Wordsmith

Peter S. Beagle

By Wolfen Moondaughter
March 1, 2006

The animated feature The Last Unicorn has been one of the most influential works in my entire life, as I was only seven or eight when I first saw it. Of course, when I got older and discovered that it was based on a novel (the author, Peter S. Beagle, of course, also penned the screenplay for the film), I had to read the original work! Shortly after that, I found another novel by Beagle, The Folk of the Air, and devoured that as well. It took, has stuck with me over the course of my life, and opened avenues of the imagination that I might never have found without Beagle as a guide. I'll be eternally grateful for that.

Last September I had the pleasure of finally meeting Mr. Beagle at Dragon*Con in Atlanta. I wrote an article on his recent legal and financial troubles for our December issue, as per information gathered from his business manager, Connor Cochran. Now allow me to present to you the man himself ...

Sequential Tart: What was your first published gig? Was it something your enjoyed writing?

Peter S. Beagle: My very first published gig, if you don't count school newspapers, would have been a story published in Seventeen magazine called "Telephone Call," in 1956. I was just 17 myself, come to think of it. It won their fiction contest and paid me $500, which was more than I'd ever seen in one place at that time, and I was able to quit my summer job. The only other thing than write which I could really do was type, and I was working as a typist at some office downtown in New York. I'd usually get a job like that because they'd notice I could type fast ... but then once I was working they'd see I didn't exactly use the touch system, which was very important in those days, and I'd get fired and have to go looking for another job. It was nice to be able to quit, for a change.

As for the story, I was very proud of myself. At that time everybody who wanted to write was pretty much trying to do J. D. Salinger, and I thought I'd pulled it off pretty neatly. What also pleased me is that it was based on a real event. It was something that happened in my freshman dormitory. So there I was, me, I was a real writer, turning my experiences into fiction.

ST: We hear tell you've decided to rewrite The Unicorn Sonata from scratch, as well as rework The Folk of the Air. What prompted you to do rewrites on them?

PSB: My business manager, Connor Cochran, has a disconcerting habit. Whenever he edits something of mine he invariably puts his finger on the stuff that was always bothering me, that I was hoping nobody would notice. And he raised so many questions about both these books that I just couldn't ignore my feelings any longer.

I have always worried about The Folk of the Air and The Unicorn Sonata. In the case of Folk it was because it had been worked on too long, and in too many versions, for me to have any sense of its content or proportions. All told, from the first stages of writing to actual publication, with lots of interruptions from screenplay gigs and other bits of writing, I worked on that book for 17 or 18 years. I got the original idea around 1969 when I saw some — performances? productions? events? — put on in Berkeley by the Society for Creative Anachronism. And I started thinking about what would happen, what must happen, if this acting, this pretending, stole over into their daily lives.

The Unicorn Sonata started out very much as a money gig. And although I did as good a job as I could on it at the time, it was rushed, and I necessarily bypassed a good many possibilities that I would like to expand and explore now. In that sense having the book go immediately out of circulation just after being published was something of a blessing.

ST: Can you tell us anything about what changes to expect?

PSB: I never know what changes are likely to occur until I'm going over something line by line. That, or just lying back in that space between waking and sleeping, trying to cast my mind into a fresh space. It takes a while to take my mind away from the text as it is, and get back to that place where it hasn't happened yet. That said, I can offer some impressions. I feel strongly that Folk is going to get longer, not shorter, and that the climax and denouement will be quite different. With Sonata what seems clear is that for the first time I'm going to be working in a quite large and quite demanding structure, with each of the four books serving a formal role not entirely dissimilar from those served by the four movements in an actual musical sonata. I've never deliberately framed a story this way and I'm quite interested to see where it goes. Book #1 will be, of course, extremely different from the current version. And Book #2 will pick up the adventures of Indigo, who as the tale begins is in New York City with several others of his kind. At the climax of the book there will be a big change in the cast, but beyond that I'm still mulling.

ST: Tell us about "Two Hearts" and its pending sequel. How do they relate to The Last Unicorn?

PSB: "Two Hearts" is sort of a bridge between the old book and the new book. I didn't originally know I was writing anything more than a coda, but "Two Hearts" made it imperative to write a sequel. My main character, Sooz, by the time the story was over, became impossible to abandon. I normally like to leave stories kind of unfinished, with a sense that even though I've stopped telling things at this point, the characters and their lives are going on. But with some tales it isn't like that, and I have to know, so I write more stories to find out. Sooz at 17 — the age she will be in the opening of the new novel — should be quite interesting. How directly connected to The Last Unicorn it will be, though, that still isn't clear to me. I'm actually far more curious right now about how it will feel to go back and try and recapture some of the tone, the mindset, of the original, since in many ways I'm not that person at all any more, and in other ways it is as if I have never changed at all.

