Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The vitality of the stories and the fascination of the narrative plan kept me going, but the language made the going hard. It is not so much a free-floating style as a mishmash of mannerisms, few of which have any aesthetic relation to the matter, and some of which are in gross contrast to it. Effects intended to be light and humorous fall dead. A rat named Zirac lives in a town called Mahila in the cell of a monk called Charlie. The Charlie sort of thing may be meant to generalize the reference of the tale by disorienting expectation, but to me it merely cheapens the tone. Translations of the Eastern classics have tended to be stuffy, but there’s no need to rush to the other extreme and be twerpy. Edgerton’s laborious 1924 reconstruction of the original Panchatantra, intended for scholars, not for the common reader, calls the monk Tuft-Ears, and another monk, whom Wood calls merely “Charlie’s friend,” appears as Fat-Paunch, with a footnote saying the name really translates “Big Buttocks.” All this is a good deal funnier than Charlie, and also reminds us that being rude about the clergy is a very ancient art.

  The worst trouble with tone is in the dialogue:

  “Come along, Lady Pinfeathers,” he menaced gruffly. “We’ll leave Zirac to make himself at home while you and I get some chow ready. I’ll hunt for it and you can be the pretty waitress. Heh heh! …”

  This kind of stuff goes on for pages. And “he menaced gruffly” is symptomatic of another tendency in Wood’s prose, towards the purple pulpish:

  The afternoon sun blazed low in the sky, its light raking across the landscape and scattering all detail into glinting brilliance. A zephyr caressed the iridescent kiang tips, swaying them back and forth, one into another, in brief, shimmering waves.

  Seldom have so many present participles achieved so little. Here, for contrast, is a bit from the stuffy old Edgerton version:

  [The lion] laid upon him his right hand, plump, round, and long, and adorned with claws like thunderbolts in place of ornaments, and said courteously, “Peace be with you….”

  Now, that’s how animals talk! Ramsay Wood seems to lack faith in his material, to believe that it needs “brightening up” or “interpreting for the modern reader,” as they say. It doesn’t. It’s good, strong stuff. It tastes a lot better without 7-Up.

  The illustrations by Margaret Kilrenny have all the wit and grace one could desire, and their exact and delicate reference to their sources in Eastern art is a delight. Only the first two books of the Panchatantra’s five are presented here; if you publish the rest, O Publisher! please let us have more of these lovely drawings.

  Kalila and Dimna: Selected Fables of Bidpai, retold by Ramsay Wood, illustrated by Margaret Kilrenny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980).

  UNFINISHED BUSINESS

  by Maggie Scarf

  (1980)

  All of us feel down sometimes, but some of us get down and can’t come up again. Depression is the only clinically recognized psychic illness that is frequently fatal: it ends all too often in suicide. There are forty to sixty-five million depressives in the United States. Two-thirds of them, the consistent large majority of diagnosed cases, are women. Housewives and wage earners alike, home-and-babies or office-and-career, it makes no difference: a person taught by her society to perceive herself as a born loser is going to find it hard to feel like a winner. Maggie Scarf’s Unfinished Business is a big book on a big subject: depression in women.

  What is depression?

  “I keep making decisions and then disassembling them….” That’s Brenda, one of the many voices in the book, women interviewed at clinics and hospitals. “Feeling as if I’m in mourning for something without having any notion what that something is. That’s Diana.

  “If one conceives of life as a kind of continuous thread,” says Scarf, “then depression is a place of snarling, of tangling, of stoppage … a signal of adaptive failure.” The symptoms include inability to experience pleasure, impaired ability to think and remember, indecisiveness, irritability, fatigue (or frenzied activity), sleep problems, impotence or frigidity, sadness, and lack of interest in anything outside one’s self and one’s pain. “The mood state itself is a filter of experience, allowing nothing cheerful or gratifying to come through.”

