Reflections: On the Magic of Writing Read online

  But it would be daft to see Minas Tirith as Jerusalem, bravely fronting evil. It owes far, far more to the doomed city of Atlantis. With it, Tolkien is working another sleight-of-narrative. Atlantis was very old, wonderfully civilized, and built in a series of terracelike rings. And it was inundated before the dawn of history. By deliberately using and knowing that he was using Atlantis as a model, Tolkien again ensures that the reader gets the message without needing to know: Minas Tirith is doomed. And, as the muster of Mordor proceeds, you cannot see how, even if Rohan comes, that could make much difference.

  Rohan is preparing to come. So is Aragorn. In an action heralded in the Barrows, in Moria, and again in Shelob’s Lair, Aragorn sets out with his Grey Company to take the Paths of the Dead. Aragorn is of course, as the descendant of the Kings of the North, preeminently qualified to summon those faithless dead in there and make them keep their word at last. But this episode, terrifying as it is, repeats such an often-adumbrated scene that it almost carries the weight of an allegory: you can take the failures of the past, much as Tolkien has by now taken most of Western literary heritage, and force them to do at least some good toward the future. Tolkien would deny this. He says irritably in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, “I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’” (I, 7), and maybe he is right. And watch out. Strewn all around this section are striking examples of the fey or doomed utterance. Aragorn himself says, “It will be long, I fear, ere Theoden sits at ease again in Meduseld” (III, 46). Halbarad says in Dimholt, “This is an evil door, and my death lies beyond it” (III, 59). And in the midst of the battle, the Black Captain himself says, “No living man may hinder me!” (III, 116). This sort of thing has also been heralded, when Aragorn warns Gandalf against entering Moria. Because of that, we are prone to believe these sayings. Then notice that not one of them comes true in the way it suggests. Theoden is killed and never sits in Meduseld. Halbarad is not killed in the Paths of the Dead, but a long way out on the other side. And the Black Captain is hindered by a Hobbit and killed by a girl. Since the bringing about of the future is what this movement is concerned with, we should be troubled.

  For, you see, the battle which ought to be final, in which the forces of good throw everything they have at Mordor, is no such thing. It is a magnificent battle, though. One of Tolkien’s gifts is being able to rise to the largest occasion. I wait with bated breath every time for Rohan to come, or not come, and sing as they slay. But when it is over, the enemy is still working on Denethor and Mordor is not destroyed. So, in a pattern which is now familiar, there is a coda to this huge movement. By now these codas are definitely forming an “afterward” and looking to the future. In this one, Faramir and Éowyn find healing and love, and the other protagonists debate, in a way that echoes the Council of Elrond, and like that Council, resolve on an act of aggression: they will attack Mordor as a diversion for Frodo. So are we to suppose that this whole movement has been a huge diversion?

  Only then does Tolkien take up the story of Frodo and Sam. This is what might be called the slow movement, drear and negative and full of tribulation. Although it is odd that the positive side of the action is compounded of killing and politics, and the negative of love, endurance, and courage, this is how it seems to be. Tolkien insists that the first is valueless without the second. Odd, as I said, particularly as the slight Christian tinge given to Minas Tirith definitely reflects on Frodo, who is now displaying what one thinks of as the humbler Christian virtues; and because the careful plotting of this movement, to make it in most ways the antithesis of the preceding one, keeps bringing, to my mind at least, Clough’s poem “Say not the struggle nought availeth.” The force of that poem is that, even if you are not succeeding in your own locality, someone somewhere else is.

