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INTRODUCTION

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

—Hamlet, I, v, 166-67.

I.

Peter S. Beagle burst upon the literary scene in 1960 with the publication of his first novel, A Fine and Private Place, written before he was twenty years old. After that auspicious beginning he slowed down a bit but still produced a significant and well-received body of work, including “Come Lady Death,” 1963, a novella; I See By My Outfit, 1979, a memoir of a cross-coutry motorscooter trip; The Last Unicorn, 1968, his comic masterpiece and best-known novel; “Lila the Werewolf,” 1971, another novella; The Folk of the Air, 1986, a return to the incursion of the fantastic into the modern world; The Innkeeper’s Song, 1993, a hard-edged pure fantasy containing both the best fight scene and the best sex scene in modern fantasy; The Unicorn Sonata, 1996, a young adult novel where the borders of the mundane and fantastic worlds merge mysteriously; Tamsin, 1999, another young adult novel again returning to his favorite device of the fantastic impacting the modern world, and revisiting the impact of ghosts on reality as he had in his first published work; and “A Dance for Emilia,” 2000, a novella also dealing with ghosts in the modern world, involving the possession of a cat by the spirit of a man unwilling or unable to leave this earth without saying goodbye to his friends. His early works, including A Fine and Private Place; The Last Unicorn; and the two novellas “Lila the Werewolf” and “Come Lady Death,” were republished in The Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle, 1978; and his shorter fiction has been collected in Giant Bones, 1997, in which he revisits the world of The Innkeeper’s Song, also published as The Magician of Karakosk and Other Stories in 1999; The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances, 1997, 2003, a retrospective collection of stories and essays dating back to 1957; The Line Between, 2006, containing ten new stories including four fables, a children’s story, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, an old tar’s tale, a sequel to one novel and a prequel to another, and the germ of a prospective witch novel; and We Never Talk About My Brother, containing one previously uncollected story from 1981 but concentrating on new fiction from 2007-2009, including three pieces published in 2008 in a limited edition called Strange Roads. Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle, a retrospective collection of short fiction, came out in February, 2010. His novella extending the story of The Innkeeper’s Song, called “Return,” was released in September, 2010. A new collection of short stories, Sleight of Hand, including a new Schmendrick story, was published in March, 2011.

Beagle has announced a magical realist retelling of the Persephone myth, to be called Summerlong (formerly titled For All We Know), supposedly to be published in 2012. He has announced a complete revision and expansion of The Folk of the Air, to be called Avicenna, and a radically expanded and altered four-volume rewrite of The Unicorn Sonata. His children’s fantasy novel, I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons, may also be published in 2011 or 2012. He is working on a young adult novel extending his story “El Regalo,” to be called My Stupid Brother Marvyn, the Witch. More important to his many fans, however, Beagle has also announced a sequel to The Last Unicorn, and published The Last Unicorn: The Lost Version in 2006. A new collection entitled The First Last Unicorn and Other Beginnings has been announced for April, 2012. Included will be a novella-length adventure of the last unicorn, in which she bands together with a duo of ambivalent demons to seek out her lost brethren, apparently either from or adapted from The Lost Version. Additional chapters from A Fine & Private Place, from the unpublished novel Mirror Kingdoms, and even snippets from Beagle’s childhood and teenaged years will included. Correspondence, running commentary, and interviews should give insight into Beagle’s creative process. Additionally, he has sold but not yet published Green-Eyed Boy: Three Schmendrick Stories, which is scheduled for publication in 2011 or 2012. Several other collections are also in the works, including Three Faces of The Lady, 2011 or 2012 (collection centered on “Come Lady Death”); Three Unicorns, 2011 or 2012 (story collection with additional essay); Four Years, Five Seasons, 2011 or 2012 (story collection released as an audiobook in 2010); and Sweet Lightning, 2011 or 2012 (1950s baseball fantasy novel). It remains to be seen how many of these promised works will see the light of day, given that his seventieth birthday is behind him, but Beagle continues to turn out short stories at a prolific rate.

