SOURCE: "Time, Space & Consciousness in the Fantasy of Peter S. Beagle," in San Jose Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, February 1975, pp. 52-61.

[In the following essay, Becker explores Beagle's manipulation of time and space.]

In Peter Beagle's first novel, A Fine and Private Place, Jonathan Rebeck, the hero, has lived surreptitiously in a New York cemetery for nineteen years, aided by a talking raven who steals food for him from local stores. Rebeck would rather be dead, like the ghosts he talks with until they forget and fade from life. The kind and sociable Rebeck has become a reluctant teacher of the newly dead; he tells the ghosts Michael and Laura: "You'll drowse…. In time sleep won't mean anything to you … it won't really matter." But Michael, a suicide who values life now that his is over, rejects the somnolent peace of Rebeck's art of dying, and he tells Laura to fight back—as he does—to remember the feeling of being alive: "Caring about things is much more important to the dead because it's all they have to keep them conscious. Without it they fade, dwindle, thin to the texture of a whisper. The same thing happens to people, but nobody notices it because their bodies act as masks. The dead have no masks."

These passages illustrate Beagle's concern with the problems of human existence that give his fantasy worlds force and coherence, but they do not fully convey the comic, inventive and richly particular texture of his writing. Nor do they fully reveal the ironic nature of Beagle's fantasy, which involves the reader's consciousness of space and time, of the real and the imaginary in fiction. Both A Fine and Private Place (published in 1960, the year Beagle turned twenty-one) and The Last Unicorn (1968) have talking animals as characters. But the animals are not merely delights of fantasy; they are the fantasist's technique for exploring the nature of reality in the modern world. The raven who brings Rebeck food, for instance, is a testy and tough-talking pragmatist, whose contempt for illusion is modified only by his need to preserve dignity. After grouchily delivering Rebeck a whole baloney, he says, "There are people … who give and people who take…. Ravens don't feel right without somebody to bring things to…. You think we brought Elijah food because we like him? He was a dirty old man with a beard."

In the first chapter of The Last Unicorn, the Unicorn leaves her forest of eternal spring to search for others like herself: she meets a butterfly, who says, "I am a roving gambler. How do you do?" From this zany acquaintance she gets the first help in her quest. The butterfly's disjointed conversation flutters with snatches of poetry, popular songs, and commercial slogans: "The sweet and bitter fool will presently appear. Christ, that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again…. You can find your people if you are brave…. Let nothing you dismay, but don't be half-safe."

The raven and the butterfly are both traditional talking animals of fantasy and eccentrics like many of the helpers met by the heroes of folktales. But they simultaneously undercut the fiction, for their language in part refers not to the internal world of the story, but to some real context outside of it. The raven functions throughout A Fine and Private Place as a link between the cemetery and the "real" New York surrounding it; he also shows the limits of the fantasy in action, for he constantly opposes to the wishes and dreams of the other characters the indifference of the outside world. His last words in the story are to Rebeck, who is trying to avoid a difficult commitment: "Don't come sniffing around me, friend. I don't make decisions. I'm a bird."

The butterfly has a smaller but essential part at the beginning of The Last Unicorn. While providing a clue in the fairy-tale mystery of the vanished unicorns, his jumbled quotations refer to places and times outside the fantasy context and jar the reader into a complex participation in the fiction. This magical messenger, who says good-by by announcing politely, "I must take the A train," shifts us from the medieval fairy-tale world into our own memories and experiences. This anachronism not only creates irony and humor in the fantasy but tends to blur the distinction between the "reality" of everyday experience and the "illusion" of a story.

"What is reality?" I had written this absurd and important question while making notes before my conversation with Peter Beagle; when at one point I showed it to him, he said "O my God" in a soft voice of dismay (later he would say, "I have very little didact in me"). But he continued,

… the thing that interests me most is the line between fantasy and realism, because they're both so arbitrary. The books I like always seem to shimmer back and forth between one and the other. And many books that are presented as realistic novels I find utterly fantastic, and a lot of books that are listed as fantasy seem very normal to me….

