SebastianPiccione
Sunday, April 26, 2009, 12:51 AM
Back at Megacon, it was both my honor and my privelege to spend a good part of the convention hanging around with Peter S. Beagle, Nebula and Hugo winning author of A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE, THE LAST UNICORN, and THE INKEEPER'S SONG, to name a few. People flocked to the table to share tales of how his stories touched them, and to listen to the man tell little asides about his own life and works. He has that gift, the ability to completely capture his audience with his words, be they spoken or written.
Here is some of what he had to say.
Sebastian Piccione: Are you working on anything currently?
Peter S. Beagle: I have to finish a story, while we’re on the road. I don’t know how the ending is supposed to come out. So, yeah, I’m always working on something. There are stories that have to be finished, and there are a couple of books that are essentially finished that might come out this year, and they need one more pass through. It’s rare when I’m not working on something. There’s a story of one of my favorite writers, James Thurber, he was just at a cocktail party with wife. He was just leaning against the wall, glass of wine in his hand, just looking around at things, and his wife marched up to him and just said, “DAMN IT, Thurber! Stop writing!” And, yeah, one part of you is always doing that whether you’re aware of it or not.
Seb: The creative mind is always taking things in and sorting things out in your down time?
Peter: Whether you know you’re doing it or not. A lot of it is unconscious.
Seb: This is a two part question; you’ve said you’re a voracious reader, who were inspirations as a reader starting to write, and who do you read now?
Peter: In terms of being a fantasy writer, the people who meant the most to me where T. H. White; Lord Dunsany; another Irish writer, James Stephens, fewer people know of him, but he was a major influence; and James Thurber, who wrote THE THIRTEEN CLOCKS, and THE WHITE DEER. Those are books I know almost by heart. They figure in THE LAST UNICORN, they work in there. And overall, the guy who made the most difference was a writer named Robert Nathan, who’s remembered if he is remembered at all, for PORTRAIT OF JENNY. They made a movie from it that still turns up late at night. I discovered Robert in High School and college, and I read everything he wrote. They were borderline fantasies. Definitely fantasies, but more in attitude than anything else. He managed to do complicated things so simply. There is no excess in Robert’s work. We became friends in the last 20 years of his life, and I’ve always thought my first book, A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE, was me imitating a book he’d written six years before I was born, called ONE MORE SPRING. I’d wanted to write ONE MORE SPRING in the worst way, but Robert already had, so I wrote A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE instead. Those are my major influences. There are others come and go, I’m easily impressionable. I grew up in a very literate family, where it wasn’t weird, at least not for me, to say at twelve years old or so, while having dinner, “I know who I want to write like,” and I was on a William Saroyan kick; and I ran into the living room and came back with his book MY NAME IS ARAM. It had a number of short stories based on growing up in Fresno. I read, right at the dinner table, I read his story, “The Pomegranate Trees,” aloud. And nobody said that was weird. I was very lucky that way.
Seb: And who are some of the people that you read now?
Peter: Strangely, I don’t read a lot of fantasy or mainstream books. I read a lot of history, my father was a history teacher. I’ve been reading more poetry lately. Right now, I’m reading a writer who just knocked me over in the 1980s, published three novels, and hasn’t been heard from since. But, we’ve been corresponding and he sent me an omnibus volume of those three books. His name is Barry Hughart. His novels feature a hundred year old (or possibly older) Chinese scholar, Master Li. And the stories are told by his disciple, an assistant, Number Ten Ox. He’s a peasant boy, who’s named Number Ten because his family ran out of names around then. And his nickname is Ox, because he’s strong as an Ox, and he’s a wonderful narrator, innocent, kind-hearted, and wide eyed. And he explains, Master Lee always introduces himself thus, “My family name is Li, my personal name is Kao, and there is a slight flaw in my character.” Which there is, he’s on the side of good but he’s an old scoundrel, and his sleeves are always filled with throwing knives because you never know when you might need them.
Anyway, I read the books in the 1980s, fell over backwards and vowed to myself I’ll not ever try to imitate this guy, there’s no point to it. When Barry sent me this omnibus volume and I started reading them again, I remembered that he’s that good! He’s not at all well known, and he hasn’t written any more novels about Master Lee and Number Ten Ox, because he said it was getting to be a formula, and he didn’t want to do that. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, and we write back and forth irregularly, but damn he’s good.
Seb: We had discussed how my daughters are completely enamored of the Red bull, and my youngest spends her entire day telling me “Daddy, you da wast unicorn, and I da Wed bull!” and then she chases me around, so can I get you to tell the inspiration behind the Red Bull?
