from writings of
Peter S. Beagle

As much as I’ve ever explained it to myself (being intellectually lazy, and consequently a kind of National Park for underdone thoughts), the fantastic turn of vision suits both my sense of the world as a profoundly strange and deceptive place, and my deepest sense of poetry, which is singing. It also gives me the richest possible forest of lives and happenings to move in, busy and shadowed, at home in the shadows of time. At any rate, I am advised that I start talking like that after the second San Miguel.

After the third, I am likely to announce that all writing is fantasy anyway: that to set any event down in print is immediately to begin to lie about it, thank goodness; and that it’s no less absurd and presumptuous to try on the skin of a bank teller than that of a Bigfoot or a dragon. But the truth seems to be that I just see like that, and sing like that, and always have.

“The thing is, it’s still only Lila, not Lon Chaney or somebody. Look, she goes to her psychiatrist three afternoons a week, and she’s got her guitar lesson one night a week, and her pottery class one night, and she cooks eggplant maybe twice a week. She calls her mother every Friday night, and one night a month she turns into a wolf. You see what I’m getting at? It’s still Lila, whatever she does, and I just can’t get terribly shook about it. A little bit, sure, because what the hell. But I don’t know. Anyway, there’s no mad rush about it. I’ll talk to her when the thing comes up in the conversation, just naturally. It’s okay.”

Ben said, “God damn. You see why nobody has any respect for liberals anymore?”

“Death lives among the poor,” he went on, “and comes to visit them every day, for he is their only friend.”

Lady Neville answered him as coldly as she had spoken to the young lord. “He may be forced to deal with them, David, but I hardly think that he seeks them out as companions. I am certain that it is as difficult for him to think of the poor as individuals as it is for me. Death is, after all, a nobleman.”

Young people in general sense the difference between the real and the phony. They don’t know it—when they begin to know that difference, and to try to articulate it, then they are adults and subject to all the pains and fallibilities of that state. They can be misled by fools or madmen, but they sense the preacher who doesn’t feel a word of his sermon, the mountebank who is putting them on, the society that does not believe in itself. They rarely take a phony of any sort to their hearts.

Tolkien believes in his world, and in all those who inhabit it. This is, of course, no guarantee of greatness—if Tolkien weren’t a fine writer, it could not make him one—but it is something without which there is no greatness, in art or in anything else, and I find very little of it in the fiction that purports to tell me about this world we all live in.