a gallimaufry

reading notes, 5th March 2021

(Dogwalking chez gallimaufry; French school, early nineteenth century, A Young Woman Standing Reading a Book in the Woods, her Dog beside her, oil on canvas; found here)

Writing about books takes me an insanely long time, and sometimes I don’t have an insanely long time to devote to it. Sometimes I read a book and I enjoy it but I don’t have anything to say about it. So I thought what I might do, fairly regularly, is write a short post about what I’ve been reading and what I’m looking forward to reading, no real analysis, no spoilers. And then I hope that in the comments, you’ll tell us what you’ve been reading and are looking forward to reading.

I have just finished...

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield. I found it in the library and for some reason I borrowed it. ‘For some reason’ because I read her first novel, The Thirteenth Tale, and began by enjoying it but found the ending unsatisfying – annoying, even. And then I read her second novel, Bellman & Black, and did not like it at all. Still, there was something about the way she writes... So I’m very glad that I persevered because I really did enjoy Once Upon a River and it was exactly the right book at the right time.

One midwinter night a man bursts into The Swan at Radcot, on the Thames, carrying a dead child in his arms, and collapses. Miraculously, the child returns to life. But who is she? Is she Amelia Vaughan, who was abducted two years ago and never seen again? Her parents believe so. Is she Alice Armstrong, whose desperate mother has drowned herself? Her father claims her. Could she be Ann, Lily White’s little sister, even though Lily is now a woman in her forties? And how can a dead child revive? It’s a novel about the stories people tell themselves, as entertainment or exploitation or as a means of surviving, where they come from and how they can change. It brings a nineteenth-century community to life, it’s funny and sad but ultimately a cheering book, and it features a sapient pig.

I am looking forward to...

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. For reasons too boring to list here, I had ordered a copy of this before it was published but was only able to get my hands on it (thanks to my kind mother) yesterday. Entirely by coincidence, I had been having a tiny Susanna Clarke fest. My daughter had received the DVD of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for her birthday (yes it was from me, pretending to be the hens; I knew she’d enjoy it and I am of course softening her up for when she’s old enough to read the novel). We watched that, and I’d been rereading stories from The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Piranesi lives in a wonderful house quite alone, except for Tuesdays and Fridays when he’s visited by his only friend, the Other. But then messages start appearing, chalked onto the pavements: there is someone else in the house. A friend or, as the Other tells Piranesi, a foe?

What have you just finished? And what are you looking forward to reading next?

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (4)

(James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White No. 3, 1866, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham; found here)

Amazing news! I have finally finished rereading The Portrait of a Lady. And it is clear to me that if I am not to be reduced to reading nothing more demanding than the oeuvre of Enid Blyton, I had better start spending less time on the internet. My attention span appears to be the size of a gnat’s these days.

Despite my mental feebleness I have thoroughly enjoyed the novel and am keener than before to read The Wings of a Dove which, Graham Greene assures me in the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition, is a variation on the same basic plot. I have been thinking more about what I wrote last time, James’s wonderful ability to use metaphor to turn an emotional or cognitive state into a concrete image; an example being about Henrietta’s nosiness into Goodwood’s private business: ‘this enquiring authoress was constantly flashing her lantern into the quiet darkness of his soul’. Do other writers do this and I just haven’t noticed, or is it a peculiarity of Henry James’s? There seems something very particular about it.

Even though I have read the novel before I had completely forgotten the most significant revelation near the end of it and was completely gobsmacked. The actual ending was open yet bleak as James’s endings always seem to be (well, of those of his works I’ve read), and yet perhaps not completely bleak. Isabel returns to Rome because she has promised Pansy she will, repaying a betrayal (not Pansy’s!) with loyalty. And Ralph has left her the use of Gardencourt for a year; the novel has proved Ralph to be prescient and so perhaps Isabel will not stay long with horrible Osmond after all.

