Smoky House (1940) was Elizabeth Goudge's first novel for children and fortunately she got better, but I am fascinated that for her first outing she tried a sentimental and redemptive fable of fairies, angels, and wise animals riffing so strongly on Kipling's "A Smuggler's Song" (Puck of Pook's Hill, 1906) that it contains not only the brandy and tobacco, the parson and the clerk, the laces and the spy and the doll all the way from France, but its own ballad of looking the other way. The results are an incredibly mixed bag. Not even chapter by chapter, but scene by scene the tone careens between merry adventure, moral instruction, and treaclous levels of twee. The high-wire numinous intermingling of Fairy and Paradise which is the foundation of The Valley of Song (1951) gets a foreshadowing in this novel's household-helpful Good People and the Angel-of-the-Left-Hand-Back-Bedpost, but their metaphysics are nowhere near as successfully blended, especially when Goudge is still classing the old gods among the unseelie company of the moor-haunting Bad People. The Christianity overall is much stickier than I associate with her work, whose bedrock Anglicanism elsewhere shows no difficulty in coexisting with various strains of folk magic, classical myths, and even the zodiacal, elemental hierarchies of mysticism or ritual magic. Here it seems primarily a matter of praying very nicely, which isn't even how it works in her adult novels to this point:
Faith, as no doubt you have discovered, is a very powerful force. If you believe sufficiently firmly that something nice is going to happen to you it generally does happen. Your faith is like a fishing rod with a hook on the end. You can reach out with it and hook the thing that you want towards you.
Lady, if there were any virtue in the power of positive thinking, my excitement at discovering a hitherto unread children's Goudge in the Malden Public Library earlier this week would have made this book much better than it is. The language is consistently charming to lovely, especially when describing the natural world or music or the less precious manifestations of angels and fairies. The youngest of the five children is a believable eight-year-old who communicates preferentially through such disruptive and eloquent noises as cats-on-the-roof, cork-coming-out-of-a-bottle, squeaking-slate-pencil, and lions-roaring-after-their-prey, failing which she will just yell. The best of the three animals is a magnificently rotten-tempered jennet who can scent the thoughts in a human mind as if catching them on the wind and will unerringly eat the most cherished bush of flowers in any garden. The most poetry in the story clusters ironically around its least pleasant character, the sharply secretive Fiddler whose misery radiates off him as mystifyingly as the beauty of his playing which is likened to the music of Pan and the angels and can gladden any listener but himself:
He was certainly worth looking at. He was unusually tall and thin, and dark not with the russet colouring of the West Country but with the unfamiliar sallow darkness of a foreigner . . . And when West Country people speak of a foreigner they don't necessarily mean someone born in a foreign land, but just some one not born in the West Country . . . His eyes were very black, set in deep pits of shadow, and seeming to be without light even when he smiled. His face, lean and hard, looked half-starved, and his lips had a bitter twist to them. His clothes were mad and gay; a bright blue coat, an orange scarf twisted round his throat, a black hat with a wide curly brim; but torn and shabby and mud-splashed. He wore gold rings in his ears and red ribbons fluttered from his fiddle.
Much later, when he is thinking over his life with something more than his usual embittered self-justification, the animals who are his only audience think that his regret smells like violets. That kind of poignant, poetically unexpected detail taps much more into Goudge's strengths than cutely informing the reader that the mer-people, despite being the prettiest of all the fairies, are also the stupidest because spending so much time in the sea is like having a perpetual cold in the head. I am guessing she panicked over the youth of her audience, since Island Magic (1934) which is shot through with fairy lore has no equivalent propensity toward saccharine, but it means that when she writes of the world under the roots of the trees of which humans can merely dream and even the best of dogs is permitted only a day, its caverns roofed with glow-worms and curtained with green leaves, its inhabitants occupied with the immortal work of caring for their subterranean charges of foxes and rabbits and moles, it bounces off Arthur Rackham and Richard Dadd and comes to rest, with an infant mole being taught to say its prayers, with Brian Jacques. It really does feel like a dry run for the Valley of Song—flower fairies who take care of the flowers, and insect fairies who look after the butterflies and bees and things, and tree fairies and bird fairies and animal fairies—and if she needed to write one in order to get to the other, since the other was a formative book of my childhood I am glad that she did, but the power and the weirdness are not there yet in Smoky House. I am much more persuaded by the idea of music being like time in that nothing is ever lost in it. And if it is apparent that many of the novel's whimsies do not land for me, I genuinely like the punch line to the otherwise tiresomely moralizing discovery that money gained by theft cannot be redistributed even with good intent without passing at least a minor misfortune on:
And the next day there would be rumours all over the countryside that the-Man-with-the-Handkerchief had been seen again, that a rich traveller had been robbed up on the high moors, and that a poor traveller had had a bag of money thrown at his feet by the unseen hand of a Good Person, and had heard a voice saying from behind a heather-covered hillock, "Pick this up if you don't mind having spots."
tl;dr the novel is minor Goudge and I am not sorry to have read it, especially its sketch-forms of ideas she would much more creatively return to, but I am probably not its target audience beyond its intertextuality—for good measure, there are echoes also of Shakespeare and Yeats—and being a sucker for certain character trajectories even when didactically written. I finished it and went and re-read the Pharaoh Lee stories out of Kipling's Rewards and Fairies (1910) and will re-read some other Goudge as soon as I can borrow it. I like having a library in my life which reminds me of the ones in my childhood, whether it furnishes me with the same kind of favorites or not.
