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The Rutabaga Lamp: The Reading and Writing of Fairy Tales

Before I learned to read, I thought all people were divided into two sorts: explorers and dreamers. I had a clear image in my mind of both, and I still remember the source of that image. Two weeks before Christmas, my Sunday school teacher gave us little canisters in which we were to put money for the poor. Painted on these curious banks were the three wise men. I supposed it was for these three indigents that we were saving, and I thought it very odd that men so wise should be reduced to taking alms from children.

But it was easy to see why they were poor. They had spent all their money on expensive clothes, gifts, and travel. They had, I was sure, prudent wives waiting for them at home in leaf-brown hoods and homespun gowns, three wise women who would never get their pictures on banks, because, like the wise women in fairy tales, they would never travel to the far corners of the earth and bring back tales of adventure. The wise women of the fairy tales are not tourists. They travel invisible roads. Their journeys are inward: their destinations belong to the uncharted territory of dreams. Because these places are not found on maps, the stories about them are called fantasies. I imagined that wise men wrote geographies and histories of real places. They were the explorers. Wise women wrote fantasies and fairy tales. They were the dreamers.

The more I read, the more I understood that the best writers are both explorers and dreamers. And nowhere is this truer than in the stories we call fairy tales. I have always thought of fairy tales as one of the highest forms of truth, like parables, or the koan which, repeated and taken to heart, help Zen monks along the road to enlightenment. Their truth is hidden, and therein lies their power.

I remember my first encounter with this sort of truth. Once upon a time, if I had been asked to describe an egg, I would have said “An egg is hard and smooth and fragile on the outside, but inside you will find a yellow yolk and a white, which isn’t white but a sort of pale slippery yellow.” Hard. Smooth. Fragile. Yellow. White. The egg has vanished. I have covered it with labels. I can see it no longer and can give you no further account of it.

What shattered these labels for me was a riddle. The egg was the answer, yet knowing the answer did not keep me from enjoying the riddle:

In marble walls as white as milk,

Lined with a skin as soft as silk,

Within a fountain crystal-clear,

A golden apple doth appear.

No doors there are to this stronghold,

Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.¹

When I first heard riddles, I soon realized that I did not need to know the answer to enjoy the riddle. Indeed, not until I grew up did I learn that one of my favorite poems was a riddle for snow:

White bird featherless

Flew from paradise,

Pitched on the castle wall;

Along came Lord Landless,

Took it up handless,

And rode away

to the King’s white hall.²

But now I hear somebody ask, “What have riddles to do with fairy tales? Where are the fairies, the wizards, the witches?” To answer, I must borrow a definition of fairy tales from Tolkien, who takes pains to distinguish between fairy, meaning elf, and fäerie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. “Fäerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic,” he explains. “And though it keeps elves, dragons, and trolls, it also holds the sun and moon, the earth and sea, and ourselves, when we are enchanted. A fairy story, says Tolkien, is “one which touches on or uses Fäerie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy.”³

Though children read fairy tales, fairy tales are not only for children. The brothers Grimm took their tales from German peasant women who took them from each other. A hundred years before the publication of those tales, Charles Perrault, a French academician at the court of Louis XIV, published—under his son’s name—Tales of my Mother Goose. The frontispiece to the 1697 edition shows an old woman warming herself at the hearth and telling stories to a young child. Who is this old woman? The child’s grandmother? A peasant nurse? “If she were a peasant Nanny, rather than a blood grandmother, she must have remained forever a stranger to everyone in the household but the children …,” suggests one critic. “No wonder such old women appear in their own tales as creatures from another world …”⁴

Perrault’s book set the women at court writing fairy tales, not only for children, but for each other, to be read in the salons. Madame de Sévigné mentions in a letter that she spent the evening listening to fairy tales with great pleasure.⁵ “If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults,” says Tolkien, who did not develop a taste for fairy tales until after he was grown up. “They will, of course, put more in and get more out than children can.”⁶

Certainly many of the literary fairy tales published in Europe during the nineteenth century are for adults. Both Hans Christian Andersen and George MacDonald wrote fairy tales for adults as well as for children. Charles Dickens adds the subtitle, “A fairy tale of home” to his adult story, “The Cricket on the Hearth.” E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Golden Flower Pot” is subtitled “A Fairy Tale of Our Time,” yet the only tale by Hoffman most children know today is “Nutcracker and the King of Mice” and few know it except as a ballet. And in our own time, who reads James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold? Children or their parents? Or both?