Which brings me to something I haven’t yet been able to resolve: what are Isabel’s rights? She married a American in Italy but in an American church. Which nation’s jurisdiction applies to her? Were she British and married in Britain, her property and money would have become her husband’s, but perhaps the US or Italy had more liberal laws? (This is assuming that Isabel might overcome her reverence for the institution of marriage and its duties.)

Another possible bright light at the end of the novel is Henrietta’s future. True, there is not one single precedent of a happy marriage in this book and true, Ralph’s previous experiment in bequests ended disastrously. Like Isabel, I’m a tiny bit sorry that she is going to marry, but at least they know each other well. And this time Ralph seems to have directed his legacy more wisely, in giving his money to Henrietta to start a newspaper and work. I was quite annoyed on Henrietta’s behalf to discover that in this edition of The Portrait of a Lady, revised by James in 1907, the author altered passages about her to make her more of a caricature. She deserves better than that!

Having spent so much time with the characters and known them so deeply, I cannot stop wondering about what will happen to them... Thanks again to Dolce Bellezza, for precipitating this, even though I’ve finished so much later than everyone else in the readalong!

(Antonio da Correggio, Adoration of the Child, 1518–20, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; from here; surprisingly – to me, anyway – ‘Henrietta had a special devotion to this intimate scene – she thought it the most beautiful picture in the world’; perhaps from this we are meant to realise that Henrietta too would like a family?)

what makes a good poem?

(Carl Spitzweg, De Arme Poet [The Poor Poet], 1839, oil on canvas; Neue Pinakothek; found here)

I’ve deleted the post I originally wrote here. It was a long-winded and dull answer to Rebecca Watts’s article in PN Review entitled ‘The Cult of the Noble Amateur’ criticising the work of three poets, most particularly Hollie McNish; you can read more about it in the Guardian. Since writing my post, I saw better arguments elsewhere, such as this and this slightly barbed riposte by Don Paterson. I should just add here that I thought Watts had every right to write her piece and to review Hollie McNish’s poetry. However, I disliked the personal tone of her attack (ironic as she was complaining about the cult of personality), and her failure to interrogate her own standards and even try to engage with McNish’s aims. I also thought that greeting the work of three poets as being the advent of the Poetry Apocalypse was ridiculous.

Instead I want to pick up the point that I was reaching at the end of the first version of this. Watts had a clearly defined set of criteria of what a poem (and, less defensibly, what a poet) should be. She measured McNish’s poetry against these criteria and found it wanting. That approach is not always the best way to read literature, I find. Usually you have to take work on its own terms – usually it tells you how to read it, if you’re paying attention. But that’s not always the case and anyway, it’s not easy to do.

I’m reading Edmund Gordon’s stellar biography of Angela Carter at the moment. In it, he records the reactions of many critics to Carter’s work as it was published. Irrespective of whether they like the books or not, some critics are more sensitive to what Carter was trying to do than others. But how do you judge something like The Passion of New Eve when you’ve never encountered anything like it before? If you do not understand the writer’s purpose, is that your failure or hers?

What I am thinking about here is how ‘wrong’ Watts and some of Carter’s critics are in applying existing standards to work which challenges those standards. Must we change our ideas of literature every time we open a book? I am inclined to say that yes, we should. But all of them? Is that realistic? And how then do we define what is ‘good’ and what is not if we do not have consistent standards? Is it possible to separate ‘good literature’ from ‘I liked this book’? I wibble around this subject; what do you think?

 

SNB: The Book of Dust Volume I: La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman

(John Constable, Dedham Vale with River Stour in Flood, painted some time between 1814 and 1817, possibly commissioned as a wedding present; found here, which also has more information about it)

 

Happy Thursday to you! It’s a cold, wet, grey Belgian day here; I am freezing in the study, one cat is lying on the sofa swearing at anyone who even looks at him, the other is watching the laundry revolving in the washing machine. Good times.

My review of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage is now up at Shiny New Books.

