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So very sure his father was always, of the right and the wrong
This time last year, I was on a plane returning from D.C., enthusiastically underslept and thinking about Sherlock. This year, my god-daughter's birthday was Arisia Saturday and one of us needs to cross state lines in the near future. She is three years old now; I am informed there was a pirate party. I should just have recorded myself singing "Captain Kidd" or something.
Desktop note! This one dates from April 2010, when it looks as though I promised it to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
asakiyume as an expansion on comments ("By the same token, a few months ago I re-read The Grey King for the first time in literally I don't know how many years and realized that while I could have reconstructed the basic plotline, numerous visual and mythological details, and even quoted some of the text from memory, I had not at all remembered a major supporting character past his plot function and I was flabbergasted, because he was precisely the sort of character I would have expected to imprint on") and then failed to follow through, the usual. I was prompted to dig it up again by something genarti said at the YA panel "Strong Stories with Strong Parents" on Sunday. We were both talking about Owen Davies.
Having just finished Susan Cooper's The Grey King (1975) for the first time in literally I don't know how many years, I find it interesting to note that Owen Davies was not part of the story I remembered. White-haired Bran with his tawny owl's eyes, yes; I am not going to forget his parentage or his harp-playing or the choices he made and the first time I read the book in a slant of sunlight on my grandparents' downstairs couch in Maine, I started immediately trying to apply his Welsh pronunciation guide to all the names in the Prydain Chronicles—I make a point of the voiced dental fricative in "Fflewddur" to this day, even knowing Lloyd Alexander didn't. Cafall with the silver eyes that see the wind, yes, because it is in the poem; and whose hound he was named for, because it is part of Bran. I remembered John Rowlands, although mostly because he reappears in Silver on the Tree (1977), and I remembered Caradog Prichard vividly, because he is Cooper's most convincing depiction of the Dark in human form. (He makes no bargains, he summons nothing, he is not a fallen angel or even a tragic figure like Hawkin; he is a small-minded, spiteful, quick-angering man who nearly does murder over a meaningless grudge and destroys himself for it anyway. And once he wanted to be a poet, so he braved the night up on Cader Idris. He genuinely disturbs me.) I didn't remember the riddles under Craig yr Aderyn, but I remembered the sky-blue, hooded lord of the Dark. The Brenin Llwyd and his milgwn. At least one of the sheepdogs' names. But Bran's foster-father? Looking at him now, I would have expected to him to stick: "the familiar drab Owen Davies with his humourless, slightly guilty air," who for three days was loved by Arthur's Guinevere and for eleven years has been a father to her son, not quite as successfully as either of them might have hoped. That is exactly the sort of character-in-the-corners-of-things that under normal circumstances I re-read for. He was a surprise to me.
I suppose it's appropriate; he's introduced as a nonentity.
"How do you do, young man?" Bran's father came forward, holding out his hand; his gaze was direct and his handshake firm, though Will had an immediate curious feeling that the real man was not there behind the eyes. "I am Owen Davies. I have been hearing about you."
"How d'you do, Mr. Davies," said Will. He was trying not to look surprised. Whatever he had expected in Bran's father, it was not this: a man so completely ordinary and unremarkable, whom you could pass on the street without noticing he had been there. Someone as odd as Bran should have had an odd father. But Owen Davies was all medium and average: average height, medium-brown hair in a medium quantity; a pleasant, ordinary face, with a slightly pointed nose and thin lips; an average voice, neither deep nor high, with the same precise enunciation that Will was beginning to learn belonged to all North Welshmen. His clothes were ordinary, the same shirt and trousers and boots that would be worn by anyone else on a farm. Even the dog that stood at his side, quietly watching them all, was a standard Welsh sheepdog, black-backed, white-chested, black-tailed, unremarkable. Not like Cafall: just as Bran's father was not at all like Bran.
