Hope Mirrlees, ‘Lud-in-the-Mist’ (1926)
Hope Mirrlees is important for the development of Fantasy in the 20th century for her novel Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). It enjoyed only small success on initial publication and soon fell out of print, to be rediscovered by Lin Carter decades later and reissued in 1970 as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. The title had passed out of copyright, under the USA’s (then) laxer laws, and though Mirrlees was still alive — she did not die until 1978, at the ripe old age of 91 — Carter neither obtained her permission for the reprint, nor paid her any money. He later claimed he’d assumed she was dead. In one sense she was, for after a burst of literary activity in the early 1920s Mirlees had more-or-less stopped writing altogether after this, her third novel. The reprint meant that Lud-in-the-Mist was received into a world shaped by the explosion of interest in Tolkienian Fantasy — Lord of the Rings becoming first a campus hit and then a global bestseller in the 1960s, sparking a vogue for Tolkienian and post-Tolkienian fantasy. Mirrlees’ novel has perhaps been taken as ‘Fantasy’ of that stripe, though it is actually a very different kind of work to Tolkien. It’s a great novel, but much stranger than is sometimes thought.
Lud-in-the-Mist is set in an imaginary country called Dorimare, a small but prosperous trading nation somewhere between 17th-century Holland and 18th-century England: ‘a rich plain, watered by two rivers, [in which] a considerable variety of scenery and vegetation was to be found.’ To the west the landscape becomes ‘exotic’:
Nor was this to be wondered at, perhaps; for beyond the Debatable Hills (the boundary of Dorimare in the west) lay Fairyland. There had, however, been no intercourse between the two countries for many centuries. The social and commercial centre of Dorimare was its capital, Lud-in-the-Mist, which was situated at the confluence of two rivers about ten miles from the sea and fifty from the Elfin Hills. [ch 1]
A couple of centuries earlier, the burghers of Lud-in-the-Mist staged a revolution and overthrew the old feudal aristocracy. The last ruler, Duke Aubrey, fled, some say into Fairyland itself. A senate of respectable burghers now rule the city. But although Dorimare is ‘modern’ now, many in the population are romantically attached to the idea that Duke Aubrey will return. He figures in the popular imaginary as a kind of Jacobite King-Over-The-Waters, an Arturus Rex whose restoration will supposedly bring universal happiness. The authorities wish to clamp down on this. All dealings with fairyland are forbidden, on pain of death. But Fairyland still infiltrates Dorimare, in various ways. One, of importance to the story the novel tells, is smuggling-in fairy fruit. People ingesting these comestibles might sing and dance, lose their grip or their minds, speak out of turn, grow silly, uninhibited, run wild or even run off to join the fairies. Not only is such consumption illegal in Lud, even mentioning fairy fruit is regarded as an obscenity, an outrage to respectable society. The legal fiction that malefactors are being punished for ‘smuggling silk’ avoids the need even to name the unspeakable items.
But fruit isn’t the only thing. The novel’s main character, Master Nathaniel Chanticleer — a thoroughly respectable burgher, Mayor of Lud — was himself affected by the fairy-uncanny when, as a young man, he picked out a musical instrument in his lumber room: ‘a sort of lute ending in the carving of a cock’s head, its strings rotted by damp and antiquity.’ Playing this for his friends (“let’s see if this old fellow has a croak left in him!”) the strings give out ‘one note, so plangent, blood-freezing and alluring, that for a few seconds the company stood as if petrified’. This note recurs to Nathaniel at various moments through his life, piercing the dull ordinariness of his regular existence, unsettling him: he might hear it in a cuckoo’s call, in the murmur of a stream, or in songs overheard in the street.
For years that note was the apex of his nightly dreams; the point towards which, by their circuitous and seemingly senseless windings, they had all the time been converging. It was as if the note were a living substance, and subject to the law of chemical changes — that is to say, as that law works in dreams. For instance, he might dream that his old nurse was baking an apple on the fire in her own cosy room, and as he watched it simmer and sizzle she would look at him with a strange smile, a smile such as he had never seen on her face in his waking hours, and say, “But, of course, you know it isn’t really the apple. It’s the Note.”