Perhaps in an attempt to comprehend the line dividing them, Peter Beagle has moved back and forth between fantasy and realism as his writing has proceeded. After A Fine and Private Place—which he described as "a fantasy in a realistic setting"—he wrote I See By My Outfit (1964), a factual and wryly comic personal narrative of a trip from New York to California by motor scooter. He had previously published "Come Lady Death" in The Atlantic Monthly (1963), an exquisitely realized fantasy-parable set in eighteenth-century London. From 1964 to 1968 while working on his best-known book, the fairy-tale novel The Last Unicorn, Beagle was the chief book reviewer of Holiday. At the same time he was writing articles for other magazines, among them several frank and loving essays on family life and animals, as well as "Cockfight," a realistic and sympathetic account of this sport and its fans in northern California. In 1967, when Unicorn was two-thirds finished, he and photographer Michael Bry began traveling, taking pictures and writing The California Feeling: A Personal View (1969), a series of essay-narratives with many beautiful and revealing photographs of the state's different regions and lifestyles. Since 1969 Beagle has written television and film scripts (including The Dove, a British film directed by Gregory Peck), Lila the Werewolf, a gothic fantasy novella set in modern New York, and a new novel, completed last summer and awaiting publication.

This variety of work has caused Beagle to feel uncomfortable at times about being classified as a writer of fantasy. I asked him about the domination of contemporary fiction by realism—"the great tradition" of critic F.R. Leavis:

Well, that's where it was going in 1960 when I started publishing. It's always impressed me that I got reviewed as a serious novelist…. Because in 1960 when literature was so much in the grip of Leavis and Hemingway, I could so easily have been thrown into the back of the book with forty science fiction novelists that get reviewed about once a month by somebody who doesn't like science fiction. And the thing I like about 1974 is that all kinds of strange stuff is coming out that is not necessarily catagorizeable as pulp fiction or science fiction…. I don't know where literature is going anymore … but I am a lot more interested in the possibilities and the options for a young writer than I was in 1960. I just wrote fantasies because that was the way I thought, but I never expected to have even as much success as I've had. Fantasy writers didn't.

Although the critical categories seem to be breaking down, critics still-make comparisons; Granville Hicks, writing about The Last Unicorn in Saturday Review, said Peter Beagle "stands squarely and triumphantly on his own feet," in the realm of fantasy, but Hicks also made the inevitable comparison to J.R.R. Tolkien and Lewis Carroll, a comparison reiterated on the back cover of the Dutch translation of The Last Unicorn. Later we were talking about the writers he felt close to. Beagle admires the Irish fantasist James Stephens and, especially, Joyce Cary. He continued:

… Tolkien is not an influence of mine in fantasy, but I know he's there.

Question: Do you like Peake? [Mervyn Peake, British writer and artist, author of the fantasy-epic The Gormenghast Trilogy.]

Beagle: I like Peake a lot…. I'm probably closer to Peake than Tolkien….

Once in a while you really know when someone is working your side of the street…. It's like reading the novelist Bulgakov. I read The Master and Margarita and there was this shiver of recognition. We're not doing the same thing; he's crazier than I am….

When I first read reviews of The Magus—I respect John Fowles a lot, and I got a very unhappy feeling, damn it … he's in my territory and he has a very good mind and he's probably doing it very well. And I read The Magus and, no, that's not it. He blew it…. I didn't know whether I was relieved or unhappy…. Robert Nathan said in a letter … that he really had managed to call up the old gods, and then he backed off and explained them as rabbits out of a hat, and you can't do that.

Beagle regrets that Robert Nathan no longer receives the recognition he had in the early 1940's when Portrait of Jenny was translated into eight languages and made into a movie. Between 1919 and 1967 Nathan was, he said, "one of my great influences when I was in high school and college…. So when I started writing A Fine and Private Place I was taking off almost directly from Nathan's work." In The California Feeling he wrote, "I have learned important things from him—or at least started to learn them … such things as leanness and control…. Other writers have learned the same things from Hemingway or from Chekhov."