Spoiler: I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Since it’s just won the Waterstone’s Book of the Year Award, you don’t have to take my word for it... (Though I should remind you I have very good taste so you probably ought to.) Congratulations, Mr Pullman!

a long and rather boring post about bookshelves

It’s been a little while since I last posted here. Since then, the US has leapt into a handcart and gone hurtling off to Hell. It is so much worse, and progressing so much faster, than I had feared. It’s almost laughable, it’s so bad. Meanwhile, Britain’s future under Brexit looks worse and worse but for some reason we’re going to plough ahead with it instead of admitting it’s a Bad Plan. And in further happy news, many environmental scientists think we’ve gone so far that we won’t be able to limit global warming to 2^oC. Basically, my friends, it’s the end of the world as we know it.

(I can’t find a source for this piece of marginalia, please tell me if you know it)

Among other things – like working – why wasn’t I born to wealth and idleness? – I’ve been bravely engaging with this depressing state of affairs by re-arranging my books. The sky may fall in but at least I’ll be able to lay my hand on my Renaissance poetry as I expire. I was driven to it by too much ogling of Simon’s posts on Other People’s Bookshelves. After reading every single one, I was forced to conclude that Other People’s Bookshelves tend to look much nicer than mine, which have a stuffed-into-every-available-space air to them. They also tend have fewer thick black cobwebs and bits of spider dinners and less dust clinging to the pages. And then, if I’m tidying and cleaning, maybe I should cull a bit too. Viewed practically, I can’t reread all of these books before I die, especially as tempting new books keep being published all the time.

The first thing to do was to think about ordering. I had a large wall of books, which was divided into non-fiction, poetry and drama, and fiction, all then arranged alphabetically by author. There’s a small bookcase in the kitchen, containing gardening books, travel, a paltry few cookery books, books on making stuff. There’s another bookcase in the sitting-room in which my daughter’s books and my art books strive for mastery. My unread books were all crammed into the icy cupboard I pompously refer to as my ‘study’. I never seemed to read any of them... And then in the attic were boxes of children’s books, and let’s not even think about the books still at my parents’ house in Britain...

I decided that, in addition to needing to tidy and cull my books, the TBR system wasn’t working and ordering things alphabetically was boring. (Is this my midlife crisis? Deciding that my shelving system lacks thrills?) Ignoring the art books and the books in the kitchen for the time being, I planned to group the non-fiction by subject and then shelve all the literature – poetry, prose and fiction – chronologically. Great idea, eh? What could go wrong?

This is what happened.

(Well, this is not what happened – if only it had been like this! Edouard John Menta, Maid Reading in a Library, oil on panel, shamelessly filched from Harriet)

First I tackled the non-fiction. That was fun! I’d forgotten how many interesting books I owned, read and unread. All muddled up together, I hadn’t been able to find anything nor looked very much. But now, sitting with their friends, they look much more attractive. There’s a group of wimminy writer books, which includes diaries and biographies and Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, May Sarton, Maya Angelou – also a biography of Ottoline Morrell – but not Lesley Blanche. She’s with the Imperialist travellers, along with Emily Eden and White Mughals, and I put Edward Saïd there too to keep an eye on them. There’s a group of books on Nigeria and another on witchy books, of which I have a surprisingly large number. Perhaps I should change my job.

But I didn’t find many books I wanted to get rid of, though I suspect deep in my heart that I may not ever get round to reading some of them even once.

And it took a loong time....

Then I started on the Everything Else. There are a lot more of them, and unfortunately despite my Cunning Plan to pile some books horizontally and divest myself of others, I didn’t seem to have any more space for them. Possibly a bit less, as, since I was going to get rid of so many books, I had acquired a few replacements, and then, you know, it was Christmas, and then all the bad news in the world and all the great books other people seemed to be reading and writing about...

It turns out that shelving your books chronologically is not a straightforward task after all. For a start, do you choose publication date or composition date for your chronology? Because some novels weren’t published in their authors’ lifetimes, and some earlier texts weren’t published until hundreds of years after they were originally written, yet it would look odd to stick Anna Weamys’s continuation of Sidney’s Arcadia in the twentieth century. On the other hand, how would I know when most of them were originally written – copyright pages give the year of publication and there is no way I am going to faff around trying to find out when pen was originally set to paper for hundreds and hundreds of books.

