The Fourth Pig (2 page)

In 1916, when she was not yet twenty, she married Dick Mitchison, who was a friend of her brother Jack's; he was also very young (b. 1894), a soldier in the Queen's Bays infantry regiment and about to fight in France; he was badly wounded in the head almost immediately in a motorbike accident as he was carrying dispatches; but he returned to the trenches, rose to become a Major, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. In civil life he became a lawyer, and a distinguished Queen's Counsel; together they grew to share overwhelming indignation at the social conditions in England. He entered parliament as a Labour MP amid the bright hopes of the 1945 Attlee government, and was later ennobled (though Naomi did not use the title “Lady Mitchison”).
Their marriage was long, turbulent but strong, both of them accepting each other's lovers as friends. After the shock she felt during her first experiences of sex as a very young wife, which she wrote about frankly and bravely, Naomi struck out for freedoms (such as contraception, abortion, and open marriage) with more courage than many in her social circle. Nevertheless, she had six children, losing her firstborn, a boy, to meningitis at the age of 9, and a daughter shortly after birth, events which surface in anguish in many of her books.

Naomi Mitchison conjures up ardent tomboy heroines in homage to the dream of freedom she had entertained before the conventions of class and gender put her in shackles. She imagines them as paragons of desire and autonomy in faraway settings—in ancient Egypt, Scythia, Sparta, Gaul, Constantinople, Rome, Scotland, or Hell, where they can act as daughters of her longings, and she wanted them to beckon to her readers as irresistibly as any fairy from the fairy hill. Several stories in this collection, such as “Soria Moria Castle” and “Adventure in the Debateable Land,” and Kate Crackernuts herself, present such figures of female liberators.

She also wanted to prove that science—her father and Jack's preserve in her family—could be reconciled with fantasy, which was her own strength. She refused to allow the latter to be dismissed by the former. In an attempt to rekindle magic in modern, rational times, she plays with wilful anachronisms. The technique is a form of defamiliarisation: she takes the humdrum and queers it. Slang falls from the lips of the gods (“What utter bilge, Xanthias,” says Dionysos in “Frogs and Panthers”). Later in the same story, the god returns in a motorcar, smoking. In this updated
classical myth, Mitchison kneads together her lingering conscience about belonging to the upper class, her solidarity with the workers, and her memories of her father's work on the respiratory horrors of industrial towns in the north. She wanted to refresh tradition, and feared what she called “the archaistic view.”

The literary scholar Gill Plain recently commented that Mitchison “creatively politicised history, using it as a space through which to imagine ‘an abstract future postwar,' and to challenge the assumptions of patriarchal history.”
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She reaches backwards in time, and reconstructs a better, more intense, more conscious, more meaningful experience in the past for several periods and peoples and cultures. History, retooled, is then shot through with magic and mythic effects. The Debateable Land that is the literary terrain of myth and fairy tale set her free to imagine what she longed for—or sometimes feared.

Naomi Mitchison was one of the splendid unstoppable graphomaniacs of her day, to put alongside prodigal precursors and authors of her youth (Mrs Oliphant, Walter Scott, H. G. Wells); she published nearly a hundred books, as well as hundreds of articles, reviews, and blasts in the papers, not to mention her private letters (she and her husband, when apart, would correspond on a daily basis until the Thirties). Writing became as necessary to her existence as breathing or eating: a form of health-giving exercise. She was of the generation of women who went in for emancipatory athletics, as in the Women's League of Health and Beauty. Her activity was writing. There is hardly a genre she did
not attempt, a reader whose interests she did not try to capture, or a world of experience she did not enter.

The struggle between the good citizen and the wild girl, the nurse and the sorceress, runs through the whole of her astounding body of work. It accounts, too, for the neglect that she has fallen into for some time now. For it is a bit of mystery that this once best-selling novelist, polemicist, memoirist, and
grande dame
of letters, who came from a fabulous intellectual lineage, was englamoured by wealth and prestige (at least for part of her lifetime), and led an intrepid experimental life in her work and her loves, should not have captured more attention since her death in 1999 at the age of 101. After all, the Haldanes were formidable scientists, eccentric, spirited, politically activist, and far richer than, for example, the Mitfords, who have inspired shelf-loads of admiration. Naomi wrote several times, with wry, comic vividness, about her family's charmed life before the Second World War, with many forbidding aunts and grandparents, crowded households of servants to meet every need, and much nonchalant possession of dark labyrinthine mansions; her memoirs give off a wonderful whiff of Blandings Castle and the immortal Aunt Agatha of Wodehouse's imagination. The novelist Ali Smith has commented warmly on “the overall frank friendliness” of her voice in these books.
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Naomi Mitchison seems ripe for Bloomsbury-style fandom.