ST: What's the status of your situation with Granada Media and the animated version of The Last Unicorn?

PSB: It didn't have to be war. War could have been avoided. But essentially that's what it is now. They claim the film is somehow still $15 million in the red, which is ludicrous given that it cost around $3 million to make and has earned $15-20 million or more since 1982. So I've hired a capable lawyer and I'm enlisting fan support. There is letter-writing and fundraising going on in preparation for an eventual lawsuit. I wish it didn't have to be like this, but I'm not going to go away just because the fight is hard. They appear to be counting on precisely that, but if so I'm going to have to disappoint them. This is full out.

ST: Continent Film Ltd. has held the film option for the live-action version of The Last Unicorn, yet nothing has come of their supposed planning. Can you tell us a little about what's happening — or rather, not happening — there?

PSB: Michael Pakleppa of Continent is a very old friend, made in the early '80s when The Last Unicorn animated film was dubbed into German and he was its distributor in that country. Michael worked heroically on the project, and I always admired the fact that he was doing it running on fumes. He brought everyone he could who was involved in the film to Germany, and in my case he put me up at the fanciest hotel I think I've ever been in. He also did an enormous amount of publicity and put the film into twice as many theaters as usually happens in Germany. The end result was that he made a success out of it in the German-speaking countries he distributed to. And he became obsessed with making a live-action version. But the fact is that this project is larger than Michael can handle. It's not going to happen while Continent Films has the rights. In one sense that is good, because I'd rather not have it made than made badly. And in another sense it is disastrous, because there's no reason it couldn't be made well. Their official website has always been completely inaccurate regarding anything to do with stages of production, who has been signed, and the rest of it. As for the work ... well, I think the progress shown on the website is terrible. In this post-LotR,, post-Narnia world, you just can't stick a horn on a horse no matter how much CGI you use to trick it up afterwards. You can't get away with it. It won't happen. It will be laughed out of theaters.

Last year I discovered that Michael had arranged to have another screenplay written without telling me, in order to try and satisfy certain issues raised by a possible funding source. And I felt ... well, for lack of a better word I felt betrayed. Michael may have gone long stretches without ever telling me anything, because he wouldn't share things unless he could make them sound halfway hopeful, but he'd never done anything like that. He should have told me there was a problem and let me try to solve it, if problem it really was.

Thanks to "Two Hearts" and the new novel I have some media rights leverage I never had before, and am actively trying to put together a deal that would buy out Continent and give me more say in the eventual outcome of things. With Michael I have none.

ST: Assuming you could get The Last Unicorn remade, what would you like to see done with it?

PSB: I'd like to see it made, obviously, with a good deal of money, not just for special effects but for production values, for the overall look of the film. But mainly I'd like to see it made with love from all sides. From me, from the producers, from the actors, from the director. Directing this one would not be as huge a job as, say, directing The Lord of the Rings. But it would be a tricky one in a completely different way, because it is and isn't a fairy tale. The nearest thing I can think of to it is what was done with The Princess Bride, which managed to be both a delightful, fascinating fairy tale and a spoof of fairy tales as well. Come to think of it, Rob Reiner might be an excellent director for The Last Unicorn. I'd never thought of that until just now.

ST: How is Summerlong coming along? Is it still on track to be published this year with all you have going on?

PSB: Summerlong was actually finished more than three years ago. I'm making a few last changes in response to editorial suggestions from Connor and from John Douglas, who is line editor for Conlan Press, but that's all. Everything is definitely on track for publication this year.

ST: After so many years between novels, what are you finding new and exciting about this story?

PSB: It's not anything I've ever done before, and I'm always drawn to what I haven't yet done. While it is definitely a fantasy it deals, if you will, with real adults instead of with young people or fairy tale characters. In some ways I think of The Innkeeper's Song as my first fully grown-up novel, and I find this to be in the same category, although it is completely different.

ST: Writing Sarek has been delayed, due to expanding material. What else are we going to be seeing in this non-fiction piece besides your annotated script?

PSB: The book has opened up to include a number of interviews with people involved with that episode or the show in general. There is also more material by me about Star Trek and the process I went through, from beginning to end, writing my little piece of that universe. Connor says the delay is really his fault, and it may be: he keeps digging things up that I want to include, to explain, to explore.

ST: Were you already a Trek fan when you wrote the episode?