Peter: In 1956 when I was 17, a favorite cousin of mine on the half-Mexican side of the family, married a Spanish painter, who like most painters, needed a bill-paying gig to put bread on the table. He got a job putting a fashion show together, in the physical sense, putting runways in place, and platforms, and so on. He roped me into working with him that summer. I liked him, and I was learning all kinds of useful Spanish words to say when you hammer your finger rather than the nail. At the end of the summer, since he couldn’t pay me, he gave me one of his paintings. It was a painting of unicorns fighting bulls, including a red bull. I’ve had it ever since. As far as I can tell, something of the inspiration comes from that painting.
Seb: THE LAST UNICORN is your most famous story, but which story is your favorite?
Peter: My favorite is still THE INNKEEPER’S SONG, and I’m still very fond of the world I made up for that book, which I seem to be inventing backwards. I had such a good time writing THE INNKEEPER’S SONG that I’ve found excuses to go back into that world I’d invented. Connor [Cochran] and I were just discussing that I’m about due to write another story set in that universe. Sometimes I use characters from earlier stories, sometimes I make up something entirely different, but I like to make the world coherent and remember things I’ve said about it before, references I’ve made. So there’s a collection called GIANT BONES (here in America, anyway; it was called THE MAGICIAN OF KARAKOSK everywhere else it was published) that has six stories set within that world. I’m also very fond of TAMSIN. I had a lot of fun writing that one. And there’s a nonfiction book I did called I SEE BY MY OUTFIT, about coming across the country on motor-scooters with my best friend, that may have been the most fun to write. I was 24, just off the road and writing about what we’d been through making it across the country on these tiny machines. That was a real pleasure.
Seb: As we sit here and people are coming up for signatures and to talk to you, what’s it like to have people come up and tell you how the book or the movie THE LAST UNICORN has effected them, and how they remember it all this time later?
Peter: It’s a very mixed bag. It’s strange, it’s flattering, sometimes it’s immensely touching. Sometimes, of course, you value more when they come up to ask questions or speak about another book. Without intending to do it, I realized that I or the book touched people in a way I had no idea would ever happen. Nobody sets out to write a classic, or a book that changes people’s lives. Not unless you have a much higher opinion of your skills than I do. You just try to get the story told. And, I never thought I WOULD get THE LAST UNICORN told. I was exhausted when I finished it. And I certainly never knew it would be around over 40 years later. As with so many things, it’s a crap shoot. I didn’t know the book would last so long, I certainly didn’t know the movie would be around 27 years later. But then I didn’t know that I would be around now, either, so I’m pleasantly surprised by all of it, and flattered, but always a little startled. I think it’s Thomas Martin who said “I wear my eyebrows, so to speak, always slightly raised.”
Seb: Speaking of the joys of people talking to you about both THE LAST UNICORN and your other books, I see you keep pointing people towards a book that has a short story sequel to THE LAST UNICORN. What can you tell us about that book, and that story in particular?
Peter: The collection is called THE LINE BETWEEN and the story is called “Two Hearts.” It won the Hugo and the Nebula. I was dumbfounded because I’d never been nominated for either one. It was a good story. It actually works out because it’s not told from the viewpoint of one of the characters from THE LAST UNICORN, but from the viewpoint of a nine year old girl, who’s stubborn, and courageous, and small. She sets out to find the King. She doesn’t even know his name, or that it’s Lír. She sets out to bring the King to her village because there’s a griffin eating children. It’s been living in the woods for a good 10 years, since before she was born, and for a long time it just ate sheep and goats, which was hard enough to deal with, since these villagers raise sheep and goats. However, lately it’s been eating children. The king has been sending knights and squadrons, and they never come back. So she’s going to tell him it’s his job. He has to do it. He’s the King, he can’t send anybody else to do his job. But, she doesn’t know who the King is or where he lives, and on the way she encounters Schmendrick and Molly, and it goes from there.
Seb: I’ll wrap with this final question: if there was any one thing about Peter S. Beagle that you would want the world to think…when they think Peter S. Beagle, beyond “hey, the last unicorn guy!” what would you like them to think?
Peter: That I’m still here, doing my best to get better at what I do, and trying to tell new stories. I try very hard not to repeat myself. A lot of people instinctively want the same mixture as before. It’s like my editor, Judy Lynne Del Rey, asking me for a blurb for a series that was so obviously an eighth-grade rip-off of THE LORD OF THE RINGS, that I just couldn’t do it. And she said, “Alright, I know what I’m doing. This is for people who’ve read the LORD OF THE RINGS 40 times, and can’t quite get it up for the 41st, but they still want the same mixture.” And, it was a point-for-point rip of THE LORD OF THE RINGS, the first of many. For good or ill, I don’t do that. Perhaps there are no knew stories, just new mixtures of old ingredients, but I keep at it.