But she does not command this kind of following, and the problems that her writing poses for contemporary readers stem from that split she rightly diagnosed between the “we” and the “I”
in her makeup. Some of the writers with whom she could be compared—contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf (b. 1882) and Elizabeth Bowen (b. 1899), and others who were close friends, Wyndham Lewis (b. 1882) and Aldous Huxley (b. 1894)—were naturally modern. Whether by instinct, default, or choice, such writers belonged to the twentieth century and conveyed features of the time without needing to check their watches. But Naomi Mitchison is only partly modern. Or perhaps, as in the title which Jack Zipes has given this series, she was oddly, but not entirely, modern. This quality, her faltering modernity, arises from many features of her life and work.
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Chiefly, she felt deep loyalty to a whole array of groups, with whom she cultivated a sense of belonging, and for whom she spoke. They were the “we” who shadowed her throughout her life: they changed identity, but, at one period or another, Soviet workers, oppressed women and mothers, sharecroppers in the South of the United States, Scottish crofters and fishermen, Botswana nationalists, all claimed her attention.

The love of enchantment flourished alongside practical activity: farming, campaigning for Scottish development and for the community around her—a lively fictionalized memoir,
Lobsters on the Agenda
(1952), chronicles her efforts on behalf of local fisheries. She was also actively involved in the independence of Botswana, where she became a tribal elder. Jenni Calder gave her 1997 biography the title
The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison
, but nine is an understatement. Mitchison unleashed her forces in all
these areas, as well as giving voice to her unstoppable imaginative powers, in book after book, article after article. Among nearly a hundred publications, the heroes and heroines she brings to life before us often represent a cause. To an exceptional degree, Mitchison's torrential energies were directed at making a difference to others, and there is sometimes too much of a sense that she has designs on her text, and on you, her reader.

Naomi Mitchison's less than complete modernity also stems from her passionate belief in the mythical imagination. She fought to defend it against the high status of rationality and scepticism, advocated by family and friends. She also liked witches and witchcraft, and in her ferocious magnum opus,
The Corn King and the Spring Queen
(1931), she creates a towering, complex self-portrait in the character of Erif Der (Red Fire backwards), who has the gift of spellbinding, and uses it to powerful but often troubling effect. She felt animosity towards D. H. Lawrence, on account of his view of dominant male sexuality, but she shares some of his love of primitivism and ritual. In spite of her distaste for archaism, archaism colours her passionate imagination, adding a streak of neo-paganism that has been relegated from current versions of modernity. It can make her a bit old-fashioned, as she herself recognised in later years.

Mitchison the writer saw herself as an enchantress, and she liked to attract a large company around her, of children, family, friends, and retainers. In the Fifties, at her home in Carradale on the beautiful Mull of Kintyre in Scotland, a family friend called Charlie Brett painted the doors of a cupboard with a romantic panorama of the house standing in the magnificent landscape. Naomi figures there as Circe, standing on the threshold facing
the sea, where Dionysos' vine-wreathed barque is sailing by and Ulysses is approaching in his boat, while local fisher folk, friends, guests, shepherds, villagers are also transmuted into creatures from myth and fairy tale. Scotland was Attica, or Thrace, or Calypso's Isle—or Circe's.

