Reflections: On the Magic of Writing

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Meanwhile, feminism had become a force and was slowly changing the climate of opinion. I looked one day at a picture I own called Fire and Hemlock. It is a very peculiar picture, because sometimes there seem to be people in it and sometimes not. And I realized I was about to write the book. If anything sparked it off, it was probably the saying “Those whom the gods love die young.” (I often find my books are founded on a saying or proverb. The maddest is Archer’s Goon, which is founded on a dire pun: “urban gorilla.”)3 But there was another consideration. Janet, the hero of “Tam Lin,” behaves throughout like a woman and not like a pseudo man. I wanted a narrative structure which did not simply put a female in a male’s place—and, oddly enough, the structure I came up with was no other than that great favorite, the Odyssey. I think that at least part of the reason for this is Penelope, who, as I said before, is in her way as tricksy as her husband: she clearly has a mind. And Odysseus is a thinking hero. I knew my story was going to be a journey of the mind to some extent, both for Polly and for Tom.

  Now you must understand that I came to writing Fire and Hemlock not only with the Odyssey in mind. My head was awash with myths and legends, hundreds of them, and they all contribute, but there are three which underlie it principally. The most obvious, of course, are the ballads of “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer,” seen as parts of a whole. This gives the emotive aspect of the story: that of a foray into the supernatural world of the imagination to rescue the one you love (and this love is seen in the same way as Britomart’s: as being the same as the heroic ideal). As to the second and third underlay, you must bear with me if I hold the third up almost to the end, but the second is the Odyssey, of course. The Odyssey accounts for the shape of the story, and the way it largely had to be told in flashback. For Homer’s Odyssey starts in what we have to call present-day Ithaca, and when Odysseus himself finally appears, at least half of his story is in flashbacks. We find him disentangling himself from Calypso, a possessive nymph, then telling his story to the next people he meets: Nausicaa and her family. This gave me several elements. By association with Scheherazade, it made me see that Polly would be telling the story. It gave me Tom’s recent divorce from Laurel. In addition, the witch Circe, when she lets Odysseus go, tells him he has to visit Hades first. This could be her way of saying “I’ll see you in hell first!” but, since she is semidivine, it becomes literal truth and means “You’ll have to pass through death first.” This ties in so wonderfully with the “tithe to hell” that the fairy folk have to pay in “Tam Lin” and gave me the ending of the book. It also gave me an important fact about Laurel: this way she has of bending the truth to her own ends. Put this together with the gift of true speaking the Queen gives Thomas the Rhymer, and you have Laurel’s gift to Tom: that everything he imagines will come true. It is not only a hellish gift from a supernatural female; it is the mark of a particularly terrible type of woman—I’m sure we all know at least one such person—a woman who confuses fact and fiction impartially for her own ends. For Laurel is Circe as well.

  At the opening of the book, Polly, as well as Tom, is in thrall to this woman. She had to perform a strenuous and truthful act of memory to break that thralldom. This in itself is intended to be an act of heroism akin to Odysseus confronting the sirens. But as a girl, one would expect Polly to be in the role of Penelope—and she is, by and large, in that Tom ranges the world, while Polly stays at home—but there is another hero in the Odyssey, Odysseus’s son, the young, naive Telemachus. Polly takes the role of Telemachus on herself when she first meets Tom, by naming herself Hero; and this begins a long series of heroic roles that both she and Tom adopt. Polly does this semiknowingly at age ten, because she knows instinctively that her only contact with him that Laurel cannot break is that of the imagination. At ten, children are good at knowing such things. Polly first expresses this knowledge in the naive made-up story of Tan Coul and his friends, with herself as assistant hero. As she grows older and recognizes the complexity of life, the naive make-believe becomes more and more marginal, so that as she searches for her ideal in a new form, she takes on a whole series of heroic roles. She is Gerda in “The Snow Queen,” Snow White, Britomart, St. George, Pierrot, Pandora, Andromeda, and Janet from “Tam Lin” and many more, in a sort of overlapping succession.

  Tom appears to cling to the role of Odysseus, which he takes on himself with the letter about the giant in the supermarket. Anyone reading that section closely may have noticed that the giant has only one eye, like Polyphemus the Cyclops. But in fact Tom loses that role to Polly around the time he meets his alter ego in the hardware shop and becomes in turn Leander, Kay kidnapped by the Snow Queen, the Knight of the Moon, Artegal, Bellerophon, Prometheus/Epimetheus, Harlequin, Perseus, Orpheus, and of course Tam Lin. He and Polly are continually swapping active and passive roles and sharing the part of Odysseus between them.

