Adventure classics – Day and night, different but together

“The Day Boy and the Night Girl”

by George MacDonald

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It’s an old saying that opposites attract. But is there hope for reconciliation if the world of each opposite is deadly to the other? Can each opposite be right, but better when united to the other? Sounds like a topic too heavy for a fairy tale? Welcome to the world of 19^th-century Scottish preacher turned writer George MacDonald, and gorgeous 1882 fable, “The Day Boy and the Night Girl.”

George MacDonald

Don’t get turned off by MacDonald’s original calling in religion. Ostracized from the church, he turned to writing to support his growing family. Not all his work translates well beyond its Victorian roots, but he left a handful of stories of enduring power, written in prose rich as a Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.

“There once was a witch who desired to know everything,” the story of "The Day Boy and the Night Girl" begins. “Her name was Watho, and she had a wolf in her mind. She cared for nothing in itself – only for knowing it.”

And to that end, Watho designs a diabolical experiment: what effect will raising human beings in completely different environments have on their psychology? She entices two pregnant women to visit her. (In deference to Victorian sensibilities, MacDonald doesn’t actually state that the women were pregnant, only that they gave birth to children during their visits.)

The first woman is a member of the king’s court, whose husband is away on a long and dangerous mission. The second woman was a young widow whose husband has recently died, and who has since become blind. They are housed in different parts of Watho’s castle, unaware of each other’s presence and treated differently, to the extent even of receiving special diets.: “venison and feathered game,” milk and “pale sunny sparkling wine” for one, for the other “milk and wine dark as a carbuncle, and pomegranates, and purple grapes, and birds that dwell in marshy place.”

The first woman gives birth to a son who Watho steals immediately afterward, telling the mother that her child died the moment he was born. After the distraught mother left the castle, the witch secretly raises the boy, naming him Photogen, and “taking care that the child should not know darkness.”

Several months after Photogen is born, the second woman also gives birth, dying in the process. Her child, who Watho names Nycteris, is raised in darkness, housed in a windowless part of the castle illuminated only enough to allow the child’s nurse to tend to her.

And so the children grew up, neither knowing the other, until their teens. Again sparing the sensibilities of his Victorian readers, MacDonald doesn’t use terms as crude as “puberty” or “adolescence.” But we know from the kids’ increasing restlessness that teenage rebellion can’t be far behind.

The girl is the first. (MacDonald’s heroines tend to display a surprising un-Victorian tendency toward independence.) One night while Nycteris’s nurse-turned-jailer is absent, a minor earthquake shakes the castle, knocking down her single lamp. While searching for the lost lamp, the girl accidentally discovers a secret door out of her windowless chamber and escapes to the top of the castle. 

"Starry Night," wikimedia commons

There, for the first time, she sees the sky, “lit by a perfect moon . . . like silver glowing in a furnace – a moon one could see to be a globe – not far off, a mere flat disc on the face of the blue, but hanging down halfway, and looking as if one could see all round it by a mere bending of the neck.” Her life can never be the same, and although she returns eventually to her room in the castle, she becomes increasingly adept at sneaking out to revel in the beauty of the night.

Photogen has always been allowed to roam freely, although Watho has given her huntsman orders to bring him home before darkness falls.

However, “one morning, when he happened to be on the ground a little earlier than usual, and before his attendants (Photogen) caught sight of an animal unknown to him, stealing from a hollow into which the sunrays had not yet reached.” He pursues the animal on horseback, but it eludes him. He questions the huntsman, remarking that the creature must be a coward, and before thinking, the man replies that it was “one of the creatures the sun makes uncomfortable. As soon as the sun is down, he will be brave enough.”

The answer makes Photogen determined to test his own courage by confronting this terror of the dark that Watho has warned him against. But when he slips away secretly at night, he finds his light-based courage unequal to the terrors of darkness. Until he meets Nycteris, who is as at home in the dark as he is in the light.

