Myth Happens

I learned last night that Mary Stewart had died. She was 97, which is a respectable age, and her last novel was published in 1997, but I am still sorry in the way of something gone out of the world. I grew up on her writing.

I inherited her from my mother. She collected Stewart's romantic suspense novels, eventually achieving everything but The Wind Off the Small Isles (1968), about which she doesn't feel too bad because it was never published in the U.S. I still look for it in used book stores. On my own shelves, I have carefully-jacketed hardcovers of This Rough Magic (1964) and Airs Above the Ground (1965) and a battered pocket paperback of Madam, Will You Talk? (1954) that shed both covers long before I got to it. A favorite I'm missing is My Brother Michael (1959) and I should like The Moon-Spinners (1962) someday. She returned to Greece most often in her modern novels, sometimes shadowed by its classical past, sometimes by more recent history. It mixed with my mother's stories of backpacking around Europe in 1968, throwing silver to the sea for Poseidon off Crete and getting back a watermelon in return. I have none of the Merlin books here. I've only ever read my mother's copies, three well-loved hardcovers that I took to school with me in seventh and eighth grade. Druidic sacrifice outside my homeroom door, the altar blazing INVICTO in the cafeteria, a dark-eyed boy's ghost on the river while I waited for the bus under willow trees that blew down decades ago. The Crystal Cave (1970) is the best. You can feel the others stiffening into frieze the closer they adhere to the Arthurian canon, but there's something I love in each of them: the sword of Macsen Wledig in The Hollow Hills (1973), Niniane-Nimue in The Last Enchantment (1979). The Wicked Day (1983) was my first sympathetic Mordred, even if Elizabeth E. Wein's is my favorite. Stewart was not my first vision of Merlin, either; that was Peter Dickinson or Jane Yolen or T.H. White. (I read The Sword in the Stone before I saw the movie and as a result never warmed to the latter, although I will always love Bill Peet's admission of modeling Merlin's nose after Walt's.) But I come back always to her Merlin, Myrddin Emrys, the watchful child with falcon-dark eyes, dreaming a glitter of dragons—air and darkness, a word, a promise. I watch in the crystal and I wait in the hollow hills. His fifth-century Roman Britain was as vivid to me as the Bronze Age of Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958), excavating something human out of conjured names and tesserae of myth. She was my introduction to Mithras, even before Rosemary Sutcliff. When I was twenty-three, I was as old as Merlin at Arthur's conception and now that I'm thirty-two, at my age he was meeting the boy Arthur for the first time. He's such an early piece of the inside of my head, I don't think about it often. But there that whole world is. There's something I loved. There's the person who wrote it, gone.

There's an interview with her here; I watched it last night. I recommend it, especially the part where she talks about writing the kind of books she did because they were the sort of thing she wanted to read—like John Buchan, but with female protagonists. It is true that her heroines are often scared, but never because of their gender; they are no more out of their depth than any other ordinary person suddenly finding themselves in the midst of intrigues they didn't ask for, and they are rarely utterly helpless. I'm sure there are all sorts of other problems I can't see for reading them so early, but I've never understood why there weren't more movies made of the romances than Disney's The Moon-Spinners (1964), which I pretend doesn't exist. Perhaps her language wouldn't translate; she wrote so gracefully of place and so precisely of expressions and movements, I can see exactly where it imprinted my own work. I still think Derek Jacobi about fifteen years ago would have played a perfect Julian Gale.

I'll be in a used book store this afternoon. I'll look for her.

"So all through that winter he came to me. And he came at night. I was never alone in my chamber, but he came through doors and windows and walls, and lay with me. I never saw him again, but heard his voice and felt his body. Then, in the summer, when I was heavy with child, he left me . . . They will tell you how my father beat me and shut me up, and how when the child was born he would not give him a name fit for a Christian prince, but, because he was born in September, named him for the sky-god, the wanderer, who has no house but the woven air. But I called him Merlin always, because on the day of his birth a wild falcon flew in through the window and perched above the bed, and looked at me with my lover's eyes."