  These are only indications; Scarf does not “define” depression and then color in the outlines. The whole book is a definition, and the picture she gives of depression grows out of and remains rooted in individual case studies and in her discussions of theories and therapies. These discussions are of a breadth and equanimity rather unusual in the field. While making her own inclinations clear, Scarf leaves us free to think. No instant certainties are offered. This is a work of popular psychology, written in accessible journalistic prose without technical jargon; it’s for Us, not for Them. But it isn’t “pop psych.” Opinion is not uttered but presented for examination. The book is eminently judicious, in that it makes very few judgments. And it is admirably good-natured. It isn’t always easy to keep your cool in the bullet-riddled area between the Male-as-Norm bastions of traditional psychology and the Male-as-Enemy outposts of radical feminism, but Maggie Scarf never loses her head. She can even cope with Freud’s famous statement “What we shall never know is what a woman really wants.” Some women, including this reviewer, automatically foam at the mouth at the fatuousness of the remark, its bland arrogation of cognition to men—for who, after all, are “we”? Again and again, the male is human, the woman is deviant. But Scarf mildly calls the statement “rather ironical,” and goes on: “What I am trying to do is actually turn the question from a semi-mocking one to a perfectly serious one—to ask what it is that, when lacking in a woman’s life, can lead to states of depression? What do women, at the various stages of their lives, require in order to live?”

  Well, cheers for that question—cheers and praise.

  The subtitle, Pressure Points in the Lives of Women, is misleading if it makes the book sound like another predictable-crises manual. The “stages of their lives” are simply the six decades from the teens to seventy, each exemplified by one or several portrait-interviews, each voice, each woman, a voice from the darkness: Loss, Mourning, Terror, Despair, Anger, Loneliness. The first great loss in the adolescent’s life is that of her childhood. She must trade baby security for adult independence, and if love fails along the way, she may perceive the process not as liberation but as abandonment, and be left to cope with life not in hope and trust but in grief and fear. At each phase of life this pattern may arise or recur. And always the achievement of self-reliance, of a self that can freely be and do in the world, is hampered by the cultural bias that encourages a woman to ask, “What do they want of me?” and frowns upon her asking, “What do I want to do, to be?”

  For me, the weakest part of the book is the section on women over fifty. Scarf is very funny about doctors who consider old age—in women, not in men—abnormal and curable; but her argument against the “hormone replacement therapy” school seems to lead her into some sweeping denials. She refuses to connect depression with menopausal hormone changes in any way. Evidence supports her in that depression is not statistically any more frequent in the years from forty-five to fifty-five than before or after. The convenient stereotype of the moody bitchy crazy menopausal woman—give her Valium, it’s all hormones—is out. But since she has connected depression directly with hormone changes at puberty and after childbirth, I wonder why Scarf dismisses hormones so absolutely at menopause, not even considering hormone fluctuation (as opposed to loss), nor mentioning the often careless prescription of oral hormones, including the Pill, as a possible cause of depressive states. The one case study for the fifties is curiously atypical; after hearing about the woman’s childhood, you can only admire her for getting to age fifty-two at all. In the sixties, again only one case study, and again some proselytizing—for ECT, electroshock. I found the discussion of this hot subject cursory, compared to the full, solid discussions of drugs used to treat depression. And “Mrs. Garvey”—all the others are on a first-name basis
, only this one is distanced—seems dull, insipid, a typical little old lady, seen with so little empathy that Scarf twice admits to “feeling strange” when asking her about her mother. But aren’t grandmothers allowed to be daughters? And if ECT is so safe for Mrs. Garvey, and so helpful, despite the fact that nobody can say what it does, why not use it on depressives of forty or thirty or fifteen? But Scarf doesn’t suggest that, leaving me with an unhappy impression that she thinks ECT is fine for old depressives. Why? Because the old depressives are right, at last? Because what they knew all along, waking alone in the black pit of 2:00 a.m., is true—they don’t matter any more?

  Scarf has not the sensitive ear of such interviewers as Ronald Blythe; all her informants tend to sound alike, sharing her own rather flat casual style. But this is a minor flaw in a book of real weight and integrity. Depression is an immensely complex subject, and the patience and comprehensiveness of Maggie Scarf’s handling are perfectly appropriate. Depression may be a depressing subject, but the voices of women from the darkness are very moving, and Unfinished Business is, in its firmness and intelligence and charity, an invigorating, hope-giving book.

