The Fourth Pig (3 page)

The belief in the danger posed by fairies from the fairy hills was recorded by the Reverend Robert Kirk in the manuscript of his parishioners' beliefs, drawn up at the end of the seventeenth century. Walter Scott, who reinvigorated the folk and fairy lore of Scotland, was the first to write about Kirk's astonishing anthology, but it was not published until 1893, when Andrew Lang edited it under the new title
The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies
, and supported its accounts of Second Sight and other paranormal and curious powers.
¹⁰
Andrew Lang was a family friend of the Mitchisons, and Lang's appetite for legends, history, and fantasy can also be strongly felt in Naomi's combination of proud localism and voracious eclecticism. Beginning with
The Blue Fairy Book
in 1889, he edited stories from all over the world in anthologies for children that were revised and generally standardised and cleaned up by his wife, Leonora Alleyne, and other female scribes. In spite of this bland tendency, Lang's collections were wildly successful, and have influenced generations of writers, including the preeminent English fabulist Angela Carter (1941–1992), whose fierce, baroque revisionings of classic fairy tales in her collection
The Bloody Chamber
(1979) took the erotic supernatural to a pitch of intensity that Naomi Mitchison would have relished.

Later in life Naomi declared that she “never much cared for the more romantic series of fairy tales in spite of their lovely pictures.”
¹¹
The “lovely pictures,” mostly by H. J. Ford, depict details of jewels and clothing with a heightened, Pre-Raphaelite realism that chimes with Mitchison's love of vivid description. Like Carter and unlike Lang, Mitchison avoided the
Fairy Books
' rather solemn politeness; by contrast she relished transgression and a certain degree of delinquent extremism—especially in her female characters. Her stories are filled with daring steps across the threshold of permitted normative behaviour, and often open into scenes of extraordinary erotic, savage violence, as in the fertility rituals dramatized in
The Corn King and the Spring Queen
. Here, in
Kate Crackernuts
, similar reverberations from Frazerian fertility ritual break through:

Fairy:

Shall we take her, shall we keep her?

In the harvest of the foe

Shall we bind, shall we reap her?

In the Green Hill deeper

Shall we stack her, hold her, keep her?

Sick Prince (with hate):

Take her, take her,

Bind her, blind her! (Act II, scene III)

Around this time Mitchison was close to Wyndham Lewis, and he illustrated an exuberant, crazy, phantasmagoric quest
story she wrote in 1935,
Beyond This Limit
, about an artist called Phoebe, who, armed with an alarmingly live crocodile handbag, cures herself of a broken heart and sets out for freedom.
¹²
It begins in a
salon de thé
in a recognisable present-day Paris, but turns into a fugue through surrealist dreamlands populated by creatures out of the
Alice
books or one of Leonora Carrington's comic fables. But Mitchison is aware that not all her heroines succeed in cutting the traces of convention. The “Snow Maiden” in this collection is a promising mathematician, but boys and peer pressure and social expectations drive the brains out of a girl: “So Mary Snow got married to George Higginson, and then—well then, she just seemed to melt away … like an ice-cream sundae on a hot afternoon. … Some girls do seem to go like that after they get married.” Jenni Calder comments that this bleak satire targets Lawrence.

The story which gives the collection its title,
The Fourth Pig
, foresees the impending horror of World War II with a clarity very few possessed in the Thirties: the jolly nursery classic of three little pigs has taken a dark turn, and their youngest sibling knows the nature of the Wolf: “I can smell the Wolf's breath above all the sweet smells of Spring and the rich smells of Autumn. I can hear the padding of the Wolf's feet a very long way off in the forest, coming nearer. And I know there is no way of stopping him. Even if I could help being afraid. But I cannot help it. I am afraid now.”

Her brother Jack openly adopted Marxism in 1937, and Naomi herself was forthright in her support for the Republican side in
the Spanish Civil War, which was raging as she was putting together
The Fourth Pig
: “There is no question for any decent, kindly man or woman,” she wrote, “let alone a poet or writer who must be more sensitive. We have to be against Franco and Fascism and for the people of Spain, and the future of gentleness and brotherhood which ordinary men and women want all over the world.”
¹³
The “black bulls of hate” in “Pause in the Corrida” evoke the conflict directly, but much of the collection's feeling of dread and darkness seeps through its pages from the implications of the Fascists gaining ground elsewhere as well.