The effect this intrusion of faerie on Nathaniel is, paradoxically, to make him more conventional and respectable: before he heard it he sometimes dreamed of travel and adventures:
But after he had heard the Note a more stay-at-home and steady young man could not have been found in Lud-in-the-Mist. For it had generated in him what one can only call a wistful yearning after the prosaic things he already possessed. It was as if he thought he had already lost what he was actually holding in his hands. From this there sprang an ever-present sense of insecurity together with a distrust of the homely things he cherished. With what familiar object — quill, pipe, pack of cards — would he be occupied, in which regular recurrent action — the pulling on or off of his nightcap, the weekly auditing of his accounts — would he be engaged when IT, the hidden menace, sprang out at him? And he would gaze in terror at his furniture, his walls, his pictures — what strange scene might they one day witness, what awful experience might he one day have in their presence?
Hence, at times, he would gaze on the present with the agonizing tenderness of one who gazes on the past: his wife, sitting under the lamp embroidering, and retailing to him the gossip she had culled during the day; or his little son, playing with the great mastiff on the floor.
This nostalgia for what was still there seemed to find a voice in the cry of the cock, which tells of the plough going through the land, the smell of the country, the placid bustle of the farm, as happening now, all round one; and which, simultaneously, mourns them as things vanished centuries ago.
And the crack in the tea-cup opens a lane to the land of the dead, as another writer put it, in a not unrelated work.
There are other intrusions from Fairyland in Mirrlees novel. When his son Luke becomes disaffected — the result, it is rumoured, of him actually eating the forbidden fairy fruit — Nathaniel takes the advice of his doctor, Endymion Leer, and sends him for a change of air to stay at a country farm. This farm is close to the borderlands of Fairy, and though it is in itself part of the ordinary, normal world it attracts strange visitors. For instance, there is old Portunus the weaver, ‘a wizened old man with very bright eyes’. Others see in Portunus only a kindly old fellow ‘always ready to lend a helping hand to the maids — to break or bolt hemp, to dress flax, or to spin. And when their work is over to play them tunes on his fiddle.’ But Luke notices something else about him that the others don’t seem to see: ‘sitting by the fire when he thinks no one is watching him roasting little live frogs and eating them’. Portunus’ fiddle plays a uncanny music, to which folk are compelled to dance hectic wild dances. Or take Endymion Leer (a frequent visitor to the farm, as well as being a Ludite doctor): might he be some kind of emissary or agent from fairyland, smuggling fairy fruits into the city, singing strange sings, intoxicating and variously unsettling the Ludite citizenry?
One way of taking Lud-in-the-Mist would be in terms of the dynamic between the forces of respectable Lud and the wild, romantic, uncanny, alarming or enchanting forces of faerie. Lud insists it has banished faerie altogether. When an antiquarian publishes a book that suggests otherwise — Traces of Fairy in the Inhabitants, Customs, Art, Vegetation and Language of Dorimare — it causes outrage: ‘the printer was, of course, heavily fined, but he was unable to throw any light on its authorship. The manuscript, he said, had been brought to him by a rough, red-haired lad, whom he had never seen before. All the copies were burned by the common hangman, and there the matter had to rest.’
King Lud is the mythological founder of London: and we can take Lud-in-the-Mist as a more romantic, a more ‘fairy’, version of London-in-the-Fog. There’s nothing of Dickens’s busy urban grotesque in Mirrlees’ representation of the city (although there are various Dickensian touches throughout the novel: names, characterisation, and plotting) but there’s much about England and Englishness in the novel’s imaginary kingdom. Although, actually, I found myself thinking Lud might be a different town to the Smoke. It is not on the coast, for one thing — fittingly for a novel about how bourgeois facticity is compromised by the mirage and fantasy of faerie, Lud is inconstantly described as being ten miles [ch 1] and twenty miles [ch 2] west of the sea. More, Lud stands on the confluence of two rivers, the large Dawl flowing down from the north, and the much smaller Dapple, which ‘had its source in Fairyland’ to the west and ‘played no part in the commercial life of the town’— though there is a Dorimare maxim repeated several times in the book: ‘never forget that the Dapple flows into the Dawl.’ But this doesn’t sound like London, which is a major sea port (or used to be) and has one big river running through. It does, however, sound like Reading (further than 20 miles inland from the sea — but then again, England is proportionately bigger than Dorimare) which has both the ‘big’ Thames running through it out of the north and the smaller from-the-west Kennet. I note that Mirrlees died in Goring, which is a leafy Thameside suburb of Reading. But perhaps this is a stretch: I introduce it less for its Berkshire specifics, and more because the two rivers upon whose confluence Reading stands — ‘never forget that the Kennet flows into the Thames’ — are, I would argue, as I do in this old, rather indecent blogpost, gendered: a father river and a mother river. A patriarchal logic and a womanly fertility. And that’s at play in Lud-in-the-Mist, as a novel, too.
