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A grove of whitethorn on a hillside and a girl on a brown pony
I learned last night that Mary Stewart had died. She was 97, which is a respectable age, and her last novel was published in 1997, but I am still sorry in the way of something gone out of the world. I grew up on her writing.
I inherited her from my mother. She collected Stewart's romantic suspense novels, eventually achieving everything but The Wind Off the Small Isles (1968), about which she doesn't feel too bad because it was never published in the U.S. I still look for it in used book stores. On my own shelves, I have carefully-jacketed hardcovers of This Rough Magic (1964) and Airs Above the Ground (1965) and a battered pocket paperback of Madam, Will You Talk? (1954) that shed both covers long before I got to it. A favorite I'm missing is My Brother Michael (1959) and I should like The Moon-Spinners (1962) someday. She returned to Greece most often in her modern novels, sometimes shadowed by its classical past, sometimes by more recent history. It mixed with my mother's stories of backpacking around Europe in 1968, throwing silver to the sea for Poseidon off Crete and getting back a watermelon in return. I have none of the Merlin books here. I've only ever read my mother's copies, three well-loved hardcovers that I took to school with me in seventh and eighth grade. Druidic sacrifice outside my homeroom door, the altar blazing INVICTO in the cafeteria, a dark-eyed boy's ghost on the river while I waited for the bus under willow trees that blew down decades ago. The Crystal Cave (1970) is the best. You can feel the others stiffening into frieze the closer they adhere to the Arthurian canon, but there's something I love in each of them: the sword of Macsen Wledig in The Hollow Hills (1973), Niniane-Nimue in The Last Enchantment (1979). The Wicked Day (1983) was my first sympathetic Mordred, even if Elizabeth E. Wein's is my favorite. Stewart was not my first vision of Merlin, either; that was Peter Dickinson or Jane Yolen or T.H. White. (I read The Sword in the Stone before I saw the movie and as a result never warmed to the latter, although I will always love Bill Peet's admission of modeling Merlin's nose after Walt's.) But I come back always to her Merlin, Myrddin Emrys, the watchful child with falcon-dark eyes, dreaming a glitter of dragons—air and darkness, a word, a promise. I watch in the crystal and I wait in the hollow hills. His fifth-century Roman Britain was as vivid to me as the Bronze Age of Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958), excavating something human out of conjured names and tesserae of myth. She was my introduction to Mithras, even before Rosemary Sutcliff. When I was twenty-three, I was as old as Merlin at Arthur's conception and now that I'm thirty-two, at my age he was meeting the boy Arthur for the first time. He's such an early piece of the inside of my head, I don't think about it often. But there that whole world is. There's something I loved. There's the person who wrote it, gone.
There's an interview with her here; I watched it last night. I recommend it, especially the part where she talks about writing the kind of books she did because they were the sort of thing she wanted to read—like John Buchan, but with female protagonists. It is true that her heroines are often scared, but never because of their gender; they are no more out of their depth than any other ordinary person suddenly finding themselves in the midst of intrigues they didn't ask for, and they are rarely utterly helpless. I'm sure there are all sorts of other problems I can't see for reading them so early, but I've never understood why there weren't more movies made of the romances than Disney's The Moon-Spinners (1964), which I pretend doesn't exist. Perhaps her language wouldn't translate; she wrote so gracefully of place and so precisely of expressions and movements, I can see exactly where it imprinted my own work. I still think Derek Jacobi about fifteen years ago would have played a perfect Julian Gale.
I'll be in a used book store this afternoon. I'll look for her.
"So all through that winter he came to me. And he came at night. I was never alone in my chamber, but he came through doors and windows and walls, and lay with me. I never saw him again, but heard his voice and felt his body. Then, in the summer, when I was heavy with child, he left me . . . They will tell you how my father beat me and shut me up, and how when the child was born he would not give him a name fit for a Christian prince, but, because he was born in September, named him for the sky-god, the wanderer, who has no house but the woven air. But I called him Merlin always, because on the day of his birth a wild falcon flew in through the window and perched above the bed, and looked at me with my lover's eyes."
