The Road to Fantasy

Some years ago—seven, maybe: that seems a fitting number—I was asked to take part in a broadcast discussion on fantasy. Fantasy . . .? Strangely, though I had written often enough on Carroll, Le Guin, all those mages, I had never really defined the term to myself. Unscripted talks need a headful of ordered thought and proper reserves of data. I wandered into the National Book League¹ and glanced at the splendid array of pamphlets. "Have you," I asked, "a thing on fantasy?" "No," replied Jenny Marshall sweetly, "but you will write one."²

My mind leaps over the following months or longer and lands at a point when a list was at last compiled (about 200 titles, in print or almost so), and a paragraph—factual, succinct, freshly evaluating—was due to be written on each. The whole thing was to be the N.B.L.'s Christmas exhibition, and time (as always) was running out. Each day I would calculate that, working from dawn to dawn, I might complete a further ten or twelve entries. The average was nearer three. But somehow it was done; the introductory essay was finished, typed, and put in the messenger's patient hand. The exhibition was held; the little book was kindly received by the critics, and presently it was sold out. A second edition has also gone. The third is on the way.

Problems? Findings? Many of both. But the main ones at the outset concerned the term itself. For is not all our reading fantasy? It is Middle Earth; it is also the seed catalogue, the travel brochure, the do-it-yourself handbook. It is the child's dream of being an orphan, a foundling—even more than the orphan's dream of being a "family" child. It is the king over the water, Bonnie Charlie, a fellow who in life, I believe, scarcely deserved the marvelous "fantasy" songs that his cause inspired, songs that move us still. It is the exile's dream of the homeland. Edward Thomas, who never left his native England until he went to his battle-death in France in 1917, listened to soldiers speaking of home. For him, their easy fantasy covered a deeper one. What is that place? he mused. And where?

I would go back again homeNow. Yet how should I go?

This is my grief. That land,My home, I have never seen;No traveller tells of it,However far he has been . . .

John Masefield reproached himself for writing fantasy poems about the sea ("All I ask is a tall ship") when he knew too well how harsh and mentally dulled could be the life of a working seaman of his day. (He came to the sea as a boy, and left it forever before he was twenty—thus, both the knowledge and the nostalgia. For the truth of the fantasy, read his great poem Dauber.) Jane Eyre—and Villette, too—are wish-dream fantasy raised to the level of genius.

Fantasy lies down a rabbit hole, but even there it needs the presence of Alice herself, a non-fantastical girl if ever there was one. It is the ballad of Percy and Douglas, that stirred the young Philip Sidney more than a trumpet; it is the battle trumpet itself, and the harp song of the minstrel boy, marching out to death. It is the pretty pastoral theme of a hundred poems ("How sweet is the shepherd's sweet lot!"), already an absurdity when Shakespeare wrote As You Like It, where a whole summer court plays at greenwood. It is Samarkand if you do not live there—and equally, to many a child, the home life of Little Women.

Enough. A limiting line to the list had to be somewhere drawn. I saw this line at just beyond the furthest edge of the probable—and then as far on as need be. What did the New Collins English Dictionary say? "Fantasy, n. A creation of the imagination unrestricted by reality . . . a series of pleasing mental images, usually serving to fulfill a need not gratified in reality . . . an illusion, hallucination or...