One objection to the ‘Lud-is-Reading’ thesis is that Mirrlees, despite dying on its outskirts, had no particular connection with that town. She grew up in South Africa (her father owned an extremely profitable sugar business there: Mirrlees herself never wanted for money) and Scotland, studied Greek at Cambridge, and then lived in London and Paris, hobnobbing with the Bloomsbury set — Virginia Woolf was a friend; so was T S Eliot. She entered into a close relationship with the eminent classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, who had taught her at Newnham. Presumably they were lovers, although Mirrlees scholars seem strangely hesitant to say so. Certainly they were a couple, living, travelling and working together, though Harrison was forty years Mirrlees’ senior. Julia Briggs, in her Dictionary of National Biography article, captures something of the flavour or their menage.
In 1910 Mirrlees went up to Newnham College, Cambridge, having already met the great classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, who became her tutor. Hope became deeply attached to her and, in turn, became Jane’s favourite pupil. After Hope went down in 1913 the two remained in close contact, living together, writing to each other in a private language in different personae, sometimes as the elder and younger walrus, or else as the two wives of ‘the Old One’, Jane’s ancient teddy bear … Mirrlees’ first novel, Madeleine, one of Love’s Jansenists (1919), set in the seventeenth century among the circle of précieuses around Mme de Scudéry (who fancies herself as ‘Sappho’) … seems to be a roman à clef recording Mirrlees’s flirtation with Left Bank lesbianism. As a young woman, Hope was striking, with dark hair, bright blue eyes, and a beautiful voice. Virginia Woolf described her as ‘her own heroine — capricious, exacting, exquisite, very learned, and beautifully dressed’.
Not sure how many male subjects of the attention of the Dictionary of National Biography get assessed on their pulchritude and dress-sense, mind you (Briggs, in the later in the article, says: ‘Hope Mirrlees grew heavy [after Harrison’s death in 1928], with a booming contralto and a passion for dogs’). But the importance of Harrison to Mirrlees life and writing, or hers to Harrison’s, can hardly be underestimated. And it’s an exercise I can leave up to the reader to set the alluring but unsetting — to respectable bourgeois sensibilities — draw of lesbianism, as against the patriarchal normative heterosexual structures of tradition, against the story that Mirrlees has written in this novel.
One way of doing this is to treat the novel as a midrash upon Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862). It’s clear enough that Rossetti’s story is the source for Mirrlees’ ‘fairy fruit’ storyline, with fairies in the place of goblins; and Goblin Market is often read as a masterpiece of same-sex desire, of female bonding, and a dismantling of patriarchal authority. It is also, as I argue in this old blog post, a spiritual, Dantean work. Something of the same is true of Lud-in-the-Mist, I think.