Since I have always assumed that fairy tales are as necessary to both children and adults as dictionaries, I was much surprised to receive a letter from a former student at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, asking if the fairy tale was dead. She writes as follows:

I have been informed that what I have to offer the world is unpublishable. Blanket statement to cover all fairy tales. Told in this case by an agency (paid in cold hard cash) who advertises that they solicit picture book manuscripts.… If it is true that fairy tales … are unpublishable, then I had better know it now. And give the whole thing up.

That’s the way my mind runs—to gnomes and fairies, witches and warlocks, with side trips to the ancient gods.… It has occurred to me that if the agency is right, I am as extinct as the dodo.… Please, please tell me, is “Little Red Riding Hood” all there is?

The best way to answer her question, I thought (for I did not know her work), was to ask Barbara Lucas, who was then editor of children’s books at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the publisher of two of my favorite fantasies for children, The Little Prince and Mary Poppins. And very soon I realized how different an editor’s point of view is from a writer’s.

“Fantasy represents the worst of several thousand manuscripts we get a year,” she told me. “People put some consideration into writing an adult book, but they’ll sit down and write a children’s book on a rainy afternoon. They think writing for children is easy. It’s the hardest thing in the world.”

Why, I wanted to know, do so many of these manuscripts fail?

“Fantasy is very structured,” she answered. “You introduce your main character. You show who the leading characters are and what they want to achieve. You make your promises and you follow through. You’ve got to have your audience believe that those characters are never going to get what they want. And then, either they get what they want, or they get what turns out to be better.”

That sounded to me like good advice for the writer of realistic fiction. Surely there were problems peculiar to fantasy.

“Most people don’t understand fantasy,” said Barbara. “They think it is an exercise for stream-of-consciousness. They confuse two things: fantasy and to fanatisize. Fantasy has to be rooted in logical, familiar things. First you have to get your reader comfortable. Along the journey you’ve got to have things connect, to make the journey meaningful. Otherwise there’s no point of reference.”

“Do you think more adults than children read fantasy?” I asked, remembering how many of my favorite writers for adults have tried their hand at fairy tales.

“Adults love fantasy,” answered Barbara. “They help to keep it alive. Most children are TV bred. Watership Down was submitted as a children’s book and sent upstairs. If we want to get both markets for a book, we market it as an adult book and let it filter down. If we market it as a children’s book, adults won’t buy it.”

And what advice did she have for the student from Bread Loaf?

“She should study the market,” replied Barbara.

Market? I had a lunatic image of bookshelves lined with carrots and cauliflowers. I thought of rainbows fading into ticker tape, of stocks rising and falling on the invisible backs of gnomes. When I write a book, I never think of the market for it. But though our views differed, Barbara and I agreed on one thing: the more fairy tales you’ve read, the more skill you bring to writing your own. The best writers of fairy tales have always had a deep knowledge of the stories handed down by our ancestors, like a thread binding us to some innocent part of ourselves that might otherwise be lost.

I reread the letter. “Is ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ all there is?” How could I answer this writer? Should I tell her to read Perrault’s Tales of My Mother Goose, in which “Little Red Riding Hood” was first published? Would it not be better to ask, Why has Little Red Riding Hood endured so long? What in that simple story moved Charles Dickens to confess that Little Red Riding Hood “was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.”⁷

Perrault’s stories are witty and elegant versions of traditional fairy tales. Over and over we recognize the traditional motifs: the quest, the animals who offer advice, the witch who hurts the hero, the wise woman who helps him. When my students use these motifs, they often apologize for their stories. A story can’t be good, they fear, if it is not original. They forget that writing, like many other things, can be both original, and traditional. When I go to a wedding, I do not judge the occasion a paltry affair because the bride walked down the aisle on her father’s arm in the last wedding I attended, and therefore the wedding is not original.