PSB: I did know the show well. I'd seen every episode in reruns. It was a standard joke with the people living with me at the time that I mostly watched it for shots of Nichelle Nichols as Uhura. They'd look at their watches and say "Oh, it's five o'clock! Time to watch Uhura's Thighs" — that was the name of the show around my house. So I have my curious personal connection, as everyone does who loves Star Trek.

But there was an economic factor to consider, as well. It had been a particularly bad winter, with no work on the horizon, and I wasn't at all sure how we were going to get through it. So I will always be grateful to a science fiction writer friend named Diane Gallagher, who tipped me off that although the show was house-written, they had a couple of gaps they needed filled by outsiders. If I got down there in a hurry, she said, I might be able to sell them something. Which is what happened.

ST: Do you have any thoughts to share on the state of that franchise after Next-Gen and its apparent demise?

PSB: I'm sure the franchise will bounce back. For me, never having seen much of Enterprise, Star Trek peaked with Deep Space Nine — my favorite of the various spinoffs, and one that I'd have loved to write for. I think there will be a reconsidering time now, not just on the part of Paramount, but also in the minds of the audience, who may be a little Trek'ed out at the moment and need to catch their breaths. I don't know what the procedure will be, whether there will be another series or some movies first, or something else entirely, but I know that in one form or another Star Trek will return.

ST: After being involved in both Trek and Lord of the Rings, is there any other pre-existing fictional universe you'd like to dabble in?

PSB: I don't honestly think about that much. But if I were ever to be asked to join in any Joss Whedon project, especially anything to do with Buffy or Spike, I'd leap at it. That's beyond question. In fact, I had a kind of Buffy-tinged dream last night. I can't recall the details now, but Willow showed up, I know that.

ST: It seems you've recently moved all of your published output to Conlan Press, a smaller independent printing house. What would you say are the benefits to self and independent publishing? The downsides?

PSB: Conlan Press is more like a central platform for my work, rather than the exclusive source. In addition to what Connor and I plan there, I've also got a new collection coming out this summer from Tachyon Publications, a children's book due out someday from Scholastic's Blue Sky Press, a graphic novel adaptation of The Last Unicorn from Scholastic's Graphix line, and graphic novels of A Fine And Private Place and The Folk Of The Air from Dabel Brothers.

The downsides, of course, are the twin problems of economics and distribution. It is hard to move fast or attract a lot of attention when you are small and don't have a lot of working capital. And it is hard to get the books into stores — though direct on-line sales make that fact a little less important, at least in the long haul, and Connor is cooking up new marketing alternatives I can only marvel at. The upside is that I am working with a real person who is instantly available, who knows my work extremely well, and who may make editing suggestions — or bring up possibilities that would never have occurred to me — but who won't ever ask me to reconstruct a book in such a way that it will become personally repugnant. This is exactly what happened with Summerlong, which was originally contracted to a major East Coast publishing house, and explains why the book has been so long-delayed in release. I just couldn't bring myself to do what the editor was asking, because I know it would have ruined the book. In the end they finally cut it and me loose.

It's also nice to be able to pick up the phone, or just drive across the bridge, and make sure things are going right. I can do this with Conlan and with Tachyon, because they are both in San Francisco. With the bigger East Coast publishers things seem to take forever, and I never quite know what is happening — or more to the point not happening — and I certainly never know why. To this day it is a mystery to me why it took Scholastic nearly 11 months after acceptance to send me a contract and a check for my first children's book. I never want to go through that again, with Scholastic or anyone else.

The personal connection becomes much more important with age. I think of my friend Robert Nathan, who literally outlived everyone he knew at Alfred A. Knopf, where he published for 40 years. In the end he simply had to leave. Not only were all the people who understood his work gone, but a whole new view of publishing, a whole new professional and ethical attitude, had taken hold. He was lied to, ignored, and generally treated like gum on his editor's shoe. He really had no choice but to move on.

ST: Compare the state of the publishing industry today to when you were first starting out. Is it pretty much the same leopard with slightly-different spots, a whole new animal?

PSB: Publishing has changed a great deal in the 46 years since my first book came out, and most dramatically in the last decade. The simplest thing I can say is that I brushed against the last era in which publishing could be considered a gentleman's game. There was piracy going on, certainly, but it was on a much smaller scale. The blockbuster mentality that exists in both movies and publishing today wasn't there, then. In those days a publisher would, without hesitation, print an essentially worthless bestseller that would move hundreds of thousands of copies ... but there was an understanding that it paid for all those other writers whose first and second books hadn't done anything, but whose third book might. Or for that poet whose work would never make the publishing house a dime under any circumstances, but whose presence on the list added prestige to the company. There was a rationale that got a lot of people published whom I don't think would be published at all, in today's market.

