Fantasy's Golden Age

...But despite the fact that the beauty and morality of the fantasy worlds of Stephens, Graham, Milne, Lewis, Thurber and Tolkien contrast so sharply with today's presumed realities-as though goodness and beauty had finally admitted themselves antithetical to truth-it may well be that future scholars will think of the first half of the 20th century as a Golden Age of Fantasy...

...Since I had not encountered an animal story written after Graham's The Wind in the Willows that was anything more than charming for children, I read Jean Garrigue's newly published The Animal Hotel with the greatest delight...

...The attraction of this kind of important, consequential unreality is as elusive as it is strong...

...and the first fruitful issue of this marriage (the union being well blessed, in this case, with more than a little of the Catholic faith) was the work of the late C. S. Lewis...

...Upon her return she delivers a very moving narrative which takes about half of the novella, including the wonderful descriptions of the bear telling the story and of her relationship with the animal audience...

...Aside from the very ancient form of the faerie story, and the very modern one of science fiction, a third strain, and one at least as old as the first, was reintroduced during the 1920s when Kenneth Graham and A. A. Milne wrote in the tradition of the beast fable, or animal tale...

...She does not give the impression of succinctness, because there is a wealth of detail in her descriptions, and she begins the book with a long, somewhat generalized section on the continuing characteristics of existence in the Animal Hotel, as when she reports that: "The cat stacked his fishheads in a corner and the birds kept their cuttlebones under the bed...

...While it had been considered primarily the property of children for at least two centuries, Graham and Milne far transcended this readership...

...With descriptions of this sort, the beginning is slow, in terms of the plot, but is utterly delightful in terms of the intimate knowledge it imparts of the real personalities of cats and sheep and stags-or, more precisely, of one cat, one sheep, and one stag...

...But if fantasy had remained solely in the hands of the Nouveau artists, to dwindle with them into the effete 20th-century fairylands in New York and London, James Stephens' The Crock of Gold, published in 1912 (and still known in parts of Ireland where Yeats' name has not yet been heard) would likely have stood as the solitary great example of the genre in this century...

...Her magical affection and wisdom and strength drew them back together again...

...During the bear's absence the harmonious structure of their companionship had nearly broken down, and the animals had made ready to depart...

...A novella about animals (and not about humans dressed up as animals, either), it is as sharply witty as Thurber's Thirteen Clocks and has characters as real and as lovable as those in The Wind in the Willows...

...And yet it is entirely original-as different, for example, from those two books as they are from one another...

...The ending is not that they lived happily ever after, for the cat may never recover from the visions of circus grandeur that have been implanted in his easily-turned head...

...Or that: "the animals vied with one another to see who could get into [the bear's] lap and stay longest...

...Reviewed by JENNIFER ALDRICH Novelist and critic Only since the burst of popularity for J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings has the fantasy literature of the past half century received serious critical attention...

...It should be clear that fantasy has a status of its own, which allows a serious writer to create a world that can matter very much to a reader, even if the author employs much more fiction than is ordinarily admitted in fiction...

...the sheep is reminded of the tragic loss of her own precious lambs, a long time ago...

...Rather than try to describe the phenomenon for those who have not yet felt it, I would recommend Jean Garrigue's book as one very good way of entering an exciting and essential world...

...Like Tolkien, Lewis had a vivid sense of the primitive background of human emotions, both in time and in the subconscious, and traced them through the medium of etymological history-a subject in which the two men were authorities...

...They do not talk much about death, but, with the old stag particularly, one sees their short lives as fragile and transitory...

...Fortunately, however, at least two other streams flowed.with and into this Art Nouveau revival...

...The realization that one must return again from this world does not make it any less magical while it lasts, and for this reason the world of The Animal Hotel seems hard to place in a century which has paid much louder heed to Jack Kerouac or to the author of Catch 22 than to the writers with whom Jean Garrigue is associated...

...Although this new efflorescence may seem somewhat anachronistic, it follows the period of Art Nouveau when the earlier great examples of fantasy were looked at anew and lavishly reissued and re-illustrated...

...An example is the beautiful Aldine House edition of Le Morte D'Arthur, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley and published in 1893...

...There is a mystery-the disappearance of the bear who runs the hotel...

...but otherwise it would have been necessary to begin by making an apology for this delightful book-to explain that though it is a novella entirely based upon assumptions that are not true (the degree of intelligence and communication among the animals, for example), the action and the characters can reach conclusions which are true enough to matter...

...Yet the works of this period probably excel all others in the genre since Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and perhaps even Le Morte D'Arthur...

...For when Miss Garrigue has finished painting their portraits they are too real to be looked upon as merely sketches of a type or of a species...

...and the stag, in one of the loveliest passages of the book, is made to recall once again the tragedy of his doe's murder by hunters...

...For those who are already aware of this world, I can only say that The Animal Hotel approaches its very best examples...

...During Lewis' lifetime they were friends as well as colleagues at Oxford University, where (to produce another example of this movement's roots in the late 14th and 15th centuries) Tolkien wrote a definitive work on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight...

...The brief mortality of the animals is made very real...

...Really, they seemed to think she was made for clambering over while the bear as they did it affected a sternness she couldn't possibly feel and sometimes had to break out laughing at her own importance while she pretended, of course, that they were tickling her...

...but it is plain enough that this is a fantasy situation which can occur only once, and that once cannot last forever...

...They did not write as exclusively for adults as did James Thurber, even at his most fantastic, but it is among their adult audiences that they are best appreciated...

...and with them they will include The Animal Hotel of Jean Garrigue...

...If the reader is initially inclined to suspect the seriousness of a poet, and a woman poet at that, who chooses to express herself through the whimsical medium of beast fable, he will quickly and happily find that Miss Garrigue seldom wastes a word in being cute, or precious, or even overly alliterative...

...Whatever the mole ate he ate all of, so he presented no problem...

...When the action of the story begins it does not take the direction a reader might expect...

...It has taken a long prologue to get to The Animal Hotel...

...Taking us, I hope, not quite at our own self-estimations, they may put aside our most characteristic genres for one in which we have excelled most other ages...

...In that case, literature students of times to come will have the great pleasure of reading the outstanding authors of fantasy whom I have mentioned...

...As science fiction became a recognized form, its wonder and liberty became associated with the boundless mysteries of magic...