In 1935 Mitchison had published
We Have Been Warned
, the only novel she set in her own time and place; it was unflinchingly honest—dismayingly so, to her contemporaries. Although the eventual publishers (Constable; others refused the risk) censored her original version, she was still too frank about sex for the critics: she sets down with her usual vigour the sexual difficulties and disappointments that she knew from experience, gives a picture of free love without apology, and describes her lovers using contraceptives—conveyed with a feminist practicality which eluded Lawrence, for example. But Naomi was not yet used to criticism, as her earlier fictions, from
The Conquered
(1923) onwards, had all been enthusiastically received—and widely read.

In the story here called “Grand-daughter,” a child looks back, from some unidentified point in the future, at the times of her grandmother's generation, and wonders at their blindness. The little girl expresses her surprise at the foolishness of her elders in those distant days, the 1930s. She is imagined, by Naomi, leafing
through books produced in the decade, books like
The Fourth Pig
, and marvelling at what their authors missed. This brief, ironic piece of proleptic memoir is a kind of premature obituary, but it does show Naomi Mitchison's self-awareness. She knows she was, like the grandmother in the story, “very much laughed at for saying that the industrial revolution had destroyed magic.” But the imagined grandchild of the future goes on to defend herself: “All intelligent forward-thinking people, even in the so-called imaginative professions, insisted on the recognition of their rationality and put it constantly into their talk and writing. … Yet, of course, that was not the whole of life.” Continuing in the voice of this child in the future, Mitchison then muses on the rise of “Nazi irrationality,” which “was only successful because it gave some solid fulfilment to a definite need in human beings.” She castigates herself and her generation for allowing the success of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany. Her generation failed because they did not provide an outlet for the emotions which fascism exploited: “The rationalists stupidly feared and hated this need [for magic] … and refused to satisfy it decently and creatively.”

The passage is an exercise in counterfactual history, but in 1936 Mitchison does not know how long and terrible the effects of fascism will be. One of these prolonged effects—part of the long shadow cast on history by those times—concerns the cult of national folklore, myth, and ritual; they were implicated in the ugliest sides of nationalism, state power, and sexual prescription, repression, and ethnic identity politics. Naomi was writing when the act of recovering the neglected fairy lore of local, unlettered folk struck a blow on behalf of the overlooked labourer, and
when pagan, Dionysiac frenzy represented a belief in the arts and in freedom of expression against the choking grip of Christianity. In a letter to the poet Laura Riding at this time she expresses her anger that the Nazis have turned myth and fairy tale to their own purposes.
¹⁴
The fate of the kind of neo-paganism that Mitchison dramatized is a complicated issue, and myth and fairy tale have taken a long time to break the tainting association with right-wing nationalism. The work of fairy-tale scholars like Maria Tatar, Donald Haase, Susan Sellers, Cristina Bacchilega, and the editor of this series, Jack Zipes, has been vital in reconnecting readers with the alternative tradition—with the utopian, or often dystopian, honest fabulism of philosophical fairy tales, from Voltaire to Kafka, Karel Čapek, Kurt Schwitters, Lucy Clifford, and Angela Carter.

In the Thirties, with the Third Reich in power and the Second World War impending, fairies were being claimed for the forests of Germany, and were changing in character; fairy tales and myths, fertility rites and tree worship were annexed for ideas that were utterly repellent, and Mitchison's witchiness and whimsy no longer matched her high purposes or the needs of the times. She has glimmers of this consequence here, and it is significant that, after
The Fourth Pig
, Naomi returned to her vast historical canvases and moved back into remote times. In 1939, she published one of her most famous novels,
The Blood of the Martyrs: How the Slaves in Rome Found Victory in Christ
. As the title suggests, early Christian persecution by Nero inspires a huge and fervent manifesto
for the heroic and bloody resistance of the have-nots against the haves.