ST: I know you're not just a writer, but a singer as well. When you sing, you do so not just in English, but German, French, and even Yiddish; how versant are you in those tongues? (I mean, a lot of people know a few songs in a language that isn't their native tongue, but they might not necessarily know what they're singing ...)

PSB: I'm only fluent in French and Spanish, and only to the level where I can make friends and carry on daily conversation. As far as the other languages go, I have a very good ear, and I can usually pick up the sound — of any romance language, at least. Languages outside that family are not so easy. My ex-wife used to try and coach me on how to sing in Hindi, and I could hear, with one part of myself, the intervals. But I just couldn't get them right. I thought I was doing it while trying, but I couldn't, not really. So I don't try languages where I simply can't hear the sound. And I won't sing anything where I don't understand the lyrics exactly. That's crucial to singing anything, in your own language or anyone else's. You have to know what's in there.

Regarding Yiddish and German, I have a story to share about an old friend, the photographer Michael Bry. Michael was born in Germany and raised in Chile. He's got to be over 80 now, and living back in Germany, but some years ago he came to hear me at the little restaurant in Santa Cruz where I performed every Saturday night. It was a French place, and I was singing mostly in French. But because we both loved Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill — we used to sing them in the old VW bus we traveled in around California, working on things — that night I sang "Mack the Knife" in German for him. He got very excited. He even stood up from his table and sang with me. Afterwards I said to him "Mike, I've never done anything like this in German before, how did it sound?" And he answered "Wonderful, it sounded wonderful! Absolutely Yiddish!" So there you are.

ST: How did you come to speak Spanish and French? Did you grow up with those tongues, learn them in school, in college, on your own?

PSB: I have half-Mexican cousins who are favorites. Their father was Mexican, and their mother, my father's baby sister, was Polish Jewish. They are my most beautiful cousins, and I grew up sort of tagging around after them, trying to talk like them. I picked up Spanish without knowing I was picking it up. Of course it was a very mixed bag of their father's Mexico City Spanish, New York street Spanish, and classical Spanish. (The older of the two cousins is well-known as a translator and student of medieval Spanish poetry.)

French I didn't have a word of. But when I was in college, I happened to hear a poet/songwriter/singer named Georges Brassens on a record album in the university's library. I cannot tell you why the music, why his guitar and the voice behind it, seized me so immediately. But I had to learn French. I had to learn those songs, to know what he was singing. I had to. And I basically learned French word by word from Brassens' songs, picking up his heavy southern accent. Brassens was a high school dropout who had read everything, and taught himself Greek and Latin so he'd have more stuff to read. So the best way I can describe it is it would have been like a foreigner learning English from a Cajun with a classical education.

As I've told classes over the years, the best incentive for learning those songs — entirely apart from a feeling for music and the sentiment inside the lyrics — is that these elegant ballades, which quite often sounded as if they came out of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, when translated properly and with a full understanding of double meanings, often turned out to be exquisitely obscene. I recommend it highly as a teaching method.

ST: Do you play any instruments, like the character Joe Farrell from Folk of the Air?

PSB: Only guitar. I have always allowed Farrell to be the first-class musician that I'm not. I'm good enough to know what good really is, but that's all. All of the lute scholarship in Folk comes from a black lutenist named Jeffrey Day, who was playing Santa Cruz when I was playing in that restaurant. We used to catch each other's gigs. We talked music, and we especially talked about his lute playing, because I was so curious about the instrument.

ST: You've spoken often about the hardships of making a living at writing. If it weren't for that pesky muse tying you to the desk, what career might you have pursued? Would you have been a full-time singer, or something else?

PSB: I can't remember ever seriously wanting to be anything but a writer. I love singing, and in my fantasies I'm singing ballads with Count Basie's band. And I sometimes wonder if I had devoted as much concentration and intensity to the guitar as I have to writing, how good I could have been. I don't know. Never will, really.

ST: I met you at Dragon*Con; have you been to any media conventions like that before?

PSB: The last couple of years I've been to more than I've ever been in my life, which is another one of those changes that Connor is responsible for. And I'm enjoying it immensely. I realize that there is an ego matter involved here, of course, because in meeting people I'm discovering that I am much better known than I thought I was. The best way I can describe it is that never in my life, before these last couple of years, have people ever asked to have their pictures taken with me. People don't usually do that with writers. So I am delighted, fascinated, grateful, and inspired. On the other hand, when I'm there I'm not working. So there's a delicate balance to walk.

ST: Do you dabble in the SCA at all, frequent Renaissance Faires, or engage in other group fandom activities?