If the peasant grandmother who first told Little Red Riding Hood—and Little Red Riding Hood herself has many different names—could listen to a few of the stories written by the writers who claim they are writing fairy tales, how astonished she would be! First of all, she would see no connection between her art and those fanciful failures of which Andrew Lang writes, “they always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and appleblossoms.… These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach and succeed. At the end, the little boy or girl wakes up and finds that he has been dreaming.”⁸ Who knows better than our peasant grandmother that fairy tales are moral but not moralistic, instructive but not didactic? At some of our best-known fairy tales she would shake her head in bewilderment and murmur, “How things have changed! In my time, the fairies never came to christenings. Why, you could frighten them off with the Lord’s prayer! Tell, me, do people still turn into beasts and beasts into people? Are there still ghosts and spirits and wishing caps? And do you still tell stories of kings and queens and princesses? And have you made these things your own, as I made them mine when I told my stories?”

To make them your own; that is the difference between the archetype and the stereotype in fairy tales. The stereotype starts and ends in abstraction. Of the stereotype we say, “I’ve seen that before” and we tire of it. But of the archetype we say, “Where have I seen you before? Was it in a dream we met?” The archetype begins in experience. Before it becomes impersonal, it is intensely personal. And this transformation, from the personal to the impersonal, from the particular grandmother to the archetypal wise woman, involves as much waiting as willing.

It is a long journey from what we know because we’ve lived it to what we know because we’ve invented it. I made that journey backward, from story to source, when I asked my husband to read the manuscript of a fantasy novel for children, Uncle Terrible.* He read in silence until he met a character whom all the animals in the world called Mother. At her waist she wears the cord of life and the cord of death, and every morning she sings the song of strong knots to keep them together. She runs an inn for animals under a cemetery. Seen in the right light—or the right dark—the shadows cast by the gravestones are her windows:

The windows, which kept the odd shape of the stones themselves, looked right down into Mother’s house. The shadow of an angel gave Anatole a clear view of the living room.… The lamp on the great round table was carved from a rutabaga, and the oil in the lamp threw such an amber light on the floor that the rushes scattered there seemed washed in honey.

And here is Mother herself:

A giant of a woman was striding toward them. The face that smiled out of her sunbonnet was as lumpy and plain as a potato. She wore corn shucks gathered into a gown, over which shimmered an apron of onion skins. Through her bonnet poked antlers that branched out like a tree, and at the end of every branch danced a flame, which lit the ground before her. She was carrying a laundry basket, and every now and then she threw out a handful of snowdrops which vanished as soon as they touched the ground. A thin glaze of frost sparkled in their place.

My husband put down the manuscript.

“Where,” he said, “did you find her?”

I did not know. Had I found her in fairy tales? I have long loved the character of the wise woman in the old stories. Yet my wise woman was not borrowed from these. She took her shape from my work and my wishes. I have gathered corn shucks into dolls, toted laundry baskets, scattered snowdrops, and peeled onions and longed for a gown such as onions wear, of some shiny pale gold silk, thinly striped with green. But had I found her or had she found me?

More miraculous than any fairy tale is the significance of the detail that can start a story going. Henry James recalls a dinner party in which the lady beside him made “one of those allusions, that I have always found myself recognizing on the spot as ‘germs.’ The germ, wherever gathered, has ever been for me the germ of a ‘story,’ and most of the stories straining to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as minute and wind-blown as that casual hint … dropped unwillingly by my neighbor.”⁹

The germ from which my wise woman grew was the lamp, carved long ago from a rutabaga by my immigrant ancestors to light their first home in the new world. I never saw the lamp. But I heard about it from a great-uncle, who, after retiring from his job as a salesman in St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote a family history, which he published at his own expense. Uncle Oscar did not care for fairy tales. Every year I gave him the same book for Christmas: the updated edition of the World Almanac. To converse with my uncle was to learn the number of deaths caused by tidal waves since 1807 or who won the championship in softball for the slow pitch for any given year. He called his book The Tales of Two Eyes and Ears for Seventy Years, and in his preface he announced that he would tell the truth and nothing but the truth. “This book relates to incidents that I have seen, or that were told to me in my boyhood days,” he wrote. “The names of characters, dates, and locations are true to the best of my knowledge.”