It doesn’t take the witch long to discover their meetings. And in revenge for their spoiling of her hideous psychological experiment, she devises a dreadful punishment, one that neither can endure alone.

Will they be able to survive? Will they escape the witch’s imprisoning castle and her power? Treat yourself to a free online reading of “The Day Boy and the Night Girl” at Librivox  (or at any of several sites on YouTube.)

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a November of fairy tale fantasy with Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard.”)

Adventure classics -- Love, time after time

The Portent

by George MacDonald

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"If you see anything in it, take it and I am glad you have it: but I wrote it for the tale," George MacDonald told his wife when she asked him what the meaning was of his 1864 ghostly romance, The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision of the Highlanders Commonly Called the Second Sight (to give its full title).

You can’t blame Mrs. MacDonald for being curious. The story’s hero had more than a passing resemblance to her husband. And, probably, if you consider yourself happily married but your husband’s writing a romantic story about a reincarnated lover from a past life, well, you’ve got to wonder¼

After all, MacDonald could get heavily into “meaning” at times. As a failed preacher (his conservative Calvinist congregations weren’t enthusiastic about his leanings toward a doctrine of universal salvation), he all too often turned to writing sermons in the form of books when no one would pay him to speak them.

But over a long and prolific life, he wrote a handful of short stories and several novels¾ and one of these is The Portent¾ that still endure. And in these best of MacDonald’s stories, “the deeper meanings came there almost by accident, for they were part of himself,” Oxford don Roger Lancelyn Green wrote in his introduction to The Complete Fairy Tales of George MacDonald. “If we could explain the story it would not be there any more¾ just as if we tried to cut up a soap-bubble to see how the lovely colours were put into it.”

So, what is The Portent? A love story? A ghost story? An allegory (although not a heavy-handed one) about the transformative power of love between poor but proud Scottish tutor Duncan Campbell and the lovely, fey Lady Alice?

After finishing university but failing to obtain the military commission he longs for,
Duncan accepts a post as tutor in an English earl’s household. There he meets the earl’s ward, Lady Alice. Although the family considers Alice mentally deficient, her highly original remarks strike Duncan as “closely allied to genius.” He sympathizes with her position as a fellow outsider, but Alice shuns him.

One night, while exploring an uninhabited wing of the mansion, Duncan happens upon Alice sleepwalking. Startled, she faints. As he tries to bring her back to consciousness, he hears the sound which has been a portent of doom in his family, the sound of a galloping phantom horse, always distinguishable by the clanking of the loose shoe that caused it to fall to the death of its rider, Duncan’s long-ago ancestor.

Believing that only members of his family can hear the phantom, Duncan is amazed when Alice also admits to hearing the portent of disaster. As an attachment grows between them, he wonders if she is a distant relation of his. Or, as he begins to believe, is she the reincarnation of the beloved whose beauty doomed his jealous ancestor? And are he and she fated to repeat the tragedy or can love finally defeat the forces of darkness?

As an introduction to MacDonald’s writing, this is the story I recommend. His language is at both its most beautiful and most approachable, with no metaphysics heavier than a deliciously creepy legend of tragic love. And it’s short. Having read the book several years ago, I promised myself just to give it a quick scan to refresh my memory. Instead, I reread my 1979 edition from
www.abebooks.com cover to cover. It’s also readily available at Amazon or free at www.gutenberg.org/. And enjoy this post’s illustration of an eerily brooding MacDonald, 1870, found at wikimedia.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a December of spirited adventures with Lloyd Douglas’s The Robe.)

Adventure classics -- Light in every way

The Light Princess

by George MacDonald

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I’ll admit not catching most of George MacDonald’s sly satirical touches when I first read his mid-nineteenth century fairy tale, “The Light Princess,” in my family’s 1956 edition of The Junior Classics. But I knew that this story about a princess with a mind of her own -- light as it was -- was like nothing else I’d ever seen.