Another thing Beagle learned from Nathan—or more likely shared with him—was a way of perceiving, so that to him, "Certain things that seem unlikely or unnatural to other people seem very natural … and other things that seem very normal and daily for most people seem incredibly strange and fictional." Beagle especially admires in Robert Nathan the older writer's ability to "wander around in time."

He's the only man I know of really who could effortlessly have a man on an airplane forced down in the Jordanian desert and have him aided … by a girl who may or may not be Merlin's Nimue, or she may be just a nice hippie girl he met at Stonehenge playing the guitar.

This concern with time, both as a dimension of human action and culture and as a fictional dimension to be explored flexibly in the consciousness of his characters and the awareness of the reader, is a central fact in Peter Beagle's fantasy. It reflects his awareness of himself:

I was very conscious of time slips because having always felt—in a very vague kind of way—not out of any one particular time, just out of sync, out of place. I'm learning to live with it, actually to make a career out of it.

Peter Beagle's sense of temporal dislocation has been sharpened by his living in and writing about California. At the beginning of The California Feeling he wrote:

A lot of the time, I don't even like the place. I don't like the politics, and I don't like the values behind the politics, and I don't like what's being done to the sky and the land and the water; and what I really don't like is that sense of having gotten here almost too late…. This is the California feeling, and … Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo, Joaquin Murietta, and John Muir undoubtedly suffered from it too…. But I came here from New York City, where you grow up knowing that there never was a golden time, that there was nothing to be too late for.

Beagle's portrait of his adopted state—like Michael Bry's fine photographs—alternates between and juxtaposes the past and the present: Gold Rush towns, the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Russian Fort Ross, Berkeley's student movements, the high Sierra, Caesar Chavez at Delano. This California feeling is a sense of beauty and of loss, of better yesterdays, just-missed possibilities, the end of the Frontier. The sad chapter on Los Angeles and Disneyland shows the end of the American dream in the banality of future shock.

But Beagle likes much of what is here, old and new. The California Feeling is the best portrait of California in the Sixties I expect to see. Giving a wealth of information on the many regions he visits, he talks to contemporary people against a past becoming legend. He sees compassionately and simultaneously the old lumberjacks and the new consciousness of the counter-culture, the Esalin Institute and Hearst Castle. Beagle here is something like one of his characters, whom he called "a collector of lost things." He has an unlikely sympathy for the baron of San Simeon, with his huge and miscellaneous collection of European art, because he "really tried … to incorporate it all into his own life." If we are too late for legend, there is still much worth keeping, like the seacoast north of Santa Cruz, a region pictured in a recent book for which Beagle wrote the introduction.

Legend is the common ground of fantasy writers of the present and mythmakers and poets of the past. Since the eighteenth century most writers in the "great tradition" of modern fiction have given up their claim in this older territory and have sought universal patterns in the structure of ordinary experience. The worlds of modern legendary fantasy have definite environments with their own history; C.S. Lewis calls his children's series the Chronicles of Narnia, and Tolkien's world parallels a mythical Middle-Earth to the prehistoric age of giants. Peake's rambling and ritualized castle has existed for seventy-seven generations. Such fantasy worlds usually have uniform natural laws and formal ethical and social structures—a code of fairyland that is essentially conservative and similar to the rules of Christian chivalry and courtly love which dominate the legendary fantasy of medieval romance. These closed worlds of legendary fantasy may be remote, but they also reflect the era of their creation: as several reviewers have observed, Tolkien's Hobbits are legendary fantasy versions of the conservative and rural British middle and working classes. They succeed in their exploits by muddling through with rather dull and virtuous perseverance, like the characters of John Buchan, who prosaically emerge from the same Edwardian ethos. The Oz books of L. Frank Baum were long suspect partly because he purposely ignored traditional legends and created a middle American agrarian fantasy utopia ruled by P.T. Barnum. Legendary fantasy is a once-upon-a-time folktale elaborated geographically and historically; it shades into saga and historical romance. In modern versions it often projects into the future perfect of science fiction or the past horrific of the gothic novel.

