What Hero - and I, too, was
The Hero of A Story, my own -
could Do without A Villain?
It was The Dark Ones, after all,
on whom everything depended.
The Black Sheep :
NO, NO,' said my mother, "Jacob was the good son:
But I preferred Esau. Is there a child who can hear Bless me, even me also, O My Father’ and does not groan for Esau? And what, after all had the poor Man done? It is a bad thing to be hungry.
It is a difficult thing to a shed deathe pomp, the responsibility. the burden of setting a goer example. What firstcomer, with a combative, ambitious brother at his heel, does not sometimes long to forget it all and settle for lentil soup?
Besides, there was that business of the goatskins. Wasn't that cheating?" I asked my mother. And she, ever honest, squirmed and twisted, struggling with her sense of justice, her wish not to set herself up against authority and her natural irritation with an. argumentative child. She could not explain, if indeed she realised it, that Jacob was the great fox of history, the crafty turner of all moral tables, the man of paradox who by stealing a thing that was not his, came to consort with angels - those going up and those going down — and by struggling with one of them, made that thing his own.
She cast around in her pool of maxims and thankfully fished neup. 'Esau,' she said, as though settling the matter for ever, 'Esau was the black sheep of the family. Well, that was something I could accept - and without disloyalty. If Esau was a black sheep, so were all my best-loved friends - Ishmael and the Prodigal Son, Dan in Jo's Boys, Peter Rabbit, my Uncle Cecil and Major Battle.
Uncle Cecil's blackness was a grown-up secret, a thing of nods and becks and hints. All we really knew of it was that he had married — a last straw apparently - a lady whom my mother described as 'some sort of Hindoo. But we well understood Major Battle's weakness. 'Not before the children, said the gossips, tossing their heads and sipping the air in the manner of thirsty geese, And thehildren, neither shocked nor surprised, said to What wasa black sheep lao. mimatio brously, in the general view, one full of iniquity. If so, might I not be one myself, in spite of the tireless efforts of parents, teachers and friends? But wasthe general view the right one? Can leopard change his pots - and it he can, should he? Was a black sheep just a white sheep dirtied or black in his own right - accepting his colour, proud of it and his three bags full of wool? Did there exist another world where black sheep thought of their erring lambs as the white sheep of the family?
No answer came. Perhaps the question was its own answer and would drop its truit when it ripened. was still many years away from discovering the Chinese symbol of the Great Ultimate, black fish with white eye, white fish with black, the opposites reconciled to themselves and to each other within the encompassing circle.
It was in my future, however, and because it was there it sent back messengers from time to time as a river at its sea-mouth sends back news to the source.
One thing seemed certain - even the nursery rhymes declared it - that for white to be truly white, lily and snow, it needed its dark opposite. Frost and jet between them - attraction, repulsion and interaction - brought forth the ten thousand colours. Good, it seemed, in life as in story, was pallid and colourless. It needed to be touched by bad to blush and know itself. Where would poor Cock Robin have been - an ordinary bird in an ordinary bush - if he had not met the sparrow? All unknown to history; and his funeral dirge - oh, the birds of the air a-sighing and a-sobbin - unwritten and unsung. Who cares about the goodness of Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail until it is contrasted with the behaviour of their brother Peter? It does not exist till then.
Indeed, Peter Rabbit in his own miniscule way is one of the true black sheep of literature. Like Alcott's Dan, he retains his integrity against all odds, refusing firmly to conform, withstanding every genteel effort to sickly him o'er with white. Poets are made of the same stuff. There is no easy way home for them, either. They must cut their own path through thorn and thicket, like Uncle Ceci and Major Battle.
No matter on how small a scale — Homer in a paragraph, the world in a grain of sand — the relation between the antagonists con date at the he inconcede on tend gentleman, lom Kitten merely a kitten till Samuel Whiskers and Anna Maria wrapped him up in the dough.
And when I came to the fairy tales there was no change in the established pattern, the landscape merely widened. 'I can't think; said my mother, 'what makes you so fond of Rumpelstiltzkin! The miller's daughter is so much nicer.'
Much nicer, but much less interesting. There were, however, certain maidens who were something more than comely ciphers, those like the Goose Girl and Little Two-Eyes, brave and defenceless as wounded hares; and the peerless, fearless Sleeping Beauty, grasping her fateful spindle. But I care for them and their lovely princes far more now than I did then. If I am true to my memory, the heroes and heroines have all one face, bland and featureless. It is the lineaments of the villains - dwarf, giant and stepmother, wicked fairy, dragon, witch - that leap to me now across the years. Each one is different, each is its own - pitted, grained and cicatriced, battered by passion and power.
Can I have been one of the Devil's party, as Blake said of Milton, finding Adam and Eve so tenuous, Satan so solid, in 'Paradise Lost'? Was I, like Blake's Black Boy, 'bereaved of light'?
It was possible. And if so it had to be borne. What hero - and I, too, was the hero of a story, my own - could do without a villain?
It was the dark ones, after all, on whom everything depended.
They awoke the virtues, imposed the conflict and, by strictly throwing the story forward, brought it to its strict end - the achievement of Happy Ever After. Their frightfulness, for me, had a kind of splendour, absolute and without spot, as it were. It was something one could completely count on, even, in a way, respect.
You, monsters who are about to die, I salute you!
This uncompromising black and white of the fairy tales was what I needed as a child. It gave me a kind of reassurance. Children, beneath their conforming skins, have aboriginal hearts, savage, untutored, magic-ridden. When the old drums beat below the surface, their feet cannot help stamping. It can be frightening, even appalling, to a child to meet in himself the ancestral ghosts. 'Who am I he will ask, in this situation - caught between the world of the sun and the dark corroboree? Am I alone, unique, eccentric, the only one of my kind?'