The rutabaga lamp lit a small corner of the chapter called “Honeymoon trip from Sweden to America by Mr. John Martinson, born in Fagelsjo, Helsingland 1842 and Miss Anna Halverson, bom in Sveg, Jamtland 1842.” It unfolds the story of how a young man and his bride, both twenty-five years old, sail from Sweden to New York; of how Mr. and Mrs. Martinson lose their name because too many Swedes named Martinson have already arrived; of how they receive new names and how they leave the immigration sheds as Mr. and Mrs. John Hedlund; of how they make their way by train and by riverboat to St. Cloud, Minnesota, which, says my uncle, “was the end of the line.”

What happened to them there reminds me of the fairy tales in which the youngest son sets off down the road to make his fortune, and it is always the right road, for he meets those who offer to help him, and if he follows it far enough he meets the princess he must rescue and the troll he must rescue her from. The road is more than a road; it is his destiny. In my uncle’s history, however, destiny is not mentioned. He writes:

Mrs. Hedlund’s relatives were supposed to meet them there, but none were to be found. A Norwegian who was ready to start home with an empty wagon, offered them a ride as far as he was going, which was a little village by the name of Cold Springs. There they rented a little house by the roadside where they could watch for their relatives. They remained there more than a week, before the expected relatives arrived.…

The mansion into which they were cordially invited by their relatives was an underground cellar, the very best and only habitation in their possession. While in St. Paul, they had secured some good warm clothing and shoes, so with plenty of ammunition they were able to secure deer and other game … For lighting purposes they hollowed a large rutabaga for a lamp, filled it with skunk oil, with a strip of rag for a wick. That winter they cut logs and built a small log house.

Like all fairy tales, the story has a happy ending. Mr. Hedlund opened a gun shop and earned enough money to build a comfortable home and raise a large family. My great-uncle adds, “I was lucky enough to marry one of his fine daughters.”

This was my first introduction to Mrs. Hedlund. It would not be accurate to say I forgot her, yet I ceased to think of her after I put down my uncle’s book. And so she fell asleep in the dark cellars of my mind, taking her rutabaga lamp with her. And over the years, the storeroom that hid her filled up with myths and fairy tales, goddesses and witches and wise women. And Mrs. Hedlund, living among them, took on their light and their look, as partners in a long and happy marriage are said to resemble one another. When she turned up many years later in the fairy tale I asked my husband to read, her root cellar had become an enchanted place and she herself was as ancient as the old woman so often celebrated in nursery rhymes:

There was an old woman lived under the hill,

And if she’s not dead, she lives there still.

Only the rutabaga lamp remained unchanged, casting its light both on the cellar in my uncle’s history and the dwelling that my dreaming had made of it. Thank goodness that did not change. How could I show the imaginary house if not by the natural light of the rutabaga lamp? How can we see an imaginary world except by the light of this one?

If you could hold the rutabaga lamp to one of the oldest stories in the world, that of the human child stolen by the fairies, you would find as many tales in that plot as there are people to tell them. Among modern versions I’ve always admired Mary Lavin’s “A Likely Story.” To her, the lamp shows, first of all, the everyday world of country Ireland. It shows her the pump in the village, the gloss of a blackbird’s wing, the bread cooling on the window sill in the morning, the clatter of rain on a tin roof. The fairies who lure the boy Packy from his home are as natural as the birds, the bread, and the rain. And why should they be otherwise? As Tolkien points out, “it is man who is … supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom. The road to fairyland is not the road to heaven; not even to Hell …”¹⁰

Perhaps the failure to see fairyland is a human failure, for which a good writer can atone by describing it with loving attention to detail. Of the little man in green who kidnaps the boy Packy, Lavin says that “his shoes … were so fine his muscles rippled under the leather like the muscles of a finely bred horse rippled under his skin.” While showing us the beauty of the other world, she shows us the beauty of this one. For Packy, everything rare is weighed against the commonplace and found wanting. In the fairy’s chambers under the earth, he sees gold basins and ewers and pails. The fairy tells him the advantages of gold utensils. “Nothing ever gets cracked down here; nothing ever gets broken.” Packy is unimpressed:

Not that he thought it was such a good idea to have cups made of gold. When you’d pour your tea into them, wouldn’t it get so hot it would scald the lip off you?

One day in the summer that was gone past, he and the Tubridys went fishing on the Boyne up beyond Rathnally, and they took a few grains of tea with them in case they got dry. They forgot to bring cups though, and they had to empty out their tin-cans of worms and use them for cups. But the metal rim of the can got red hot the minute the tea went into it, and they couldn’t drink a drop. Gold would be just the same?