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Lud-in-the-Mist is not, despite its fame (its belated post-1970 fame) a very well understood novel. Exhibit A:
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, published in 1926, and first reprinted in 1970 in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. It is a deceptively simple book, telling of the town of Dorimare, some of whose people have been afflicted by the eating of fairy fruit, an act now regarded as a crime. Dorimare is located by the confluence of two rivers, one of which has its origins beyond the Debatable Hills in Fairyland. A few centuries earlier, fairy things had been looked upon with reverence, but at the time of this tale anything related to Fairyland is considered an obscenity. The Mayor, Nathaniel Chanticleer, has long repressed his yearnings to go to Fairyland but now must go in order to save his own son. Mirrlees skillfully weaves a spell in this novel to show that the inner life of the imagination, represented by faery, has as much value as the outer life of the everyday. [Douglas A. Anderson, ‘Fairy Elements in British Literary Writings in the Decade Following the Cottingley Fairy Photographs’ Mythlore, 32:1 (2013), 9]
I don’t mean to dunk-on Anderson particularly, but, as a paragraph of critical prose, this is just awful. Never mind the substantive errors — (the town is not called ‘Dorimare’, that’s the country: the town is called Lud-in-the-Mist, as per the novel’s title; Chanticleer, though he does travel to rescue his son, never goes as far as Fairyland itself: only into the borderlands) — the whole ‘take’ here is jejune. ‘Deceptively simple’ means ‘this novel seems simple on the surface, but is actually more complicated when you look more deeply into it’. But Lud-in-the-Mist is not simple on the surface. There’s much going on in the narrative, the characters are complex and sometime contradictory, the prose shifts from plainness to poetry, from declarative and summative statements to passages of philosophising and resonant mysticism; the storyline swaps between Fantasy adventure to a Scottian ‘smugglers’ romance to a whodunit murder-mystery. More, the claim the novel ‘shows that the inner life of the imagination, represented by faery, has as much value as the outer life of the everyday’ entirely misses what faerie means, how faerie figures, in the book, and in Mirrlees conception of the world. The opposition Lud-in-the-Mist makes, quite explicitly, is between the logic of faery and the logic of the law, with the latter being in its way just as imaginative and mythic, certainly just as fictional, as the former (I say more about this below). To reduce Mirrlees rich, mythopoeic, bewitching, rebarbative novel to a simplistic kindergarten moral about the ‘importance of an imaginative inner life in the ordinary men and women of today’s everyday’ is not just to distort, it is wholly to miss the point.
Fairyland is Fantasy, the uncanny other, the source of romantic thrill and scare, the exciting and alarming. But Fairyland is also: the past, the pre-Modern: Nathanial first starts to suspect that Leer is an agent of Fairyland when he hears the ‘note’ in his voice, and remembers the fellow’s antiquarian interests — we discover that he was the secret author of the academic study previously banned in Lud.
A strange fellow, Leer! The Note had once sounded in his voice. Where did he come from? Who was he? Nobody knew in Lud-in-the-Mist. And, then, there were his antiquarian tastes. … the past was dim and evil, a heap of rotting leaves. The past was silent and belonged to the Silent People. [ch 12]
The Silent People are the fae, of course. They are not ‘the past’ in the abstract, they are Taylorian porous subjectivity — as opposed to our present’s buffered identities. They are, as Alan Jacobs points out in his excellent essay on his novel, Henry James Sumner Maine’s ‘status’ old-world rather than today’s ‘contractual’ levelling.
Like many other fantasy writers, Mirrlees is interested in what happens if the power of Fairyland cannot be wholly excluded from our well-buffered society. In this case, we see what happens when magic begins to creep back into well-ordered and well-buffered lives. To figure this as essentially a drug war — an inevitably unsuccessful attempt to prevent the smuggling of what one character in the story significantly calls the “commodity“ of fairy fruit — is a wonderful conceit and developed with delightful panache, tracing an elegantly oscillating line between the economic and the metaphysical.
… What happens at the end of the book is a restoration of magic to Dorimare and Lud-in-the-Mist. In this sense, the end of the story might be thought to resemble that of The King of Elfland‘s Daughter, in which Elfland, which had previously “ebbed” or withdrawn itself from our world, rushes back to enclose the kingdom of Erl, making it a region of Elfland. But in Mirrlees’s tale, that’s not quite how things work out. The once and future mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, Nathaniel Chanticleer, restores Dorimare’s friendship with Fairyland and not only makes fairy fruit freely available rather than legally prohibited but indeed suggests, as does his friend Ambrose Honeysuckle, that everyone eat it … But (here perhaps we should recall Woolf’s description of Mirrlees as a “prickly & perverse young woman”) Master Nathaniel’s radical policy does not result in in Dorimare’s being absorbed into Fairyland. Rather, there is a kind of negotiated contract between the two worlds that in many ways confirms, rather than refutes or overcomes, the mercantile and capitalist character of Dorimare. Fairy fruit becomes so plentiful in Dorimare that it can’t all be eaten, and the people of Dorimare extend their commercial influence by learning how to produce candied fairy fruit, which they then export to the whole world. We witness not the absorption of Dorimare into a magical world but rather the triumph of its commercial expertise and ambition. Fairy fruit becomes indeed a commodity.