The first thing that impacts a reader is the variety Beagle brings to the writing of fantasy. While the writer’s almost overwhelming sense of humor pervades all of his work (most noticeable in The Last Unicorn and least noticeable in The Innkeeper’s Song), the worlds of most of the other novels, novellas, and even short stories are separate and distinct, with the specific exceptions of the stories of Giant Bones, which was purposefully set in the world of The Innkeeper’s Song, and the other stories set in the universe of The Innkeeper’s Song, and his continuing return to Joe Farrell as the reader’s guide to the fantastic intruding into our cozy world. This may be explained at least in part by Beagle’s explicit declaration in his Foreword to Giant Bones that, “From the first, A Fine and Private Place, I wanted my novels to be as different from one another as I could make them, within the limitations of my skill and imagination.” In his headnote to “Two Hearts,” a brief sequel to The Last Unicorn which appears in The Line Between, he puts it differently: “I always had a real horror of repeating myself.” That he has succeeded so well is a testament both to his skill as a writer and to his imagination, or perhaps to his acquiescence to horror in his life.

II.

Peter Soyer Beagle was born in New York City on April 20, 1939, to Simon Beagle, a history teacher, and Rebecca Soyer Beagle, also a teacher, and he was raised in the Bronx within sight of the Woodlawn Cemetery, which inspired his first novel. He proudly carries his mother’s birth name as his middle name, a constant reminder that his grandfather, Abraham Soyer, was a writer. Abraham was born in Russia and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1912. He wrote articles for the Jewish press in Hebrew and Yiddish, and one of his collections of fables, The Adventures of Yemima and Other Stories, first published in Hebrew in Tel Aviv, has been translated into English by his daughter Rebecca and his daughter-in-law Rebecca L. Soyer and published in 1979. His son Raphael Soyer, a well-known artist, contributed the illustrations, and Peter contributed a brief foreword. Raphael’s two brothers, Moses and Isaac Soyer, were also artists. Another of Abraham’s books, Forgotten Worlds, was similarly translated by Rebecca Beagle and Rebecca Soyer and published in 1991. Abraham lived with the Beagles in the Bronx until his death in 1940 when Peter was ten months old, and was reportedly the only one who could quiet Peter when he cried as a baby.

Peter broke into what might be called the family business by entering a contest in Seventeen when he was only 15 years old and a student at the Bronx High School of Science, and he came to the notice of Bryna Ivens, who was Louis Untermeyer’s spouse. In 1955 a poem he entered in the Scholastic Writing Awards Contest won him a scholarship, and he went off to college at the University of Pittsburg. During his sophomore year a story of his won the Seventeen contest, and he graduated with a B.A. in creative writing and a minor in Spanish in 1959, having just turned twenty, and having submitted A Fine and Private Place for publication. He followed the old tradition of the Grand Tour, spending close to the next year in Europe.

Marshall Best of Viking Press was his editor, improving the book by suggesting elimination of a mystery subplot and suggesting the title ultimately used in place of Beagle’s proffered The Dark City. Beagle recalls him as “a great editor,” who showed “loving attention and focused literary concern.”

A Fine and Private Place earned Beagle critical acclaim and a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship for study at Stanford University when he returned to the United States. While there he worked on an unpublished novel begun in Europe entitled The Mirror Kingdom while fellow students Ken Kesey and Christopher Koch worked on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Year of Living Dangerously. Another of his fellow students was Larry McMurtry, who was working on Leaving Cheyenne. The Mirror Kingdom was not fantasy; it was about “a young American musician’s romantic adventures in Paris,” written when Beagle himself had just been a young American writer having romantic adventures in Paris, as he tells us in the Introduction to The Line Between.

Beagle’s second book, I See By My Outfit, was also published by Viking in 1966, edited by Aaron Asher. A memoir of his cross-country motorscooter trip from New York with his friend Phil Sigunick to his new home in California, it was first published in two parts in Holiday under the title “A Long Way to Go” and was also very well received. In 1964 Beagle had married Enid Nordeen, whom he had met at Stanford, and adopted her three children, Vicki, Kalisa, and Danny. He dedicated I See By My Outfit to them and the other “people in the house,” Phil and Tom. Phil was Phil Sigunick, his closest childhood friend who later became a successful artist, with whom he made the cross-country motorscooter trip that was memorialized in the book; it is not clear who Tom was. His well-received novella “Come Lady Death” was published in Atlantic in 1963, and he later adapted it into the libretto for an opera entitled The Midnight Angel. David Carlson wrote the music.