(Meanwhile, I brought down the boxes of children’s books and stuffed them in one of the bookcases in the study any old how. They look frightful. I haven’t photographed them. I can’t sort them out because I’d have to remove them from the bookcase and I can’t currently reach said bookcase because in front of it are stacks of Everything Else and books I am contemplating culling but can’t quite decide on. Ah well. Later.)

Other problems with my wonderful new system were arising. First, what to do about collected works? Second, checking all the dates and comparing them with other books was taking ages, and I’d open a book, look at the date and forget it as soon as the book was closed.

And then, what a lot of good books I have! Oh, I remember this one, gosh it’s years since I read it, let me see, will I ever read it again? Let’s have a look... Hmmm... Oh no, it’s time to collect E from school, where has the afternoon gone? Definitely need to keep this one anyway... (No, the culling part of the operation has gone extremely badly.)

The end result has been the Fudge System. It’s not strictly chronological, I’ve grouped the books into eras and then arranged them sort of chronologically (publication or composition date according to where they seemed happiest) and sort of by size (for the horizontal ones). I haven’t finished yet, but so far I am really liking the result. I tend to read books according to my mood and now it’s easier to find something that fits. The only possible disadvantage is that now that the TBRs are mingled among my already-read books, I can’t easily see how many there are and there may be less restraint around the acquiring of new books. On the other hand, it will encourage me to handle all my books more, and be content with what I already have, which can only be a good thing.

Still, as I say, I haven’t finished yet. What will happen when I reach the end of the available shelf space with a hundred or so homeless books? Who knows... Maybe you can distract me in the interim by writing about how you shelve your books, possibly posting a few photographs, you know we all want to see them and it is after all the reason I wrote this post...

improving on the old masters

(Svetlana Petrova, Zarathustra the Cat and Edouard Manet, Can I Help You Sir? found here via here)

It’s a well-known fact that no art is Great Art unless it has kittens in it. While the Rubenesque Zarathustra is no longer a kitten, I think we can all agree that her replacing Suzon as the barmaid in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergère improves it inestimably. No one would dare start a fight with that face looking at them.

Svetlana Petrova is a Russian artist who specialises in photoshopping pictures of her cat onto famous works of art. What a joy of a job! You can see more of her work here.

Happy Friday! (It’s the 13th, I only learnt this after I had got out of bed but the sky hasn’t fallen in yet.)

Un autre monde, by J.J. Grandville

Last weekend, and the previous one, I visited a fascinating exhibition here in Belgium called Middle Gate, which brought together work by professional and outsider artists, and showed them in a conventional gallery, a church, a museum and the art department of a psychiatric treatment centre, to consider art-as-art, myth and psychiatry. It was beautiful, perplexing and disturbing, and I wish I could return this weekend as there was so much to look at and think about and so little time. I’m not going to write a review of it here because it’s closed, but if you are interested you can read more about it in English here.

(‘Apocalypse du ballet’, from here)

The exhibition included work by Cindy Sherman, Paul Klee, René Magritte, Odilon Redon and a lot of contemporary artists from Belgium and abroad whose names I didn’t know. But the greatest pleasure for me was my discovery of J.J. Grandville, a nineteenth-century French artist.  Born in Nancy in 1803, Grandville moved to Paris at the age of twenty-one and began work as a lithographer. His private life was appallingly sad. None of his four sons lived longer than a few years, and his first wife died of peritonitis. He died at the age of forty-four, a couple of months after his last child. Grandville’s caricatures, often featuring animal-headed people, were enormously popular until 1835, when the government cracked down on caricatures and re-introduced prior censorship. Grandville then turned to book illustration. He supplied work for editions of Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, as well as issuing books of lithographs. It was the exquisite, delicate drawings from one of these books, Un autre monde (1844), which caught my eye at the exhibition and which I’ve used to decorate this post.

