Chiefly, she felt deep loyalty to a whole array of groups, with whom she cultivated a sense of belonging, and for whom she spoke. They were the “we” who shadowed her throughout her life: they changed identity, but, at one period or another, Soviet workers, oppressed women and mothers, sharecroppers in the South of the United States, Scottish crofters and fishermen, Botswana nationalists, all claimed her attention.
The love of enchantment flourished alongside practical activity: farming, campaigning for Scottish development and for the community around her—a lively fictionalized memoir, Lobsters on the Agenda (1952), chronicles her efforts on behalf of local fisheries. She was also actively involved in the independence of Botswana, where she became a tribal elder. Jenni Calder gave her 1997 biography the title The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison, but nine is an understatement. Mitchison unleashed her forces in all these areas, as well as giving voice to her unstoppable imaginative powers, in book after book, article after article. Among nearly a hundred publications, the heroes and heroines she brings to life before us often represent a cause. To an exceptional degree, Mitchison’s torrential energies were directed at making a difference to others, and there is sometimes too much of a sense that she has designs on her text, and on you, her reader.
Naomi Mitchison’s less than complete modernity also stems from her passionate belief in the mythical imagination. She fought to defend it against the high status of rationality and scepticism, advocated by family and friends. She also liked witches and witchcraft, and in her ferocious magnum opus, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), she creates a towering, complex self-portrait in the character of Erif Der (Red Fire backwards), who has the gift of spellbinding, and uses it to powerful but often troubling effect. She felt animosity towards D. H. Lawrence, on account of his view of dominant male sexuality, but she shares some of his love of primitivism and ritual. In spite of her distaste for archaism, archaism colours her passionate imagination, adding a streak of neo-paganism that has been relegated from current versions of modernity. It can make her a bit old-fashioned, as she herself recognised in later years.
Mitchison the writer saw herself as an enchantress, and she liked to attract a large company around her, of children, family, friends, and retainers. In the Fifties, at her home in Carradale on the beautiful Mull of Kintyre in Scotland, a family friend called Charlie Brett painted the doors of a cupboard with a romantic panorama of the house standing in the magnificent landscape. Naomi figures there as Circe, standing on the threshold facing the sea, where Dionysos’ vine-wreathed barque is sailing by and Ulysses is approaching in his boat, while local fisher folk, friends, guests, shepherds, villagers are also transmuted into creatures from myth and fairy tale. Scotland was Attica, or Thrace, or Calypso’s Isle—or Circe’s.
Several of the friends in the circle of her passionate attachments can be glimpsed in the wings of these fairy tales: “Grand-daughter” is written for Stella Benson, a kindred spirit, feminist and writer, who had died of pneumonia in 1933. G.D.H.C., the dedicatee of “Soria Moria Castle,” is Douglas Cole, who was the husband of Margaret Cole; she was a longtime lover of Naomi’s husband, Dick. In “Birmingham and the Allies,” which describes the Labour defeat in 1931 and Dick’s initial failure to win a seat in parliament, his election team are included by name, including his agent, Tom Baxter. The dedication of “Mirk, Mirk Night”—“for strange roads, with Zita”—alludes to Naomi’s travels in Alabama with the adventurous activist Zita Baker, when the two women joined the sharecroppers in their fight for better conditions, outraged the local white inhabitants, and had a great deal of fun. Her obituary in the Guardian rightly commented, “There was a Fabian, Shavian flavour to her energy; she could have belonged to the ‘Fellowship for a new Life.’ ”9
The commitment to fantasy takes a lyric songlike form, as in some of the writings in this collection, and also often tends to comedy (sometimes inadvertently—the “Chinese fairies” in “Birmingham and the Allies” don’t quite bring the comrades to mind as they should). Sometimes this British taste for feyness and nonsense has the effect of undermining the strength of her dreams. Her rational side refused to allow full surrender to the seductions of fairyland—she is clear that she doesn’t believe in the supernatural, but her fictions are driven by its forces and structured by ritual. At her best, Naomi Mitchison is forthright and witty, writes with brio and passion and lucidity, and conveys a huge appetite for life, for people, for new adventures, and for breaking through barriers. At her worst, she damages her serious purposes with whimsy, sometimes with wishful thinking, and sometimes with lurid bacchanalian violence. Her writing is a bit hit-and-miss, but her personality is colossal and wonderful.