But in fact, there were no cups at all it appeared.

“One no longer has any need for food, Packy,” said the little man, “once one has learned the secret of eternal youth!”

“You’re joking, sir!” said Packy, doubtful. At that very minute he had a powerful longing for a cut of bread and a swig of milk.¹¹

Most of the traditional changeling stories show the fairy world through human eyes. But what if we look at the human world through the eyes of the fairies? Sylvia Town-send Warner’s novel Kingdoms of Elfin opens at the moment of kidnapping. No praise of rustic pleasures here; her fairies are more at home in the court than in the country. Though fairies are invisible to mortals, she knows that they must not be invisible to readers. Rain and oak, birch and fir, heath and hill, wind and fire—of such familiar stuff are their lives made. Enchantment begins in the commonplace:

When the baby was lifted from the cradle, he began to whimper. When he felt the rain on his face, he began to bellow. “Nothing wrong with his lungs,” said the footman to the nurse. They spread their wings, they rose in the air. They carried the baby over a birchwood, over an oakwood, over a firwood. Beyond the firwood was a heath, on the heath was a grassy green hill. “Elfhame at last,” said the nurse. They folded their wings and alighted. A door opened in the hillside and they carried the baby in. It stared at the candles and the silver tapestries, left off bellowing, and sneezed.

“It’s not taken a chill, I hope,” said the footman.

“No, no,” said the nurse. “But Elfhame strikes cold at first.” She took off the swaddling clothes, wrapped the baby in gossamer, shook pollen powder over it to abate the human smell, and carried it to Queen Tiphaine, who sat in her bower. The Queen examined the baby carefully, and said he was just what she wanted: a fine baby with a red face and large ears.

“Such a pity they grow up,” she said. She was in her seven hundred and twentieth year, so naturally she had exhausted a good many human babies.¹²

Once you begin to see human lives from the point of view of nonhumans, you are on your way to writing The Lord of the Rings and doing away with the human altogether. Who knows better than Tolkien the pitfalls here? “Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun,” he points out. But “to make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible … will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.”¹³

Fairies, princesses, wizards. The writer who wants to make them his own takes none of the traditional characters and motifs for granted. Take, for example, the good fairy godmothers who bring so much happiness to the kind and virtuous. Are they happy themselves? Thackeray’s sketch of the Fairy Blackstick in The Rose and the Ring holds the conventional duties of good fairies up to the light of common sense, with amusing results:

Between the kingdoms of Paffagonia and Crim Tartary, there lived a mysterious personage, who was known in those countries as the Fairy Blackstick, from the ebony wand or crutch which she carried; on which she rode to the moon sometimes, or upon other excursions of business or pleasure, and with which she performed her wonders.

When she was young, and had been first taught the art of conjuring by the necromancer, her father, she was always practising her skill, whizzing about from one kingdom to another upon her black stick, and conferring her fairy favours upon this Prince or that. She had scores of royal godchildren; turned numberless wicked people into beasts, birds, millstones, clocks, pumps, bootjacks, or other absurd shapes; and in a word was one of the most active and officious of the whole College of fairies.

But after two or three thousand years of this sport, I suppose Blackstick grew tired of it. Or perhaps she thought, “What good am I doing by sending this Princess to sleep for a hundred years? by fixing a black pudding on to that booby’s nose? by causing diamonds and pearls to drop from one little girl’s mouth, and vipers and toads from another’s? I begin to think I do as much harm as good by my performances. I might as well shut my incantations up, and allow things to take their natural course.” … So she locked up her books in her cupboard, declined further magical performances, and scarcely used her wand at all except as a cane to walk about with.¹⁴

And the boons that fairies bestow on those they love; are they really so desirable? Jay Williams shows the logical consequences of a reward often given to good girls: every time you speak, gold will fall from your lips:

The floor was covered with gold pieces which had piled up against the door like a drift of yellow snow. Four bright gold pieces fell from her mouth and clinked to the floor.

The girl clapped her hand to her forehead and said, “Drat!”

Another gold piece dropped from her lips. She took down a large pad that hung on the wall and began writing busily on it. Marco and Sylvia came and looked curiously over her shoulders.