(‘Le Louvre des marionnettes’, pen-and-ink drawing, Collection Ronny et Jessy Van de Velde, from here)

Talking flowers, angry vegetables, tightrope-walking fleas, hybrid animals, eccentric viewpoints... Grandville has been called a proto-Surrealist, and I think you can see why. Max Ernst, André Breton and Georges Bataille were inspired by Un Autre Monde, it’s impossible not to feel that Lewis Carroll and perhaps John Tenniel too had either seen the book or drunk the same water as Grandville.His pictures are fanciful, witty, grotesque, fevered. You can see all the illustrations from Un autre monde here. Go and look!

(‘Mlle Tender et M. Tunnel, concert of steam cornet and soprano’, from here)

(‘The wheel of fashion’, from here)

(‘A young ewe leads the dancing with an ageing panther’, from here)

cheery wibblings

 
(Jonathan Adams Bartlett, ‘Portrait of Harriet’, c. 1840, Terra Foundation for American Art; found here)

1. Hurrah! I passed my final set of exams and am now a fully qualified teacher. No teenager in the land is now safe from an English lesson from me. I have also lost a stone in weight from sheer terror and am covered in boils, and am thus an adornment to any Belgian classroom.
2. Another hurrah! I was offered another evening of teaching English at the adult education centre where for the last year I’ve been giving English lessons.
3. However, now that I can, I’m not sure that I want to teach English. I like teaching, but I don’t really enjoy teaching language – not least because I don’t know the proper grammatical rules and have to learn them in a hurry before lessons, and then in the panic of standing up before the class I forget them all. I am going to make an effort to teach myself grammar over the holidays, yes I am o yes.
4. So once again I am thinking of studying for a PhD (I was just setting about the paperwork for one when we emigrated). I won’t be able to study my original subject and in fact if I’m to have any chance of a job teaching undergraduates I believe I’ll have to study twentieth-century or contemporary literature. But that will be no hardship!
5. Although I have a nasty feeling that, this being Belgium, I’ll have to study for another Master’s first. I love studying, but yet another year might just push this out of the category ‘Taking realistic steps towards full-time employment’ and into the category ‘Massive self-indulgence’.
6. But I have time to think about all this…
7. I also have time to start writing here more regularly. Looking around, I see all the usual Helenish schemes which never quite came to anything. Writing about De aanslag? Working my way through great works of Modernism? Discussing the Grimms’ fairy tales one story at a time? Oops. I’m still excited about these reading plans although somewhat daunted about posting about them in public, you might think that after childbirth (a while ago now!) and a year of teacher training I’d have no shame left but weirdly I do still feel very self-conscious about what I write here.
8. At the moment, however, I am really, really tired. I am so sorry I haven’t replied to comments earlier, I just don’t have the energy usually. It’s getting better though. However, I need your help... While I’m full of plans and dreams, at the moment I’m still reading children’s books (just indulging in a Joan Aiken binge). But I’m almost at the end of what I own, and still in need of comfort reading. Dear readers, can you recommend me some good but light fiction? For children or adults, I love both. Thank you, and a happy Saturday to you!

In a Shoreham Garden, by Samuel Palmer

(Samuel Palmer, ‘In a Shoreham Garden’, watercolour ca. 1830; from the Victoria and Albert Museum collection)

I was a leetle over-optimistic the other day when I thought that I would again have time for writing here. During the last couple of weeks I have been entirely occupied with work for my teacher-training course. I do believe that I am almost at the end of the busiest part... I don’t have time even to write about fairy tales at the moment, but I didn’t want to neglect this place as I did before. Therefore I’m just putting up cheaty quick posts, so you know I’m still here... And who knows, maybe you will enjoy them?

Charlotte Mew’s poem ‘I Have Been Through the Gates’ is one I love very much and it never fails to give me the chills. And I am also very fond of this painting by Samuel Palmer. Spring is finally touching Belgium and while we don’t yet have any beautiful blossom like that Palmer painted, daffodils and buds of new leaves are pricking the browns and greys of our surroundings with brighter colours.