Towards the end of her life, Mitchison was disappointed by the neglect of her work: she was no longer Circe or the oracle at Delphi or Cumae, but Cassandra, and was not being heard. The political ideals for which she and her family had battled were being mothballed; she was born under Queen Victoria when Gladstone was Prime Minister and died under Tony Blair and New Labour: the span reveals a changed world, and the dashing of progressive hopes and dreams.
The tales in The Fourth Pig are a “misch-masch,” as Lewis Carroll called his first such compilation, the album of miscellanea he made up to amuse his siblings. Naomi Mitchison customarily wove prose and poetry together in her fiction, and published such anthologies throughout her career, refusing to rank genres of storytelling, or to make a hierarchy of different belief systems or manifestations of the supernatural. Fairy tales were not inferior to myth or myths lesser than religion. Some of the stories she reworks here are very well known (“Hansel and Gretel”; “The Little Mermaiden”); in others she picks up the tune of a ballad with admiring fidelity to the form (“Mairi Maclean and the Fairy Man”); several of the tales involve experimental twists of her own. The reverie of Brünnhilde as she floats down the Rhine takes its place beside a fairy play Kate Crackernuts, dramatising in charms and songs a struggle against the subterranean powers who live in the fairy hills of Scotland and abduct humans for their pleasure.
The story of Kate Crackernuts was collected by Andrew Lang in the Orkneys and included by the folklorist Joseph Jacobs in English Fairy Tales (1890; a misnomer, but an inspired and foundational anthology). Naomi Mitchison adapted it as a lively fairy-tale play in verse, written, as the stage directions show, for family theatricals. The story inverts the fairy tale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” as it features a spellbound prince instead, who is stolen away to dance all night in fairyland. The play version here also carries strong echoes of Christina Rossetti’s famous poem “Goblin Market,” which similarly stages an epic struggle between two loving sisters and the rescue of one by the other. In Mitchison’s version, Ann is transmogrified by Kate’s cruel mother, and given a horrible sheep’s head, while Kate’s rescue mission introduces a heterosexual love plot, not found in Rossetti. The play also recalls the terrible wound and subsequent delirium and illness that Dick Mitchison, Naomi’s young husband, suffered in World War I, and her long vigil at his bedside as he pulled through. It is characteristic of Naomi Mitchison’s spirit that she dramatises a girl’s heroic knight errantry on his behalf. The same memories haunt the poignant closing story in the collection, “Mirk, Mirk Night,” but the heroine here is herself rescued from the fairies by the hero, who “smelt of tobacco and machine oil and his own smell,” suffers from the shivers from shell shock, and yet delivers her from the beguiling, shining, and crying of the trooping fairies in pursuit.
The belief in the danger posed by fairies from the fairy hills was recorded by the Reverend Robert Kirk in the manuscript of his parishioners’ beliefs, drawn up at the end of the seventeenth century. Walter Scott, who reinvigorated the folk and fairy lore of Scotland, was the first to write about Kirk’s astonishing anthology, but it was not published until 1893, when Andrew Lang edited it under the new title The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, and supported its accounts of Second Sight and other para
normal and curious powers.10 Andrew Lang was a family friend of the Mitchisons, and Lang’s appetite for legends, history, and fantasy can also be strongly felt in Naomi’s combination of proud localism and voracious eclecticism. Beginning with The Blue Fairy Book in 1889, he edited stories from all over the world in anthologies for children that were revised and generally standardised and cleaned up by his wife, Leonora Alleyne, and other female scribes. In spite of this bland tendency, Lang’s collections were wildly successful, and have influenced generations of writers, including the preeminent English fabulist Angela Carter (1941–1992), whose fierce, baroque revisionings of classic fairy tales in her collection The Bloody Chamber (1979) took the erotic supernatural to a pitch of intensity that Naomi Mitchison would have relished.