In 1968, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Beagle achieved literary immortality of a sort with the publication of The Last Unicorn. This fairy tale for adults garnered great critical attention, but Beagle may have found it difficult to top since his next novel did not see the light of day until 1986. In the interim he supported himself as a freelance writer, publishing his widely-loved novella “Lila the Werewolf” in an Ace Books collection in 1971. Beagle and Enid divorced in 1980.

During the 1970s Beagle increasingly wrote screenplays, including the animated version of The Last Unicorn produced by Rankin-Bass, which was released in 1982, and Ralph Bakshi’s animated The Lord of the Rings in 1978. He later wrote one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Sarek,” Episode 71, which aired in 1990. He had been involved in a contract dispute with London-based Granada Media over royalties for The Last Unicorn film; the matter was settled out of court in the summer of 2011. Beagle harbors some hopes of a live-action film at some point in the future, given the successes of the Tolkien and C. S. Lewis fantasy films. During the 1970s he also indulged his avocation as a folk singer, appearing every weekend at L’Oustalou, a club in Santa Cruz, California, from 1973 to 1985. He sings in English, Yiddish, French, and German, and has released an album, Acoustics: The Lost ’62 Tape. In 1988 he married writer and artist Padma Hejmadi. The Innkeeper’s Song was dedicated to her.

Beagle says The Folk of the Air, published in 1986, was the first time he ever wrote about Berkeley, with which he fell in love in about 1960. Place is always important in his fiction, and he has said with regard to his forthcoming novel Summerlong that he couldn’t have written about Seattle while he was living there (he spent one year in a condominium on Queen Anne Hill and five more on Bainbridge Island, both of which appear in Summerlong). The Innkeeper’s Song, however, is his favorite work; he thinks of it as his first grown-up novel. It is neither a ghost story nor a fairy tale, but an attempt to deal with very real people in an imaginary world. He doesn’t classify it as a grown-up novel simply because it contains what he calls his first group sex scene, but because he thinks it contains a depth of emotion that marks the beginning of a mature period. Beagle believes he was able to access certain things, such as what love means, more fully than he had been able to do before.

Unfortunately, by 2001, in Beagle’s words he “was 62 years old and living in Davis, California, then, second marriage a shipwreck, nice house where I’d once been happy now in foreclosure and scheduled for auction, work not happening, outlook so numbed by disaster that I couldn’t really absorb how bad things had become.” It was at that time that he began a literary relationship with Connor Cochran, and reinvented himself as a writer of short fiction. The rest, as they say, is history.

Beagle’s story “Two-Hearts” won the Hugo Award in 2006 and the Nebula Award in 2007. He won the Inkpot Award for Outstanding Achievement in Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2006. Beagle won the inaugural WSFA Small Press Award for “El Regalo,” published in The Line Between, and he was given the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2011.

III.

British critic C. N. Manlove, in his influential 1975 book Modern Fantasy: Five Studies, defines a fantasy as:

“A fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the reader or the characters within the story become on at least partly familiar terms.”

He further discusses what he meant by “a fiction”; “evoking wonder”; “supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects”; “a substantial and irreducible element”; and “with which the mortal characters in the story or the readers become on at least partly familiar terms.” Manlove distinguishes between what he calls “comic” or “escapist” fantasy and “imaginative” fantasy, and provides his analysis of the failings of the attempts of Charles Kingsley; George MacDonald; C. S. Lewis; J. R. R. Tolkien; and Mervyn Peake, whom he characterizes as “among the best known of modern writers of fantasy,” in avoiding “escapist” failings. He concludes that not one of them succeeds in sustaining his original vision, and suggests that “[t]he basic problem seems to be one of distance, distance between the ‘real’ and fantastic worlds, or between nature and supernature.” According to Manlove, “the gap between the worlds has grown too wide for more than an occasional vision (MacDonald, Peake) of its healing.” There are very real obstacles to writing modern fantasy, but even considering that Manlove would not claim great things for any of the writers he has considered. He ultimately dismisses the genre as “lacking in the full character of reality” despite any compensatory strengths. He leaves it to “the cultists.”

In his later The Impulse of Fantasy Literature, Manlove examines George MacDonald, Charles Williams, E. Nesbit, Ursula K. Le Guin, T. H. White, and Mervyn Peake, finding there to be some merit to the genre. He specifically dismisses William Morris, Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, and Beagle, however, as writing “anemic” fantasy.

