Lloyd Alexander, Apprentice to Life

WHEN I WAS A KID, my mother gave me a copy of The Drackenberg Adventure, starring one of Lloyd Alexander’s most memorable characters, an intrepid redhead named Vesper Holly. Last week, as I was sorting through my library in preparation for the move back to Waltham, I happened upon this book and decided to read it again. And what an adventure it was!

As usual, I began to wonder how the author’s artistry might have played a role in shaping the book’s charming style, and the answers I’ve found are reassuring. During his five decades at the typewriter, Lloyd Alexander (1924–2007) mastered several vibrant styles of children’s literature. His success, as we shall see, came in no small part from the constraints of a classical artistry.

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THE SIX ADVENTURES of Vesper Holly are, together, Alexander’s largest contribution to the genre of historical fiction; most of his other books are works of fantasy. That said, Vesper often finds herself in places that are impossible to locate on a map! A glance at their titles alone will suggest that the books (above) form an episodic series, and, indeed, each adventure stands comfortably alone, with minimal plot material carried from one installment to the next.

While writing the books, Alexander probably encountered at least two major types of external constraint. First, an episodic series—by its very nature—will give rise to a constraint of function. That is to say, the author was obligated to give each book a format similar to that of its predecessors, including the same sort of dangers, quests, and supporting characters, all within approximately 150 pages. Insofar as it prevented the maximalist expansion or intensification of those elements, this constraint therefore prompted Alexander to classicize his style by attending repeatedly to craftsmanship, depth of character, and integrity of plot over the course of the series.

Alexander appears to have further constrained himself by choosing to set the books in the nineteenth century. For an author accustomed to writing fantasy, this meant following not only the rules of the real world (no sorcery allowed!) but those of the world as it was in the 1870s—no airplanes, telephones, or automobiles to boot! Of course, a chance to read about horses and steam locomotives becomes part of the style’s appeal. This constraint of materials may have helped to discourage the author from attempting any far-fetched, maximalist capers of the sort which might temporarily increase sales but ultimately damage stylistic integrity.

The Chronicles of Prydain, vol 5.

JUST AS HIS TALES of Vesper Holly epitomize the episodic series, Lloyd Alexander demonstrates his mastery of the narrative saga in what might be his most popular collection of books, the Chronicles of Prydain. The five books in the saga are all closely linked via one sustained plot that does not fully resolve itself until the events of the final volume, The High King.

We need not assume that the Chronicles of Prydain are the only representatives of their style simply because Alexander did not produce chronicles of anything else. Believe it or not, even though the Chronicles are works of complete fantasy, their author triggered a constraint of function by deliberately emulating the style of his own literary favorites: “From as far back as I can remember, I always loved the King Arthur stories, fairy tales, mythology—things like that,” explains Alexander in a 1999 interview for the Scholastic Press. “So it was very natural for me when I came to write the Prydain books to sort of follow that direction.”

Those old legends also provided Alexander with a constraint of materials when deciding what to call his characters. In other words, their names were borrowed! “They come from history and mythology,” the author admits. “And they’re quite old—many thousands of years old, in fact. So I didn’t invent any of them. I found them and chose names that seemed to suit the personalities.”

On the whole, however, such constraints are minor, and Alexander’s general avoidance of maximalism shall appear all the more impressive as we learn more about how he wrote the books. Most significantly, he published the first books in the saga before he had even conceived of the last. “Each book seemed to generate still another book,” reports the author, who had planned to write in total only two or three volumes. “So by the time I finished, which was about seven years later, I had written five books. I was quite surprised at how it worked out.” Therefore, although it cannot be said of all narrative sagas, the style of this one had numerous opportunities to evolve during its lengthy creation. What was to stop the author from prolonging his characters’ quest through book after book without end, their plight growing more and more extreme with each page? Certainly not the blockbuster success of the first few volumes.

Yet from Alexander’s perspective, The High King was “the final logical development of the first four books in the Prydain Chronicles. It was not an easy book to write, but at least I was building on a foundation that I had already made.” Ultimately, it was the author’s commitment to the authenticity of his characters that seems to have kept the maximalism at bay:

Some readers would have liked Taran [the hero] to go off with all the other companions. My answer was if he had done that, would you have liked him better for it? When they stopped to think about it, they realized that Taran did the right thing. It was a hard decision, but they liked him better because he stayed.

In forcing Taran’s character to remain true to life, Alexander followed the classical artistry of all great fiction writers towards a conclusion that continues to move readers around the world (and literally brought its author to tears).

FOR NEARLY A DECADE before finding his voice as a children’s author, Lloyd Alexander struggled to write something meaningful—and publishable—in the maximalist world of mainstream adult fiction. Only through the constraint of writing for children did he find the freedom to put down on the page what he really wanted to say about life. Alexander always had high praise for the power of imagination in his works of fantasy, but—as his treatment of the hero Taran reveals—he would have been the first to admit that fantasy worked best when guided in one way or another by constraints of the real world.

“I have to smile, remembering myself as a very much younger man . . . I was still looking for a way to say whatever it was, if anything, I had to say,” recalled the author in his acceptance speech for the Newbery Medal in 1968. “Perhaps we have to serve an apprenticeship to life before we can serve one to art.”