Later in life Naomi declared that she “never much cared for the more romantic series of fairy tales in spite of their lovely pictures.”11 The “lovely pictures,” mostly by H. J. Ford, depict details of jewels and clothing with a heightened, Pre-Raphaelite realism that chimes with Mitchison’s love of vivid description. Like Carter and unlike Lang, Mitchison avoided the Fairy Books’ rather solemn politeness; by contrast she relished transgression and a certain degree of delinquent extremism—especially in her female characters. Her stories are filled with daring steps across the threshold of permitted normative behaviour, and often open into scenes of extraordinary erotic, savage violence, as in the fertility rituals dramatized in The Corn King and the Spring Queen. Here, in Kate Crackernuts, similar reverberations from Frazerian fertility ritual break through:
Fairy:
Shall we take her, shall we keep her?
In the harvest of the foe
Shall we bind, shall we reap her?
In the Green Hill deeper
Shall we stack her, hold her, keep her?
Sick Prince (with hate):
Take her, take her,
Bind her, blind her! (Act II, scene III)
Around this time Mitchison was close to Wyndham Lewis, and he illustrated an exuberant, crazy, phantasmagoric quest story she wrote in 1935, Beyond This Limit, about an artist called Phoebe, who, armed with an alarmingly live crocodile handbag, cures herself of a broken heart and sets out for freedom.12 It begins in a salon de thé in a recognisable present-day Paris, but turns into a fugue through surrealist dreamlands populated by creatures out of the Alice books or one of Leonora Carrington’s comic fables. But Mitchison is aware that not all her heroines succeed in cutting the traces of convention. The “Snow Maiden” in this collection is a promising mathematician, but boys and peer pressure and social expectations drive the brains out of a girl: “So Mary Snow got married to George Higginson, and then—well then, she just seemed to melt away … like an ice-cream sundae on a hot afternoon. … Some girls do seem to go like that after they get married.” Jenni Calder comments that this bleak satire targets Lawrence.
The story which gives the collection its title, The Fourth Pig, foresees the impending horror of World War II with a clarity very few possessed in the Thirties: the jolly nursery classic of three little pigs has taken a dark turn, and their youngest sibling knows the nature of the Wolf: “I can smell the Wolf’s breath above all the sweet smells of Spring and the rich smells of Autumn. I can hear the padding of the Wolf’s feet a very long way off in the forest, coming nearer. And I know there is no way of stopping him. Even if I could help being afraid. But I cannot help it. I am afraid now.”
Her brother Jack openly adopted Marxism in 1937, and Naomi herself was forthright in her support for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, which was raging as she was putting together The Fourth Pig: “There is no question for any decent, kindly man or woman,” she wrote, “let alone a poet or writer who must be more sensitive. We have to be against Franco and Fascism and for the people of Spain, and the future of gentleness and brotherhood which ordinary men and women want all over the world.”13 The “black bulls of hate” in “Pause in the Corrida” evoke the conflict directly, but much of the collection’s feeling of dread and darkness seeps through its pages from the implications of the Fascists gaining ground elsewhere as well.
In 1935 Mitchison had published We Have Been Warned, the only novel she set in her own time and place; it was unflinchingly honest—dismayingly so, to her contemporaries. Although the eventual publishers (Constable; others refused the risk) censored her original version, she was still too frank about sex for the critics: she sets down with her usual vigour the sexual difficulties and disappointments that she knew from experience, gives a picture of free love without apology, and describes her lovers using contraceptives—conveyed with a feminist practicality which eluded Lawrence, for example. But Naomi was not yet used to criticism, as her earlier fictions, from The Conquered (1923) onwards, had all been enthusiastically received—and widely read.
In the story here called “Grand-daughter,” a child looks back, from some unidentified point in the future, at the times of her grandmother’s generation, and wonders at their blindness. The little girl expresses her surprise at the foolishness of her elders in those distant days, the 1930s. She is imagined, by Naomi, leafing through books produced in the decade, books like The Fourth Pig, and marvelling at what their authors missed. This brief, ironic piece of proleptic memoir is a kind of premature obituary, but it does show Naomi Mitchison’s self-awareness. She knows she was, like the grandmother in the story, “very much laughed at for saying that the industrial revolution had destroyed magic.” But the imagined grandchild of the future goes on to defend herself: “All intelligent forward-thinking people, even in the so-called imaginative professions, insisted on the recognition of their rationality and put it constantly into their talk and writing. … Yet, of course, that was not the whole of life.” Continuing in the voice of this child in the future, Mitchison then muses on the rise of “Nazi irrationality,” which “was only successful because it gave some solid fulfilment to a definite need in human beings.” She castigates herself and her generation for allowing the success of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany. Her generation failed because they did not provide an outlet for the emotions which fascism exploited: “The rationalists stupidly feared and hated this need [for magic] … and refused to satisfy it decently and creatively.”