  Maggie Scarf, Unfinished Business: Pressure Points in the Lives of Women (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1980).

  ITALIAN FOLKTALES

  by Italo Calvino

  (1980)

  Prowling among dictionaries, I discovered that the word “fairy” is fata in Italian and that it derives, like the word “fate,” from the Latin verb fari, “to speak.” Fate is “that which is spoken.” The Fates that once presided over human life dwindled away in fairies, fairy godmothers, inhabitants of fairytales.

  The English word “fable” and the Italian fiaba or favola, a story, “a narrative or statement not founded on fact,” as the Shorter Oxford puts it, descend from the Latin fabula, which derives from that same verb, fari, “to speak.” To speak is to tell tales.

  The predestined spindle has pricked her thumb; here lies the Sleeping Beauty in the silent castle. The prince arrives. He kisses her. Nothing happens.

  So the prince comes back again next day, and the next day too, and his love is

  so intense that the sleeping maiden gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, and you never saw two more beautiful children in your life. They came into the world hungry, but who was to nurse them if their mamma lay there like a dead woman? They cried and cried, but their mother didn’t hear them. With their tiny mouths they began seeking something to suck on, and that way the boy child happened to find his mother’s hand and began sucking on the thumb. With all that sucking, the spindle tip lodged under the nail came out, and the sleeper awakened. “Oh, me, how I’ve slept!” she said, rubbing her eyes.

  The two children are named Sun and Moon, and Sleeping Beauty’s mother-in-law tries to have them served up stewed for the prince’s supper, but he hears the silver bells sewn on his wife’s seven skirts ringing, and saves everybody—except the mother-in-law—and they live happily ever after, in Calabria.

  To find the moral, the message, the meaning of a folktale, to describe its “uses,” even so circuitously as Bruno Bettelheim has done, is a risky business; it is like stating the meaning of a fish, the uses of a cat. The thing you are talking about is alive. It changes and is never quite what you thought it was, or ought to be.

  One of the innumerable delights of Italian Folktales is its mixture of the deeply familiar with the totally unexpected.

  Most of the basic “story-types,” of which Calvino says there are about fifty represented here, are more or less familiar to members of the English folk literary tradition. The themes that recur in all Western folktales run through these; we meet the youngest son of the king, the wicked stepmother, the stupid giant, the helpful animals, the magic boots, the house of the winds, the well that leads to another world: people and places we all recognize, archetypal forms of our perception of life, according to Jung, embodiments of ideas as basic to our subjective existence as the ideas of extension, right/left, reversal, are to our existence in space. But the recombinations of these themes are mostly not familiar. This is much more than Cinderella served up with salsa di pomodora. The tales are endlessly surprising. And their mood is quite different from the elegance of the French contes, the iconic splendors of Russian skazki, the forest darknesses of German Märchen. Often they resemble the British tales of the Joseph Jacobs collections in their dry and zany humor, but they have more sunlight in them. Some are wonderfully beautiful. “The natural cruelties of the folktale give way to the rules of harmony,” as Calvino says in his introduction.

  Although the notion of cruelty persists along with an injustice bordering on inhumanity as part of the constant stuff of stories, although the woods forever echo with the weeping of maidens or of forsaken brides with severed hands, gory ferocity is never gratuitous; the narrative does not dwell on the torment of the victim, not even under pretense of pity, but moves swiftly to a healing solution.

  Italo Calvino’s part in this book is not that of the eminent author condescending to honor a collection of popular tales with an introduction—anything but. Essentially the book is to Italian literature what the Grimms’ collection is to German literature. It is both the first and the standard. And its particular glory is that it was done, not by a scholar-specialist, but by a great writer of fiction. The author of The Baron in the Trees and Invisible Cities used all his skills to bring together the labors of collectors and scholars from all the regions of Italy, to translate the tales out of dialects into standard Italian, and to retell them:

  I selected from mountains of narratives … the most unusual, beautiful, and original texts…. I enriched the text selected from other versions and whenever possible did so without altering its character or unity, and at the same time filled it out and made it more plastic. I touched up as delicately as possible those portions that were either missing or too sketchy.