Seb: I’ve greatly enjoyed speaking with you and listening to you. Some people who put out books are writers, but listening to you, you are a true storyteller.
Peter: Blame my father, I got it from him.
Here is some of what he had to say.
Sebastian Piccione: Are you working on anything currently?
Peter S. Beagle: I have to finish a story, while we’re on the road. I don’t know how the ending is supposed to come out. So, yeah, I’m always working on something. There are stories that have to be finished, and there are a couple of books that are essentially finished that might come out this year, and they need one more pass through. It’s rare when I’m not working on something. There’s a story of one of my favorite writers, James Thurber, he was just at a cocktail party with wife. He was just leaning against the wall, glass of wine in his hand, just looking around at things, and his wife marched up to him and just said, “DAMN IT, Thurber! Stop writing!” And, yeah, one part of you is always doing that whether you’re aware of it or not.
Seb: The creative mind is always taking things in and sorting things out in your down time?
Peter: Whether you know you’re doing it or not. A lot of it is unconscious.
Seb: This is a two part question; you’ve said you’re a voracious reader, who were inspirations as a reader starting to write, and who do you read now?
Peter: In terms of being a fantasy writer, the people who meant the most to me where T. H. White; Lord Dunsany; another Irish writer, James Stephens, fewer people know of him, but he was a major influence; and James Thurber, who wrote THE THIRTEEN CLOCKS, and THE WHITE DEER. Those are books I know almost by heart. They figure in THE LAST UNICORN, they work in there. And overall, the guy who made the most difference was a writer named Robert Nathan, who’s remembered if he is remembered at all, for PORTRAIT OF JENNY. They made a movie from it that still turns up late at night. I discovered Robert in High School and college, and I read everything he wrote. They were borderline fantasies. Definitely fantasies, but more in attitude than anything else. He managed to do complicated things so simply. There is no excess in Robert’s work. We became friends in the last 20 years of his life, and I’ve always thought my first book, A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE, was me imitating a book he’d written six years before I was born, called ONE MORE SPRING. I’d wanted to write ONE MORE SPRING in the worst way, but Robert already had, so I wrote A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE instead. Those are my major influences. There are others come and go, I’m easily impressionable. I grew up in a very literate family, where it wasn’t weird, at least not for me, to say at twelve years old or so, while having dinner, “I know who I want to write like,” and I was on a William Saroyan kick; and I ran into the living room and came back with his book MY NAME IS ARAM. It had a number of short stories based on growing up in Fresno. I read, right at the dinner table, I read his story, “The Pomegranate Trees,” aloud. And nobody said that was weird. I was very lucky that way.
Seb: And who are some of the people that you read now?
Peter: Strangely, I don’t read a lot of fantasy or mainstream books. I read a lot of history, my father was a history teacher. I’ve been reading more poetry lately. Right now, I’m reading a writer who just knocked me over in the 1980s, published three novels, and hasn’t been heard from since. But, we’ve been corresponding and he sent me an omnibus volume of those three books. His name is Barry Hughart. His novels feature a hundred year old (or possibly older) Chinese scholar, Master Li. And the stories are told by his disciple, an assistant, Number Ten Ox. He’s a peasant boy, who’s named Number Ten because his family ran out of names around then. And his nickname is Ox, because he’s strong as an Ox, and he’s a wonderful narrator, innocent, kind-hearted, and wide eyed. And he explains, Master Lee always introduces himself thus, “My family name is Li, my personal name is Kao, and there is a slight flaw in my character.” Which there is, he’s on the side of good but he’s an old scoundrel, and his sleeves are always filled with throwing knives because you never know when you might need them.
Anyway, I read the books in the 1980s, fell over backwards and vowed to myself I’ll not ever try to imitate this guy, there’s no point to it. When Barry sent me this omnibus volume and I started reading them again, I remembered that he’s that good! He’s not at all well known, and he hasn’t written any more novels about Master Lee and Number Ten Ox, because he said it was getting to be a formula, and he didn’t want to do that. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, and we write back and forth irregularly, but damn he’s good.
Seb: We had discussed how my daughters are completely enamored of the Red bull, and my youngest spends her entire day telling me “Daddy, you da wast unicorn, and I da Wed bull!” and then she chases me around, so can I get you to tell the inspiration behind the Red Bull?
Peter: In 1956 when I was 17, a favorite cousin of mine on the half-Mexican side of the family, married a Spanish painter, who like most painters, needed a bill-paying gig to put bread on the table. He got a job putting a fashion show together, in the physical sense, putting runways in place, and platforms, and so on. He roped me into working with him that summer. I liked him, and I was learning all kinds of useful Spanish words to say when you hammer your finger rather than the nail. At the end of the summer, since he couldn’t pay me, he gave me one of his paintings. It was a painting of unicorns fighting bulls, including a red bull. I’ve had it ever since. As far as I can tell, something of the inspiration comes from that painting.