  Now the way I did this was something else I learned from Spenser. Spenser’s allegory ranges from large, overt personifications (pride is a woman called Pride who lives in a palace with a filthy backyard) to relationships so subtle that it is sometimes hard to call them allegory. And at other times the allegorical role is shared about among many characters, each of whom is some aspect of it. I tried to do the same with the heroic personifications and actions of Polly and Tom to find some way, you see, to call on the magical or god-guided aspect of all heroic careers. So sometimes I made the action overtly supernatural and sometimes so close to mundane factualness as to be indistinguishable from everyone’s ordinary acts. And sometimes halfway between the two.

  In order to organize this, I found that the narrative moved in a sort of spiral, with each stage echoing and being supported by the ones that went before. I had to work very hard in the final draft to make sure that echoes were not repetitions, because at the same time I was establishing another set of resonances that had to be hidden in the same spiral. These were directly concerned with gods and the supernatural. All the female characters are arranged in threes, with Polly always at the center. There are Nina (who is silly), Polly (who is learning the whole time), and Fiona (who is sensible); there are Granny, Polly, and Ivy, old, young, and middle-aged respectively. The first threesome may not strike people as significant, but taken along with the second, I hope it begins to suggest the Three Formed Goddess, diva triforma. Toward the end of the book, Granny takes on the role of Fate and Wisdom quite overtly, shearing fish and explaining the riddle of the ballad of “Tam Lin.” Laurel is of course an aspect of this goddess. Consequently, the most important threesome is Laurel, Polly, Ivy. Ivy is the mundane parasitical version of Laurel, very green and clinging—Laurel as the Lorelei in suburbia, if you like. And Polly, make no mistake, is intended to be an aspect of Laurel too—Laurel as Venus and the Fairy Queen—but she is the aspect that appears not in “Tam Lin” but in “Thomas the Rhymer,” the good and beloved Queen that Thomas first mistakes for the Virgin Mary and then submits to. The adventures Polly and Tom have together fairly carefully echo this second ballad. I did this not out of perverseness but because of what I had learned from Spenser, through Britomart, of the Christian contribution to the heroic ideal: that the deity is for everyone. There is God in all of us as well as with us. It follows that the major part of a hero’s quest is to locate that deity within and to live up to its standards. And if the hero is female, it also follows that the deity is likely to be female too.

  (If anyone wonders about the male characters, yes, they are surreptitiously arranged in the same way.)

  You will probably be thinking by now that I had a rich mix and a complex structure to control. This is true. You may also be wondering about the third underlying myth that I mentioned. Before I come to this myth, however, I have to mention another factor. I needed a conscious, organizing overlay to this narrative. As you can probably see by now, it could well have run out of control without one. And, unlike the mass of myths and folktales in the story which came surging into the narrative almost unbidden, this
had to be in my conscious control. The organizing overlay I chose was T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. This, on a purely technical level, gave me a story divided into four parts and featuring a string quartet. It also gave me the setting and atmosphere for the funeral Polly gatecrashes in Hunsdon House:

  Footfalls echo in the memory

  Down the passage which we did not take

  Toward the door we never opened

  Into the rose garden. [. . .]

  Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

  Round the corner. Through the first gate,

  Into our first world, shall we follow

  The deception of the thrush? [. . .]

  So we moved [. . .]

  Along the empty alley, into the box circle,

  To look down into the drained pool.

  Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

  And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

  And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly [. . .]4

  Chapter 2 is full of echoes from “Burnt Norton.” The vases come from here. I chose the poem because it combines static meditation with movement in an extraordinary way, to become a quest of the mind away from the Nothing of spiritual death (Hemlock in my book), toward the fire which is imagination and redemption—the Nowhere of my book. A heroic journey from Nothing to Nowhere is what Polly takes.

  Though I was always aware of Eliot’s poem as an overlay, I only, as it were, turned the sound up on it from time to time. I kept it low until the Bristol section after this initial forte, where Polly—now in the role of Snow White, Eurydice, and Britomart—is turned out, lost and looking down into the River Avon.

  [. . .] I think that the river

  Is a strong brown god [. . .]

  Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

  And piece together the past and the future,

  Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

  The future futureless, before the morning watch

  When time stops and time is never ending [. . .]

  Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing [. . .] ? 5

  I turned the sound down on Eliot after that until Polly remembers what it was she did to lose Tom and put them both in Laurel’s power. Now here I must remind you of my childhood discovery that all heroes are likely to make one horrible mistake. On the human level, Polly’s mistake is to behave like her mother, with possessive curiosity, and spy on Tom. On the mythical level, it throws the story back to the tragedy and failure of Hero and Leander, with which the story started. This unjustified curiosity, which leads the hero to spy on his or her partner, is a motif in dozens of folktales—“East of the Sun and West of the Moon” being the one which is mentioned in the book. Here the young wife sees her husband in his true shape in the night, and loses him. This summary will no doubt remind you all of a much better-known story—the story which is, in fact, the third underlying myth in Fire and Hemlock—the story of Cupid and Psyche. Now from long before C. S. Lewis this was a myth of the human soul in search of a beloved ideal, which is what Tom has now become for Polly. Tom in fact has Cupid’s attributes, although few people seem to notice. When my British publisher was unable to see this, I simply asked her, “Who is mostly blind and goes to work with a bow?” and she said, “Oh, I see!” But, to go back to human terms, and Polly’s loss of Tom, people do lose sight of their ideals quite often in adolescence and young adulthood—they tend to see life as far too complex and come up with the idea that things are only real and valid if they are unpleasant or boring. The myth of Cupid and Psyche is certainly about this. Or, as Eliot says: “human kind/Cannot bear very much reality,”6 and the defense is to deny the imagination any reality at all. But the story of Cupid and Psyche is not mentioned in the book on purpose, because Cupid and Psyche are both in their own ways gods, not heroes—and anyway it always seems to me that powerful stories like that one always pull their weight better for only being hinted at.