'No, you are not', say the fairy tales. And they bring out their comforting brood of dragons, each with a paladin prince to match.
They put the thing in its proper perspective; for every inner insubstantial shadow they provide a palpable counterpart that will bear examination. Cut out the spectres from the tales — there are those I hear, who would gladly do this while sticking to Herod and the atom bomb - and you cut out their healing meaning.
When one knows that the outer world has dragons — a couple, perhaps, at every corner — it is easier to contemplate the ones within oneself.
Neither Grimm's stories nor any myth frightened me as a child
- not gorgon, Minotaur nor chimera, nor the terrible, beautiful
'Juniper Tree. But the sea-captain behind my door, limping on his left leg and tapping the wall with a pencil — he was another matter.
"You see, said my mother every night, grandly flinging the door wide, 'he's not there — and you know it! I did, indeed, but she was speaking of a real captain. Mine was, alas, inside my head, and that door she couldn't open.
'But Grimm is so coarse and blood-bespattered - can you bear the cruelty?' people ask me. I can and could. These stories have grown and are not invented; they are old trees rooted in the folk, massive and monolithic. There is nothing in them that is subjective, or personal or neurotic. Simple, tribal crypto-grams, their cruelty is not for cruelty's sake but to show that life is cruel. 'This is how things are, they say — and how mellifluously they say it! 'The battle of black and white is joined and must be fought to the end. Sit under our shade or go your way, it is all the same to us.'
They make no requirements. One can choose. And how much rather would I see wicked stepmothers boiled in oil — all over in half a second - than bear the protracted agony of the Little Mermaid or the girl who wore the Red Shoes. There, if you like, is cruelty, sustained, deliberate, contrived. Hans Andersen lets no blood. But his tortures, disguised as piety, are subtle, often demoralizing. It is all subjectivity here, a great performer playing the organ, with emphasis on the Vox Humana. Ah, how pleasant to be manipulated, to feel one's heartstrings pulled this way and that - twang, twang, again and again, longing, self-pity, nostalgia, remorse — and to let fall the fullsome tear that would never be shed for Grimm.
I enjoyed it. I even wallowed in it, yet I never could quite understand why I felt no better for it. Perhaps I missed the pagan world with its fortitude and strong contrasts. I and my soul were one there, but Andersen seemed to separate us. He suggested instead - how coaxingly - that I should not try to fight with dragons but just be a dear good child. He reminded me, sweetly, of the rewards and what, alas, awaited me if I should happen to fail. But his characters were so enervating, I needed more bracing companionship - a giant, perhaps, and a witch or two. There were no black sheep in Andersen - he would have found the idea distasteful. (You can't count the Ugly Duckling, for he was really a swan.) They were all white sheep, some clean, some dirty, but a homogeneous flock.
Nor could Hans Andersen have invented, I thought - he wouldn't even have wanted to — a villain strong and dark and lovely and worthy to be loved. For me there was such a one in Grimm, the 13th Wise Woman in 'Little Briar Rose, or, as she is more popularly known, the Wicked Fairy in 'The Sleeping Beauty.' To begin with, she was a victim of chance. The King had only 12 gold plates. Someone had to be left out. It might have been any of the others but it happened to be she. And because of that, to the end of time, men would scorn and point at her and spit upon her shadow. None of them would stop to think that if she had not brought her gift of death, Beauty would neither have slept nor awakened. There had, I knew, to be instruments - things were made wrong that they might come right - and the lot had fallen to her. For this unluck I pitied her, and because I pitied her floved her, and because I loved her she had to be blameless.
'You love the Wicked Fairy?' said my parents, raising their eyebrows at each other. Had they a crow in a swan's nest? It seemed only too likely. I had to bear the opprobrium, since I couldn't deny what my heart said. And because I bore it, the Wicked Fairy - or so it seemed to me then - loosed for me many many secrets.
I saw that she and her 12 sisters, constantly exchanging roles, played every part there was. Myth, fairy-tale, life — it was all the same. The 13 wise women were nymph, mother, crone, goddess;
Kore, Demeter and Astarte, the Witches, the Fates and the Furies.
They birthed the babe, blessed the bride-bed and swaddled the corpse for its clay cradle.
Their business was the whole of life. And in another story on another day, the 13th would perhaps be the Good Fairy and another sister would turn the key that set the wheel in motion.
She did not need my love and pity, but I had to feed them both in myself in order to see her plain.
Plain? She was crystal! A tall, glass, shiny mountain from which I could see with a new eye the world of fairy tale Hero apositions. white sheep and black, there they stood in their fixed positions, opposite and separate and yet not unrelated. Rather, they were two ends of the stick, thrust away from and drawn to each other because of the stick itself.
And what of the stick, the space between, that divides and also connects? Here again was my old question and I carry it with me still. Somewhere, I thought, in my childishness, there is a place between North and South, where all opposing brothers meet, where black and white meet, where black and white sheep lie down together, where St George has no enmity to the dragon and the dragon agrees to be slain.
'What happened to Esau?' I asked my mother.
She smiled as one bringing good news.
'After Jacob wrestled with the angel, Esau came to him with his arms wide and fell on his neck and kissed him.' So - the wheel had turned. The story had run its full course, through discord to harmony, through conflict to Happy Ever After.
‘O my shadow, I said to myself, I will not let thee go except thou bless me'
First published in The New York Times: 1965.