This conclusion is one of the most fascinating things about Lud-in-the-Mist. The ‘whodunit’ strand to the novel (the farm at which young Luke stays is owned by a widow, perhaps in league with Fairyland: but did she murder her husband? — read on to find the solution to this mystery!) is also a passage from uncertainty to certainty, from mystery to solution. The same could be said of the Scottian smuggler adventure element: how is the fairy fruit being brought into Lud? Secret passageways, sacks weighted to bob just below the surface of the water, coffins apparently for burial but actually packed with contraband: all the thriller adventure novel feints. It’s not that it’s not narratively satisfying to read these mysteries and follow-through on their solutions — for it is — it’s that such procrustean solutionising ought, surely, to be anathema to the logic of Fairy. And yet, in Mirrlees’ novel, it isn’t. The novel brings the two logics together in a wonderfully satisfying way.
In Mirrlees’ second novel, the un-fantastical The Counterplot (1923), a young woman, Teresa Lane, daughter of a well-to-do English family — something of a bluestocking, on the road to spinsterhood, stiff in society but with a vibrant inner life (Mirrlees’ self-portrait) — observes her family and friends during a summer spent in their country house: their games and love-affairs and religious observances, eventually translating their interactions into a play (the play is included, as the finale of the novel). Teresa is particularly fascinated by the potency of fairy tales, and the banality and emptiness of much Modern discourse. At one point she reads Calderon’s ‘Autos Sacramentales’, registering her disappointing that they are too in thrall to their religious allegory, ‘the characters abstractions — Grace, the Mosaic Law, and so on’. What works for Theresa is a fantasy that is rooted in the materiality of existence:
I knew, of course, that [Calderon’s Autos] were written in glorification of the Eucharist and that they were bound to be symbolic, and ‘flowery and starry,’ and all the rest of it — but the unregenerate part of me — I suppose it’s some old childhood’s complex — has a secret craving for genre. Every fairy story I read when I was a child was a disappointment till I came upon Morris’s Prose Romances, and then at last I found three dimensional knights and princesses, and a whole fairy countryside where things went on happening even when Morris and I weren’t looking at them: cows being milked, horses being shod, lovers wandering in lanes; and one knew every hill and every tree, and could take the short cut from one village to another in the dark. And I’d hoped, secretly, that the Autos were going to be a little bit like that … that the characters would be at once abstractions — Grace, the Mosaic Law, and so on — and at the same time real seventeenth century Spaniards, as solid as Sancho Panza, gossiping in taverns, and smelling of dung and garlic. [Mirrlees, The Counterplot, 122]
This, I think, is what Mirrlees herself attempted in Lud-in-the-Mist: ‘an Auto that was at once realistic and allegorical,’ as Teresa says here. It is one of the great successes of Lud-in-the-Mist that the reader does indeed comes to feel she knows every hill and every tree, and could take the short cut from one village to another in the dark. This beautifully detailed and rendered world, its solid ordinariness threaded through with the glamour and terror of Fairyland, is also about Grace I think, and redemption: temptation in the form of those Edenic fruit; Chanticleer with his cock-crow name facing down three denials before he is able to recover the lost the children (Markus Bockmuehl: ‘the image of Peter and the rooster summons up not only thoughts of remorse and repentance, but also resurrection and renewal: the cock’s crow projects into the dark night of Maundy Thursday the bright daylight of Easter Sunday renewal.’)
This also, I think, explains the curious, or at least unusual, generic path Mirrlees followed, with but not of the Bloomsbury set, a Modernist and not a Modernist. Mirrlees is famous, in some quarters, for her fractured Modernist long poem Paris (1920), an influence on Eliot’s Waste Land. But she is hardly a canonical Modernist, and one reason for that, I think, is that she took seriously — took to heart — the mythological underpinnings that other Modernists (Joyce’s Homeric allusions, Eliot playing with Jessie Weston) treated only as structural or allusive scaffolds. Here is John T. Connor:
It might seem hard to find a place for fairy lore in the modern, metropolitan fabric of High Modernism, but one of the more interesting aspects of Mirrlees’s oeuvre is the way it reconnects contemporary intellectual-historical and social concerns — secularization, disenchantment, the disintegration of community — to their Romantic conceptual hinterlands. Mirrlees insists on aligning the neo-Romantic sociology and anthropology of her own moment with its post-Enlightenment prehistory, exploring the analogy between the cultural politics of modernist primitivism and Romanticism’s own investment in the cultural forms it perceived as prior. Mirrlees shows a deep knowledge of the romance-revival work of Bishop Percy and Richard Hurd, the Ossian controversy and the romance inflection of the Romantic-era novel.