PSB: Not really. I go to occasional Renaissance Faires with friends, or my oldest daughter and her husband, but it has been a while. None lately. And I've seen SCA things out of the side of my eye when I've been to various conventions. But I don't know anyone there now, at least as far as I know. And I've never been a member or taken any serious part.

ST: Will you be attending any conventions this year?

PSB: Yes! They blur ... it's like that old movie, If It's Tuesday This Must Be Belgium ... but I'll open up the calendar and look at the list. Hmmm ...

March 3-5 I'll be GOH at Consonance, a filksinging convention in Milpitas, California.

March 10-12 I might be at Grand Slam XIV, the Creation Sci-Fi Summit in Pasadena, California (it's not settled yet).

May 26-29 I'll be at Balticon, in Baltimore, Maryland. I'm hoping to meet Neil Gaiman there (he's GOH) and thank him for the various small kindnesses he's done me in the last year.

June 7-11 I'll be participating in the Mythic Journeys Conference in Atlanta.

June 23-25 I'm GOH at ApolloCon in Houston.

July 13-16 I'll be in Nashville for my annual pilgrimage to the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society event, which is something of a Mecca for certain kinds of guitarists, and a place where I am unabashedly a fan, not a featured presence in any way.

July 20-23 they tell me I'm a major guest at the San Diego Comic Con.

And then there's a big rush, four weekends in a row: August 10-13 I'm a featured guest at GenCon Indy, in Indianapolis. August 17-20 I'll be in Las Vegas for the Star Trek convention there. August 23-27 I'll be in Anaheim for the World Science Fiction Convention. And September 1-4 I'll be back in Atlanta for my second Dragon*Con.

Connor hasn't scheduled anything after that because he knows I'll need a breather, but I'm sure they'll be at least two or three more between then and the end of the year.

ST: You once said of yourself and your wife, in reference to how the computer has affected your life, that "on the information superhighway we're a pothole." What are your thoughts on how the internet has affected the notion of "fandom community" over the years?

PSB: The fan community in general has simply exploded with the Internet. It's almost beyond my comprehension how fast a story, a craze, a rumor, or some piece of technical news will get around. People keep much more track of what's going on than I had ever imagined. Most writing — most art, for that matter — is so solitary a business that it is quite surprising to get on the Internet and find out how many people who aren't related to you want to know what you are doing.

ST: A number of your fans have banded together to help spread the word about your mother's need for medical care, as well as the legal battles you've been facing in regards to collecting money you're due. How are you and your mother both faring these days, in health and in spirit?

PSB: My only physical problem that I know of is never getting quite enough sleep. But my mother is blind from macular degeneration, has a hard time hearing, and has all the ills one would expect in a woman who just turned 100 last December 25th. (I associate Christmas strictly with my mother's birthday.) As she says herself, it's not always good to get so old. She feels she has outlived her life, because except for her most immediate family she has lost everyone she ever loved.

Inevitably blindness and near-deafness isolate her. We've recently gotten her a new hearing aid, which seems to be helping a good deal. I try to see her every day when I am in town. And I read to her, because in some ways the very cruelest thing to happen, for her, is not to be able to read. I sometimes think that if she could still read on her own she'd live forever.

Her short-term memory is largely gone. I've been there in the morning to visit, and then had her call in the afternoon to ask when I'm coming. On the other hand her long-term memory is sometimes remarkable.

Last year at this time I was convinced she was going to die any day, what with issues of heart and lung congestion and other matters. But most days now she is stable. She sleeps better. Her condition is well-monitored and the drug and treatment regimens are generally effective, so I don't panic the way I was. And, remarkably, her weight is the same as I always remember it being, around 118-120 pounds.

You know, she taught me how to read. In my kindergarten years you weren't supposed to arrive already knowing how, but thanks to my mother I did, and my kindergarten teacher was really pissed and let it be known. If my mother hadn't started me so early I wouldn't be the person or writer I am today, and I think about that often, as I read to her.

ST: Do you have any closing thoughts to leave our readers with?

PSB: For all the difficulties that come with being a full-time, lifelong artist ... and for all the mistakes I wish I hadn't made ... and for all the things I reach for that I want to create, but might not be able to ... despite all that I feel incredibly lucky. I know my best books are yet ahead of me, and that I can honestly say I finally know what I am doing. Which is good, because given my commitments, and all the things I'm signed up to do, it's like George Burns' line: "I can't die, I'm booked."

Peter Beagle — Peter Beagle's Website
Conlan Press — Conlan Press — Peter Beagle's publisher
Help Peter — What You Can Do To Help Peter Beagle