The complex sense of time in modern fiction may well have its origin in the gothic, in which a modern consciousness responds to terror out of the past, the return of the dead. Time shifts in most science fiction or fantasy are mere devices for arriving at another fictive world, like the convention of the dream vision. Only a few modern writers, such as Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf, use time in the structure of their fiction satirically or thematically. Peter Beagle's manipulation of time in fantasy goes beyond technique and becomes the means for defining states of human consciousness, will, and value. As his writing has matured, the idea of time has become increasingly important and has been used with increasing flexibility as he developed his ironic and sadly comic view of human character and fate. A Fine and Private Place presents a modern analog to a traditional folk tale theme, where the hero is suspended out of time, like Odysseus or Rip Van Winkle. Jonathan Rebeck voluntarily enters the cemetery where time stands still; like the ghosts, he is fading from life, rejecting involvement: "I don't want to be loved; it's a burden on me." Beagle's resolution complements his ironic and wistfully comic treatment of the theme; Rebeck is retrieved into the world of living time by the stout and warm-hearted widow Gertrude Klapper, the very opposite of the coy mistress implied by his title. The ghost of her husband helps Rebeck make up his mind: "You are a living man and you have deceived yourself. For a man there is no choice between worlds. There never was."

In The Last Unicorn the theme of time is pervasive, and it underlies a fantasy narration of rapid action and detailed characters. The setting is vaguely late medieval, and the story has a indefinite legendary framework: "I was deliberately taking the classic fairy tale structure, the classic fairy tale characters," Beagle told me, "and trying to do something else with them. I was saddling myself and aiding myself both with all the proper forms." But we see the "proper forms" of the traditional quest plot from many points of view at once, not only in the ironic inversions and multiple time-references within the story, but in the shifting of the reader's consciousness during fairy tale event, twentieth-century dialogue, ironic parody, and ingeniously relevant literary anachronisms. The Unicorn, an ingenue goddess whom most humans take to be a white mare, escapes from Mommy Fortuna's seedy Midnight Carnival—a traveling circus of sadly real animals, mythological monsters, and one true harpy. With Schmendrick, a schlemeil Mandrake who has been flunked out as a sorcerer's apprentice and cursed by his master with eternal youth, the Unicorn seeks King Haggard and the mysterious Red Bull, who holds the other unicorns captive in a wasteland where time stands still.

Schmendrick ("last of the red hot swamis") is captured by the scruffy brigand Captain Cully, whose band is a pathetic parody of Robin Hood's. Cully fabricates limping ballads of his exploits and hopes they will be collected by Professor Child (a real nineteenth-century ballad scholar). Schmendrick is forced to entertain the bandits, but his skills are comically inaccurate and trivial, disappointing his audience and himself. But at a crucial moment of frustrated anger he gives himself up to the magic and unknowingly calls up the real Robin Hood and his Merry Men, who silently and powerfully cross the clearing. The magician presents to the ragged company the images of their deepest desires. Their wild yearning is the distance between their fallen state and their ideal possibilities. This episode presents at once the real and the imaginary—the fictional present, the legendary past, the reader's memory, and true and false magic.

Here as elsewhere in Beagle's writing, the characters remain true to the story, but they are intelligent and self-conscious, and their speech constantly threatens the fictional framework. At a moment of decision in The Last Unicorn, when the Unicorn wants to keep her mortal human form and give up the quest, her lover Prince Lir says: "No … the true secret of a hero lies in knowing the order of things…. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story." And near the end of the book, when the now King Lir rides homeward, Schmendrick says, "Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale."

Lila the Werewolf (1974), Peter Beagle's most recent story, is not a fairy tale at all, but a low-key novella set in New York with a deceptively straightforward opening:

Lila Braun had been living with Farrell for three weeks before he found out she was a werewolf. They had met at a party when the moon was a few nights past the full…. Girls sometimes happened to Farrell like that.

Lila's psychobiological atavism is as inexorable as the moon: "First day, cramps; the second day, this. My introduction to womanhood." Lila "made a handsome wolf: tall and broad-chested … her coat was dark brown, showing red in the proper light." She kills only zoo animals and dogs, and is being treated by a psychiatrist. Farrell, "whose true gift was for acceptance," tells his friend Ben,

If I break up with her now, she'll think I'm doing it because she's a werewolf. It's awkward, it feels nasty and middle class…. I don't want to mess up anyone's analysis. That's a sin against God.