“I am Roseanne. Welcome,” the girl wrote. “As you see, I have something of a problem. Some time ago, I saved the life of the good fairy Melynda. As a reward, she said to me, ‘My child, since you are poor but kind, a gold piece shall fall from your mouth with every word you speak.’ … I’m sorry about the floor. I had some friends in for a party last night, and I haven’t had a chance to sweep up yet.”¹⁵

How much can you tinker with the traditional fairy tale before it changes into something else? It’s easy to tell why a fairy tale has gone wrong, harder to tell why it has gone right. It’s easy to see why George Cruikshank failed to improve on Grimm’s fairy tales when he rewrote them twenty years after he illustrated the first English edition. Cruikshank, now a confirmed teetotaler, assures his readers that at Cinderella’s wedding “the King gave orders that all the wine, beer, and spirits in the place shall be collected together, and piled upon the top of a rocky mound in the vicinity of the palace, and made a great bonfire of on the night of the wedding …¹⁶

Dickens, who admired Cruikshank the illustrator did not admire Cruikshank the editor. “In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected,” he observes. “… Whoever alters them to suit his own opinions … appropriates to himself what does not belong to him.”¹⁷ What would Dickens think of Anne Sexton’s retelling of Cinderella in Transformations, her collection of Grimm’s tales retold as poems? For those unacquainted with this book, I give two stanzas from “Cinderella”:

Once

the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed

and she said to her daughter Cinderella:

Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile

down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.

The man took another wife who had

two daughters, pretty enough

but with hearts like blackjacks.

Cinderella was their maid.

She slept on the sooty hearth each night

and walked around looking like Al Jolson.

Her father brought presents home from town,

jewels and gowns for the other women

but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.

She planted the twig on her mother’s grave

and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.

Whenever she wished for anything the dove

would drop it like an egg upon the ground.

The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the ball, as you all know.

It was a marriage market.

The prince was looking for a wife.

All but Cinderella were preparing

and gussying up for the big event.

Cinderella begged to go too.

Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils

into the cinders and said: Pick them

up in an hour and you shall go.

The white dove brought all his friends;

all the warm wings of the fatherland came.

and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.

No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,

you have no clothes and cannot dance.

That’s the way with stepmothers.¹⁸

Has Sexton meddled with what does not belong to her? No. She grinds no axes, preaches no sermons. Let no one be deceived by her comic tone; the poems start from a deep understanding of fairy tales and a respect for the dark pools of consciousness from which they rise. Between the peasant grandmother and the poet who calls herself Dame Sexton lie Jung, Freud, and the magic of modern science.

When I took my son to see a Walt Disney movie called The Cat from Outer Space, I was struck by how much science fiction has borrowed from the fairy tale. A cat from a far planet arrives in a spaceship that looks very much like a crystal ball. The cat understands our language, and by means of thought transference, it makes its wishes known without speaking. A jeweled collar gives it the power to fly. Like the clever animals in the fairy tales, this space-age descendant of Puss-in-Boots helps the hero and confounds the villain. To the hero it gives the words he needs to run the spacecraft. Though they are a jargon of technology and mathematical formulae, they sound magic to children, who do not understand them. The power of science is ours when we understand its laws. But the power of abracadabra—what has that to do with laws and logic? To be told that abracadabra is a corruption from a Hebrew phrase that means “I bless the dead”—what power does that give you but the power of faith that the dead are alive and no mathematical formula on earth can tell us how?

Science fiction often carries the same spiritual truths that fairy tales have always carried. But science belongs to a universe of cause and effect, of laws that we could understand if only we were clever enough. Magic, on the other hand, is man’s way of confronting a mystery that is beyond human understanding. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and wither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John, 3:8). When science masquerades as magic, it may give us spiritual lies such as this one, which recently caught my eye in a toy shop. On a box that claimed to hold Snow White’s talking mirror was written the following:

Snow White’s

Talking Mirror

ages 3½ to 10

It’s a Real Mirror

But just tilt it and

MAGICALLY

Snow White’s Face

Appears

and she really

TALKS TO YOU

Snow White says

6 different phrases.

Advertised on TV.

Requires 1 C cell and 3 D cell.

Batteries not included.