Wyndham Lewis painted Naomi's portrait while she was working on the novel: she is frowning, her chin gripped by her left hand, her focus distant and intense. It is a powerful picture of a woman writing and thinking; on her right, at her shoulder, recalling her new, ardent interest in Christian sainthood, he has included an image of Jesus on Calvary, with sketches of the other two crosses for the thieves.
¹⁵

Later still, Mitchison turned away from history to science fiction, which is a related but different kind of fantastic storytelling. In
Memoirs of a Spacewoman
(1962), she still remembers her childhood biological experiments with Jack, and imagines hermaphroditic fluidity and intelligent sex organs; she also casts herself as the saviour of caterpillars who are being inculcated with low self-esteem through telepathic communications from beautiful butterflies. She has become an astronaut, has left the fairy hill forever and taken off into outer space.

Marina Warner

 

I would like to thank Graeme Mitchison and Sally Mitchison very much indeed for sharing thoughts about their grandmother, and for commenting most helpfully on the draft of this essay. My profound thanks also to Gill Plain, Ali Smith, Graeme Segal, and Kate Arnold-Foster for their help with readings and responses, and to the editor of this series, the indefatigable and inspired Jack Zipes.

1
   Naomi Mitchison,
Saltire Self-Portraits 2
(Edinburgh: The Saltire Society, 1986), p. 32; see also Elizabeth Maslen, “Mitchison, Naomi Mary Margaret, Lady Mitchison (1897–1999),”
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., May 2009,
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/50052
, accessed 30 Aug. 2009); Diana Wallace, “Naomi Mitchison,”
The Literary Encyclopedia
, 14 Nov. 2005.

2
   Quoted in Frances Spalding,
Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography
(London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 131.

3
   Vera Brittain,
Testament of Youth
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1993), quoted in Ali Smith, “The Woman from the Big House: The Autobiographical Writings of Naomi Mitchison,” (1987) introduction to Naomi Mitchison,
Small Talk … Memories of an Edwardian Childhood
(1973) (Glasgow: Kennedy & Boyd (2009), p. vii.

4
   Mitchison,
Small Talk
, p. 50.

5
   Ibid., p. 33.

6
   Gill Plain,
Women's Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 154.

7
   Smith, “Woman from the Big House,” p. vii.

8
   The terms “intermodern” and “intermodernist” have been suggested in relation to Mitchison and contemporaries; see Further Reading for critical studies by Hubble, Lassner, Montefiore, Maslen (see
note 1
), and Mackay and Stonebridge.

9
   Neal Ascherson, “Naomi Mitchison—a Queen, a Saint and a Shaman,”
Guardian
, 17 Jan. 1999.

10
   Robert Kirk,
The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies
, ed. Andrew Lang, with introduction by Marina Warner (New York:
New York Review of Books
, 2007).

11
   Ibid., p. 51.

12
   NM,
Beyond This Limit: Selected Shorter Fiction of Naomi Mitchison
, ed. Isobel Murray (Edinburgh: Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 1986), pp. 1–83.

13
   John Simkin,
Spanish Civil War
(Spartacus Educational, 2012,
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wmitchison.htm
, accessed 14 June 2013).

14
   NM, Letter to Laura Riding, 1 March 1937 (
http://www.ntu.ac.uk/laura_riding/scholars/119214gp.html
, accessed 14 June 2013).

15
   The picture is in the National Galleries of Scotland.

THE FOURTH PIG

Sometimes the Wolf is quiet. He is not molesting us. It may be that he is away ravaging in far places which we cannot picture, and do not care about, or it may be that he lies up in his den, sated for the time, with half-slumberous, blood-weighted eyes, the torn flesh hot in his belly provoking miasmic evil which will turn, as he grows cold and hungry again, into some new cunning which may, after all, not be capable of frustration by the meek. For we never know. Sometimes the Wolf is stupid and can be frightened away. We may even say to ourselves that we have killed him. But more often, although we try not to think about this, the Wolf is too much for us; he refuses to be hoodwinked by the gentle or subtle. And, in the end, it is he who has the teeth and claws, the strength and the will to evil. And thus it comes, many times, that his slavering jaws crush down through broken arteries of shrieking innocents, death to the weak lamb, the merry rabbits, the jolly pigs, death to Mother Henny-penny with her downy chicks just hatched, death to Father Cocky-locky with his noble songs to the dawn, death sooner or later to Fox the inventor and story-teller, the intelligent one who yet cannot escape always. So they die in jerking agony under the sun, and the Wolf gulps them into his belly, and his juices dissolve their once lively and sentient flesh.