This wasn’t a princess who stayed obediently cloistered in a tower. Or whose idea of a rowdy night out was going to sleep for a hundred years. Not on your life. This was a princess who, when confined to her room, climbed out for a midnight swim.

And if a handsome prince happened to come along -- she wasn’t about to put herself out looking for one -- she didn’t worry about whether their friendship conformed to conventional Victorian standards of deportment. As long, of course, as he was a good swimmer. Swimming was her passion and water, indeed, was the only medium in which she could enjoy the freedom of not floating off into the atmosphere.

Because much as some of us may wish to register more lightly on our scales, this princess really was light -- a defect wished on her by a spiteful aunt, whose witchcraft had deprived the princess of her gravity in both the scientific and psychological senses.

Of course, she was able to regain her gravity by falling (one of MacDonald’s many puns -- and they are hilarious, not horrible) in love. And when her boyfriend the prince (he’s the obedient one in the story) offered to die by drowning to save her life, threatened by the actions of the same wicked aunt, the princess saved his life instead.

Given that the story is from the hand of the Scottish preacher turned professor turned author who C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien acknowledged as an influence, both the
obedient and disobedient have their proper place in the scheme of things.

Lewis Carroll, who would complete Alice in Wonderland with MacDonald’s encouragement, wrote in his diary in July 1862 about a walk with MacDonald. They took MacDonald’s publisher the manuscript of “The Light Princess,” which included, in Carroll’s words, “some exquisite drawings by Hughes.”

I was unable to find any of the drawings by Pre-Raphaelite painter and illustrator Arthur Hughes, but I’ve snitched one of his more famous paintings, “Ophelia,” to go with this post. If that sounds too serious, consider the description of the fairy tale’s light-minded princess: “. . .she would laugh like the very spirit of fun; only in her laugh there was something missing. . .I think it was a certain tone, depending upon the possibility of sorrow -- morbidezza, perhaps.”

“The Light Princess” is included in numerous other editions of MacDonald’s works, with illustrations by artists as famous as Maurice Sendak and actor Humphrey Bogart’s mother Maude Humphrey. But it’s also available online at
http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/George_MacDonald/The_Light_Princess/
Want to know more about George MacDonald? See
http://www.george-macdonald.com/
(Next Friday, a December of spirited adventures continues with Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Bridge of San Luis Rey.)

Adventure classics -- An ape and a gentleman

Is there a more perfect modern myth than Tarzan of the Apes?  Modern, at least, as in ninety-nine years old this year – Edgar Rice Burroughs’s masterwork was first published in magazine format in 1912.  The writer was born in 1875 and after enduring health problems and a series of low-paying jobs, tried his hand at fiction without having any illusions about his skill as an author.  He recalled later that “although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read. . . .”

My sister and I devoured Tarzan books during what would now be termed our years as middle grade readers.  All I remembered was the adventure, so that when I started to read one to my then middle grade daughter, I was shocked by how awful the writing was.  Not only were the books filled with the overwhelming bigotry and racism of their era, but Burroughs also seemed to have fallen under the spell of the deliberately archaic language that “good bad writer” Rudyard Kipling used in writing about children, indigenous people and animals.  Fortunately, excellence in writing isn’t needed for the art of myth making.

“The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art – the art of myth-making, is a species of the literary art,” C.S. Lewis wrote as editor of nineteenth-century fantasy writer George MacDonald’s works.  “. . . myth does not essentially exist in words at all (and) can coexist with great inferiority in the art of words.”

Perhaps it was because he only aimed to tell an entertaining tale, without worrying about literary excellence or burdening himself with excessive knowledge of his equatorial African setting that Burroughs attained such purity as a transmitter of myth.  The myth of the lost child who grew up to be Lord Greystoke but, still more wonderfully, king of the apes.  In that mythic realm, Burroughs has few rivals.

(The copyright of Tarzan of the Apes has expired in the United States, so I hope not to go to jail for reproducing its dust-jacket illustration here.  Does anybody dare share memories of books they once loved that they have to bowlderize now for family reading?)