Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

  THE LITTLE PRINCE (1943)

  A loving lament for a friend who fell to Earth, shared the desert, guilelessly offered parables of human truth, and died in order to return to his celestial home.

  The Little Prince (published first in French as Le Petit Prince) is a bittersweet palimpsest that has entranced generations, deploying multiple layers of meaning to acknowledge gently the hard truths of life, leaving adults sad but hopeful, yearning for the child from the stars and his laughter. It is the best-known work of the French writer, poet, and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–44) and remains one of the most-translated books ever, a modern classic suggesting that the simplest things in life are the most important.

  In writing The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry drew on his own experiences as a pilot (he had qualified as one in 1922), including a period serving in North Africa. In 1944 during World War ii he attempted a reconnaissance mission over France and never returned. In 2004 the wreckage of his plane was recovered, although the exact cause of the crash remains unknown.

  The story begins with one of Saint-Exupéry’s watercolors, an image copied from a “true” jungle book the narrator read at age six. A boa constrictor coils around a “wild beast” whose eyes bulge as the snake’s mouth gapes to consume him. As a child, the narrator explains, he attempted to recreate the image; resulting in something “grown-ups” took for a hat, but which the six-year-old clearly saw as a snake digesting an elephant. On the next page, the narrator reprints the mundane, gray scale, explanatory cutaway view of the snake with a small, dismayed elephant standing inside it. In this simple depiction of mortality Saint-Exupéry demonstrates the clash of potential meaning—which children see directly—and mundane interpretation, which blinds adults to seeing the potential. Within the narrative, however, this clash is productive: The Little Prince chides grown-ups, but enriches them, too.

  The narrator, now an adult, has grown up to become a pilot who has crashed in a barren desert with no signs of civilization. While he struggles to fix his plane, a young boy with golden hair and a scarf appears as if from nowhere. Over the next eight days the Little Prince tells the narrator vivid tales of his home on a faraway asteroid, his adventures on other planets, and how he fell to Earth. These tales are parabolic and present culturally symbolic themes. The Little Prince tells the narrator, for example, of a man on a tiny planet who forgot to tend to his bushes. Three of the seeds should have been plucked when they began to sprout, because they were “bad.” Instead, they grew to be powerful baobabs that he could not cut down, trees that sucked the life out of his planet and shattered it. “Children,” the narrator writes, recounting this story, “Watch out for baobabs!” (We must learn for ourselves, of course, what are the baobabs in our own lives.)

  This boy who fell to Earth is not an avatar of Jesus. His views, story, and effect are, however, consonant with the Christian thread in Western culture: “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). Furthermore, as Jesus told his doubting disciple Thomas, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29), the Little Prince tells the pilot, “The important thing is what can’t be seen.…” The Little Prince does not die for his friend, however. He dies to get back to his rose, which he loves because he has tended her. Still, his home asteroid, B-612, bears the number 4 (symbolic in the Bible of Earthly completeness) multiplied by 153 (the number of miraculous fish—or souls—that Peter nets in obeying the risen Jesus [John 21:11]).

  The last image of the book shows a desert landscape with only a star. The narrator asks us to let him know if we ever see this landscape, and under that star, a child. “Don’t let me go on being so sad: Send word immediately that he’s come back.”

  TOVE JANSSON

  THE MOOMINS AND THE GREAT FLOOD (1945)

  Jansson’s much-loved tales of Moomin trolls taught generations of children the importance of kindness and good manners, even amid chaotic adventure.

  Tove Jansson (1914–2001), inventor of the Moomin trolls, is a Scandinavian institution, and her strange, gentle, unfailingly polite little creatures have delighted millions around the world. Jansson originally came up with the Moomins, or something very like them, in her childhood, and continued developing them when she became a professional artist and illustrator. They first appear in her adult work in political cartoons she drew for the satirical magazine Garm.

  The first of the Moomin books published, The Moomins and the Great Flood (really a short story of about sixty pages), is not “officially” part of the Moomin series. It can, however, be seen as proof of concept for the ensuing series (and the enormous franchise that they later became). The world described in the book is one in flux. The Moomins travel from forest to swamp to cliffside cave to beach, before finally being swept away by the titular flood. (They even spend the night in a candy meadow with rivers of chocolate and jam, perhaps inspiring Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.) The book ends with the family reuniting, and with Moominpapa announcing he has found the perfect valley for them to build a house to live in, which serves as the setting for all future Moomin books.

