives in the present tense, and so he befriends the beggar who turns out to be—

ME: A helpful wizard in disguise?

ANON: Right again. Kindness in the fairy stories is properly rewarded. Now back to the princess. We left her quailing before the book that had predicted such good fortunes for her sisters. They dragged her up to the book and she read, “The youngest daughter of this king will be married to a pig from the north.” Her sisters tried to comfort her. “When did it ever happen,” they said, “that a king’s daughter married a pig?”

ME: It happens all the time in fairy tales.

ANON: So she marries the pig and settles down and lives unhappily ever after?

ME: No. The pig is really a prince in disguise.

ANON: Since you already know this story, I don’t suppose you want to hear any more.

ME: I don’t know the story. I only know the rituals in the story. Or should I call them symbols?

ANON: Call them whatever you like. You are not listening to my story because it has symbols. You are listening because you care about the world I’ve invented and the characters who people it. And if I bring on a six-foot pig with a wedding on his mind, it’s not to make your blood run cold, it’s to make the youngest daughter wiser for having to face him. And if I add a witch who offers to break the spell for her, it’s not to make all the girl’s wishes come true but to help her choose between good and evil. The greatest writers for children know that fairy tales are not only for children. One evening Hans Andersen was leaving the theater after a play, and he overheard someone say that the play ought not to be taken seriously as it was only a fairy tale. “I was indignant,” exclaimed Andersen. “In the whole realm of poetry no domain is so boundless as that of the fairy tale. It reaches from the blood-drenched graves of antiquity to the pious legends of a child’s picture-book.”¹⁶ Isn’t it odd that so simple a story can carry our deepest fears and desires in so small a space?

So our conversation ends. I think of the story of the princess and her pig. None of the ideas in it are new to me. Is that why I like stories that hide ideas, so that I can find them again, like a ring lost in the house, all the more precious when I find it because I had forgotten it? When I was a child, my sister used to blindfold me and lead me about our house, letting me guess through which rooms we passed before she took off the blindfold. In that brief moment of surprise when I saw where I was, everything looked strange to me. Is it for the pleasure of discovering what we already know that we hide familiar things in fantastic stories where straw turns into gold, words into spells, and ourselves into heroes?