I inherited her from my mother. She collected Stewart's romantic suspense novels, eventually achieving everything but The Wind Off the Small Isles (1968), about which she doesn't feel too bad because it was never published in the U.S. I still look for it in used book stores. On my own shelves, I have carefully-jacketed hardcovers of This Rough Magic (1964) and Airs Above the Ground (1965) and a battered pocket paperback of Madam, Will You Talk? (1954) that shed both covers long before I got to it. A favorite I'm missing is My Brother Michael (1959) and I should like The Moon-Spinners (1962) someday. She returned to Greece most often in her modern novels, sometimes shadowed by its classical past, sometimes by more recent history. It mixed with my mother's stories of backpacking around Europe in 1968, throwing silver to the sea for Poseidon off Crete and getting back a watermelon in return. I have none of the Merlin books here. I've only ever read my mother's copies, three well-loved hardcovers that I took to school with me in seventh and eighth grade. Druidic sacrifice outside my homeroom door, the altar blazing INVICTO in the cafeteria, a dark-eyed boy's ghost on the river while I waited for the bus under willow trees that blew down decades ago. The Crystal Cave (1970) is the best. You can feel the others stiffening into frieze the closer they adhere to the Arthurian canon, but there's something I love in each of them: the sword of Macsen Wledig in The Hollow Hills (1973), Niniane-Nimue in The Last Enchantment (1979). The Wicked Day (1983) was my first sympathetic Mordred, even if Elizabeth E. Wein's is my favorite. Stewart was not my first vision of Merlin, either; that was Peter Dickinson or Jane Yolen or T.H. White. (I read The Sword in the Stone before I saw the movie and as a result never warmed to the latter, although I will always love Bill Peet's admission of modeling Merlin's nose after Walt's.) But I come back always to her Merlin, Myrddin Emrys, the watchful child with falcon-dark eyes, dreaming a glitter of dragons—air and darkness, a word, a promise. I watch in the crystal and I wait in the hollow hills. His fifth-century Roman Britain was as vivid to me as the Bronze Age of Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958), excavating something human out of conjured names and tesserae of myth. She was my introduction to Mithras, even before Rosemary Sutcliff. When I was twenty-three, I was as old as Merlin at Arthur's conception and now that I'm thirty-two, at my age he was meeting the boy Arthur for the first time. He's such an early piece of the inside of my head, I don't think about it often. But there that whole world is. There's something I loved. There's the person who wrote it, gone.
There's an interview with her here; I watched it last night. I recommend it, especially the part where she talks about writing the kind of books she did because they were the sort of thing she wanted to read—like John Buchan, but with female protagonists. It is true that her heroines are often scared, but never because of their gender; they are no more out of their depth than any other ordinary person suddenly finding themselves in the midst of intrigues they didn't ask for, and they are rarely utterly helpless. I'm sure there are all sorts of other problems I can't see for reading them so early, but I've never understood why there weren't more movies made of the romances than Disney's The Moon-Spinners (1964), which I pretend doesn't exist. Perhaps her language wouldn't translate; she wrote so gracefully of place and so precisely of expressions and movements, I can see exactly where it imprinted my own work. I still think Derek Jacobi about fifteen years ago would have played a perfect Julian Gale.
I'll be in a used book store this afternoon. I'll look for her.
"So all through that winter he came to me. And he came at night. I was never alone in my chamber, but he came through doors and windows and walls, and lay with me. I never saw him again, but heard his voice and felt his body. Then, in the summer, when I was heavy with child, he left me . . . They will tell you how my father beat me and shut me up, and how when the child was born he would not give him a name fit for a Christian prince, but, because he was born in September, named him for the sky-god, the wanderer, who has no house but the woven air. But I called him Merlin always, because on the day of his birth a wild falcon flew in through the window and perched above the bed, and looked at me with my lover's eyes."
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I read the rest of your entry after, and found mine coincidentally echoed some of yours. Ditto, including Mary Renault. Stewart, Renault, and Tolkien are my 'holy trinity,' the three writers who made me want to write.
Thanks for posting. I might only have found out years later, otherwise.
–Nici
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You're very welcome. You wrote well of her, too.
