But were I so fortunate as to have a day to spend in bed, in between dunking scones in Lady Grey, nibbling at blood oranges, and heaving a wad of Kleenex in the direction of the wastebasket and cursing when I miss (and then having to quickly get out of bed to retrieve it, because the dog likes to shred used Kleenex, the nastier the better)...I'm sorry, where was I? Oh - yes - if I had the day to spend in bed, why, then I could be productive! That is to say, I could spend the day thinking of imaginative designs for the cover of my forthcoming book:
Andersen Alterations:
Tales of Hans Christian Andersen
Rendered into Perverse Verse
The book is now undergoing a thorough editing by my partner-in-crime John Wirenius, whose own Phineas at Bay I so recently and so ruthlessly fine-tooth-combed, and when he's through with it, if there's anything left, I shall publish it under the aegis of The Monocle Press.
Both John's book and mine are firmly rooted in the nineteenth century, but our books differ in significant ways. Phineas at Bay takes existing characters invented by the author to whom John is paying hommage - Anthony Trollope, of Masterpiece Theater's The Pallisers fame - adds a few more of John's own invention, and then takes up where Trollope left off, with an entirely new plot. Basically, the six volume Pallisers series is now a seven volume series - with the difference, if you'll pardon my intruding my opinion here, that Trollope's six books can, at times, flounder into tediously lengthy passages that don't seem to get us anywhere, whereas John's book, while scrupulous in maintaining the Trollopian tone and adhering to the motivations and emotional make-up of the characters Trollope created, clips along at a brisker pace and has a sly, subtle wit and a certain sparkle that are uniquely John's own. In kindness to the earlier author, one must remember that Trollope was writing back in the day when authors got paid by the word, and so it behooved them to pad.
Andersen Alterations, on the other hand, started out as a straight re-telling of existing well-known fairy tales by the Danish master, such as The Emperor's New Clothes, The Little Mermaid, Thumbelina, The Red Shoes, and six others (the most arcane is probably The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf). I truly had it in mind to put some of Andersen's loveliest tales into lyric verse, and that was how I began. Before I'd gotten a quarter of the way into the first one I attempted - it happened to be The Red Shoes - I found myself unable to adhere to my original intentions. As I say in my Foreword - a sort of Apologia Pro Carmina Sua -
As I composed, hommage turned to a snort;
I started on my task respectfully
but pretty soon was snickering with glee.
For H.C. Andersen, the Danish bard
loves telling tales in which the luck is hard -
and, while I've stuck severely to his story,
the tone has morphed to quasi-Edward Gorey.
And so, Gentle Reader, I am musing on a cover illustration that will fitly set forth the spirit of the collection, and I think I have come up with something. What I have in mind is Breughel's Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, only instead of Icarus' little white legs kicking helplessly in the water beside the ship, we will, perhaps, have the Little Mermaid diving off the side of the ship to her own destruction, while the plowman in the foreground peruses a volume of Andersen's Tales and therefore fails to notice that he has just harrowed Thumbelina in two, and the shepherd to his right gazes raptly upward at a naked Emperor.
If you have any more ideas for dreadful visual things to do to Hans Christian Andersen's iconic fairy tale folk, I'd be delighted to hear them.
No comments:
Post a Comment