She is a major example of the antiquarian aspect that runs through Modern Fantasy, from its Scott- and Scott-inspired start through to the antiquarian Fantasy of Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell. See also Terry Pratchett’s comic inhabitation of this mode: his use of footnotes, his interest in the past, his play with literary allusion and pastiche. I mention Pratchett because Mirrlees strikes me as, inter alia, a comic writer: there is a sly, sometimes black humour in all her novels. Connor goes on:
Those factors that make Mirrlees most resistant to critical and curricular incorporation — her scholarly habitus, her social conservatism, her critical eclecticism — need not be read to her discredit. In the antiquarian’s naïve nominalism, her overcharged relationship to the historical particular, there is something that refuses easy translation into presentday terms of relevance. Though Mirrlees shared with Harrison an interest in social transformation and in the fate of communities writ both large and small, she is at her most lyrical when describing the residua of history. Not one to hope overmuch for the future, Mirrlees nonetheless fantasizes a future technology that would allow her to “listen in” on forgotten voices from the past. She imagines herself tuning in to the “kaleidoscope of sounds” that echo in the “waste places of the universe” and wonders whether, perhaps just once, she would happen to catch “the words of some dead lover” (89). This is an erotic relation to the past premised on the individual chance encounter and the frisson of a queer touch across time. If this is a model of recovery, it does not insist on the recapture of the lost object, but rather celebrates its momentary evanescence. [John T. Connor, ‘Hope Mirrlees and the Archive of Modernism’ Journal of Modern Literature, 37:2 (2014), 181]
Sandeep Parmar [‘Introduction’, Hope Mirrlees: Collected Poems (Carcanet 2011)] quotes something Jane Harrison said, as influential upon Mirlees art:
I have elsewhere tried to show that Art is not the handmaid of Religion, but that Art in some sense springs out of Religion, and that between them is a connecting link, a bridge, and that bridge is Ritual.
In her 1914 study Mythology, Jane Harrison makes a number of quite large claims. Myth, she says, is Greek (and more broadly, oriental) and not Roman:
Some decades ago it was usual to call Greek gods by Roman names. For Athena we said Minerva, for Eros Cupid, for Poseidon Neptune. This baleful custom is now happily dead. We now know that till they borrowed them from the Greeks the Romans never had in the strict sense of the word any gods at all. They had vague demonic beings, impersonal, ill defined, and these beings they called not dei (gods) but numina (powers). The Romans in the strict sense were never iconists, such was not the genius of their race; they did not personify, did not create personalities, hence they could not tell stories about persons, could not create myths; they had little or no mythology. [Harrison, Mythology (1914), 12]
‘The Roman numen is devoid of human characteristics,’ says Harrison. ‘He has not even sex, or at least his sex is indeterminate. How indefinite the numen is, is seen in the old prayer formula in which appeal is made to spirits, sive mas sive femina “whether he be male or female.” These vague spirits or numina were associated with particular places and were regarded with vague feelings of awe inclining towards fear rather than love.’ She quotes Varro (‘the Romans worshipped their gods without images’) and contrasts the Greeks, who. she says ‘knew they were iconists’.
The primitive Pelasgians, equally with the more civilized Greeks, worshipped some form of divinity, they “offered sacrifice,” they had ritual. But of what they sacrificed to, they had no clear conception. Their divinities were not individualized, they had not human forms, they were not called by proper names such as Zeus and Athena… it is true that man only at a late stage attributes complete personality to the thing he worships. Personality comes with the giving of animal or human form. Before anthropomorphism (human form), before theriomorphism (beast form) we have a stage of animism when the gods are intangible forces dwelling anywhere and everywhere. They become real gods when man localizes them, gives them definite form and enters into fixed relations with them. Then only, when from Powers they become Persons, can they have a Mythology.