  With absolute sureness of touch Calvino selected, combined, rewove, reshaped, so that each tale and the entire collection would show at its best, clear and strong, without obscurity or repetition. As a teller of tales he had, of course, both the privilege and the responsibility to do so. He assumed his privilege without question and fulfilled his responsibility magnificently. One of the best storytellers alive telling us some of the best stories in the world—what luck!

  Fiabe italiane was first published in Italy in 1956. My children grew up with a selected edition of them, Italian Fables (Orion Press, 1959). The book was presented for children, without notes, in a fine translation by Louis Brigante, just colloquial enough to be a joy to read aloud, and with line drawings by Michael Train that reflected the wit and spirit of the stories. Perhaps a reading-aloud familiarity with the cadences of this earlier translation has prejudiced my ear; anyhow I find George Martin’s version heavier, often pedestrian, sometimes downright ugly. I don’t hear the speaking voice of the storyteller in it, or feel the flow and assurance of words that were listened to by the writer as he wrote them. Nor does the occasional antique woodcut in the present edition add much to the stories. But the design of the book is handsome and generous, entirely appropriate to the work, which includes for the first time in English all the tales, as well as Calvino’s complete introduction, and his notes (edited by himself for this edition) on each story. The notes illuminate his unobtrusive scholarship and explain his refashionings of the material, and the introduction contains some of the finest things said on folklore since Tolkien—such throwaway lines as:

  No doubt the moral function of the tale, in the popular conception, is to be sought not in the subject matter but in the very nature of the folktale, in the mere fact of telling and listening.

  Come and listen, then. Come hear how a girl named Misfortune found her Fate on the seashore of Sicily:

  At the oven, Misfortune found the old woman, who was so foul, blear-eyed, and smelly that the girl was almost nauseated. “Dear Fate of mine, will you do me the honor of accepting—” she began, offering her th
e bread.

  “Away with you! Begone! Who asked you for bread?” And she turned her back on the girl.

  But Misfortune persists in showing goodwill towards this nasty hag, and so we find how Fate may turn to Fairy by the magic of Fable.

  The Fate, who was growing tamer, came forward grumbling to take the bread. Then Misfortune reached out and grabbed her and proceeded to wash her with soap and water. Next she did her hair and dressed her up from head to foot in her new finery. The Fate at first writhed like a snake, but seeing herself all spick-and-span she became a different person entirely. “Listen to me, Misfortune,” she said. “For your kindness to me, I’m making you a present of this little box,” and she handed her a box as tiny as those which contain wax matches.

  And what do you think Misfortune found in the little box?

  Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales, translated by George Martin (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).

  PEAKE’S PROGRESS

  by Mervyn Peake

  (1981)

  Classification, the distinguishing of styles and relationships, is essential to literary criticism, but some writers are members of a class that contains no other member. Such troublemakers, who won’t quite fit in anywhere, tend to get left out of the textbooks and ignored in the discussions. Critical neglect may be overcompensated by uncritical praise from reader-devotees, which gives the critics ground to gibe at the “cultists,” whose praise then grows shriller. The major fantasists are all mavericks, and all of them, including Carroll and Tolkien, have traveled at least part of this descending gyre of neglect-defense-contempt-adulation. So have such great unclassifiable novels as Finnegans Wake and Kim. Though American Lit people ought to be used to mavericks, they don’t seem to be able to lay a rope on Austin Tappan Wright. An illustrious name in the egregious non-company of those who don’t belong is that of Mervyn Peake; and now, possibly to the annoyance of the critics, certainly to the delight of his readers, Peake’s Progress has appeared to exhibit the maverick genius in all his superb gaits and paces—storyteller, playwright, poet, illustrator.