Beyond Horatio's Philosophy: The Fantasy of Peter S. Beagle. David Stevens
(ghosted?) with a sprightly cast of characters including mortals Jonathan Rebeck and Gertrude Klapper and ghosts Michael Morgan and Laura Durand. Michael and Laura, although dead, fall in love and remain together to face an uncertain eternity, while Rebeck and Mrs. Klapper also fall in love and embark on their own journey towards an unknown future. Love redeems Rebeck, and might be said to redeem Michael as well, although Michael’s redemption is perhaps not as significant as Rebeck’s.
Beagle dedicates the novel to his mother and father, Simon and Rebecca, among others, and this is not the last of his fiction to be so dedicated. Tamsin, for example, is dedicated: “To the memory of Simon Beagle, my father. I can still hear you singing, Pop, quietly, to yourself, shaving.” He dedicated one of his collections of short stories, The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances: “for my mother, Rebecca Soyer Beagle, who told me stories, and never thought I was weird.” One can imagine the teen-aged writer basing his main characters, Rebeck and Gertrude Klapper, on idealized versions of his parents, although of course such a conjecture cannot be verified. Beagle has said, however, that the idea for the novel came about when he and his mother took a walk through a New York cemetery more than 40 years ago. Some of the mausoleums were so large, his mother remarked, that you could practically live in them. By the time they walked out of the cemetery, according to Beagle he had the complete plot for his first book.
There is also a talking raven who plays a significant role in the novel, a wise-cracking, Jewish-sounding bird who would be right at home in the comic world of The Last Unicorn. His function on one level is to bring Rebeck food; he has been doing so for the nineteen years Rebeck has confined himself to the grounds of a New York cemetery because he could no longer stand the things that happened outside. The nameless raven does it because it is his nature, and ravens have always brought people food since Elijah. As he explains, “We’re closer to people than any other bird, and we’re bound to them all our lives, but we don’t have to like them. You think we brought Elijah food because we liked him? He was an old man with a dirty beard.” But on another level the raven functions to keep the audience from taking Rebeck too seriously. It would be far too easy for the character to slip the bonds of sanity, and decline into despair. In another novel perhaps he would. But not here. Beagle has another fate in mind for Rebeck.
Enter the ghost, stage left. One of Rebeck’s distinguishing characteristics is that he sees, hears, and talks to ghosts. He doesn’t know why, and we never find out why. After Beagle sets up Rebeck and the raven in Chapter One, he immediately introduces Michael in Chapter Two. There can be no doubt that Michael is dead; his ghost rises through his coffin and watches his own funeral and his weeping widow. No one can see him or hear him—except Rebeck, whom he sees sitting before a mausoleum. Rebeck explains that he enjoys helping the dead adjust to their new state. He speaks to them, plays chess with them, does whatever they need or want until finally “they drift away, and where they go I cannot follow. They don’t need me then; they don’t need anyone, and this pleases me because most of them spent their lives trying not to need.”
In Rebeck’s world, “the body dies quickly, but the soul hangs on to life as long as it can because living is all it knows.” Or perhaps “memory” is a better word than “soul”: “Living is a big thing, and it’s pretty hard to forget.”
“You find yourself becoming greedy of people; whenever they come to visit here you watch every movement they make, trying to remember the way you used to do that. And when they leave you follow them all the way to the entrance, and you stop there because you can’t go farther.… They had it all backwards, you see, those old ghost stories about the dead haunting the living. It’s not that way at all.”
The dead, in A Fine and Private Place, are confined forever to the cemetery where their bodies are interred. Heaven and hell are for the living, not the dead. Eventually the dead forget things, because they no longer wish to remember. But Rebeck makes Michael this promise:
“As long as you cling to being alive, as long as you care to be a man, I’ll be here. We’ll be two men together in this place. I’ll like it, because I get lonesome here and I like company; and you’ll like it, too, until it becomes a game, a pointless ritual. Then you’ll leave.”
But the leaving is metaphorical, not physical; at some point, in A Fine and Private Place ghosts merely lie down and wrap themselves in the earth. They remain in the cemetery for eternity, only pretending to sleep. Being dead is “Like nothing at all. It is like nothing at all.” So says one who should know, at the climax of the novel.
Enter a second ghost, stage right. After introducing Mrs. Klapper for Rebeck in Chapter Three, Beagle rounds out his cast with Laura for Michael in Chapter Four. Laura, too, is dead, and comes into the cemetery with her funeral party. She and Michael meet and discuss their situation; while Michael was not ready for death, and continues to fight against it, Laura was more than ready and is prepared to embrace it. But she discovers that the dead can’t sleep, as the living can, and when she lies down and closes her eyes it’s as if she still had them open. Rebeck tells her, “Each man’s death is his own concern, and whether he sleeps or doesn’t sleep is of less importance than how he accepts it—or how he rationalizes it.”
The primary conflict in the novel arises from Rebeck’s fear of life outside the cemetery. Both Rebeck and Michael are in denial. Rebeck fears that he cannot cope with the modern world, and Michael has fantasized that his wife murdered him, which prevents him from admitting that he killed himself. The main problem to be resolved is how Rebeck will be reintegrated into society, and the secondary problem is how Michael and Laura can remain together when Michael’s body is moved to another cemetery because of his suicide.
Rebeck, of course, being alive, does not belong in the cemetery. Michael, being a suicide, does not belong there either. Both must be removed for the world to return to its natural state. Mrs. Klapper, who came to the cemetery to visit her dead husband’s mausoleum (enter the third ghost, through a trap), returns to see Rebeck and eventually falls in love with him. She gives him the courage he needs to walk away and reenter the world. Laura, who did not love in life, learns to love in death, and gives Michael the courage to face his deepest fears. When Michael’s body is exhumed and taken to a more appropriate final resting place, Rebeck arranges for Laura’s body to be moved surreptitiously to the same location. That way they can be together for whatever time is left them before one or both finally forgets what it is to be alive. Rebeck thinks being loved is one way to become real, but the ghost of Morris Klapper, Mrs. Klapper’s dead husband, corrects him: “I think the only way to become real is to be real to yourself and to someone else. Love has nothing to do with it.” Ultimately A Fine and Private Place is about how a man learns to be real to himself and to someone else. Love has everything to do with it.
As was the case with The Last Unicorn (see Chapter Two, below), IDW is scheduled to bring out a comic book and graphic novel version of A Fine and Private Place.
CHAPTER TWO: THE LAST UNICORN
While humor is peripheral to much fantasy, it is central to Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Beagle creates a quasimedieval universe with built-in anachronisms to serve as the setting for his fairy tale that is at once high romance and self-parody. He presents a serious theme, that we are what people think us and we become what we pretend to be, with a comic technique, and much of the success of the novel can be traced to its humor.
Beagle leaves no doubt about his comic intentions very early in the novel. Before any of the important mortal characters are introduced, the unicorn meets a butterfly. While some important exposition is presented, the main purpose of the encounter is humorous. In Beagle’s world butterflies can talk, but all they can do is repeat what they have heard. This butterfly has apparently heard a lot of popular songs, a lot of television commercials, and a lot of Shakespeare and other medieval and Renaissance English poetry. Its speech is a combination of these elements, and the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the sublime is very funny:
“Death takes what man would keep,” said the butterfly, “and leaves what man would lose. Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. I warm my hands before the fire of life and get four-way relief.”
The other speeches from this brief section are just as incongruous. Responding