  And yet the world of this book (published in 1945, English translation 2012) is a great deal more civilized than we might expect. When the Moomins part from friends, Moominmama promises: “We’ll send you both a letter and tell you what happened.” Even in the midst of this wilderness, it seems, one can still rely on the mail. And after the flood, the various displaced creatures sit together around campfires, sharing their surviving utensils and making each other warm drinks, as good neighbors should. Manners, and neighborly behavior, are central to these books and their world, which for all its fantastic qualities, is rooted in the Finnish landscape and Swedish culture in which Tove Jansson grew up. There is something reminiscent of Tolkien’s hobbits and the Shire in the world of the Moomins (Jansson illustrated the first Swedish translation of The Hobbit, published in 1947). The Moomins are earthy, eager for both diversion and comfort, and keen to have everything in its right place. The world they construct for themselves reflects these preoccupations: the Moomins’ house is cozy and full of all the odds and ends that one needs to feel fully at ease. Moominmama, meanwhile, never sets out on an excursion without a full meal, complete with cutlery and a butter dish, and a purse full of whatever she and her children might need to be well and happy.

  Their tulip was glowing again, it had opened all its petals and in the midst of them stood a girl with bright blue hair that reached all the way down to her feet.

  The change of the seasons determines the shape and nature of the Moomin world. A later novel, Finn Family Moomintroll (1948, English translation 1950) takes place over a long summer, and features such quintessentially Scandinavian summer excursions as a boat trip to the islands and a night under the stars. In Moominland Midwinter (1957), Moomintroll wakes up unexpectedly during his hibernation, and finds the world altered and frighteningly foreign. Too-Ticky, who he finds living in the family’s beach house (thus transforming it, too, into something unfamiliar), explains: “There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear.” In Moominvalley in November (1971, English translation 1971), the family are absent, and their friends’ and neighbors’ anxiety over this, their feeling that the world does not make sense without this welcoming family at its center, is expressed through the gloomy, rainy weather of the Finnish autumn. The world of the Moomins is simultaneously fantastic and familiar, cozy and frightening, eternal and ever-changing—a tension that explains why this series of books has resonated so powerfully with generation
s of children who are just starting to discover their own world.

  1946–1980

  4 NEW WORLD ORDER

  The legacy of World War ii and ensuing Cold War tensions shell-shocked a generation of writers, each seeking to find a voice for the unspeakable. Feminist and postmodern writing also sought to redress tired tropes dogging the genre.

  MERVYN PEAKE

  GORMENGHAST (1946–59)

  Peake’s enduring gothic tales of the vast and crumbling Gormenghast castle and its curious inhabitants explore a dark world of age-old rituals, treachery, manipulation, and murder.

  The fantasy world of Gormenghast Castle is as hard to pin down as a nightmare. Mervyn Peake’s (1911–68) trilogy, written during and after World War ii, describes the life of Titus Groan, heir to the ancient Earldom of Gormenghast. Parts of the story echo the unimaginable horrors Peake experienced at the end of the war, when he worked as an artist in the newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. There is, for instance, the pitiless savagery with which some of the characters are murdered; the blind, unthinking obedience to rules and traditions that beset the castle; and the cold-hearted evil of Steerpike, who tries to seize control.

  But it is impossible to make detailed comparisons, still less to see Gormenghast Castle and its massive Tower of Flints against a background of twentieth-century Europe and the Nazis. The Gothic towers of the rambling castle where Titus Groan is born—more a city than a single home, with miles of twisting, shadowy streets running through it and secret, dilapidated areas where no one ever goes—seem to place it in medieval times, as do the ancient rites read from dusty old volumes and the banquets set with gold plate and crimson goblets. Some of the characters, such as Irma Prunesquallor, with her spectacles, her hair pulled into a bun, her flower-trimmed veil, and her neurotic obsessions, could be caricatures from the 1920s. In the third book, Titus Alone (1959), Titus journeys away from the castle among cars, skyscrapers, and televisions.

  Gormenghast is in a world of its own, isolated both in space and time. Nothing that happens can definitely be said to be supernatural, but an aura of magic hangs over the story. A strange tree grows horizontally out of the castle wall, its trunk so massive that Titus’s two aunts, Cora and Clarice, can set a table there to have tea. The Countess of Groan, with her eerie warning, “There is evil in the castle,” seems to have a mysterious premonition of the disasters to come and, by the end, she speaks with almost supernatural knowledge as she warns the departing Titus, “There is nowhere else. You will only tread a circle.… Everything comes to Gormenghast.”

  These ambiguities run throughout. Some characters, such as the Professors, are comic Dickensian figures, while Steerpike is painted with chilling psychological realism, with a terrifying, almost psychotic lack of empathy or remorse.

  Unlike novels such as Brave New World (1932, here), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949, here), or Herland (1915, here), Gormenghast presents no political warning or ideal. Rather, the literary influences on Peake’s imagination are the comic vision of Dickens, the zany nonsense world of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865, here), and the adventurous challenges of R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883, here). Gormenghast stands alone. Its world is neither magical nor realistic, neither wholly comic nor wholly tragic, neither utopia nor dystopia. Perhaps it is this shifting focus and the misty, nightmarish quality that has made Gormenghast so consistently popular since its publication.

  The first impression of Gormenghast Castle is its sheer size, with its massive, ivy-covered walls looming over the mud huts of the Outer Dwellers huddled below. The Tower of Flints dominates everything “like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven,” and the sheer Outer Wall, like a gray cliff, encloses several square miles of open ground and countless other towers, wings, and passageways. The whole complex is so extensive that most of the people who live inside never venture out.