Faithful John

(Walter Crane, illustration for ‘Faithful John’, in the Brothers Grimm, Household Stories from the Collection of the Bros. Grimm, translated by Lucy Crane (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886) found here)

‘Faithful John’ was, for me, another unfamiliar tale from the Grimms despite containing motifs recognisable from other stories such as Bluebeard and The Six Swans. It begins with an old, dying king who entrusts his son to his most loyal servant, Faithful John. (With a name like that it was lucky that he turned out to be indeed loyal!) Faithful John replies, ‘I will not desert him and I will serve him faithfully, even if it costs me my life.’ Well actually... The king adds:

After my death you are to show him all round the whole palace, all the chambers, halls, and vaults and all the treasures in them; but you are not to show him the last room in the golden corridor where the portrait of the Princess of the Golden Roof is hidden. If he catches sight of that picture he will be filled with an ardent love for her, he will fall into a faint, and for her sake he will come into great danger; you must protect him from that.

It may not surprise you that after the death of the old king and the tour of his palace, the new king starts to notice that there is one room to which he is never admitted. When challenged, Faithful John prevaricates: ‘There is something inside it [...] which will fill you with terror.’ He tells the king of his promise to his father and warns that great misfortune will befall them both if he opens the door – Faithful John already takes his responsibility so seriously that he identifies his destiny with the young king’s. But his master insists and so Faithful John unlocks the door and nips in first so that he can cover up the portrait – but alas, the painting is placed in such a way that you see it as soon as you enter, and the king peers over Faithful John’s shoulder, sees the princess and faints away. Revived, he says, ‘My love for her is so great that if all the leaves on the trees were tongues, they could not express it. I will hazard my life to gain her. You are my most loyal John: you must help me.’

So John advises the king to melt down all the gold in his treasury and have it made into splendid bowls and vases and little statues of animals, and then the two of them dress as merchants and sail to the town where the Princess of the Golden Roof lives. Faithful John goes to the palace and gains admittance to the princess via her chambermaid. He shows the princess some of the gold objects, which delight her, and lures her onto the ship of his ‘rich master’ to see the rest. No sooner has the princess set foot on board than the crew weighs anchor and they set sail; the princess does not notice at first because she is absorbed in examining the golden trinkets, but then:

‘Oh!’ she cried in terror, ‘I have been deceived. I have been carried off and fallen into a merchant’s clutches. I would sooner die!’

Fortunately, however, on being reassured that the lowly rich merchant is in fact a king, she finds that ‘her heart inclined towards him so that she gladly agreed to be his consort.’

Meanwhile, Faithful John, ‘who was sitting forward in the ship and making music’, overhears the conversation of three ravens. From this he learns that when the king reaches land a fine chestnut horse will gallop towards him, but if he mounts it, it will fly away with him and ‘he will never see his maiden again’, unless someone else jumps on the horse first, whips a pistol from the holster in the saddle and shoots it in the head. After that, the ravens tell each other, the king will reach his palace and find a wedding-shirt which looks as if it is woven from gold and silver lying in a bowl, but it is actually made of brimstone and pitch and when he puts it on ‘it will burn him down to the marrow and the bone’; the remedy is for someone else, wearing gloves, to seize it and cast it into the fire. But then, after the wedding, during the dancing, the new queen will fall to the ground as if dead and will only be saved if someone lifts her up, sucks three drops of blood from her right breast and spits them out again. If anyone who knows any of this tells the king, that person will be turned to stone.

The ravens fly off. Faithful John is ‘still and sad’, but resolves to save his master even if it costs him his own life.

