Angel in the Parlor (28 page)

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?

11

The Game and the Garden: The Lively Art of Nonsense

I once had an aunt whom everyone admired as a fountain of good sense, except in matters of travel. She bought tickets to well-known places—Paris, Bermuda, Berlin—but she seemed never to arrive in them, for on her postcards she always wrote of places that could never be found on any map. Portapooka. Pannyfanny Islands. And what she did in these places was a perfect mystery:

Arrived in Portapooka last night and had a delicious feel of mesh bears. Have taught a new crock to take me up in the morning.

My mother explained to me that my aunt's secret life in these places was the result of her bad handwriting, and when we'd translated this nonsense we would find out what she'd really been up to.

Arrived in Puerto Rico last night and had a delicious meal of fresh pears. Have bought a new clock to wake me up in the morning.

I found her nonsense much more entertaining than her sense. How delightful to feel a mesh bear and to travel by crock every morning! Even after the misunderstanding was explained to me, her encounters with crocks and bears seemed quite as real as her purchase of clocks and pears, perhaps because I had already picked up the habit of hiding common sense with nonsense. If, for example, our family was entertaining guests and either my sister or I saw anything resembling a cockroach, we had been instructed to say, “There is a Turkish mosquito in the pantry.” Because of the braces on her teeth, my sister found it hard to close her mouth and sometimes during conversation would sit with it hanging open. This gave her a vacant air that did not at all reflect the liveliness of her mind. Whoever noticed this first was to say, “Good morning, Mrs. Smith,” at which signal it would snap shut like a steel trap. If I chattered too much in the presence of guests, anyone in on our game would say, “Go fetch the long matches,” and I instantly fell silent—and fetched nothing.

Sometimes a single remark became shorthand for a complicated event that we all remembered. Who could forget the day my father nearly peeled the paint off an adjacent car while trying to park his own? Who could forget my aunt calling out from the back seat, “You haven't got space for a sheet of toilet paper!” Custom shortened her advice to a single phrase, and what made sense to us must have confounded the sideswiping taxi driver to whom my aunt shouted, over the roar of traffic in downtown Detroit, “Toilet paper! For God's sake, toilet paper!” Though she may never have read
Through the Looking Glass,
my aunt was a faithful disciple of Humpty Dumpty, who tells Alice, “When
I
use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
¹

I especially treasured one postcard from my aunt that no one could ever reduce to sense. The picture showed a formal garden: an elegant maze of shaped hedges, arbors, beds of herbs and flowers. On the reverse side she had scrawled her message:

You'd love this place. The roaring shillilies san sea whet all and the pappasnippigoo are zooming.

It's right and fitting that a sensible garden and a nonsensical message should be two sides of a single card. Nonsense is both logical and absurd, like the games we play as children. Some years ago I was out walking and found myself treading on a game of hopscotch, chalked out on twelve squares. The last square, which we called “Home” when I played the game, was marked “Heaven” in this one. I am told by those who play this version of hopscotch that it's harder to get into heaven than to go home. You must throw your stone into heaven, jump to the eleventh square, pick up the stone, jump to the spot where it landed, and recite at top speed the alphabet forward and backward, your name, address, and telephone number, your age, and the name of your boyfriend or girlfriend. If I were to tell a clergyman that I got into heaven by throwing a stone into it, he would say, “Nonsense!” In life, yes, but in the game, no. In the game it makes perfect sense. Nonsense too is a game, and a great part of learning to write it is learning to play it.

When I was little and the prospect of reaching heaven seemed closer than it does now, I heard the story of the Minotaur, half man, half bull, whom King Minos kept in a maze and to whom every year the most beautiful young Athenians were sacrificed. I didn't know that when Theseus killed the Minotaur, the Athenians celebrated by drawing the maze on the ground and dancing through it. I didn't know that hopscotch may have come down to us from that custom.
²
Where else but in children's games and nursery rhymes do the ancient and the modern so amiably link hands?

The grandmother of nonsense is Mother Goose, and many a modern poet writing for adults has acknowledged his debt to her. Auden praises her songs for being almost infallible as memorable speech. Roethke, defending the difficult poems in his sequence, “The Lost Son,” claims for their literary ancestors German and English folk literature, “particularly Mother Goose.”
³
But none praises her so well, I think, as Muriel Rukeyser:

Mother Goose does not come into our lives when we are young children just having learned to speak. She is there before, before language. We come to language through her, and to mystery and laughter and action. To poetry. She is only one of many ways, of course, and she has her equivalent in all cultures.… It is this figure, Mother Goose, who bends over the early days of many of us … with her babble … It is syncopated, to both white children and black children, and must be read that way.… Who, having heard “Thislittlepigwenttomarket,” can say as an adult that he can't get the rhythms of contemporary poets or Gerard Manley Hopkins?
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