Despite Manlove’s early scorn for the writing of all modern fantasy, and his dismissal of Beagle in particular, his definition is useful. Although some of Beagle’s work aspires to nothing more than fantastic escape (A Fine and Private Place; The Last Unicorn; A Dance for Emilia) some of it (The Folk of the Air; The Innkeeper’s Song; Tamsin) is as fully imaginative as the works Manlove examines and approves.

Kathleen L. Spencer put forward a useful definition and discussion of what she calls “The Urban Gothic” in her “Purity and Danger: Dracula, The Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis,” in 1992, and in her 1987 doctoral dissertation, “The Urban Gothic in British Fantastic Fiction, 1860-1930.” While concentrating on what is essentially a subgenre of fantasy, she discusses various theoretical constructs of the fantastic, including those of Tzvetan Todorov (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 1975); Tobin Siebers (The Romantic Fantastic, 1984); Rosemary Jackson (Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, 1981); Eric Rabkin (The Fantastic in Literature, 1976), and Andrzej Zgorzelski (“Is Science Fiction a Genre of Fantastic Literature”, 1979; “Understanding Fantasy”, 1972). She sees terror as an important element of the Urban Gothic, as well as an explicitly modern urban setting. The term may be applicable to some of Beagle’s fantasy, and Spencer’s meticulous theoretical underpinning certainly is applicable to all of it.

Spencer essentially adopts Zgorzelski’s definition of the fantastic, which he asserts “consists in the breaching of the internal laws which are initially assumed in the text to govern the fictional world.” All texts contain meta-textual information about genre, generally in the opening paragraphs. In the case of the fantastic, this is a fictive world based upon objective reality, or what Zgorzelski calls “a mimetic world model.” The intrusion of a fantastic element breaches the model and changes it into a different world which follows different laws. Fantastic texts “build their fictional world as a textual confrontation of two models of reality” (emphasis deleted).

Ursula K. Le Guin, in addition to being an award-winning fantasy writer, has also disseminated a body of criticism that is useful in discussing not only her fantasy but that of other writers such as Beagle. In “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” her best-known critical essay, first published in 1979, she discusses the fantasy writer’s use of language, preferring the “high style” of J. R. R. Tolkien and Evangeline Walton. More recently, in “Some Assumptions About Fantasy” and “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists,” she argues for both the usefulness and the delightfulness of fantasy. “The tendency to explain fantasy by extracting the fantastic from it and replacing it with the comprehensible,” she asserts, “reduces the radically unreal to the secondhand commonplace.” She sounds like a latter-day Tolkien, arguing for the value of a sense of wonder, or a more comprehensible Darko Suvin, speaking of the “arresting strangeness” of fantastic literature. Despite Suvin’s jargon, Tolkien’s Catholic apology, and Le Guin’s Taoist roots, all three are essentially talking about the same thing, and no single writer exemplifies it better than Peter S. Beagle.

IV.

Previous examinations of Beagle’s fiction have been limited. For example, as early as 1975 David Van Becker examined “Time, Space and Consciousness in the Fantasy of Peter S. Beagle.” In 1977 D. P. Norford published “Reality and Illusion in Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn.” In “Incongruity in a World of Illusion: Patterns of Humor in Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn,” I briefly reviewed Beagle’s use of comic technique in his second novel in 1979; this article forms the basis for Chapter Two below, and further served as an inspiration for this book. The next year A. H. Olsen in “Anti-Consolatio: Boethius and The Last Unicorn” examined a different aspect of that work, as did R. E. Foust in “Fabulous Pardigm: Fantasy, Metafantasy, and Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn.”

In 1986 Jean Tobin published both “Myth, Memory, a Will-o’-the Wish: Peter Beagle’s Funny Fantasy” and “Werewolves and Unicorns: Fabulous Beasts in Peter Beagle’s Fiction.” Don Riggs in 1988 examined “Fantastic Tropes in The Folk of the Air, and he republished it in 1997. Richard C. West has also published his study of Beagle twice, as “Humanity and Reality: Illusion and Self-Deception in Peter S. Beagle’s Fiction” in 1988, and “Humanity Cannot Bear Very Much Reality: Illusion and Self-Deception in the Fiction of Peter S. Beagle” in 1997. In Peter Beagle, Kenneth Zahorski attempted a comprehensive evaluation of Beagle’s fiction in 1988 but was limited by the restrictions of the series in which the work appeared and by the fact that much of Beagle’s best work was yet to come. In “Alchemy of Love in A Fine and Private Place,” Joel N. Feimer in 1988 examined Beagle’s first novel. George Aichele, Jr., compared Beagle and Philip K. Dick in “Two Forms of Metafantasy” in 1988.