(Walter Crane, as previous caption)

Everything happens as the ravens foretold, but each time Faithful John intervenes, killing the horse, burning the shirt and saving the queen. On the first two occasions, when the courtiers protest at his behaviour, the king defends him: ‘Who knows what good that did? Let him be, he is my most loyal John.’ But the incident with the queen’s breast, well, I think we can all see that this might be open to misinterpretation and thus be unsurprised that the king flies into a rage and has Faithful John thrown into gaol. However, the king also condemns his loyal servant to death the very next morning without a chance to defend himself. At the gallows Faithful John explains his conduct and is turned to stone. The penitent king has the statue placed in his bedchamber beside his bed and weeps whenever he looks at it: ‘Oh, if only I could bring you back to life, my most loyal John!’ Despite this he and his wife manage to have twins.

One morning the queen is at church and the two little boys are playing by their father, who is weeping and wishing her could restore Faithful John to life, when the statue speaks and says that he can be reanimated – if the king sacrifices what he holds most dear. ‘If you chop off the heads of your two children with your own hand, and anoint me with their blood, I shall regain my life.’ The king is horrified, but reasons that Faithful John had died for him, so he beheads his sons and besmears the statue with their blood; at once Faithful John is alive again. He tells the king, ‘Your faithfulness shall not go unrewarded’, sets the heads back on the boys and they too come back to life. The king then hides all three in a big cupboard. When the queen returns from church she says that ‘all the time I was thinking of Faithful John and how we brought such misfortune upon him’. The king then explains the dilemma to her: Faithful John can be restored to life at the cost of their two sons. ‘The queen grew pale and her heart was seized with sudden fear, but she said, “We owe it to him on account of his great loyalty.”’ Having passed the test, her sons and Faithful John are all revealed to her. ‘Then they lived together in happiness until the end of their days.’

(Hermann Vogel, illustration for ‘Der treue Johannes’, in the Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, n.d. (München: Verlag von Braun u. Schneider) found here); Faithful John, who looks far too old to be leaping on fine chestnut horses, is showing some golden trinkets to one of the princess’s servants to persuade her to admit him to her mistress’s presence)

On the surface, this tale urges us to be loyal. The narrative can only conclude when the king has shown Faithful John something of the loyalty that the servant has shown to him, and thus it insists that loyalty is reciprocal. But while the king’s ingratitude is lamentable, the price exacted by the maligned servant is high. Could the story be a demand that monarchs place duty to subjects before personal life and family? Should we value loyalty as highly as the characters in this story? They all flourished because of it.

As is the way with these tales, other readings may exist. There is surely an echo here of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, which is an example of obedience perhaps rather than loyalty. Does Faithful John demand a measure of obedience too? He takes on the rôle of parent or guide to the young king on the death of the father. He advises him as a father might. For much of the story, he acts as the hero – he plans the abduction of the Princess of the Golden Roof and carries it out, he saves the king and princess from death and shows himself to be quick-witted, thoughtful and physically strong. He, the father figure, is the perfect king and prevents the real king from doing anything for himself. The king is entirely passive until he turns on Faithful John and condemns him to death. This is his only decisive act in the story, for even his own chance at heroism (if sacrificing your children is heroic, which I think in the terms of this story it is supposed to be) is dictated by Faithful John. The story demonstrates that his bond with Faithful John is more powerful than his bond with his children. (So is the queen’s, interestingly.)

I hate to always be going on about sex in connexion with fairy tales, but I can’t help but notice the juxtaposition of marital bed containing the beautiful Princess of the Golden Roof and the grim, silent statue of Faithful John. It is as if, on his wedding day, the son finally rebelled against the parental figure, explosively, too violently, and in return the parent went into a massive sulk, casting a shadow over everything, angry but refusing to be put aside in favour of the wife. And what to make of the princess, lover of gold things, perhaps a snob, perhaps a victim of Stockholm Syndrome? Why does she feel loyalty to Faithful John?

I’ve seen a Jungian interpretation of this story mentioned on the Internets, with Faithful John as the young king’s shadow and the princess as his anima; could anyone explain this further? It looks fascinating but I know next to nothing about Jung; I’d love to learn more.

Next week: The Good Bargain.