My life in books

Naomi Mitchison: A Biography, Jill Benton

The more I learn about Naomi Mitchison, the fascinated I am by the woman herself and by her vast (and alas, mostly out of print) literary legacy. Each of the books of hers that I have read so far has been very different, and yet each has spoken to me very strongly. This biography showed me more of the author herself, Mitchison the socialist, Mitchison the feminist and sexual radical, Mitchison the girl coming to womanhood, the woman coming into her own place and power, in the midst of a very highly over-achieving circle of family and friends.

Travel Light, Naomi Mitchison

What a wonderful find.

Mitchison’s part-fantastical, part-historical tale of a young girl named Halla, cast out by a wicked step-mother, mothered by bears, raised by dragons, taught to “travel light” by the Wanderer (he of the one eye and the two ravens), is a delightfully subversive story. Once she accepts that she cannot be a dragon, Halla encounters many people who have clear ideas of what she should be and what she should do, from the nasty hero who kills her guardian dragon Uggi and threatens to teach her “the way of women” (she escapes with the help of another of the dragons) to the priests and nobles of Micklegard (Constantinople) who want to use her gift for talking to animals to win money on the horse races, and later decide she belongs in a nunnery (she escapes with the help of a friendly Valkyrie), to the young man who decides that he wants to marry her.

But Halla has her own path to follow, and her own place in the world to find, and as long as she chooses to travel light – unencumbered by baggage of the physical kind, but also of the kind of expectations and assumptions and preconceptions that limit the ways one can learn and grow and adapt to change – she remains free to become herself.

The style is very plain and straightforward, the characters distinctly drawn and memorable, the message invaluable but never preached about.

I particularly enjoyed the bits about growing up with the dragons and coming to understand just how annoying and destructive those pesky heroes can be. Here's the dragonish take on the whole dragon-hunting fetish of so many heroes:

Kings and champions and heroes, unfairly armed with flame-resisting armour and unpleasant lances, were encouraged by certain underground elements and against the wishes and interests of the bulk of the population, to interfere between princess and dragon. Occasionally this resulted in tragedies, as in the case of the good dragon who was killed by the man George, or of the dragon so cruelly done to death by Perseus when about to make the acquaintance of Andromeda. It could be verified that no princess was ever asked whether she wanted to be rescued and carried off by a dragon-slayer to a fate (no doubt) worse than death.

I wish I’d known about this book when I was young.

Travel Light should be at least as well-known as a classic children’s novel as The Hobbit, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or A Wrinkle in Time. Please, if you have kids –especially girls, but boys too – in your life, give them this book.

To the Chapel Perilous, Naomi Mitchison

Just getting to read this book was the fulfilment of a quest. In a comment on my discussion, many months ago, of Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman, wolfinthewood recommended this book, Mitchison’s take on the Matter of Britain. There was no question about it, I knew I had to read this book.

But a quick search revealed that it is out of print, although there had been a recent edition released by Green Knight Publishing, and copies were available via used booksellers and Ebay. My partner looked about in the local used bookstores without success, so we ordered a copy online from a bookseller in Canada; it was shipped and supposedly delivered by the post office, but vanished before we saw it. We tried again, ordering the book from a US bookstore to be delivered to an American friend of ours. It never arrived.

The third time was the charm, and my long-awaited copy arrived just before Christmas.

And by all the gods and goddesses, it was worth it.

The book is a marvel. The premise – what if journalists, much like those of modern times, had been covering the events of the Grail Quest – allows Mitchison to present a story that is deeply satisfying on many levels. It is at once an exploration of the nature of reality, a satire on the influence of the media over public knowledge, and the influence of the rich and powerful over the media, a feminist interpretation of the Arthurian legend that positions women as independent agents, an Arthurian scholar’s delight in its incorporation of multiple source materials and variations, and a damned good romance in its own right.

By sending her main characters – reporters for rival newspapers – on a journalistic quest to uncover the true Grail among all the reports of a completed quest, Mitchison is able to retell the multiple versions of the Grail quest in the various sources that precede what is now generally considered the definitive version of the tale, found in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.

The journalistic process of investigation, interview, writing, editing, high-level editorial intervention and political influence described in the novel, which winnows many credible Grail stories down to a single media interpretation parallels the evolutionary process through which the definitive story – Galahad’s successful Quest – was established in the real-world development of the Grail material. We see through the eyes of the journalists and the various knights all the shapes and powers that the Grail has assumed in all the literary and mythic threads and traditions that were woven over time into the final widely-known version.

And we learn some great truths – that the Quest is open to all and anyone can follow the Grail that is truly meant for them, and that the story decided on by the rich and powerful to further their own purposes, often bears little resemblance to the realities that may be determined by each person for themselves.

Years and years ago, when I was but a child on the verge of adolescence, I read a book called Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison. I remember the library I borrowed it from. the room where it was shelved, the afternoon sunlight coming in the window over the shelves of science fiction. I remember the plastic cover taped over the hardbound book's dust jacket. I remember thinking, more or less, - spacewoman? This I have to read.

I was a bit young, some might say, to be reading adult science fiction, but this was one of the handful of parenting things my mother did well - she let me read whatever I wanted to. I had her library card in hand when I went to the adult section of the libaray, and I could read anything that struck my fancy. Most of that was science fiction.

What I did not remember, or realise, until re-reading the book, was how deeply it burrowed into my imaginative subconscious, with its examinations of various kinds of human and non-human reproduction and its revelation that some acts of reproduction are desired and joyful and others are inconvenient and even dangerous and need not be allowed to follow their natural course.

There is an underlying idea, only once or twice stated openly, but pervasive nonetheless, in Memoirs of a Spacewoman that reproduction should be consensual, and that a woman need not stay pregnant just because she is pregnant now - but that a woman who wants to be pregnant has every right to be so, and her needs and those of her child should be accommodated by her society.

In rereading the book, I was astonished to find images I'd forgotten were there, images that had surfaced in my dreams at a particularly crucial point in my life. I was 19, pregnant, and had decided to have an abortion. It was the only decision that was right for me at the time, but this was in the 70s and there were some elements of social conditioning for me to get through. I had a series of dreams at that time that comforted me, made me feel somehow what I knew in my mind, that I had done the right thing. It wasn't until recently, rereading Mitchison, that I realised that the images, the situations, the "stuff" that most of those dreams were made of had come right out of the pages of Memoirs of a Spacewoman.

So a very belated thank you, Naomi Mitchison, for writing the book I would need to help me resolve my emotional issues about abortion.

Oh, and in addition to all the personal stuff, it's an interesting read. Mitchison's protagonist is a career space explorer, a communications specialist, someone trained to use everything - her mind, her words, her body, her empathy - to find ways to communicate with other species. Communication at such an intense and intimate level is, at least for humans and for some other species of varying levels of sentience she encounters, can overlap with sex, which can overlap with reproduction. The events of the protagonist's life, as a spacewoman and as a parent or potential parent in some rather unorthodox circumstances, explores the conections between communication and reproduction, both biologically and culturally

In many ways ahead of its time, it deserves to be remembered as a classic of science fiction.