He's not a bad father; he loves Bran, but he has never been able to express it except through the kind of protectiveness (trying to use chapel on Sundays and non-conversation the rest of the week to keep his son away from the mysteries of the Light and the mists of the Brenin Llwyd, because even if he won't admit it out loud, he knows who his Gwennie was) that only makes Bran feel more of a freak, caged away from a normal kid's life with his tight-lipped deacon of a father. And it is Owen's religion which has bent him into "the usual expression of alarmed propriety," his conviction that his love for Bran's mother was a sin and so the faint, always undercurrent of shame or constraint in their relationship that Bran can't help but pick up on and feel is somehow his fault. You could change very little about this setup and he'd be the counterpart to Caradog Prichard, like the two chessboard figures of the Riders in Silver on the Tree: the Dark pressing in through greed on one side and denial on the other. But Cooper has a great deal of sympathy for him, which comes out first in the stories John Rowlands and Jen Evans tell about his past ("He had never loved anyone much before. Very shy, was Owen. It was like a dam bursting . . . With a man like that, it is dangerous—when at last he loves, he gives all his heart without care or thinking, and it may never go back to him for the rest of his life"), so that Will forgets his millennia of inherited experience for a minute and marvels at "this mist of romance surrounding dim, ordinary Owen Davies," and then the ways in which he keeps on surprising the youngest of the Old Ones. He is less vague than he seems; he hears the things Will doesn't say, he follows Bran, he stands with him against Prichard and the powers of the Grey King. He will probably be a lot less of a parental fuck-up from now on. But he's still an odd, regretful character, less Ector than Pellinore, and while his son may stand someday beside his Pendragon father, Owen's Gwennie never will come back to him. The last lines of the book are the echo of his loss.
He wasn't in my head at all. I'm glad to have him back.
My story "The Boy Who Learned How to Shudder" is in this anthology. I am greatly looking forward.
Desktop note! This one dates from April 2010, when it looks as though I promised it to
asakiyume as an expansion on comments ("By the same token, a few months ago I re-read The Grey King for the first time in literally I don't know how many years and realized that while I could have reconstructed the basic plotline, numerous visual and mythological details, and even quoted some of the text from memory, I had not at all remembered a major supporting character past his plot function and I was flabbergasted, because he was precisely the sort of character I would have expected to imprint on") and then failed to follow through, the usual. I was prompted to dig it up again by something genarti said at the YA panel "Strong Stories with Strong Parents" on Sunday. We were both talking about Owen Davies.Having just finished Susan Cooper's The Grey King (1975) for the first time in literally I don't know how many years, I find it interesting to note that Owen Davies was not part of the story I remembered. White-haired Bran with his tawny owl's eyes, yes; I am not going to forget his parentage or his harp-playing or the choices he made and the first time I read the book in a slant of sunlight on my grandparents' downstairs couch in Maine, I started immediately trying to apply his Welsh pronunciation guide to all the names in the Prydain Chronicles—I make a point of the voiced dental fricative in "Fflewddur" to this day, even knowing Lloyd Alexander didn't. Cafall with the silver eyes that see the wind, yes, because it is in the poem; and whose hound he was named for, because it is part of Bran. I remembered John Rowlands, although mostly because he reappears in Silver on the Tree (1977), and I remembered Caradog Prichard vividly, because he is Cooper's most convincing depiction of the Dark in human form. (He makes no bargains, he summons nothing, he is not a fallen angel or even a tragic figure like Hawkin; he is a small-minded, spiteful, quick-angering man who nearly does murder over a meaningless grudge and destroys himself for it anyway. And once he wanted to be a poet, so he braved the night up on Cader Idris. He genuinely disturbs me.) I didn't remember the riddles under Craig yr Aderyn, but I remembered the sky-blue, hooded lord of the Dark. The Brenin Llwyd and his milgwn. At least one of the sheepdogs' names. But Bran's foster-father? Looking at him now, I would have expected to him to stick: "the familiar drab Owen Davies with his humourless, slightly guilty air," who for three days was loved by Arthur's Guinevere and for eleven years has been a father to her son, not quite as successfully as either of them might have hoped. That is exactly the sort of character-in-the-corners-of-things that under normal circumstances I re-read for. He was a surprise to me.
