the Beagles in the Bronx until his death in 1940 when Peter was ten months old, and was reportedly the only one who could quiet Peter when he cried as a baby.
Peter broke into what might be called the family business by entering a contest in Seventeen when he was only 15 years old and a student at the Bronx High School of Science, and he came to the notice of Bryna Ivens, who was Louis Untermeyer’s spouse. In 1955 a poem he entered in the Scholastic Writing Awards Contest won him a scholarship, and he went off to college at the University of Pittsburg. During his sophomore year a story of his won the Seventeen contest, and he graduated with a B.A. in creative writing and a minor in Spanish in 1959, having just turned twenty, and having submitted A Fine and Private Place for publication. He followed the old tradition of the Grand Tour, spending close to the next year in Europe.
Marshall Best of Viking Press was his editor, improving the book by suggesting elimination of a mystery subplot and suggesting the title ultimately used in place of Beagle’s proffered The Dark City. Beagle recalls him as “a great editor,” who showed “loving attention and focused literary concern.”
A Fine and Private Place earned Beagle critical acclaim and a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship for study at Stanford University when he returned to the United States. While there he worked on an unpublished novel begun in Europe entitled The Mirror Kingdom while fellow students Ken Kesey and Christopher Koch worked on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Year of Living Dangerously. Another of his fellow students was Larry McMurtry, who was working on Leaving Cheyenne. The Mirror Kingdom was not fantasy; it was about “a young American musician’s romantic adventures in Paris,” written when Beagle himself had just been a young American writer having romantic adventures in Paris, as he tells us in the Introduction to The Line Between.
Beagle’s second book, I See By My Outfit, was also published by Viking in 1966, edited by Aaron Asher. A memoir of his cross-country motorscooter trip from New York with his friend Phil Sigunick to his new home in California, it was first published in two parts in Holiday under the title “A Long Way to Go” and was also very well received. In 1964 Beagle had married Enid Nordeen, whom he had met at Stanford, and adopted her three children, Vicki, Kalisa, and Danny. He dedicated I See By My Outfit to them and the other “people in the house,” Phil and Tom. Phil was Phil Sigunick, his closest childhood friend who later became a successful artist, with whom he made the cross-country motorscooter trip that was memorialized in the book; it is not clear who Tom was. His well-received novella “Come Lady Death” was published in Atlantic in 1963, and he later adapted it into the libretto for an opera entitled The Midnight Angel. David Carlson wrote the music.
In 1968, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Beagle achieved literary immortality of a sort with the publication of The Last Unicorn. This fairy tale for adults garnered great critical attention, but Beagle may have found it difficult to top since his next novel did not see the light of day until 1986. In the interim he supported himself as a freelance writer, publishing his widely-loved novella “Lila the Werewolf” in an Ace Books collection in 1971. Beagle and Enid divorced in 1980.
During the 1970s Beagle increasingly wrote screenplays, including the animated version of The Last Unicorn produced by Rankin-Bass, which was released in 1982, and Ralph Bakshi’s animated The Lord of the Rings in 1978. He later wrote one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Sarek,” Episode 71, which aired in 1990. He had been involved in a contract dispute with London-based Granada Media over royalties for The Last Unicorn film; the matter was settled out of court in the summer of 2011. Beagle harbors some hopes of a live-action film at some point in the future, given the successes of the Tolkien and C. S. Lewis fantasy films. During the 1970s he also indulged his avocation as a folk singer, appearing every weekend at L’Oustalou, a club in Santa Cruz, California, from 1973 to 1985. He sings in English, Yiddish, French, and German, and has released an album, Acoustics: The Lost ’62 Tape. In 1988 he married writer and artist Padma Hejmadi. The Innkeeper’s Song was dedicated to her.
Beagle says The Folk of the Air, published in 1986, was the first time he ever wrote about Berkeley, with which he fell in love in about 1960. Place is always important in his fiction, and he has said with regard to his forthcoming novel Summerlong that he couldn’t have written about Seattle while he was living there (he spent one year in a condominium on Queen Anne Hill and five more on Bainbridge Island, both of which appear in Summerlong). The Innkeeper’s Song, however, is his favorite work; he thinks of it as his first grown-up novel. It is neither a ghost story nor a fairy tale, but an attempt to deal with very real people in an imaginary world. He doesn’t classify it as a grown-up novel simply because it contains what he calls his first group sex scene, but because he thinks it contains a depth of emotion that marks the beginning of a mature period. Beagle believes he was able to access certain things, such as what love means, more fully than he had been able to do before.
Unfortunately, by 2001, in Beagle’s words he “was 62 years old and living in Davis, California, then, second marriage a shipwreck, nice house where I’d once been happy now in foreclosure and scheduled for auction, work not happening, outlook so numbed by disaster that I couldn’t really absorb how bad things had become.” It was at that time that he began a literary relationship with Connor Cochran, and reinvented himself as a writer of short fiction. The rest, as they say, is history.
Beagle’s story “Two-Hearts” won the Hugo Award in 2006 and the Nebula Award in 2007. He won the Inkpot Award for Outstanding Achievement in Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2006. Beagle won the inaugural WSFA Small Press Award for “El Regalo,” published in The Line Between, and he was given the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2011.
III.
British critic C. N. Manlove, in his influential 1975 book Modern Fantasy: Five Studies, defines a fantasy as:
“A fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the reader or the characters within the story become on at least partly familiar terms.”
He further discusses what he meant by “a fiction”; “evoking wonder”; “supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects”; “a substantial and irreducible element”; and “with which the mortal characters in the story or the readers become on at least partly familiar terms.” Manlove distinguishes between what he calls “comic” or “escapist” fantasy and “imaginative” fantasy, and provides his analysis of the failings of the attempts of Charles Kingsley; George MacDonald; C. S. Lewis; J. R. R. Tolkien; and Mervyn Peake, whom he characterizes as “among the best known of modern writers of fantasy,” in avoiding “escapist” failings. He concludes that not one of them succeeds in sustaining his original vision, and suggests that “[t]he basic problem seems to be one of distance, distance between the ‘real’ and fantastic worlds, or between nature and supernature.” According to Manlove, “the gap between the worlds has grown too wide for more than an occasional vision (MacDonald, Peake) of its healing.” There are very real obstacles to writing modern fantasy, but even considering that Manlove would not claim great things for any of the writers he has considered. He ultimately dismisses the genre as “lacking in the full character of reality” despite any compensatory strengths. He leaves it to “the cultists.”
In his later The Impulse of Fantasy Literature, Manlove examines George MacDonald, Charles Williams, E. Nesbit, Ursula K. Le Guin, T. H. White, and Mervyn Peake, finding there to be some merit to the genre. He specifically dismisses William Morris, Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, and Beagle, however, as writing “anemic” fantasy.
Despite Manlove’s early scorn for the writing of all modern fantasy, and his dismissal of Beagle in particular, his definition is useful. Although some of Beagle’s work aspires to nothing more than fantastic escape (A Fine and Private Place; The Last Unicorn; A Dance for Emilia) some of it (The Folk of the Air; The Innkeeper’s Song; Tamsin) is as fully imaginative as the works Manlove examines