  Anyway, as one side enters glorious Minas Tirith, Frodo and Sam creep into Mordor, its antithesis; and with them Gollum, a sort of anti-Hobbit. This ignoble trio are the only ones likely to succeed. And they fail. Make no mistake, despite their courage, and their wholly admirable affection for one another, and Frodo’s near transfiguration, their action is indeed negative. At the last minute, Frodo refuses to throw the Ring into the Cracks of Doom and puts it on instead. Their almost accidental success is due to a negative action both Hobbits performed in the past. Frodo, not lovingly, spared Gollum’s life. Sam, not understanding Gollum’s loneliness in the marshes, threatened him and turned his incipient friendship to hatred. So Gollum bites off Frodo’s finger and falls with it and the Ring into the Cracks of Doom.

  Now what are we to make of this? I have of course put it far more baldly than Tolkien does, but it is there for everyone to read. I think the explanation is suggested in the very long coda to the entire story which takes up nearly half the last volume. Most writers would have been content to stop with the destruction of Mordor, or at least after the shorter coda of rejoicing and the celebrating of Nine-Fingered Frodo that follows the fall of Mordor. But Tolkien, characteristically, has a whole further movement, which now definitely is “and afterward . . .”

  Before we try to make sense of it, let me draw your attention to another aspect of Tolkien’s narrative skill: his constant care to have each stage of his story viewed or experienced by one or other of his central characters. He had to split them apart to do it, but it is a great strength of the narrative, and one not often shared by his imitators. Each major event has a firm viewpoint and solid substance. Things are visualized, and because Hobbits are present, eating and drinking gets done. The overall effect is to show that huge events are composed of small ones, and as was signaled at the beginning, that ordinary people can get forced to make history—forced by history itself. By this stage of the narrative, however, the idea is being proposed in a different form: even the smallest and most ignoble act can have untold effect. And thank goodness for Gollum.

  Well, yes. But remember that Gollum only did for Frodo what the Dead did for Aragorn. And indeed much of this coda of codas is concerned with shrinking the scale again, back to the Shire, where the now battle-hardened Hobbits make their bit of personal history by dislodging Saruman, and the Hobbits of the Shire settle down with a happy sigh to draw quietly aside from the path of history. As Tolkien has been unobtrusively pointing out all along, if it were not for such folk, there would be nothing worth doing heroic things for. But we are being lulled again. We must not forget the Sea, nor the very clear statements that an age of the world is passing. Tolkien was not cheating about that—it proves to have passed—but only suggesting that the next age could be an age of Sauron. And remember Sauron was never really precisely there, unlike all the other characters. Before we are prepared for it, the woodwind nostalgia theme is swelling again, to drown everything else. Sam is saddened to find his actions not remembered. A mallorn tree grows in the Shire. Frodo is ill and finishes writing his history. And at length it becomes evident that the destruction of the Age entails the passing of Elf rings too, along with Galadriel, and Gandalf, whose nature has been concealed in his name all along. And Frodo too. Frodo has become Elvish, quite literally. By his not-doing, however heroic, he has widowed himself from history, just like the Elves, and must now go off upon the Sea like the rest.

  Tolkien works his final sleight-of-narrative here. He was perfectly aware of the Germanic custom of ship burial, in which a dead king was floated out to sea in a ship. Crossing the Sea is represented as a matter full of sadness, and Cirdan the shipwright is given many attributes of a priest, but the passing of Frodo is never represented as other than a permanent voyage. So the ending is heartrendingly equivocal. You can see it as Frodo moving into eternity, or into history—or not. You can see it as a justification—or not—of the negative side. In fact, we are experiencing the proper mode of Romance, which was signaled right from the start. The values of the people who wrote Romances never seem quite the same as our own. This kind of equivocal ending where winning and failing amount to the same, Arthur passes to sleep i
n a hill, and a gift exacts its price, is exactly what should have been expected. You Were Warned. For good measure, you knew that life never comes round to a happy ending and stops there. There is always afterward. But such was the skill with which this narrative was shaped that you could not see the pattern, even when it was being constantly put before you.

  Yes, there really was nothing about narrative that Tolkien didn’t know.

  Two Kinds of Writing?

