I have been to England only twice, and both visits were brief. The first time, I went with an Army buddy while we were on leave from our base in West Germany during the Cold War. We stayed in London at a cheap B & B just off Russell Square (the word “cheap,” applied to an area which, today, is ludicrously pricey, indicates how long ago it was), and spent two days of hasty sightseeing (the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, etc.) before catching a train to Bristol, where one of my actor friends was working at the Bristol Old Vic Repertory Theatre.
And the second visit barely counts at all, unless you cling to the notion that Scotland is part of England, something that won’t endear you to the Scots. My girlfriend Patsy (now my wife) and I won a week in Edinburgh through a raffle sponsored by the American-Scottish Foundation (I’m related to the Douglas clan). We landed at Heathrow, took a taxi to King’s Cross railway station, and just caught jet-lagged glimpses of the English countryside during the trip north.
So I only know England through its history and, especially, its literature, in which I’ve wallowed joyfully ever since I learned to read. As a result, the England in my mind is something of an imaginary construct. But many of the literary Englands I encountered as a child were also imaginary, at least in part.
First, there was A. A. Milne’s benign, bucolic country, which included the Hundred Acre Wood where Christopher Robin played with Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, and Piglet. Then came the magical London of A. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins books; after that, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The latter seems a fairy tale at first glance – its hero is a lion, its villain a witch – but a closer reading shows it to be an idealized, but threatened England, first conceived by the writer in 1939, when a geniune German witch (warlock, rather) was bent on laying low the British Lion.
J. M. Barrie took me to an Edwardian London even more prim and proper than the real one, where middle class children were cherished (if rather absently), but required to be seen, not heard. Benign magic breaks into this England one night, when Peter Pan, The Boy Who Never Grew Up, appears outside the window of young Wendy Darling, and flies her and her little brothers away to Neverland, to join the Lost Boys, children so unseen and unheard by their parents that they finally vanished altogether.
As a child, I also read Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare, in a glorious 1907 edition with color illustrations by Arthur Rackham which had been a gift to my paternal grandmother when she was a young girl. It even retained the white tissue-guards bound into it to protect the pictures. That wonderful book led to an early dip into the plays themselves. Although at first most of the language was lost on me, with the Lambs’ book as a guide, I managed to figure out at least part of what the characters were saying, and the essences of the plots.
Later in life, I not only read all the plays with intense pleasure, I also acted in several of them, learning more about British history in the process. Shakespeare’s England, under Elizabeth I, was still scarred by the dynastic Wars of the Roses, but its blood-fertilized soil nourished the blooming of a culture unmatched by that of any other realm in Europe, with the qualified exception of equally bloody Renaissance Italy. And Shakespeare’s history plays provided me with a description of who did what, and with which, and to whom, during the period of turmoil. Of course the description was heavily biased in favor of the House of Tudor. After all, Queen Elizabeth Her Royal Self was Shakespeare’s patroness.
So King Richard III was impressed on my memory as a hunchbacked monster who murdered everyone who stood between him and the throne, including two innocent, adorable little boys. In sooth (as Shakespeare would put it), during his brief reign, Richard was an enlightened monarch, by the standards of the time, enacting laws which gave Parliament’s House of Commons more power to restrict the throne’s physical and financial exploitation of the third estate. But Henry Tudor (who almost certainly ordered the execution of the Yorkist princes in the tower after he became king) invaded England, leaving Richard no time to bring his reforms to fruition before he was killed on Bosworth field, the last English king to die in battle.
Plots and treachery, murder and mayhem, battles and betrayals: the England that took shape in my mind from Shakespeare’s plays was seldom “merrie”, save for comic interludes set mostly in taverns, which featured broadly- painted rustics and fools. Superstition figured prominently in the Bard of Avon’s Albion: the people were all officially Catholic, but the old paganism survived under the churchly veneer. People believed in fairies (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), magicians (The Tempest), ghosts (Hamlet), and witches (Macbeth). These powerful, capricious entities had to be heeded, and if possible, placated, or dire things would happen, if they hadn’t already. The world was ruled, not by the laws of God, but by the whims of a Goddess, Dame Fortune, who spun her wheel to determine the fate of all mortals. And she was deaf to all entreaties.
When I got around to reading Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, I entered a merrier England. The pilgrims on their way to the shrine of the martyred St. Thomas à Becket stop at an inn to eat heartily, drink deeply, and regale one another with stories, some bawdy, some scary, a few slightly didactic or moralistic, but all entertaining. Even the religious folks among them (the Nun and the Nun’s Priest) let their hair down a bit; the only stiff is also the only nobleman in the company, a knight who takes his rank and honor far too seriously (and is mocked gently for it by the Host).
