I'm a mess of history with a sincere desire for you to love me
I had occasion this afternoon to mention Carol Kendall's The Gammage Cup (1959) and realized that I have never really written about it. It is one of the books that would almost certainly have been formative had I discovered it in childhood; instead I found it in early high school and still loved it. These days I have much less love for the climactic battle with the Mushrooms—it's a sharp escalation of violence in an otherwise lightly satirical, ticky-tacky-toned fable and feels intrusively pseudo-Tolkien—but I love more every time an element I first noticed almost fifteen years ago, namely that while nonconformists who become heroes are one of the staples of children's literature, Kendall is nuanced about the ways in which people do not conform.
We are introduced early on to the usual suspects of Slipper-on-the-Water, the tenth of the twelve villages scattered along the banks of the Watercress River where for eight hundred and eighty years the Minnipins have dwelt in the Land Between the Mountains:
There were three Minnipins in the village who were usually referred to by their neighbors as "Oh, Them." "They" were not considered respectable; They were a law among themselves; They lived alone instead of marrying and raising families, as normal Minnipins did; worst of all, They flaunted cloaks of such an outlandish hue that it was shaming to be seen talking to them. Furthermore, the "Oh, Thems" didn't properly work at anything: Walter the Earl spent his time digging holes in the ground in his ridiculous search for hidden treasure; Curley Green was usually to be seen sitting on her stool in a corner of the marketplace, blobbing pictures onto stretched reed paper; and Gummy—well, Gummy was bone-idle.
Specifically, Gummy spends his time composing and just as often communicating in rhyming "scribbles," so differentiated from "proper poems" because they deviate from the official model just as Curley Green's "blobs" of figurative watercolors fly in the face of the rigorously geometric style of painting that has prevailed in Slipper-on-the-Water for the last four hundred and forty years, ever since the founder of the village's first family returned in triumph from his adventures in the Land Beyond the Mountains, bequeathing his descendants a museum's worth of curiosities, a unique set of curiously punctuated names, and the last word on tradition and propriety—a narrative vigorously disputed by Walter the Earl, whose long-sought treasure is the lost history of the Minnipins. His cloak is a gold-embroidered heirloom, Gummy's a sun-colored affront to decent watercress-green, Curley Green's an even more provocative scarlet, like the door of her house which isn't watercress-green, either. Every white-plastered house has its well-polished silver doorknob, its well-trimmed reed-thatched roof, its well-watered willow tree growing out front. It's not, like, Camazotz, but so far, so Malvina Reynolds. In such a neatly conservative atmosphere, a couple of eccentric artists and a revisionist historian are pretty much the counterculture a reader of the American 1950's would expect. Hence the introduction of Muggles and Mingy, whose misfitness is more complicated and complementary and, honestly, intensely relatable.
Insofar as the novel singles out a protagonist among the five eventual Outlaw-Heroes of Slipper-on-the-Water, it's Muggles, whose mode of not conforming is initially presented as a matter of failure, not resistance. The village candymaker and the closest thing the shrine-like museum has to a docent, she's been bullied all her life into thinking of herself as simpleminded and scatterbrained instead of an inspired lateral thinker with +10 logistics and a style of housekeeping best aligned under chaotic good. (She can find anything so long as she doesn't put it away.) Her personal preference of a bright orange sash is tolerated as a benign indulgence, her tentative disagreements with the Council of Periods treated as the corrupting influence of Them, a condescending denial of her originality even though in some ways she's the most radical of them all:
"What I mean is," she went on, "well, I don't think it's doors or cloaks or . . . or orange sashes. It's us. What I mean is, it's no matter what color we paint our doors or what kind of clothes we wear, we're . . . well, we're those colors inside us. Instead of being green inside, you see, like other folk. So I don't think maybe it would do any good if we just changed our outside color. We would still be . . . be orange or scarlet inside, and, well, we would do orange and scarlet things all the time, and everybody would still—"
Watching her grow into her convictions and comfort in her own unapologetically orange inside provides the most satisfying emotional arc of the novel, not to mention several of its best callouts. My favorite character remains the least obvious of the outlaw-heroes, Mingy.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants once described him as "the town's angry, petty socialist accountant" and I do not essentially dispute this sketch. He's the farthest thing imaginable from an eccentric artist, the perpetually scowling money keeper with a deserved reputation as a curmudgeon and a rather more unjust one as a miser—he is at constant odds with the council over the disposition of the village's funds, but he's fed to the teeth watching them paid out for superficial projects like scalloping the fringe of every roof in Slipper-on-the-Water when he's argued in vain for necessary public works like repairing the dock or establishing a sick fund "to take care of folk when they have bad luck or can't work." (If the Land Between the Mountains industrializes in his lifetime, I fully expect him to organize its first union.) Even so, as much as he's laughed at for it, he's an elected official and he carries the force of societal disapproval or at least compliance when he warns Muggles not to get herself in trouble "hobnobbing with Them." His cloak may be shabby, but it's sensibly cress-green. And yet when Slipper-on-the-Water works itself into a moral panic sufficient to outlaw its iconoclasts, Mingy not only seats himself deliberately on the more or less literal equivalent of the Group W Bench, he walks out with Muggles after the rest of Them and, until the pseudo-Tolkien overtakes the plot, wholeheartedly throws himself into life in an on-the-fly commune, right down to rejecting any notion of money. As Muggles blossoms in her differently organized fashion, he matches her in his grouchy integrity; they make one of the rare romantic couples in children's literature that I believe and uncritically cheer for and neither of them needs to belong to the avant-garde, because community organizers deserve love, too. He does sing, badly and happily, when he thinks no one's listening.