I suppose it's appropriate; he's introduced as a nonentity.
"How do you do, young man?" Bran's father came forward, holding out his hand; his gaze was direct and his handshake firm, though Will had an immediate curious feeling that the real man was not there behind the eyes. "I am Owen Davies. I have been hearing about you."
"How d'you do, Mr. Davies," said Will. He was trying not to look surprised. Whatever he had expected in Bran's father, it was not this: a man so completely ordinary and unremarkable, whom you could pass on the street without noticing he had been there. Someone as odd as Bran should have had an odd father. But Owen Davies was all medium and average: average height, medium-brown hair in a medium quantity; a pleasant, ordinary face, with a slightly pointed nose and thin lips; an average voice, neither deep nor high, with the same precise enunciation that Will was beginning to learn belonged to all North Welshmen. His clothes were ordinary, the same shirt and trousers and boots that would be worn by anyone else on a farm. Even the dog that stood at his side, quietly watching them all, was a standard Welsh sheepdog, black-backed, white-chested, black-tailed, unremarkable. Not like Cafall: just as Bran's father was not at all like Bran.
He's not a bad father; he loves Bran, but he has never been able to express it except through the kind of protectiveness (trying to use chapel on Sundays and non-conversation the rest of the week to keep his son away from the mysteries of the Light and the mists of the Brenin Llwyd, because even if he won't admit it out loud, he knows who his Gwennie was) that only makes Bran feel more of a freak, caged away from a normal kid's life with his tight-lipped deacon of a father. And it is Owen's religion which has bent him into "the usual expression of alarmed propriety," his conviction that his love for Bran's mother was a sin and so the faint, always undercurrent of shame or constraint in their relationship that Bran can't help but pick up on and feel is somehow his fault. You could change very little about this setup and he'd be the counterpart to Caradog Prichard, like the two chessboard figures of the Riders in Silver on the Tree: the Dark pressing in through greed on one side and denial on the other. But Cooper has a great deal of sympathy for him, which comes out first in the stories John Rowlands and Jen Evans tell about his past ("He had never loved anyone much before. Very shy, was Owen. It was like a dam bursting . . . With a man like that, it is dangerous—when at last he loves, he gives all his heart without care or thinking, and it may never go back to him for the rest of his life"), so that Will forgets his millennia of inherited experience for a minute and marvels at "this mist of romance surrounding dim, ordinary Owen Davies," and then the ways in which he keeps on surprising the youngest of the Old Ones. He is less vague than he seems; he hears the things Will doesn't say, he follows Bran, he stands with him against Prichard and the powers of the Grey King. He will probably be a lot less of a parental fuck-up from now on. But he's still an odd, regretful character, less Ector than Pellinore, and while his son may stand someday beside his Pendragon father, Owen's Gwennie never will come back to him. The last lines of the book are the echo of his loss.
He wasn't in my head at all. I'm glad to have him back.
My story "The Boy Who Learned How to Shudder" is in this anthology. I am greatly looking forward.
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Re: pirates: SteelyKid, who is 4.5, is also a big fan, thanks to a less-awful-than-usual animated TV show which has the fictional multiverse's least-pirate-like pirates. (Chad's theory is that they're pirating digital entertainment, which is why gold keeps appearing out of thin air.) I thought about bringing some dollar coins home from the T change machine, but decided she wouldn't actually recognize them as real money so it wouldn't be worth it.
