"See to the nine weasels"

I believe I encountered my first reference to Sylvia Townsend Warner in the Independent several months ago. Warner was a regular short story writer for the New Yorker, posting off manuscripts to the editor from the Dorset cottage where she "kept company" with the poetess Valentine Ackland. Over the years, however, she became increasingly eccentric, and eventually refused to write anything but a series of quaint and curious stories about Fairyland, which the New Yorker never quite knew what to do with.

I can only imagine with what distaste the likes of William Shawn would have received these genteel missives. But of course, this really piqued my interest in her work, especially the later skein of stories eventually published as Kindgoms of Elfin. I bumped into a copy of her selected stories at the library last month, and checked it out. The "mainstream" short stories are indeed beutifully written, and reminded me a little of Isak Dinesen for their well-observed yet otherworldly quality. But when I came to the first of the fairy stories, The One and The Other, I was immediately fascinated. From what I'd read, I expected some kind of twee twaddle about rose petals and gossamer wings. What I found was freakishly strange. It was like being admitted to the play-pretend world of a precocious and extremely disturbed Victorian child.

The story at first seems to be a straightforward tale of the fairies absconding with a baker's child and replacing him with a changeling. All well and good. But within the first couple of pages, when the child is presented to the queen, things quickly get strange. She examines the child, approves of his protruding ears, names him Tiffany, and casually orders her underling to "see to the nine weasels:"

Every day a fasting weasel bites the child's neck and drinks its blood for three minutes. The amount of blood drunk by each successive weasel (who is weighed before and after the drinking) is replaced by the same weight of a distillation of dew, soot, and aconite. Though the blood-to-ichor transfer does not cancel human nature (the distillation is only approximate: elfin blood contains several unanalyzable components, one of which is believed to be magnetic air), it gives considerable longevity; ... "Dear little thing," said Tiphaine [the queen of Elfhame; all Warner's elfin kingdoms are matriarchies]. "I hope he won't age prematurely." For when grey hairs appear on the head of a changeling he is put out of the hill to make the rest of his way through the human world; which is why we see so many grey-haired beggars on the roads.

This is fascinating to me not only for the complicatedness of the ritual she describes, but its pretensions to science. Aconite is a medicine derived from wolfsbane, still in use as an anaesthetic during her time; what she can mean by magnetic air I can only guess at. But the really striking thing about this passage is its stark gruesomeness. The image of a weasel sucking the blood from an infant's neck is so powerfully disturbing. This, coupled with the ruthless way these children are disposed of after they outlive their charms marks this as a kind of fairy writing that hearks back to the undiluted horrors at the roots of the Grimm tales. They are stories for adults, not airy bits of spun sugar to be dispensed to sleepy children at bedtime. These are the kinds of stories children should be protected from, unless you want them to have nightmares.

And this more adult notion of faerie is experiencing a great resurgence at the moment. Each month seems to bring a few more books mining this rich vein. Just after I posted the above I read this post on the wonderful Endicott blog, about a new collection of queer fairy fiction, So Fey, that looks fabulous. I'm sure Sylvia would approve!

Summer to last just one day

It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands.

Since I moved to rain-lashed England a few years ago, but especially during this summer of endless rain, I've been haunted by a Ray Bradbury story I read in fifth grade. I found it right away on the internet: It's called All Summer in a Day and you can read it in under ten minutes; it's short but powerful.

The story is set in the future, in a human colony on Venus, where the sun comes out once every seven years. And the protagonist is a little girl who used to live on Earth (in Ohio) and pines for the sun. The rest of the kids are jealous of her, because she can remember the way sunlight feels on your skin, and what a sunset looks like. They've grown up in the dark, with the relentless sound of rain falling constantly on the roof of their underground complex. When scientists predict that the sun will be coming out soon, the kids are all excited - but something very sad happens, and I won't spoil it for you if you haven't read it. Suffice it to say that it moved me enough at age ten that I've remembered it for more than twenty years. And clearly many other people feel the same way. This story seems to be something of a cultural touchstone - so many of us growing up in 80s/90s America seem to have read it in school, and many bloggers seem to have been profoundly affected by it.

The interesting thing about this story is that Bradbury so effectively apes children's voices, and the fervid exchange and distortion of classroom gossip, the way children are with each other, their vague but strongly felt jealousies and alliances. It reminded me a little bit of the early bits of The Waves in how sucessful it was in capturing a child's outlook, though in a very different way.

And look! This story ran in The Sun a few weeks ago:

News: Summer to last just one day

Too bloody right.

(Illustration from here)

Sidney Sime

Instructions

via.