It’s a jolly company, and Chaucer is an expert tale spinner. I read his Tales first in translation, but eventually learned enough Middle English to get through them comfortably. Though Chaucer wrote them down, people of his time who could read at all generally did so aloud, even when they were reading to themselves; silent reading only came in during the 17th century, when books began to become widely available. So when I go back over Chaucer’s tales, I try to sing out the words in my best approximation of late 14th-century English, as it’s been reconstructed by scholars using interior rhymes and scansion as clues. Sounds like broad Scots with a touch of Irish brogue.
The adventure into an earlier England and its language led me eventually to Beowulf. It’s written in West Saxon dialect, unintelligible to anyone who isn’t a serious scholar. So I’ve contented myself with modern English versions, such as the one published by E. Talbot Donaldson in 1966, and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s 2000 rendering.
But J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was a preeminent scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, and a translation of the poem was found among his papers after his death. His son has brought it out, and it’s a triumph. Tolkien keeps the alliteration, but instead of using poetic stanzas, he sets it as rhythmic prose, to preserve the impact of the original. Because of Tolkien’s fame as a fantasy writer, his version of Beowulf seems to be in great demand among readers expecting, perhaps, more Hobbits, Orcs, and Elves. They’re in for a grim surprise. Grendel makes the Orcs look like pussycats (at least Sauron’s soldiers didn’t eat people); his mother’s even worse; and Beowulf himself is a brutish mercenary, not an idealistic champion of the right like Aragorn. Eighth- century Britain was no Middle Earth.
I entered Tolkien’s fanciful version of England in the mid-sixties, when I was a sort of Orc myself, though hardly an enthusiastic one. I was serving out my sentence as a conscript in the U. S. Army, and my then-fiancée sent me the paperback editions of all four Tolkien books to cheer me up. They did, indeed. I shared them with the only other G.I. in my unit who had gone to college, and we learned how to say a few words in Tolkien’s invented Elvish language, using the glossary and pronunciation guide which appears at the end of The Return of the King. Elvish resembles Welsh, I’m told, because Tolkien also drew upon Wales’s national epic, the Mabinogion, when he was creating his masterpiece.
I also read both The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser’s chivalric allegory about Good Queen Bess, and Thomas Malory’s Arthurian romance Le Mort d’Arthur. High adventure and even higher sentiments abound; England was never idealized as gloriously as it is in these hifalutin works, except, perhaps, in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King. But I confess I’ve never been able to finish that long poem cycle. Too much Victorian fustian and folderol. I much prefer Malory’s original, and T. H. White’s later treatment of “The Matter of England,” The Once and Future King.
So my exploration of various legendary Britains has been fairly extensive, and inevitably, when I tried to create one of my own, I drew on the work of all my predecessors. I set it in a vaguely medieval version of the British Isles. I threw in a gallant, if slightly flawed knight, a villain who is part Tolkien’s Sauron and part Shakespeare’s Richard III, a damsel in distress, and a plucky youth. Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery, and although I haven’t stolen egregiously from the masters of the genre, my novel is nothing if not an homage to them.
However, as Tolkien said of The Lord of the Rings, “this tale grew in the telling.” And mine, entitled Albion, became gargantuan: a pair of linked trilogies that weighs in at almost 620,000 words. Perhaps it’s no wonder that I haven’t been able to interest a publisher in it so far. One of the few agents who deigned to respond to my query letter, synopsis, and sample chapters, told me she lost interest in it after the first chapter because my plucky youth wasn’t enough like Harry Potter. That statement puts the attitude of the contemporary commercial publishing industry in a nutshell, it seems to me.
Of course there’s electronic self-publishing, paddling laboriously up the Amazon River. I may have to resort to it, despite its many treacherous currents and hidden snags, if I want Albion to reach a wider readership than that comprised of my family and friends, who have been kind enough to read it in manuscript. But at 77, I don’t want to waste what’s left of my life setting up a website in order to publicize and sell the monster. I took pleasure in writing it, and that was that. I’ve already finished another novel and begun two more. I write because writing gives me a reason to get up in the morning, aside from attending to my private life with my wife, not because I labor under the delusion that I can make money at it. Writing keeps me interested in life. And as most people my age will affirm, staying alive depends on whether or not life remains interesting.
England is more a myth than a reality, in my mind. The better-educated Brits I’ve met understand the temptation to drift into fantasies about their country, because they are not entirely immune to it themselves, especially now that England is mired in financial scandals and beleaguered by the rise of far-right political groups which include neo-Nazis. Albion’s in a spot of trouble today, but John of Gaunt’s “sceptered isle” has always been cycling between boom and bust, war and peace, democracy and demagoguery. Perhaps it’s time for me to pay an extended visit to England and find out what’s really going on, insofar as that’s possible to even the best-intentioned of tourists. But meanwhile, I’m grateful for the inspiration that imaginary England has provided to my writing. Britannia still rules the waves of my dreams.