Seb: THE LAST UNICORN is your most famous story, but which story is your favorite?
Peter: My favorite is still THE INNKEEPER’S SONG, and I’m still very fond of the world I made up for that book, which I seem to be inventing backwards. I had such a good time writing THE INNKEEPER’S SONG that I’ve found excuses to go back into that world I’d invented. Connor [Cochran] and I were just discussing that I’m about due to write another story set in that universe. Sometimes I use characters from earlier stories, sometimes I make up something entirely different, but I like to make the world coherent and remember things I’ve said about it before, references I’ve made. So there’s a collection called GIANT BONES (here in America, anyway; it was called THE MAGICIAN OF KARAKOSK everywhere else it was published) that has six stories set within that world. I’m also very fond of TAMSIN. I had a lot of fun writing that one. And there’s a nonfiction book I did called I SEE BY MY OUTFIT, about coming across the country on motor-scooters with my best friend, that may have been the most fun to write. I was 24, just off the road and writing about what we’d been through making it across the country on these tiny machines. That was a real pleasure.
Seb: As we sit here and people are coming up for signatures and to talk to you, what’s it like to have people come up and tell you how the book or the movie THE LAST UNICORN has effected them, and how they remember it all this time later?
Peter: It’s a very mixed bag. It’s strange, it’s flattering, sometimes it’s immensely touching. Sometimes, of course, you value more when they come up to ask questions or speak about another book. Without intending to do it, I realized that I or the book touched people in a way I had no idea would ever happen. Nobody sets out to write a classic, or a book that changes people’s lives. Not unless you have a much higher opinion of your skills than I do. You just try to get the story told. And, I never thought I WOULD get THE LAST UNICORN told. I was exhausted when I finished it. And I certainly never knew it would be around over 40 years later. As with so many things, it’s a crap shoot. I didn’t know the book would last so long, I certainly didn’t know the movie would be around 27 years later. But then I didn’t know that I would be around now, either, so I’m pleasantly surprised by all of it, and flattered, but always a little startled. I think it’s Thomas Martin who said “I wear my eyebrows, so to speak, always slightly raised.”
Seb: Speaking of the joys of people talking to you about both THE LAST UNICORN and your other books, I see you keep pointing people towards a book that has a short story sequel to THE LAST UNICORN. What can you tell us about that book, and that story in particular?
Peter: The collection is called THE LINE BETWEEN and the story is called “Two Hearts.” It won the Hugo and the Nebula. I was dumbfounded because I’d never been nominated for either one. It was a good story. It actually works out because it’s not told from the viewpoint of one of the characters from THE LAST UNICORN, but from the viewpoint of a nine year old girl, who’s stubborn, and courageous, and small. She sets out to find the King. She doesn’t even know his name, or that it’s Lír. She sets out to bring the King to her village because there’s a griffin eating children. It’s been living in the woods for a good 10 years, since before she was born, and for a long time it just ate sheep and goats, which was hard enough to deal with, since these villagers raise sheep and goats. However, lately it’s been eating children. The king has been sending knights and squadrons, and they never come back. So she’s going to tell him it’s his job. He has to do it. He’s the King, he can’t send anybody else to do his job. But, she doesn’t know who the King is or where he lives, and on the way she encounters Schmendrick and Molly, and it goes from there.
Seb: I’ll wrap with this final question: if there was any one thing about Peter S. Beagle that you would want the world to think…when they think Peter S. Beagle, beyond “hey, the last unicorn guy!” what would you like them to think?
Peter: That I’m still here, doing my best to get better at what I do, and trying to tell new stories. I try very hard not to repeat myself. A lot of people instinctively want the same mixture as before. It’s like my editor, Judy Lynne Del Rey, asking me for a blurb for a series that was so obviously an eighth-grade rip-off of THE LORD OF THE RINGS, that I just couldn’t do it. And she said, “Alright, I know what I’m doing. This is for people who’ve read the LORD OF THE RINGS 40 times, and can’t quite get it up for the 41st, but they still want the same mixture.” And, it was a point-for-point rip of THE LORD OF THE RINGS, the first of many. For good or ill, I don’t do that. Perhaps there are no knew stories, just new mixtures of old ingredients, but I keep at it.
Seb: I’ve greatly enjoyed speaking with you and listening to you. Some people who put out books are writers, but listening to you, you are a true storyteller.
Peter: Blame my father, I got it from him.