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I'm still surprised I didn't remember him—so many of my favorite characters were not children/YA when I was a child and Owen especially has that distracted, past-caught, unexpectedly sharpening quality that tended to interest me. What I remembered was that Bran had an adoptive father in the present day, he was in the story somewhere. And the rest of it, bzzzt. I'm wondering now what else from the other books I've missed.
thanks to a less-awful-than-usual animated TV show which has the fictional multiverse's least-pirate-like pirates. (Chad's theory is that they're pirating digital entertainment, which is why gold keeps appearing out of thin air.)
Hee. Which show is this?
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(Note that I have no strong feelings about Peter Pan to be offended by this version of Neverland.)
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I'd also love to hear you sing "Captain Kidd". Or maybe a variant thereof...man, I miss having those fools in my head.;)
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Thank you! It has tentacle sex.
Or maybe a variant thereof...man, I miss having those fools in my head.
They seem to be doing all right on your Tumblr.
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The tragedy of Caradog Prichard is that he must know perfectly well that he isn't a poet. Must have known that from the moment he walked off of Cader Idris. Would have heard the voice of the mountain: you are a man who is doomed to break himself for petty little things not worthy of the legends. Being condemned to small-mindedness is a self-fulfilling prophecy; it's no wonder he lashes out any way he can, especially at anything with potential for greatness. I suspect, though, that it was his choice to mingle malice with his madness. A better man could have been Tom O'Bedlam and got round to poetry that way. Hubris, yes, that he tried the mountain at all, but not all hubris is punished quite so thoroughly.
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Magical places are always bloody like that, aren't they.
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hafod, gorsedd, dwr, fflam
and the chains the words bear
and the colours of them shining
in the dark on the top of Cadair
cadair, whose chair, whose seat now?
and the sea under the moon
and all the old heroes
Sulis, Aneirin, Gwion Fach
little repetition piglets, mad in the far wood
and the way the words tie thoughts to sound
gweli, gwynt, y gwynt ar drws bob bore...
in the real wind whipping tears
out across the drowned lands all the way
Cartref Gwaelod, whose home now?
to Harlech where the men y dyn
where the words ripped and rippled
both his tongues, and some of them were flame.
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I don't think so at all. Thank you for it.
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It's like every time I re-read Peter Shaffer's Amadeus: leaving aside all questions of historicity (because Shaffer mostly did), I wonder if anyone ever sees the play and identifies with Mozart, because Salieri is so perfect a portrait of all the things an artist feels or fears about themselves at three o'clock in the morning or whatever hour of the day, staring at the screen or the page: I can hear that, I can't make it happen. I feel less kindly toward Prichard for it, though. I'm not sure how hard he kept trying.
I suspect, though, that it was his choice to mingle malice with his madness. A better man could have been Tom O'Bedlam and got round to poetry that way.
It strikes me that he has one moment of poetry, in among all the low-grade nastiness and the high-octane channeling of the Dark, and it's when he's speaking of Gwen: "A lovely thing out of the mountains she was, with a face like a flower, and fingers that made music out of that little harp she carried like no music you ever knew before . . ." And he tried to rape her, so that's what that was worth.
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You also begin to notice that whenever Salieri says "and then, a miracle happened," what he really means is "and then, something bad happened to somebody I envy."
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Thank you. [edit] FUCK OFF TINY WITTGENSTEIN.
I'm boggling at the tentacle sex!
I think it works! The editor seems to agree with me!
(The story was published originally in Sirenia Digest #9, so.)
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Edit a book on Susan Cooper and put those guys in it.
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I don't know if this is the best thing about knowing a critic of children's literature, but it really doesn't hurt.
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The bit about ("He had never loved anyone much before. Very shy, was Owen. It was like a dam bursting . . . With a man like that, it is dangerous—when at last he loves, he gives all his heart without care or thinking, and it may never go back to him for the rest of his life") reminds me intensely of this bit from Tanglefoot's Stone Fences:
"They say he got too close to his one and only lover
She came in like a fireship touched his soul with her flaming sails
Then she slipped away on a summer storm"
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No, but now I'm not likely to forget!