  The American fantasy author Emma Bull produced a literary magazine/fanzine in the 1990s titled The Medusa: The Journal of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship. This article was published in the first issue in 1990. In the journal, Diana was described as “the author of quantities of excellent books, all of which should be read by discriminating adults, on trains, with shameless enthusiasm and the occasional audible giggle.”

  With very minor changes, the article was also published in the British science fiction magazine Nexus, issue one, April 1991.

  I write what is often called speculative fiction. Usually I write it for children, but recently I wrote a novel specifically for adults.1 This was something I had long wanted to do—really ever since I discovered that quite as many adults read my books as children do; and several grown men confessed to me that, although they were quite shameless when it came to hunting through the juvenile sections of libraries and bookshops, they still felt incredibly sheepish on a train reading something that was labeled Teen Fiction. Why? I wondered. The assumption underlying their sheepishness seemed to be that teenage fiction counts as just close enough to adult fiction to be seen as regressive, whereas if they are seen reading a children’s book, that counts as research. In neither case are they assumed to be enjoying the book for its own sake.

  Silly though this seemed, it struck me as hard on them. So when I was asked if I’d like to try my hand at an adult novel, I most joyfully agreed. To my great surprise, writing it and, after that, receiving the comments of an editor revealed all sorts of additional hidden assumptions about the two kinds of writing. Most of these were quite as irrational as the shame of a grown man caught reading teenage fiction. They ran right across the board, too, and affected almost everything, from the length of the book to its style and subject matter. And nearly all of them—this was what disturbed me most—acted to deprive me of the freedom I experience when I write for children. Furthermore, when I thought more deeply about these assumptions, I found they reflected badly on both kinds of writing.

  To take the most obvious first: I found myself thinking as I wrote, “These poor adults are never going to understand this; I must explain it to them twice more and then remind them again later in different terms.” Now this is something I never have to think when I write for younger readers. Children are used to making an effort to understand. They are asked for this effort every hour of every school day, and though they may not make the effort willingly, they at least expect it. In addition, nearly everyone between the ages of nine and fifteen is amazingly good at solving puzzles and following complicated plots—this being the happy result of many hours spent at computer games and watching television. I can rely on this. I can make my plots for them as complex as I please, and yet I know I never have to explain them more than once (or twice at the very most). And here I was, writing for people of fifteen and over, assuming that the people who read, say, Fire and Hemlock last year have now given up using their brains.

  This is back-to-front to what one usually assumes, if one only looks on the surface, but I found it went much deeper than that. At first I thought it was my own assumption, based on personal experiences. Once when I was doing a signing, a mother came in with her nine-year-old son and berated me for making The Homeward Bounders so difficult. So I turned to the boy to ask him what he didn’t understand. “Oh, don’t listen to her,” he said. “I understood everything. It was just her that didn’t.” It was clear to both of us that his poor mother had given up using her brain when she read. Likewise, a schoolmaster who was supposed to be interviewing me for a magazine explained to me that he had tried to read Charmed Life and couldn’t understand a word, which meant, he said, that it was much too difficult for children. So he didn’t interview me. He was making the surface assumption that children need things easy. But since I have never yet come across a child who didn’t understand Charmed Life, it occurred to me that he was making the assumption about himself. But it was a hidden one, and when I came to write for adults, I realized that it was something all adults assumed. I grew tender of their brains and kept explaining.

  This makes an absurd situation. Here we have books for children, which a host of adults dismiss as puerile, overeasy, and are no such thing; and there we have books for adults, who might be supposed to need something more advanced and difficult, which we have to write as if the readers were simpleminded.