Several of the friends in the circle of her passionate attachments can be glimpsed in the wings of these fairy tales: “Grand-daughter” is written for Stella Benson, a kindred spirit, feminist and writer, who had died of pneumonia in 1933. G.D.H.C., the dedicatee of “Soria Moria Castle,” is Douglas Cole, who was the husband of Margaret Cole; she was a longtime lover of Naomi's husband, Dick. In “Birmingham and the Allies,” which describes the Labour defeat in 1931 and Dick's initial failure to win a seat in parliament, his election team are included by name, including his agent, Tom Baxter. The dedication of “Mirk, Mirk Night”—“for strange roads, with Zita”—alludes to Naomi's travels in Alabama with the adventurous activist Zita Baker, when the two women joined the sharecroppers in their fight for better conditions, outraged the local white inhabitants, and had a great deal of fun. Her obituary in the
Guardian
rightly commented, “There was a Fabian, Shavian flavour to her energy; she could have belonged to the ‘Fellowship for a new Life.' ”
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The commitment to fantasy takes a lyric songlike form, as in some of the writings in this collection, and also often tends to comedy (sometimes inadvertently—the “Chinese fairies” in “Birmingham and the Allies” don't quite bring the comrades to mind as they should). Sometimes this British taste for feyness and
nonsense has the effect of undermining the strength of her dreams. Her rational side refused to allow full surrender to the seductions of fairyland—she is clear that she doesn't believe in the supernatural, but her fictions are driven by its forces and structured by ritual. At her best, Naomi Mitchison is forthright and witty, writes with brio and passion and lucidity, and conveys a huge appetite for life, for people, for new adventures, and for breaking through barriers. At her worst, she damages her serious purposes with whimsy, sometimes with wishful thinking, and sometimes with lurid bacchanalian violence. Her writing is a bit hit-and-miss, but her personality is colossal and wonderful.

Towards the end of her life, Mitchison was disappointed by the neglect of her work: she was no longer Circe or the oracle at Delphi or Cumae, but Cassandra, and was not being heard. The political ideals for which she and her family had battled were being mothballed; she was born under Queen Victoria when Gladstone was Prime Minister and died under Tony Blair and New Labour: the span reveals a changed world, and the dashing of progressive hopes and dreams.

The tales in
The Fourth Pig
are a “misch-masch,” as Lewis Carroll called his first such compilation, the album of miscellanea he made up to amuse his siblings. Naomi Mitchison customarily wove prose and poetry together in her fiction, and published such anthologies throughout her career, refusing to rank genres of storytelling, or to make a hierarchy of different belief systems or manifestations of the supernatural. Fairy tales were not inferior to myth or myths lesser than religion. Some of the stories she reworks here are very well known (“Hansel and Gretel”; “The
Little Mermaiden”); in others she picks up the tune of a ballad with admiring fidelity to the form (“Mairi Maclean and the Fairy Man”); several of the tales involve experimental twists of her own. The reverie of Brünnhilde as she floats down the Rhine takes its place beside a fairy play
Kate Crackernuts
, dramatising in charms and songs a struggle against the subterranean powers who live in the fairy hills of Scotland and abduct humans for their pleasure.

The story of Kate Crackernuts was collected by Andrew Lang in the Orkneys and included by the folklorist Joseph Jacobs in
English Fairy Tales
(1890; a misnomer, but an inspired and foundational anthology). Naomi Mitchison adapted it as a lively fairy-tale play in verse, written, as the stage directions show, for family theatricals. The story inverts the fairy tale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” as it features a spellbound prince instead, who is stolen away to dance all night in fairyland. The play version here also carries strong echoes of Christina Rossetti's famous poem “Goblin Market,” which similarly stages an epic struggle between two loving sisters and the rescue of one by the other. In Mitchison's version, Ann is transmogrified by Kate's cruel mother, and given a horrible sheep's head, while Kate's rescue mission introduces a heterosexual love plot, not found in Rossetti. The play also recalls the terrible wound and subsequent delirium and illness that Dick Mitchison, Naomi's young husband, suffered in World War I, and her long vigil at his bedside as he pulled through. It is characteristic of Naomi Mitchison's spirit that she dramatises a girl's heroic knight errantry on his behalf. The same memories haunt the poignant closing story in the collection, “Mirk, Mirk Night,” but the heroine here is herself rescued
from the fairies by the hero, who “smelt of tobacco and machine oil and his own smell,” suffers from the shivers from shell shock, and yet delivers her from the beguiling, shining, and crying of the trooping fairies in pursuit.