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I like many of her modern novels; they're some of the only romances I read. They were written mostly in the '50's and '60's and I cannot promise that there are not major problems with some of them, possibly lurking in ways I failed to notice in high school and haven't re-read recently enough to realize—mostly it's stuff like gender roles of the time, which is more or less inevitable—but so far I've never been disappointed in one that I didn't bounce off initially. (Seriously, I can remember nothing about The Gabriel Hounds (1967) except that I didn't like it.) Besides the ones I mentioned in the post, I like Touch Not the Cat (1976)—I think it's her only contemporary novel for adults with a supernatural element—and The Ivy Tree (1961) does genuinely clever things with an impersonation plot. She has also a couple of novels for children that I can remember very little about except that I read them. A Walk in Wolf Wood (1980) has a werewolf and I enjoyed it. I should find it again and see if it holds up.
I should read them again, and add The Wicked Day and The Prince and the Pilgrim to the list.
I remember almost nothing about The Prince and the Pilgrim except that it's a Grail story; it may not be very good. I find The Wicked Day less compelling now than Elizabeth E. Wein's The Winter Prince (1993), but that's because the latter is my benchmark for Mordred and one of the few Arthurian novels I consider as definitive as The Crystal Cave (this is a recommendation; read it if you haven't already; fair warning for unflinchingly fucked-up family dynamics). I still liked it the last time I read it. Being set at least half in the Orkneys, it also has a lot of the sea, which is a plus for me.
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I read 'em all in the early '80s - when I could picture a younger John Gielgud as Julian Gale, and persuade myself that the initials were deliberate - and reread most thereafter. The Ivy Tree is another favourite. I never got far with the Merlin books, though; I have a known antipathy to anything Arthurian.
Early on in our relationship, I was sitting in my first agent's flat in Kensington when she took a phone call. From Mary, planning a weekend away together. I may have been a little awestruck.
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I would probably want to read it for completism's sake. I know we own her children's novels, even if I can't remember much about them; I plan to re-read them the next time I'm in Lexington and have an opportunity. I found a used paperback of The Hollow Hills at the Harvard Book Store last night. It has an appalling cover, but fortunately I don't have to look at it while I'm reading.
The Ivy Tree is another favourite.
I am somehow not surprised to hear that. It's her most unreliable narrator and the novel in which the telling of the story matters just as much as what's being told. Most of the rest of the romances seems to be first-person by default; The Ivy Tree wouldn't work any other way. Touch Not the Cat is another of my second-tier favorites. I don't have much feeling about anything past Thornyhold, from which I conclude they didn't work for me; The Gabriel Hounds is the one I remember bouncing off of. I was very pleased in college when I read The Revenger's Tragedy and discovered the context of Nine Coaches Waiting.
when I could picture a younger John Gielgud as Julian Gale, and persuade myself that the initials were deliberate
Heh. He just looked like Jacobi instantly, to me. But you'd met Gielgud; he wasn't in my head much in high school. He was a splendid Cassius in Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar (1953), but my takeaway from that was James Mason.
(Okay, I like the empty eyes of an archaic bronze mask; otherwise I look at this writeup from six years ago and think I have gotten better at writing about movies, a lot. It's not even slash potential, anyway, it's barely-sub-text, and it works.)
I never got far with the Merlin books, though; I have a known antipathy to anything Arthurian.
How so?
From Mary, planning a weekend away together. I may have been a little awestruck.
Legitimately!
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I'm honestly not sure, but it's very ingrained. Twenty years ago I was halfway through Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry, enjoying it thoroughly - and suddenly here came Arthur punting over the lake, and I rolled my eyes and nearly put the book down and it's still the one Kay that I haven't reread.
I kind of resent the saturation level Arthur has achieved; he seems to be everywhere, and I don't find him interesting. It may be an extension of my aversion to fanfic; indeed, I think the whole corpus is essentially fanfic. I'm not interested in fairy-tale retellings either, and I think that's the same thing again. I could only enjoy Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love series as much as I did by resolutely ignoring all the Arthurian echoes.
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I will not try to argue you out of your tastes; there are myths that do nothing for me. But The Crystal Cave is one of Stewart's best novels as far as I'm concerned.
It may be an extension of my aversion to fanfic; indeed, I think the whole corpus is essentially fanfic. I'm not interested in fairy-tale retellings either, and I think that's the same thing again.