Faith, as no doubt you have discovered, is a very powerful force. If you believe sufficiently firmly that something nice is going to happen to you it generally does happen. Your faith is like a fishing rod with a hook on the end. You can reach out with it and hook the thing that you want towards you.
Lady, if there were any virtue in the power of positive thinking, my excitement at discovering a hitherto unread children's Goudge in the Malden Public Library earlier this week would have made this book much better than it is. The language is consistently charming to lovely, especially when describing the natural world or music or the less precious manifestations of angels and fairies. The youngest of the five children is a believable eight-year-old who communicates preferentially through such disruptive and eloquent noises as cats-on-the-roof, cork-coming-out-of-a-bottle, squeaking-slate-pencil, and lions-roaring-after-their-prey, failing which she will just yell. The best of the three animals is a magnificently rotten-tempered jennet who can scent the thoughts in a human mind as if catching them on the wind and will unerringly eat the most cherished bush of flowers in any garden. The most poetry in the story clusters ironically around its least pleasant character, the sharply secretive Fiddler whose misery radiates off him as mystifyingly as the beauty of his playing which is likened to the music of Pan and the angels and can gladden any listener but himself:
He was certainly worth looking at. He was unusually tall and thin, and dark not with the russet colouring of the West Country but with the unfamiliar sallow darkness of a foreigner . . . And when West Country people speak of a foreigner they don't necessarily mean someone born in a foreign land, but just some one not born in the West Country . . . His eyes were very black, set in deep pits of shadow, and seeming to be without light even when he smiled. His face, lean and hard, looked half-starved, and his lips had a bitter twist to them. His clothes were mad and gay; a bright blue coat, an orange scarf twisted round his throat, a black hat with a wide curly brim; but torn and shabby and mud-splashed. He wore gold rings in his ears and red ribbons fluttered from his fiddle.
Much later, when he is thinking over his life with something more than his usual embittered self-justification, the animals who are his only audience think that his regret smells like violets. That kind of poignant, poetically unexpected detail taps much more into Goudge's strengths than cutely informing the reader that the mer-people, despite being the prettiest of all the fairies, are also the stupidest because spending so much time in the sea is like having a perpetual cold in the head. I am guessing she panicked over the youth of her audience, since Island Magic (1934) which is shot through with fairy lore has no equivalent propensity toward saccharine, but it means that when she writes of the world under the roots of the trees of which humans can merely dream and even the best of dogs is permitted only a day, its caverns roofed with glow-worms and curtained with green leaves, its inhabitants occupied with the immortal work of caring for their subterranean charges of foxes and rabbits and moles, it bounces off Arthur Rackham and Richard Dadd and comes to rest, with an infant mole being taught to say its prayers, with Brian Jacques. It really does feel like a dry run for the Valley of Song—flower fairies who take care of the flowers, and insect fairies who look after the butterflies and bees and things, and tree fairies and bird fairies and animal fairies—and if she needed to write one in order to get to the other, since the other was a formative book of my childhood I am glad that she did, but the power and the weirdness are not there yet in Smoky House. I am much more persuaded by the idea of music being like time in that nothing is ever lost in it. And if it is apparent that many of the novel's whimsies do not land for me, I genuinely like the punch line to the otherwise tiresomely moralizing discovery that money gained by theft cannot be redistributed even with good intent without passing at least a minor misfortune on:
And the next day there would be rumours all over the countryside that the-Man-with-the-Handkerchief had been seen again, that a rich traveller had been robbed up on the high moors, and that a poor traveller had had a bag of money thrown at his feet by the unseen hand of a Good Person, and had heard a voice saying from behind a heather-covered hillock, "Pick this up if you don't mind having spots."
tl;dr the novel is minor Goudge and I am not sorry to have read it, especially its sketch-forms of ideas she would much more creatively return to, but I am probably not its target audience beyond its intertextuality—for good measure, there are echoes also of Shakespeare and Yeats—and being a sucker for certain character trajectories even when didactically written. I finished it and went and re-read the Pharaoh Lee stories out of Kipling's Rewards and Fairies (1910) and will re-read some other Goudge as soon as I can borrow it. I like having a library in my life which reminds me of the ones in my childhood, whether it furnishes me with the same kind of favorites or not.
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