David M. Miller examined The Last Unicorn in 1990 in “Mommy Fortuna’s Ontological Plenum: The Fantasy of Plenitude,” while Dave M. Roberts offered a different perspective on the first novel in “Love in the Graveyard: Peter S. Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place” in 1999. Also in 1999 Maureen K. Speller published her “Unicorns, Werewolves, Ghosts and Rhinoceroses: The Worlds of Peter S. Beagle.” In 2005 Sue Matheson discussed “Psychic Transformation and the Regeneration of Language in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn.”

Many of these often excellent studies were first presented as papers at various academic conferences, most often the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, and so first saw the light of day as roughly twenty-minute presentations. Note that almost all follow the tongue-in-cheek academic tradition of an ironic or comic title with a serious subtitle; I have done the same with this book. None of the previous treatments of Beagle can claim to be comprehensive, and all but one is limited to less than fifteen pages. Additionally, there have been several interviews with Beagle published; other articles in what are essentially fanzines such as Mythlore have appeared; theses and dissertations have been churned out; and various works for hire such as those published by Salem Press have treated Beagle.

V.

In this book I intend to examine the longer fiction of Peter S. Beagle using the helpful definitions provided by Manlove and Spencer. For each novel and novella I will attempt to discern the “substantial and irreducible element of the supernatural” or the “impossible worlds, beings or objects” with which the reader becomes familiar, with an eye toward establishing Beagle’s effectiveness as a writer of fantasy. Ultimately the question in each case will come down to another of Manlove’s questions: to what extent does the text “evoke wonder” in the reader? Where appropriate I will utilize Spencer’s idea of The Urban Gothic; Le Guin’s statements on the value of fantasy; Tolkien’s ideas of fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation; and even Suvin’s concept of arresting strangeness. My primary critical mode, however, will be what is called “reader-response” criticism. Reader-response criticism focuses on the reader, or audience, and his or her experience of a literary work, rather than focusing primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. That is, I will examine each work from the point of view of an intelligent reader, making connections and responding to the text as appropriate. This approach has proven valuable in the analysis of popular fiction such as fantasy, science fiction, horror fiction, the western, the thriller, and the mystery.

In each of the following chapters I will discuss one of Beagle’s novels, along with any associated shorter fiction, with a final chapter for the major shorter fiction. Unfortunately my space is too limited for a comprehensive analysis of all the short fiction; there has simply been too much of it in the past ten years or so. My ultimate goal shall be to assess how well Peter S. Beagle conforms to the classic purposes of art: to teach and to please. How does he please us, and how does he teach us? The answers to these questions will provide us with sufficient insight to come to an understanding of Beagle’s effectiveness as a writer of modern fantasy.

In each chapter save one I shall proceed along two levels of analysis simultaneously: the fictional level and the functional level. The fictional level deals primarily with what Aristotle called mythos, or plot; the arrangement of the incidents. It is necessary first of all in understanding a work of fantasy, as any fiction, to understand who does what to whom. I perhaps err on the side of overinclusion in this analysis; but it is my assumption that most readers of this book will not be familiar with most of the works treated. The functional level deals with author-reader communication. After a reader understands what is going on in a work of fiction, it is then necessary to understand how the writer manipulates character, thought, and diction, Aristotle’s ethos, dianoia, and lexis, to communicate with a reader. My functional level analysis in all but one of the chapters that follow is interspersed with the fictional level analysis, and it leads to some specific conclusions in each chapter as well as a general conclusion to this book.

The one exception to this scheme is Chapter Two, in which I deal with The Last Unicorn. In this chapter my method is reversed: I deal with the functional level primarily, with discussion of the fictional level interspersed throughout as needed. The reason for this change in methodology is that I assume many if not most readers of this book will already be familiar with The Last Unicorn, either from the book itself, the animated film, the graphic novel, or perhaps the audio edition, and thus much less fictional level analysis is required. When in Chapter Two, however, I deal with lesser-known works (The Last Unicorn: The Lost Version; “Two Hearts”), I revert to my more usual mode.