As far as I know, Kendall wrote only the three Minnipin novels; I don't actually care all that much for the sequel The Whisper of Glocken (1965) except for its perspective on the heroes of The Gammage Cup, but I adore the prequel The Firelings (1981) with its fantastic volcanic folklore:
At its appointed time, the sun bobbed out of the Swollen Sea and brought to life the Scars of Cherrychoke that stood in the nest of Belcher's collarbone high above the village. One by one, like a procession of elders, the angular shafts of rock cast their shadows against Belcher's right shoulder: Old Crank and Wotkin; then Ashlar with the long-tailed rat on his head; obsequious Sadiron bowing and scraping to Toplady; several minor figures known as dworkins; and last of all and most important, Skopple Guy of the Hand. It was said that as long as Skopple Guy extended his arm above the pillow, so long would Firelings endure.
I wish The Gammage Cup ended without feeling like it detoured through a less interesting children's fantasy on the way, but the things it does well, I return for. Like universal healthcare and finding things according to their pile on the floor. And afterward I always want some watercress and trout.
We are introduced early on to the usual suspects of Slipper-on-the-Water, the tenth of the twelve villages scattered along the banks of the Watercress River where for eight hundred and eighty years the Minnipins have dwelt in the Land Between the Mountains:
There were three Minnipins in the village who were usually referred to by their neighbors as "Oh, Them." "They" were not considered respectable; They were a law among themselves; They lived alone instead of marrying and raising families, as normal Minnipins did; worst of all, They flaunted cloaks of such an outlandish hue that it was shaming to be seen talking to them. Furthermore, the "Oh, Thems" didn't properly work at anything: Walter the Earl spent his time digging holes in the ground in his ridiculous search for hidden treasure; Curley Green was usually to be seen sitting on her stool in a corner of the marketplace, blobbing pictures onto stretched reed paper; and Gummy—well, Gummy was bone-idle.
Specifically, Gummy spends his time composing and just as often communicating in rhyming "scribbles," so differentiated from "proper poems" because they deviate from the official model just as Curley Green's "blobs" of figurative watercolors fly in the face of the rigorously geometric style of painting that has prevailed in Slipper-on-the-Water for the last four hundred and forty years, ever since the founder of the village's first family returned in triumph from his adventures in the Land Beyond the Mountains, bequeathing his descendants a museum's worth of curiosities, a unique set of curiously punctuated names, and the last word on tradition and propriety—a narrative vigorously disputed by Walter the Earl, whose long-sought treasure is the lost history of the Minnipins. His cloak is a gold-embroidered heirloom, Gummy's a sun-colored affront to decent watercress-green, Curley Green's an even more provocative scarlet, like the door of her house which isn't watercress-green, either. Every white-plastered house has its well-polished silver doorknob, its well-trimmed reed-thatched roof, its well-watered willow tree growing out front. It's not, like, Camazotz, but so far, so Malvina Reynolds. In such a neatly conservative atmosphere, a couple of eccentric artists and a revisionist historian are pretty much the counterculture a reader of the American 1950's would expect. Hence the introduction of Muggles and Mingy, whose misfitness is more complicated and complementary and, honestly, intensely relatable.
Insofar as the novel singles out a protagonist among the five eventual Outlaw-Heroes of Slipper-on-the-Water, it's Muggles, whose mode of not conforming is initially presented as a matter of failure, not resistance. The village candymaker and the closest thing the shrine-like museum has to a docent, she's been bullied all her life into thinking of herself as simpleminded and scatterbrained instead of an inspired lateral thinker with +10 logistics and a style of housekeeping best aligned under chaotic good. (She can find anything so long as she doesn't put it away.) Her personal preference of a bright orange sash is tolerated as a benign indulgence, her tentative disagreements with the Council of Periods treated as the corrupting influence of Them, a condescending denial of her originality even though in some ways she's the most radical of them all:
"What I mean is," she went on, "well, I don't think it's doors or cloaks or . . . or orange sashes. It's us. What I mean is, it's no matter what color we paint our doors or what kind of clothes we wear, we're . . . well, we're those colors inside us. Instead of being green inside, you see, like other folk. So I don't think maybe it would do any good if we just changed our outside color. We would still be . . . be orange or scarlet inside, and, well, we would do orange and scarlet things all the time, and everybody would still—"
Watching her grow into her convictions and comfort in her own unapologetically orange inside provides the most satisfying emotional arc of the novel, not to mention several of its best callouts. My favorite character remains the least obvious of the outlaw-heroes, Mingy.