  Anyone examining this rather surprising assumption will see that it comes all tangled up in at least one other one: that books for adults are supposed to be longer. Everyone appears to know this. There are jokes about the fifth book in the trilogy—for longer seems to mean “lots” as well—and it would probably startle most adults to discover that an average children’s book picked at random from my shelves (it happened to be To Tame a Sister, by Gillian Avery) runs to 260 pages of very small print, that T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone is only a few pages shorter, and that Arthur Ransome’s series of thirteen books average 350 pages each (and, by the way, The Sword in the Stone is first in a set of four). Nevertheless, in spite of knowing this, when I came to write for adults, I found myself assuming I was writing something long. It was very exasperating. Though the finished book is actually slightly shorter than Fire and Hemlock, it carries in it, despite my best efforts, all the results and implications of this hidden assumption.

  A long book, it follows, is going to be read in bits. Therefore you have to keep reminding your readers of things, even if they do use their brains. Some adult writers trust their readers so little that if they have, say, a hero with blue eyes who comes from Mars, they call him “the man from Mars” every time they mention him, and interlard this with “the blue-eyed man from Mars,” or occasionally “the man with blue eyes.” I swore a great oath not to do this, but it hovered, and I had to fight it. Hovering over me also was the notion “This should be the first in a trilogy” (which is another way of having things read in bits), and I kept worrying that I was not only bringing the book to too definite a conclusion but that I was also obliged to set up a world in great detail in order to be able to use it again. Now, having come to my senses and started to think about these assumptions, I ask myself why. A book should conclude satisfactorily; to leave the ending for the next volume is cynical (and annoying for readers). And as for having my world there in detail, it was when I realized that I was actually being deterred from considering the sequel by the assumption that adults have to be reminded of the plot and action of the First Book between the lines of the Second Book—this despite a host of really good ideas—that I began to feel this was absurd. When I wrote Drowned Ammet I did not feel it necessary to recapitulate Cart and Cwidder. It would have been largely irrelevant anyway. I took the usual course of those who write for children and relied on my readers having the nous to pick up the situation as they went along. So why should I assume adults are different?

  The answer seems to be: because publishers do. It was around this area that I began to run foul of the assumptions of my would-be editor as well as my own. A “long” book naturally entails various kinds of padding. Apart from the kinds I’ve already mentioned, the most obvious form of padding is description—whether of the galactic core seen from the vertiginous skin of a spaceship, or the landscape passed through on the quest. Unfortunately, descriptions are where children stop reading, unless something is being described as an essential part of the story. I agree with them. I have long ago discovered that if I know what a given scene looks like in exact detail I do not need to describe, because it comes over in the writing, in phras
es and not as a set piece. But I knew the assumption was different for adults. I used my usual method, but I added a hundred percent more describing. The would-be editor objected. “Too short” and “I don’t get enough of a sense of wonder” were the phrases used. I bit back a retort to the effect, “But you should get a sense of wonder if you stop to imagine it!” Adults are different. They need me to do all that for them.

  Perhaps the difference is merely that they need me to do different things. I started writing for children at a point where all but a few children’s books were very bad and inane. So inane were they that my husband used to fall asleep, when reading aloud at bedtime to our young, after a maximum of three sentences. The resulting outcry convinced me not only that I could do better myself, but also that it was imperative to put something in the books for the benefit of adults who had to read them aloud. I always do this, which is what makes me so amazed that I think of adults as a different animal when I come to write a book especially for them. But—and it is a big but—I am always aware that the different thing I am doing for the children is writing something that can be read aloud. This has nothing to do with subject matter: it is purely a matter of the cadence of a sentence. If a sentence can’t be spoken with ease, then you rewrite it. When I started the adult novel, I thought, “Oh, good. I don’t need to think of that. What freedom!”

  Oddly enough, this revealed another hidden assumption. Adults expect a more “literary” turn of phrase. This does not necessarily mean more polysyllables—though as a lover of words I seized the chance to use those—but simply the kind of sentence that does not reproduce the way we all speak. It has hanging clauses and inversion and is long—and here was a terrible discovery: more clichés lurk in those literary turns than ever appear in any spoken kind. For the sake of freedom from forms of words that others had overworked, I had to go back to assuming that this, too, was going to be read aloud.