The passage is an exercise in counterfactual history, but in 1936 Mitchison does not know how long and terrible the effects of fascism will be. One of these prolonged effects—part of the long shadow cast on history by those times—concerns the cult of national folklore, myth, and ritual; they were implicated in the ugliest sides of nationalism, state power, and sexual prescription, repression, and ethnic identity politics. Naomi was writing when the act of recovering the neglected fairy lore of local, unlettered folk struck a blow on behalf of the overlooked labourer, and when pagan, Dionysiac frenzy represented a belief in the arts and in freedom of expression against the choking grip of Christianity. In a letter to the poet Laura Riding at this time she expresses her anger that the Nazis have turned myth and fairy tale to their own purposes.14 The fate of the kind of neo-paganism that Mitchison dramatized is a complicated issue, and myth and fairy tale have taken a long time to break the tainting association with right-wing nationalism. The work of fairy-tale scholars like Maria Tatar, Donald Haase, Susan Sellers, Cristina Bacchilega, and the editor of this series, Jack Zipes, has been vital in reconnecting readers with the alternative tradition—with the utopian, or often dystopian, honest fabulism of philosophical fairy tales, from Voltaire to Kafka, Karel Čapek, Kurt Schwitters, Lucy Clifford, and Angela Carter.
In the Thirties, with the Third Reich in power and the Second World War impending, fairies were being claimed for the forests of Germany, and were changing in character; fairy tales and myths, fertility rites and tree worship were annexed for ideas that were utterly repellent, and Mitchison’s witchiness and whimsy no longer matched her high purposes or the needs of the times. She has glimmers of this consequence here, and it is significant that, after The Fourth Pig, Nao
mi returned to her vast historical canvases and moved back into remote times. In 1939, she published one of her most famous novels, The Blood of the Martyrs: How the Slaves in Rome Found Victory in Christ. As the title suggests, early Christian persecution by Nero inspires a huge and fervent manifesto for the heroic and bloody resistance of the have-nots against the haves.
Wyndham Lewis painted Naomi’s portrait while she was working on the novel: she is frowning, her chin gripped by her left hand, her focus distant and intense. It is a powerful picture of a woman writing and thinking; on her right, at her shoulder, recalling her new, ardent interest in Christian sainthood, he has included an image of Jesus on Calvary, with sketches of the other two crosses for the thieves.15
Later still, Mitchison turned away from history to science fiction, which is a related but different kind of fantastic storytelling. In Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), she still remembers her childhood biological experiments with Jack, and imagines hermaphroditic fluidity and intelligent sex organs; she also casts herself as the saviour of caterpillars who are being inculcated with low self-esteem through telepathic communications from beautiful butterflies. She has become an astronaut, has left the fairy hill forever and taken off into outer space.
Marina Warner
I would like to thank Graeme Mitchison and Sally Mitchison very much indeed for sharing thoughts about their grandmother, and for commenting most helpfully on the draft of this essay. My profound thanks also to Gill Plain, Ali Smith, Graeme Segal, and Kate Arnold-Foster for their help with readings and responses, and to the editor of this series, the indefatigable and inspired Jack Zipes.
1 Naomi Mitchison, Saltire Self-Portraits 2 (Edinburgh: The Saltire Society, 1986), p. 32; see also Elizabeth Maslen, “Mitchison, Naomi Mary Margaret, Lady Mitchison (1897–1999),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., May 2009, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/50052, accessed 30 Aug. 2009); Diana Wallace, “Naomi Mitchison,” The Literary Encyclopedia, 14 Nov. 2005.
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