  The Castle stands at the foot of the craggy Gormenghast Mountain, with the virtually impenetrable Twisted Woods and Gormenghast River at its foot. On its other three sides, marshland, quicksand, and swamps stretch into the distance. This is the waterlogged, inhospitable setting for the great flood, the waters of which rise to the highest floors of the castle and nearly destroy it.

  Within the castle walls, the world looks resolutely backward. Much of the fabric of the buildings is falling down, held together only by the ivy that covers it. More importantly, this atmosphere of decay extends to the people who inhabit the buildings. The ancestors of the Earl of Groan have ruled Gormenghast since time immemorial, but now the sole function of the family is to fulfill the endless, detailed, and apparently ridiculous rituals and traditions recorded in old ledgers, interpreted by the Earl’s Master of Ritual. Titus, whose birth was recounted in Titus Groan, is reintroduced at the start of Gormenghast as “suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual.” This is the world, overwhelmed by the past, from which he wants to escape, and over which the evil Steerpike is determined to rule.

  Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone have been described by the novelist Anthony Burgess as some of the most important works of the imagination to come out of the modern age. The books present a coherent fantasy world with its own bizarre rules and assumptions, but beneath the surface can be seen several aspects of Peake’s own life. His father was a Christian missionary, and Peake was born in Kuling, in China’s Kiang-hsi Province, spending most of his childhood in Tianjin, southeast of Beijing. Some see echoes of Imperial China in the rituals and customs of Gormenghast Castle and the Groan family, and the precipitous landscapes of Peake’s birthplace, where fortified Chinese towns cling to the steep mountain slopes, are reflected in the descriptions of the castle’s setting.

  Furthermore, Peake spent several years before and after World War II living on the island of Sark, in the Channel Islands, from where he took some of the place-names in Gormenghast, such as the Coupée, Silvermines, Gory, and Little Sark. However, probably the most significant period of his life was the time he spent drawing in the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. He wrote several moving and tortured poems, and the horrific sights and experiences of Belsen clearly left a dark and ineradicable impression on his imagination.

  Like an earlier fantasy novel, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Gormenghast demonstrates its author’s anxiety about the growing demand for social equality in the first half of the twentieth century. The rule of the Groan family may be overbearing, hidebound, self-obsessed, and crippled by its stultifying sense of duty to tradition for its own sake, but the aspiring new meritocracy represented by Steerpike presents a chilling alternative. In one memorable scene, Steerpike slowly pulls the legs off a beetle, murmuring to himself as he does so, “Equality is the great thing—equality is everything.”

  The three books that tell the Gormenghast story are not a true trilogy, since they were originally planned as part of a longer series intended to follow Titus throughout his life. But, by the mid-1950s, with two books completed and work on the third in hand, Peake was beginning to show early signs of Parkinson’s disease. He was increasingly incapacitated both physically and mentally over the next few years, and he died in 1968, at age fifty-seven, after several years in a nursing home.

  Apart from Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone—and the illustrations that established him as an artist—Peake also produced a series of highly regarded portraits and wrote several volumes of poetry and a number of other novels for children and adults, including the darkly humorous Mr. Pye (1953). Many of his books, including the Gormenghast novels, have been adapted for radio and television, and a fourth book in the series, Titus Awakes, was posthumously published in 2011 by Peake’s widow Maeve, to mark the centenary of his birth.

  Ultimately, the world of Gormenghast defies classification—unique, fascinating, enthralling, beguiling, and occasionally horrifying. It is a place of dreams, fantasies, and nightmares drawn from experienc
e.

  GEORGE ORWELL (ERIC ARTHUR BLAIR)

  NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949)

  One of the great dystopias of the twentieth century, Orwell’s bleak vision of a totalitarian near-future has spawned many imitators and its instantly recognizable ideas and terms have entered into the public consciousness.

  To twenty-first-century readers, the imagined world of Nineteen Eighty-Four can seem over-the-top (though the surveillance state of Oceania might seem quaint by today’s standards of satellite imagery and drones). In the late 1940s, however, George Orwell’s (1903–50) depictions were legitimate extrapolations of very recent history, pushing contemporary trends to their grotesque ends. In 1949, it was not yet five years since the death of Adolf Hitler. Stalin still lived and ruled with a monstrous despotism that had killed millions in intentional famines, party purges (“the Great Terror”), and war crimes. The term “socialist” had been appropriated by Hitler’s “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” and “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”. Hope for a benevolent Russian revolution had been betrayed. Nazism, Communism, and World War II had demonstrated shocking human capacities for producing and accepting outrageous propaganda, fanatical commitment to orthodoxy, blatant rewriting of history, cynical side-switching, bureaucratic time-serving and tyranny, torture, mass enslavement, mass murder, and lust for power. Orwell’s bleak vision of the future was within legitimate limits of satiric exaggeration.