(I will almost certainly re-read the series now that I'm thinking about it. I haven't straight through since 2010, if then. I might have skipped around.)
reminds me intensely of this bit from Tanglefoot's Stone Fences
I shall need that song, I think.
That is a very appropriate icon. It occurs to me now that someone must have written also about Cooper's Gwen/Guinevere, and I haven't read any of it, and I'd like to.
[edit]
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I actually helped run a two hour Arthur roundtable with music and scholarship last year at Lunacon that was a lot of fun. Sadly, I missed out half of it, but for very good reasons.
I can't find the song on YouTube, but there is a DropBox with your name on it.
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Congratulations! Looks a brilliant anthology, that.
I make a point of the voiced dental fricative in "Fflewddur" to this day, even knowing Lloyd Alexander didn't.
And well you should. It's a bit funny, as I don't speak Welsh at all, but I suppose it's on account of what gets done to Irish on a regular basis, but I feel like thanking you for this, although at the same time I amn't at all sure it's the thing to say.
I should just have recorded myself singing "Captain Kidd" or something.
I'd much like to hear you sing that one, some time.
Is the "Captain Kidd" that you have the one that starts out "My name is Captain Kidd
As I sailed, as I sailed..."?
Patsy used to sing that at the session in Anna Liffey's. I've never learnt it, although I've thought on doing so at times.
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Thank you! It's a table of contents I really want to read.
Is the "Captain Kidd" that you have the one that starts out "My name is Captain Kidd
As I sailed, as I sailed..."?
Yes, although the version I learned first is a minor-key one by Waterson:Carthy and it seems to be in the minority. I love it, though.
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You're welcome! My feelings with regards to the table of contents are much the same as your own.
Yes, although the version I learned first is a minor-key one by Waterson:Carthy and it seems to be in the minority. I love it, though.
And now I'm even more curious to hear the version you sing. I'm thinking Patsy's was in a minor key as well.
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Now, tangentially, I'm intrigued by how much Caradog Prichard disturbs you and what you say about him:
he is Cooper's most convincing depiction of the Dark in human form. (He makes no bargains, he summons nothing, he is not a fallen angel or even a tragic figure like Hawkin; he is a small-minded, spiteful, quick-angering man who nearly does murder over a meaningless grudge and destroys himself for it anyway. And once he wanted to be a poet, so he braved the night up on Cader Idris. He genuinely disturbs me.)
What is it about him that most disturbs you?
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Thanks. My desktop really is full of this stuff. At least if I get it out in the world (or that corner of my livejournal that passes for it), I feel like I'm doing something. There are pieces I've owed you personally for years.
What is it about him that most disturbs you?
That I have met people like him, who need no interference or encouragement from supernatural powers to do their best to worsen the world around them; that the desire for poetry (however selfish, however misguided, however deluding) means there is something in him that might once have been something else, but it can't be salvaged or separated from the rest of the suspicion and frustration and monstrous conviction that because he wanted something (someone), he should have got it (her); that when the Grey King pours himself into Prichard at the end, it doesn't actually change anything about him. The painter in Greenwitch is just a servant of the Dark, unsettling in his furtive and reckless behavior and his eventual fate (although I have always loved the conceit of his painted spells, lurid, jagged abstracts—I'd love to know if anyone has actually tried to reproduce them), but his alignment, so to speak, is all we know of him. Hawkin in The Dark Is Rising is more sympathetic and his reasons for the damage he does entirely human and believable, but a mythic dimension is required for both his betrayal and his punishment. Caradog Prichard did it all to himself. You've met people like him. He spends a lot of time on the internet.
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Yes, I confess that when I read this: [They] need no interference or encouragement from supernatural powers to do their best to worsen the world around them I was already thinking, yes, I too have seen these people, here online.
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I have met them in person, too. They just tend there—paradoxically—to be easier to avoid.