Without a mythology there is no story. I’m less interested in whether Harrison is right about this in a larger sense (though I have my doubts: for a culture of non-iconists the Romans surely produced a great deal of notable sculpture, architecture, design and, in their greatest poets, vivid and powerful iconographic writing), and more as a gloss on Lud-in-the-Mist. For this is a novel very artfully rendered into concrete, visualisable forms. Especially when she is describing gardens or open country, Mirrlees achieves impressionistic or even Fauvist effects. In the Chanticleers’ garden: ‘doves, with the bloom of plums on their breasts, waddling on their coral legs over the wide expanse of lawn, to which their propinquity gave an almost startling greenness … and the Dapple itself, stained like a palette, with great daubs of colour reflected from sky and earth, and carrying on its surface, in autumn, red and yellow leaves which may have fallen on it from the trees of Fairyland, where it had its source.’ Or here, the narrator talks of trees:
All the world over we are very conscious of the trees in spring, and watch with delight how the network of twigs on the wych-elms is becoming spangled with tiny puce flowers, like little beetles caught in a spider’s web, and how little lemon-coloured buds are studding the thorn. While as to the long red-gold buds of the horse-chestnuts — they come bursting out with a sort of a visual bang. And now the beech is hatching its tiny perfectly-formed leaves — and all the other trees in turn.
And at first we delight in the diversity of the colours and shapes of the various young leaves — noting how those of the birch are like a swarm of green bees, and those of the lime so transparent that they are stained black with the shadow of those above and beneath them, and how those of the elm diaper the sky with the prettiest pattern, and are the ones that grow the most slowly.
Then we cease to note their idiosyncrasies, and they merge, till autumn, into one solid, unobtrusive green curtain for throwing into relief brighter and sharper things. There is nothing so dumb as a tree in full leaf. [ch 3]
Dumb in the sense of silent — as with the silent ones. Mirrlees prose is here, perhaps a little self-consciously, doing that thing poetry does: estrange a familiar thing into beauty. This, in essence, is Fairyland, the presence of the Fae in the everyday.
Mirrlees Fairyland is not, in the idiom of contemporary Fantasy, worldbuilt. It is a place, a locus numen, but the novel doesn’t go there. We are not given its society, the character of individual fairies — their kings and queens, their modes of habitation, all the stuff that Tolkien gives us with regard to his elves. We are given their songs, rituals, requirements, but only as these things bleed through into the ordinary world of mundanity. They are the Silent People. Though they are drawn into the logic of mythology, and disposed into story , it seems to me relevant that the story structures of the novel are, in effect, modern-ones: a Scottian smuggling adventure, like Redgauntlet; a 20th-century whodunit like Agatha Christie. And it is surely relevant that the numen becomes, at the end, not only absorbed into modernity but commodified and sold around the world.
Richard Lane, the father of the family whose doings comprise the topic of The Counterplot (1924), frets during breakfast over the various irritations in his life: constrained by his wife and children, unhappy with his friendships, uncertain about his mistress. Above all he worries about getting old: ‘Good Lord! He would be fifty-seven his next birthday — the age his father was when he died. It seemed incredible that he, “Little Dickie,” should be the age of his own father.’ But then he settles into reading a novel — it’s not named in the book, but it is clearly a thriller of the Greenmantle or Riddle of the Sands kind:
Damn them! Damn them! He didn’t feel old — and that was the only thing that mattered. He stuck out his chin obstinately, put on his eyeglasses again, and, returning to his novel, was very soon identified, once more, with the hero, and hence — inviolate, immortal, taboo. Whether hiding in the bracken, or lurking, disguised, in low taverns of Berlin, what had he to fear? For how could revolvers, Delilahs, aeroplanes, all the cunning of Hell or the Wilhelm Strasse, prevail against one who is knit from the indestructible stuff of shadows and the dreams of a million generations? He belonged to that shadowy Brotherhood who, before Sir Walter had given them names and clothed them in flesh, had hunted the red deer, and followed green ladies, in the Borderland — not of England and Scotland, but of myth and poetry. As Hercules, he had fought the elements; as Mithras, he had hidden among the signs of the Zodiac; as Osiris, he had risen from the dead.
