Thursday, May 17, 2012

The Brothers Grimm’s book of fairy tales – 200 years on

By Kate De Goldi| Published in The Listener on May 17, 2012 | Issue 3758

Illustration right - Anna Crichton

My primer four Croxley IG School Exercise Book records a perfectly representative story from my early years, the pencilled printing and Sister Barbara’s confident red ticks faded now, 46 years later. The story begins: “Once upon a time there were ten good little children. Their names were Christine and Beverley, Timothy and Patricia, Ingrid and Terry, Jenny and Elizabeth and Gail and Mary-Lou, and that’s all. And their mother was Kathleen [me]. Now, they had a little house in the middle of a deep wood …”
The story is pages and pages long (with a random Chapter Two heading midway); all the children are beautiful and so are their clothes; they have an adopted bear, they spend their days hunting; there is a bad witch who eventually metamorphoses into a good fairy and saves the day she has previously ruined; finally, and emphatically, there is a happy ending: “Then they had a Christmas party.”

I don’t remember writing this story but it has intrigued me since I first reread it 20 years ago, demonstrating as it does the strong influence of reading on early writing and, in particular, the elements of fairy tale that had so clearly been laid down already in my reading life. And my listening life. There were certainly fairytale collections in our family home and they were read often to me and my sisters, but the Brothers Grimm (Jacob and Wilhelm), Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen came to us most urgently and persuasively through the collection of 45rpm records in which all the (severely truncated) tales were narrated with singalong musical accompaniment by the Peter Pan Orchestra and Chorus.
I can still readily call up the hectic pace of the strings and every word of each ditty: “Don’t worry, Gretel, Hansel is beside you …”; “Cinder, Cinder-RELLa, went to the ball …”; “Sleep, sleep, sleep, Sleeping Beauty, sleep till your dreams coooommme truuuuue.” Etc. Constant listening to those 45s meant the syntax and cadence of the stories – oddly faithful to fairy-tale “music” despite the ridiculous concision of the retellings – went deep into the bones. Hence, no story could be real unless it opened with “Once upon a time”; hence, the frequency with which my sentences began “Now …”

Interestingly, the six-year-old me artlessly adopting the tone and structure and many of the habits of fairy tale was also, throughout that primer four book, blending the mythic and supernatural with elements from my very ordinary suburban life in 1960s Christchurch. The names are my cousins’ and classmates’; dotted throughout are Canterbury place names, much domestic paraphernalia and the glancing anxieties of my private world. In my own small way, I was discovering the enduring allure of fairy tale: that its characters and preoccupations reflect eternal human anxieties and desires (fear of abandonment, of devouring, of loss; greed, generosity, wisdom and folly …); that its shape and structure are reliably solid and – paradoxically – porous enough for readers or writers to insert their own pressing story in the interstices.
Full story at The Listener.

And for details on a related writing competition link here.

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