skygiants once described him as "the town's angry, petty socialist accountant" and I do not essentially dispute this sketch. He's the farthest thing imaginable from an eccentric artist, the perpetually scowling money keeper with a deserved reputation as a curmudgeon and a rather more unjust one as a miser—he is at constant odds with the council over the disposition of the village's funds, but he's fed to the teeth watching them paid out for superficial projects like scalloping the fringe of every roof in Slipper-on-the-Water when he's argued in vain for necessary public works like repairing the dock or establishing a sick fund "to take care of folk when they have bad luck or can't work." (If the Land Between the Mountains industrializes in his lifetime, I fully expect him to organize its first union.) Even so, as much as he's laughed at for it, he's an elected official and he carries the force of societal disapproval or at least compliance when he warns Muggles not to get herself in trouble "hobnobbing with Them." His cloak may be shabby, but it's sensibly cress-green. And yet when Slipper-on-the-Water works itself into a moral panic sufficient to outlaw its iconoclasts, Mingy not only seats himself deliberately on the more or less literal equivalent of the Group W Bench, he walks out with Muggles after the rest of Them and, until the pseudo-Tolkien overtakes the plot, wholeheartedly throws himself into life in an on-the-fly commune, right down to rejecting any notion of money. As Muggles blossoms in her differently organized fashion, he matches her in his grouchy integrity; they make one of the rare romantic couples in children's literature that I believe and uncritically cheer for and neither of them needs to belong to the avant-garde, because community organizers deserve love, too. He does sing, badly and happily, when he thinks no one's listening.As far as I know, Kendall wrote only the three Minnipin novels; I don't actually care all that much for the sequel The Whisper of Glocken (1965) except for its perspective on the heroes of The Gammage Cup, but I adore the prequel The Firelings (1981) with its fantastic volcanic folklore:
At its appointed time, the sun bobbed out of the Swollen Sea and brought to life the Scars of Cherrychoke that stood in the nest of Belcher's collarbone high above the village. One by one, like a procession of elders, the angular shafts of rock cast their shadows against Belcher's right shoulder: Old Crank and Wotkin; then Ashlar with the long-tailed rat on his head; obsequious Sadiron bowing and scraping to Toplady; several minor figures known as dworkins; and last of all and most important, Skopple Guy of the Hand. It was said that as long as Skopple Guy extended his arm above the pillow, so long would Firelings endure.
I wish The Gammage Cup ended without feeling like it detoured through a less interesting children's fantasy on the way, but the things it does well, I return for. Like universal healthcare and finding things according to their pile on the floor. And afterward I always want some watercress and trout.
no subject
I do like what you say about Mingy--he sounds like a character I would like very much. I would have a harder time with the first three iconoclasts, and I'm neutral on Muggle.
The story of nonconformism that I really love is The Dubious Hills. I appreciate that its nonconformity was nuanced and that it respected its conformity (even while centering the nonconformists).
But there's room for more than one story in the world, thank goodness!
no subject
I am glad to have helped satisfy your curiosity! It was one of the books I didn't know anyone else had read until LJ/DW. Has no fandom on AO3, which surprised me slightly. Maybe it just feels like a comfortably closed canon.
I do like what you say about Mingy--he sounds like a character I would like very much.
My natural reaction is, what's not to like?
I would have a harder time with the first three iconoclasts, and I'm neutral on Muggle.
Because free-spirited artists are the most popularly represented kind, or some other reason?
I do like Muggles as a character; I also like the +10 logistics. She turns out to be the person hardheaded enough to pull a commune together on more than the level of open-air ideals and had no idea until she was given the challenge. That is not usually the day-saving skill set in this subgenre.
(I would be a hard sell on the pseudo-Tolkien for several reasons no matter what, but it doesn't help that I enjoy so much the stretch of the book where the outlaw-not-yet-heroes are figuring out how to live without an entire village economy to rely on: they have supplies, but the supplies are going to run out, and the weather is fine, but the seasons are going to turn, and since they don't know that the plot will oblige them to reunite with Slipper-on-the-Water for its own safety, they have to assume that they'll be living on the knoll by the Little Trickle for the foreseeable future if not the rest of their lives. Which means they need watercress beds and a fishing weir and a quern and a soapworks and a loom and a spinning wheel and a house with an actual roof on it and . . . I fully believe they'd have been independently sustainable by the end of the summer, too.)