  Once Polly knows she has lost Tom, her quest becomes more urgent. So the narrative moves back to the present time, just as it does in the Odyssey, and becomes traditionally heroic in that Polly finds that she can call for help on those she has helped in the past. This includes the one she nearly misses because it is too close to her: Fiona. This sort of thing may be a traditional motif, but it does also happen in real life—you can be very blind to people close to you, both for good or evil. Polly has accepted Seb in the same blind way. But at last, having called in her debts and made her heroic act of memory, Polly sets out to retrieve her mistake. Now here I found I had to leave the tradition represented by Janet in “Tam Lin,” because it was precisely by hanging on to Tom and being overcurious that Polly had lost him. Anyway, she has already done her hanging on as a child. It was clear to me that the only redress she could make was the reverse of possessiveness—complete generosity—generosity so complete that it amounts to rejection. She has to love Tom enough to let him go—hurtfully. This is the only way she can harness Tom’s innate strength of character, and only when hurting can he summon the full force of the fire—which is to some extent physical passion and to an even greater extent the true strength of the heroic world of the imagination Polly and Tom have built together. But Tom has to do it himself. He has depended on Polly too much.

  This is where I turned the sound up again on the Four Quartets. Polly has to take the same road that T. S. Eliot describes in his quest:

  In order to arrive there,

  To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

  In order to arrive at what you do not know

  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

  In order to possess what you do not possess

  You must go by the way of dispossession.

  In order to arrive at what you are not

  You must go through the way in which you are not.

  And what you do not know is the only thing you know

  And what you own is what you do not own

  And where you are is where you are not.7

  But I was talking about everyday life as much as Eliot was. I was also following the Odyssey, where Odysseus does at last come home, to a partnership and a personal relationship. And I wanted to indicate, however briefly, that though a relationship was possible between Polly and Tom, such a relationship is only likely to be maintained through continuing repeated small acts of heroism from both. This is what I tried to do in the coda—where the structure of the Odyssey most remarkably echoes what Eliot has to say:

  What we call the beginning is often the end

  And to make an end is to make a beginning.

  The end is where we start from.8

  Thank you.

  A Talk About Rules

  Diana Wynne Jones was a popular speaker at science fiction and fantasy events. In 1995 she was invited to appear as the guest of honor at Boskone, the annual convention run by the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA) in Boston, Massachusetts.

  Diana’s 1995 collection Everard’s Ride was published by NESFA Press as part of its program to honor special guests. The following is her guest of honor address at Boskone 1995.

  I am very glad to be here at Boskone. I really thought I wasn’t going to make it. First I didn’t seem to be able to stop having to go to hospital—there will be a book before long giving my frank opinion of most doctors, which is not high—and then there were the airline tickets. Reasonably enough, my ticket was in the name of Diana Wynne Jones and Chris Bell’s called her Chris Bell.1 The trouble was, both our passports were in our married names, which are not the same. But I had been there before. You have to go to the office and argue, I told Chris blithely. The airline won’t let you travel on a ticket that isn’t the same as your passport, so you get them to change the name on the ticket. So we took the morning off from working on the Encyclopedia of Fantasy for John Clute2 and went to the office and asked them to change ou
r names on the tickets. “Can’t be done,” they said. Nonsense, said we, and we argued. We persuaded. We talked for half an hour. And it still couldn’t be done. The Rules forbade it on that kind of ticket. Half an hour later, it still couldn’t be done and we gave up and came home. But Chris refused to be beaten and tried another way round. She rang the passport office and asked if they could change our passports instead. “Oh yes, easily,” they said.

  Well, it wasn’t actually easy. We had to order new passports and fill in forms that didn’t have a section for what we wanted to do, but it got done. And all along the absurdity of it was exasperating—that it was easier to change your passport than an airline ticket! Rules! The whole thing about Rules increasingly exasperated me. While I worked on the encyclopedia, I kept discovering Rules in fantasy that had no business being there. Camels going through the eyes of needles in all directions. Or failing to get through, or getting stuck halfway. So many things you weren’t supposed to do. So out of this exasperation I have decided to talk a bit about the Rules people insist on in various forms of writing.