If magic is only in the eye of the beholder, then to God, magic and science are indistinguishable. But to a child who touches a switch on one wall and causes a light to shine in the next room, surely electricity is magic. Out of such a maze of innocence the Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola, who has written so vividly about his sojourns among ghosts, has invented a television-handed ghostess. As her name indicates, her hand is a television set that shows the narrator events in far places. The magic mirror in traditional fairy tales did no less. Of the narrator’s encounter with this ghostess, Tutuola writes:

I was hearing on this television when my mother was discussing about me with one of her friends.… So as I was enjoying these discussions the television-handed ghostess took away the hand from my face and I saw nothing again except the hand.… I told her again to let me look at them.… Immediately she showed it to me my people appeared again …¹⁹

When Tutuola wrote My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he had not yet seen television. Those who do not believe in the miracles of magic will speak of the miracles of science, forgetting that the rising of the sun is a miracle until you learn to take it for granted. “Try to be one of the people,” says Henry James, “on whom nothing is lost!”²⁰

I must confess that when choosing marvels, I prefer ghosts to fairies, terror to beauty. I believe the chipmunk in Randall Jarrell’s The Bat Poet speaks for lovers of fantasy as well as poetry when he says, “It makes me shiver. Why do I like it if it makes me shiver?” One of my favorite ghost stories, A Christmas Carol, has always seemed to me so flawlessly written that I was much surprised to learn it had its beginnings in a much less successful ghost story. To read “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” published as Chapter 24 in The Pickwick Papers, and then to read what Dickens made of the same material in A Christmas Carol is to understand how a great writer uses traditional material to shape his own vision.

Before Ebenezer Scrooge came Gabriel Grub, the sexton who keeps Christmas so badly that he is willing to dig a grave on Christmas Eve. “Who makes graves at a time when all the other men are merry?” calls the chief goblin. “We know the man with the sulky face and grim scowl, that came down the street to-night, throwing his evil looks at the children …”²¹ The goblins carry him to hell and show him edifying scenes from everyday life, and he hears his own life judged: “men like himself, who snarled at the mirth of cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth …”²² Gabriel Grub repents, leaves his village, and returns many years later as “a ragged, contented, rheumatic old man.”

Throughout the story Grub has neither a personal past nor idiosyncrasies by which we can remember him. “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” is the story of the Cheerless Man rather than a particular person, and for that reason Dickens can draw what moral he pleases; it does not arise from the changed life of Grub. “… as Gabriel Grub was afflicted with rheumatism to the end of his days, this story has at least one moral, if it teaches no better one—and that is, that if a man turns sulky and drinks by himself at Christmas time, he may make up his mind to be not a bit the better for it …²³

Seven years later Dickens reshapes the cheerless man’s repentance into the selfish man’s journey to find the love of his fellow man. Grub’s graveyard has given way to Scrooge’s counting-house, and the sights, smells, and sounds have a local habitation and a name: London.

Once upon a time—of all good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his countinghouse. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement-stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already: it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of neighboring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every clink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.²⁴

The goblins of traditional folklore have blossomed into Marley’s ghost and the three spirits appropriate to Scrooge’s past, present, and future. Marley’s chain clanks with “cash boxes, keys, padlocks, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” The ghost of Christmas past is both an old man, like Scrooge, and a child, which Scrooge must become if he is to be saved from his own selfishness and skepticism:

It was a strange figure—like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it.… But the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.²⁵

The moral and the happy ending are earned, both by Scrooge and by the writer. A happy ending is the heart of the fairy tale, and if you tinker with the form, this must not be tinkered with. Fairy tales are a wish unrolled into a story, a wish that when we disappear under the great extinguisher of death, we may not go out forever. More impossible wishes than this have come true in the stories told by our peasant grandmother, in whose stories strange things are common: wands, wishing caps, eight-headed trolls.

But the stories we write today are literature, not folk tales. And as writers, we take common things and make them strange, just as the rutabaga lamp did in Anna Hed-lund’s cellar. Do you see the shadows it throws on the wall? The shadow of Anna’s pitcher rises like a bird. The shadow of her husband’s gun sleeps like a snake. Anna Hedlund lifts her hand and bends her fingers and makes the shadow of a strange animal. Would she mind what I made of her in my story, an earth goddess in a subterranean hotel? I think not. Who among us does not want to be saved? What storyteller will not try to see in an aging grandmother the eternal woman? And to evoke in a weary reader the ageless child?

*Published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1982.