But Farrell's complacency is shaken, and the story's naturalistic style (which reflects a viewpoint close to Farrell's) gives way to almost dream-like impressionism at the end in a nightmare chase all over Manhattan: Lila—pursued by Farrell, a loving dog-pack, her possessive mother, and a crazed Lithuanian building superintendent shooting silver bullets—barely escapes.

Lila comes close to uniting the realistic and fantastic tendencies in Peter Beagle's writing: in it, unknown but natural forces produce monstrosities of appearance or action, the inevitable intrusions of everyday life. But everything can be either accepted or ignored—as Farrell says, "Who wants to know what people turn into?" Lila's transformations of shape and time, her monthly reversions to a bloody past, are only more spectacular than Farrell's springtime changes of girl friends and his repetitive and inauthentic behavior towards them: "It's the same old mistake, except this time the girl's hangup is different. I'm doing it again." The uninvolved hero is stuck in time as much as Lila is, and his acceptance of her monstrosity is a reflection of his own; his self-awareness brings the world of fantasy closer to our own.

In one sense Lila the Werewolf is a study for Beagle's forthcoming novel, in which Farrell and Ben are major characters about ten years older. I asked him about the book, and he began with his character:

Weird things happen to Farrell…. In this particular case he gets involved with a group of people who spend a great deal of their time reenacting the Middle Ages…. They are based on existing groups. And they make their own weapons, their own armour…. They have a hierarchy … a king chosen by armed combat. I saw a group like this, knew a few people in it, and began wondering what would happen if this got out of hand…. Farrell, in this incarnation, is a lute player….

And it has something to do with a hunger for old things. Farrell was a collector of lost things, doomed buildings, extinct species of animals…. The lute … has been his attempt at finding his way back…. He gets … into this league and becomes their minstrel.

The story, as it came out in our conversation, is a complex one, with conflicts within the league, murders of its members, and a series of notable characters: a fifteen-year-old witch who tries to control time, a teacher of medieval martial arts with an apocalyptic vision of personal violence, a goddess more powerful than the witch, and Farrell's girl friend Julie. While the league attempts to live back in the Middle Ages, identities from the past begin to inhabit Farrell's and Ben's bodies: Farrell begins to have the memories and dreams of a Provencal knight minstrel, and Ben becomes a ninth-century Viking. Time is only a state of consciousness, a context that might happen to any of us. The falconer of the league tells Farrell about it, Beagle told me, like this:

'I flip the falcon off my wrist and … she goes from my wrist, which is the real world, into her own world with the air and the sky…. It could be 100,000 years ago … where it's still very dark and scary under the trees and … civilization hasn't happened yet.' And he tries to explain to Farrell how close past, present, and future are.

Farrell and Ben help each other get straightened out in time at the end of the book, which is what happens to most people in Beagle's fiction. In previous stories, a character's spiritual nature was often revealed by his fantasy form or change: the transparency of ghosts, the brightness of the Unicorn's horn, and Lila's transformations indicate states of the psyche. The boyish and fumbling Schmendrick, for instance, is transformed into a "lean and lordly" magus after his mystic experience of compassion. Just as important are the changes in time: the unicorn's experience in mortality as a beautiful girl made her a sadder, wiser, and more powerful goddess on her return to the artifice of eternity. Jonathan Rebeck, Schmendrick, and Haggard's wasteland are all suspended in time until they are brought back into natural history.

Being somehow disoriented in time is the usual situation for most major characters at the beginning of Beagle's stories: they are not where they should be (or not when they should be); they seem alone, lost, powerless, or defeated. Rebeck, the ghosts, Mrs. Klapper, Schmendrick, Molly Grue, the Unicorn, Prince Lir, Lila, Farrell—all undervalue themselves, all are better than they seem. They are eirons, like the clever or virtuous heroes of traditional comedy who win at the end. When they realize their true nature, they are in tune with their proper time and have their proper shape.

