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.
