A World Worth Returning To
George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind can bear many a long, slow, careful re-reading.
Review by Tessa Carman
When I first read George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind around age ten, I was starting to enter a stage of self-awareness. I knew I could read fast, and I was used to adults petting me for my adeptness. (Alas, I was also probably beginning to care about grades at school.)
So when my uncle, who had previously lent me a copy of The Light Princess, lent me North Wind, the timing was none too soon. I devoured it, of course, thoroughly entranced. To my shame, however, when he asked, I told him how quickly I had read it. I foolishly expected him of all people—a nonconformist farmer and a reader of Tolkien and Charles Williams—to flatter me.
I don’t recall exactly what he said, but it was a gentle version of, Who cares how quickly you read it? Did you enjoy the story? I was appropriately ashamed.
In the years since, and especially after becoming a teacher and mother, I think of books more like meals: It’s not about shoveling nutrients in your mouth, but rather about how well you dine. A repast can appear in all manner of forms: a Thanksgiving feast à la Babette; scavenged hazelnuts and wild strawberries from a meadow; frozen pizza on a tablecloth with candles and fresh sprigs of herbs; a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich after a long hike with friends; green beans with a side of tomato soup from Trader Joe’s.
So, too, with books: the assigned book from class you muse over with a pencil in one hand and an apple in the other, the serendipitous find at the library or the used bookstore, the book placed in your hands by your parents or grandfather or aunt, the inscribed greenback of poetry from a friend, the long and winding tale you fell asleep to as your dad read to you at night or when you were sick.
Where there is attention, there is love. Where there is love, there can be a feast.
One way my uncle loved me and my cousins was by giving us well-chosen stories for our delectation. We then had to return the book, so that the next person could savor it.
In high school—when I was old enough to start reading fairy tales again—I reread At the Back of the North Wind from a large lusty blue tome illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith. Though I had first read it at an age when I was starting to think I knew something, I was still struck, enchanted, by the story—especially North Wind herself, so wild and terrible, beautiful and enigmatic, and yet good. I might actually have first understood that something can be “good and terrible” through North Wind, rather than through a visit to Narnia.
North Wind will take different and sometimes terrifying shapes in order to do her work.
MacDonald’s stories are full of wise woman characters, who are both beautiful and of a great age: there’s the great old princess in The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, and the Grandmother of The Golden Key. But North Wind is a wilder being, less human than the others—she is wind, after all. And she is a servant, as Gandalf is a servant of the Secret Fire, the Flame Imperishable. (When she is telling Diamond of the country at her back, she notes East Wind’s claim that her work—from sinking ships to sweeping sky-cobwebs to rescuing sleepy bees from tulips—“is all managed by a baby.” One cannot help but think of the child who is the Old Man of the Fire, the “oldest man of all,” whom Mossy and Tangle meet in The Golden Key.)
She has her work to do; she does not pretend to understand all that she is a part of. As majestic, and as powerful as she is, she knows she is yet a creature.
Perhaps it is the friendship between the archon-like North Wind and Diamond the coachman’s son—a little boy with little to recommend him other than simple goodness; he is no great warrior, lost king, or Chosen One—that partly makes us keep coming back to this tale. After all, Greville MacDonald believed that North Wind was his father’s “best seller” because of its “two-world consciousness”: it delves into depths of reality with a guileless lucidity. North Wind explains mysteries to Diamond in such a way that the mystery is neither betrayed nor distorted; the child responds in wonder, without worrying yet about naming the deep joy that is awakening in him. Greville explains in his biography George MacDonald and His Wife:
A child no more grasps intellectually its exalted symbolism than he reflects upon Form’s relation to its indwelling Idea when he runs to his mother with a primrose because of its beauty. Yet in both cases a lasting impression of the story’s and the flower’s place in the Divine Economy remains, consciously or not. One need not ask what the rose means if its sweetness pierces the veil and gives taste of the joy that “will never pass into nothingness.”
The narrator tells us that Diamond is “a true child in… that he was given to metaphysics,” and he asks profound questions. For instance, when he first meets North Wind, he is willing to go with her, trusting that “what’s beautiful can’t be bad. You’re not bad, North Wind?”
She amends this thought: “No; I’m not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they are beautiful.”
Indeed, North Wind will take different and sometimes terrifying shapes in order to do her work. Her presence makes Diamond’s story a more-than-ordinary tale, a tale touched with Faerie. And yet, notes Greville, for MacDonald a symbol was “far more than an arbitrary outward and visible sign of an abstract conception; its high virtue lay in a common substance with the idea presented.”
I remember fondly the particular volume my uncle lent me, with a picture of a boy reading under a tree on its cover.
Such an observation rhymes with G.K. Chesterton’s insight into MacDonald’s fairy tales and “ordinary” tales: “The difference is that the ordinary moral fairy tale is an allegory of real life. Dr. MacDonald’s tales of real life are allegories, or disguised versions, of his fairy tales.” For MacDonald, Chesterton writes, “The fairy-tale was the inside of the ordinary story and not the outside…. His allegoric tales of gnomes and griffins do not lower a veil, but rend it.”
Mark Twain wrote to MacDonald in 1882 that he would send him Life on the Mississippi when published, and that he would “take the Back of the North Wind in return, for our children’s sake; they have read and re-read their own copy so many times that it looks as if it had been through the wars.”
I remember fondly the particular volume my uncle lent me, with a picture of a boy reading under a tree on its cover. When I found the same edition at a used bookstore, I snatched it up. How well I recalled the illustrations, the font, the heft of its pages.
Now I’ve begun to read North Wind to my own children, who are six and four. I wasn’t sure they were ready for North Wind, though we’ve read The Princess and the Goblin together. I could not but acquiesce when they asked for it. And so together we entered Diamond’s hayloft.
In the years to come, I hope the binding falls apart after so many readings that we will have to get another copy, whose crisp new pages a new child will take up, and read, and enter through the rent veil to that not-so-far country.
Tessa Carman writes from Mount Rainier, Maryland.
At the Back of the North Wind was first published serially in a children’s magazine called Good Words for the Young in 1868 before being published in book form in 1871.
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