But there's room for more than one story in the world, thank goodness!
There is! I should re-read The Dubious Hills; I don't think I have since college.
You might like The Firelings. It's the most ambitious and the most successfully complex of Kendall's fantasies; it has no real villain beyond the indifferent natural phenomenon of volcanism and its characters are complicated whether the reader likes them or not. Its religion is also well-handled as I recall, which cannot be taken for granted when human sacrifice is part of the plot.
no subject
And yeah: regarding the other iconoclasts, exactly. I know that creative types *are* often outsiders and iconoclasts, but it's an often-told story, and I'm especially sick of it when it's paired with "oh these awful stick-in-the-mud hidebound types who can't possibly appreciate my free spirit." Even though, I grant you, that's the sort of situation a lot of artistic, laterally thinking people do have to grow up in. (.... But you know, even then, even for those people, I feel like it's worth the effort to try see beyond Oh what fuddy-duddies, all insisting on using circular muffin tins instead of star-shaped ones.)
no subject
The sustainability planning totally reminds me of the relevant sections of Taran Wanderer—the outlaw-heroes don't get as far as weaving, smithing, or ceramics, but if left to themselves they would have. I also just don't read that many books in which people figure out how to grind their own flour.
But yes! That's a whole different, deserving-in-and-of-itself story type that definitely doesn't need a whole Heroic Battle plot grafted onto it.
I suspect the heroic battle plot came about because (a) it was Kendall's first fantasy for children (b) the outlaw-heroes needed to do something to save Slipper-on-the-Water and it didn't occur to her to make the danger a natural disaster instead of an invading enemy (c) Tolkien. The Mushrooms are functionally goblins right down to the swords that shine in their presence and there's nothing to do about it. Kendall was one of the first generation of post-Tolkien fantasists—ahead of Alan Garner, Lloyd Alexander, or Joy Chant; The Gammage Cup was not the first strictly defined fantasy to be recognized by the Newberys, but we're talking predecessors like My Father's Dragon (1948) or The Blue Cat of Castle Town (1949) or Charlotte's Web (1952)—so for all I know it read less glaringly at the time, but nowadays it really does glare and at least for me obscures slightly the actual points of the story. By the time of The Firelings, she does not have this problem.
(.... But you know, even then, even for those people, I feel like it's worth the effort to try see beyond Oh what fuddy-duddies, all insisting on using circular muffin tins instead of star-shaped ones.)
To be fair to The Gammage Cup, the repression faced by the original Them is less a matter of unmotivated conservatism and more that their iconoclasm directly challenges the authority of the Periods. Gummy's poems and Curley Green's paintings don't follow the templates brought back by their illustrious ancestor from the Land Beyond the Mountains, which have been promoted for generations as the only proper approach to these arts; Walter the Earl's antiquarian researches inherently threaten to rewrite the history of Slipper-on-the-Water when again for centuries the Periods have been in control of the narrative which naturally favors their right to be in charge. (It interests me that Kendall in the 1950's wrote a children's novel with such a strong emphasis on questioning received history: it was such a decade for American myth-making.) The Periods themselves are not dystopian overlords; they are the big fish of a small town, complacent until they start to feel defensive and then they double down on squashing whatever might cast them in the wrong, even if it means overlooking a real threat from outside the village in favor of blaming the manufactured boogeyman of the weirdos in their midst. There is a suburban feel to Slipper-on-the-Water which I suspect is another factor of the decade: the objection to the color of Curley Green's door could come straight from an HOA, even more so when the Periods really get into the importance of nice clean lawns and everyone's trees being pruned into irreproachable, artificial neatness. (The latter occurs after the outlaws have already left town, otherwise Mingy might have completely blown a fuse.) Other villagers fall on a spectrum from agreeing with the Periods to sympathizing with Them to waffling somewhere around the middle depending on how things are going and who's watching at the time. So the conflict doesn't feel as strawmannish to me as if it were simply a matter of traditionalists vs. innovators—the ending observes that traditions can be worth keeping even if they started as mistakes—but you are still not required to have it work for you.
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Like, it's not Bulgakov, but for a children's book of its generation it does a decent job representing the reasons some people want so much to be able to say who's normal and who's not—and on which side they fall, of course. Which is yet another reason the pseudo-Tolkien bothers me more every time, because except for the theme of everyone pulling together regardless of differences, it's orthagonal to all of these questions. It's not quite like two different novels got twisted up together, but it really does zigzag badly, not in the inspired way of Muggles realizing that her brain has put the necessary answer together for her without bothering to show its work.
PS Firelings
Re: PS Firelings
It's an excellent volcano! Mudpots, geysers, and full-bore eruptions. I hope you can find a copy and that you enjoy it when you do! It really should not be out of print.