Here I have a complete and utter philosophical disagreement with you: if a tradition has no single-author point of origin, I don't think it's possible for other authors to write it fanfic. I don't consider Aischylos' Myrmidons to be fanfic of the Iliad any more than I think Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber was ficcing Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm. Fanfic is a subspecies of retelling; it's not all forms of the thing itself.
If you just dislike retellings, though: again, I don't think I can talk you out of it. (Angela Carter is awesome!)
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Nine
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I like the idea of flashing, hunting, through that brief block of light: not just passing through, but seeking.
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Yes.
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(I did eventually read The Mists Of Avalon. My senior English paper in high school was an analysis of Guenevere and Morgan across several different novels and how their portrayals reflected those novels' explorations of the conflicts between the cultures they represented. I had a vague understanding that one could not discuss the female characters in the Arthurian canon without acknowledging Mists, so I dutifully read it and took notes, but MZB's take on the canon felt so inexplicably joyless to me that I was hard-put to finish it and have never wanted to reread.)
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Whom I do not know. What should I read of hers?
I had a vague understanding that one could not discuss the female characters in the Arthurian canon without acknowledging Mists, so I dutifully read it and took notes, but MZB's take on the canon felt so inexplicably joyless to me that I was hard-put to finish it and have never wanted to reread.
I read it when I was twelve and staying with my aunt in San Francisco. I've never re-read it; I remember that I liked Morgaine and the priestesses of Avalon, and I don't know that I had read any retelling which so explicitly stated itself a feminist revision before, but I had mixed feelings about Bradley's Merlin and I hated her treatment of Gwenhwyfar and her Christian fanaticism and the way she solved the Lancelet-Gwenhwyfar-Arthur triangle with poly and then broke it again. I think I would find it even more problematic if I re-read it now. I don't know if I should try again.
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Defending the City of God, for a study of women in the Crusader states. I haven't read her fiction.
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Okay, that's cool.
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That is really cool, and now I'm going to look for that.
I ran across Newman's Guinevere trilogy (Guinevere, The Chessboard Queen and Guinevere Evermore) when I was around thirteen, re-read them obsessively throughout my teens, and haven't touched them since about 1992. They're the sort of thing that are so evocative, in my memory, of a particular time and place in my life that I've felt no need to re-read them after that time and place ended.
I recall them as being nightingale-and-roses fantasy with a particularly heavy dose of melodrama, including some very dark violence and rape scenes. I also recall that they were heavily salted with original characters, most of whom I found more interesting than the canon characters, and in hindsight the canon characters also feel a lot like OCs.
I was particularly taken by the wandering scholar-priest who is constantly surrounded by an invisible choir of singers. No one can hear them except him (although on Guinevere's wedding day to Arthur they sing an epithalamium and she can hear that). He's considered both a saint and a madman because he's always waving his hands and talking to people no one can see/hear: essentially he's always in the middle of conducting a choir rehearsal, since the singers can hear him and respond to him as their conductor. Teenage me thought that was particularly awesome.
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I've never heard that term! Where did it come from?
He's considered both a saint and a madman because he's always waving his hands and talking to people no one can see/hear: essentially he's always in the middle of conducting a choir rehearsal, since the singers can hear him and respond to him as their conductor. Teenage me thought that was particularly awesome.
That is awesome. What are they?
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It's never stated outright what the choir is, but it's implied that it's a (the?) choir of angels. The character dies onscreen, and the choir is there to welcome him and he can finally see them (including the beautiful alto whose voice he has heard all his life and has never seen, although her presence has been practically tangible to him).
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I came to her later, and there are still many of her books I haven't read. But I love the Merlin books, and at
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That happened with me and Christopher Fry in 2005. In Stewart's case I had looked her up recently and been strangely reassured she was still alive, and then I looked her up again and she wasn't.
But I love the Merlin books, and at desperance's urging read and enjoyed The Ivy Tree.
I didn't click with that one as fiercely as some of the ones I name, but I like it—the narrator is one of Stewart's most interesting protagonists, and probably her most successful experiment with voice after Merlin. I am also very fond of Touch Not the Cat, with its straightforward supernatural component. There are ways in which that one feels to me like what might have happened if Andre Norton had written romance.
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