No; the hero of these romances cannot fall, for if he fell the stars would fall with him, the corn would not grow, the vines would wither, and the race of man would become extinct. [Mirrlees, The Counterplot (1924), 62]
Mirrlees’ tone here is balanced between a kind of amused mockery — this kind of potboiler is the closest the philistine Lane ever approaches to ‘culture’ or ‘art’ — and genuine articulation, a great truth of art — of ritual (such as the conventions of genre storytelling) and narrative, of myth and therefore of religion. Later in the book Richard’s daughter Teresa can’t understand what her flirtatious younger sister Concha sees in her boyfriend, dully conventional Rory Dundas.
What did she see in him? He was completely without intellectual distinction; he had a certain amount of fancy, of course, but fancy was nothing — nearly all young Englishmen had fancy — a fancy fed by Alice in Wonderland, and the goblin arabesques on the cover of Punch; a certain romantic historical sense too that thrills to Puck of Pook’s Hill and The Three Musketeers — oh yes, and, unlike Frenchmen, they probably all cherish a hope that never quite dies of one day playing Anthony to some astonishingly provocative lady — foreign probably, passionate and sophisticated as the heroine of Three Weeks, mysterious as Rider Haggard’s She. But all that is just part of the average English outfit — national, ubiquitous, undistinguished, like a sense of humour and the proverbial love of fair play.
Yes; their minds were sterile, frivolous … un-Platonic — that was the word for expressing the lack she felt in the emotional life of the Rorys, the Ebens, and all the rest of that crew; un-Platonic, because they could not make myths. For them the shoemaker at his last, the potter at his wheel, the fishwives of the market-place, new-born babies and dead men, never suddenly grew transparent, allowing to glimmer through them the contours of a stranger world. For them Dionysus, whirling in his frantic dance, never suddenly froze into the still cold marble of Apollo. [92–93]
Mirrlees is deploring Modernity, here; but she is also pointing up her own praxis as a writer, the recuperation of precisely that mythology into modernity: Lud-in-the-Mist is not just a novel in which quotidian solidities grow transparent, allowing to glimmer through them the contours of a stranger world — it is a novel about that process, that haunting.
Fairyland is delusive. But so is modernity, in its way. Towards the end of the novel Nathaniel Chanticleer delivers a big speech, recalling something his own father had said:
“But you remember what my father said about the Law being man’s substitute for fairy fruit? Fairy things are all of them supposed to be shadowy cheats — delusion. But man can’t live without delusion, so he creates for himself another form of delusion — the world-in-law, subject to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts to his heart’s content, and says, “If I choose I shall make a man old enough to be my father my son, and if I choose I shall turn fruit into silk and black into white, for this is the world I have made myself, and here I am master.” And he creates a monster to inhabit it — the man-in-law, who is like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly as he is expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than are the fairies.’ [ch 17]
Lud-in-the-Mist does not posit a linear supercession of past by present model. There’s something more dialectical at work in its juxtaposition of rational Modernity and fae-porous Past, each haunting the other. As he speaks, Nahaniel looks up at the portrait of his father, the late Master Josiah:
No, there had certainly been nothing fantastic about Master Josiah. And yet … there was something not altogether human about these bright bird-like eyes and that very pointed chin. Had Master Josiah also heard the Note … and fled from it to the world-in-law? Then he went on: “But what I’m going to say now is my own idea. Supposing that everything that happens on the one planet, the planet that we call Delusion, reacts on the other planet; that is to say, the world as we choose to see it, the world-in-law? Supposing then, that one planet reacts on the other, but that these reactions are translated, as it were, into the terms of the other? To take an example, supposing that what on one planet is a spiritual sin should turn on the other into a felony? That what in the world of delusion are hands stained with fairy fruit should, in the world-in-law, turn into hands stained with human blood?’
Fantasy is not an escapism into the magical world of the past, into marvellous dimension of wonder: it is, precisely, the mutuality of past and present, of the wondrous and the rational, of status and contract, of porous awe (shading into terror) and buffered legalist rationality. Each construes the other. Lud-not-to-be-Missed.