Beagle's novels generally have happy endings in which the internal discrepancies are resolved. But the self-consciousness of his characters about their fictional roles and the anachronism of the frequent references outside the story maintain the ironies, at once isolating the fantasy world and drawing the reader closer to it. "We are in a fairy tale and must go where it goes"; "Robin and Marian are real, and we are the legend"; "The universe lies to our senses, and they lie to us, and how can we be anything but liars?" By such speeches the characters stimulate and echo our doubts about reality. The synchronicity of times and the simultaneity of the fabulous, the fictionally real, and our own actual memories keep us shimmering between scepticism and belief, comedy and compassion. We become aware of our imaginative possibilities.

The way to reconcile these ambiguities is magic. Within fantasy, the miracle worker transcends himself by hazarding everything: "Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else's liver," the Unicorn tells Mommy Fortuna. "You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back."

The magician is impelled, as Beagle put it, by "a kind of hunger that casts out fear." Such hunger works for the writer, too:

The nearest thing I have ever seen to magic, to witchcraft, is exactly that. And I've practiced it in the sense that I wanted more than anything to be a writer, and I didn't really care what I had to sacrifice in order to get that. As it happens I remained reasonably sane and turned out to have more of a capacity for real life than I expected….

In the real working life of a writer, this creative power is related to craft, but goes beyond it: "language makes a good deal of my stories happen," he said, "which is why I can't plan too well." And the readiness is all, he explained:

… on a good day you tap into something very strange…. There were a couple of scenes in the new novel … that I "heard" while I was doing something like washing the dishes…. I didn't know who was in them or who was talking but I heard the voices. Harold Pinter talks like that and … now I've come to believe him….

Much of what I do is craft … But every so often I just have to fall back on something that can be called … the unconscious, the universal, whatever, and that … I call the swamp. And it just belches out characters I've never met, things that never happened to me…. I've come to accept it and even to call on it on occasion.

"Much of what I do is craft." Beyond the swamp is Beagle's love of language, style, music, and structure. Much of the fantasy-interest and the irony in The Last Unicorn comes from its epigrammatic dialogue, songs, allusions, and prophecies, and the cross-references among them—the same aspects which gave the fairy tale its depth and solidity. Although Beagle said he did not plan well, Unicorn proves the contrary with its deftly arranged and interconnected incidents and its characters related to each other within a family of destiny. His stories exemplify his statement to me that good writing looks like Joe DiMaggio's effortless catch of a fly ball that someone else couldn't even get to.

Craft and the swamp, discipline and magic—Peter Beagle rightly sees himself as a traditional storyteller, "a descendant of Scheherazade … a long line of people who made up stories in the bazaar." For the singer of tales, the mythic figures and the fantasy magic—like the Muse who called it forth—are ways of describing the forces that transform human life. Within Beagle's fantasy worlds, the key to magic and to power over time and space is a quality of will: the ghosts' love beyond death, the Unicorns' willingness to risk all, Schmendrick's boundless compassion. But this "hunger that casts out fear" must be put in tune with time; will must result in timely and appropriate action.

The negative of magic is "the wanting of nothingness," the "willessness" Beagle found in the characters of John Barth, whose books he reviewed some years ago. The cemetery hermit Rebeck, the fading ghosts, and Farrell in different ways share this non-involvement, a paralysis of the will. The bored and weary King Haggard's "greed without desire" is an extreme form of what Beagle called the "life-denying or life-avoiding thing." These figures are all suspended in time in their stories, cast out of their own history.

The magic of self-realization and harmony with the tempo and myth of one's life has its costs even in fantasy. Beagle's stories often end for his characters in a sad and comic blend of triumph and regret, and for the reader in an ironic recognition of the evanescence of fantasy and the complexity of his own imaginative responses. Beagle's fantasy speaks to the modern reader aware of relativity, the vast unconsciousness within and without, the renaissance of myth, the community of man and environment, the irony of history. Marianne Moore said poetry gives us imaginary gardens with real toads in them. Peter Beagle gives us imaginary times and places with real characters who reflect ourselves. And some of us are unicorns.