Gregory Maguire Steps Out from Behind the Curtain
Dave Weich, Powells.com
Can we safely call Gregory Maguire's Wizard of Oz prequel, Wicked, a sensation? Having sold three-quarters of a million copies since its 1995 publication, now the novel is enjoying a second life as a big-budget Broadway musical directed by Tony Award winner Joe Mantello.
In his first book for adults, Maguire explored Oz in the years before Dorothy's arrival, revealing some critical facts too long obscured by L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel and the classic 1939 motion picture. What made the Wicked Witch so wicked, anyway? As Maguire notes, "She wears black and she's kind of ugly; she doesn't seem to take care of her skin very well," but that hardly justifies her nasty reputation.
"It's a staggering feat of wordcraft," the Los Angeles Times marveled, "made no less so by the fact that its boundaries were set decades ago by somebody else."
Now, in Mirror Mirror, Maguire's latest novel for grown-up readers — he's also published more than a dozen books for children — the author recasts Snow White in 16th-century Italy with Lucrezia Borgia in the role of the wicked stepmother. Powell's Kathi Kirby assures readers, "Maguire's latest retelling of a classic fairy tale is intriguing, surreal, exotic, and sensual. The author's style is mature, assured, and utterly engaging. This is not your Disney bedtime tale."
Critic Ron Charles agrees: "Entertaining as all this is, it's not child's play. In the best sense, Mirror Mirror is a novel for adults that unearths our buried fascination with the primal fears and truths fairy tales contain."
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"Maguire's latest retelling of a classic fairy tale is Snow White set in Renaissance Italy and features Lucrezia Borgia as the wicked stepmother. Intriguing, surreal, exotic, and sensual, the author's style is mature, assured, and utterly engaging." Kathi, Powells.com
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"A captivating, funny, and perceptive look at destiny, personal responsibility, and the not-always-clashing beliefs of faith and magic. Save a place on the shelf between Alice and The Hobbit ? that spot is well deserved." Kirkus Reviews
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"[Maguire's] books may be placed beside the works of Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Crowley and the late Mervyn Peake.This dark folktale, a reworking of the Cinderella fable, is as exotic a vision...as mysterious as life itself." Memphis Commercial Appeal
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"[A] deftly written, compulsively readable modern-day ghost story that easily elicits suspension of disbelief....[R]eaders will be hooked." Publishers Weekly
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"A lighthearted fantasy that, while easily read, is as intricately structured as a spider's web....A fast, delightfully entertaining romp." Kirkus Reviews
Dave: Mirror
Mirror begins with a poem. How did that come to open the novel?
Gregory Maguire: Very often, the prettiest parts of a book, like poems
and epigraphs and small set pieces of description, are the pieces you stick
on last, but in this instance the poem and the idea that there would
be little snippets of poetry throughout came first. Here's why and here's
how:
I was just about to begin writing Mirror Mirror, within about a week
of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring
about fiction-making for a number of months. This seemed to be true of many
writers I knew. It certainly was true of me, too. But I did have a contract
and obligations to fulfill, so my way, finally — finally —
of getting myself into the story was to use Scotch tape to put 3x5 index
cards around the kitchen, on the kitchen cabinets. I thought to myself, If
you just think of a phrase or two, or a word, as a kind of germ, a seed to begin,
that will be how you start this one. This is not how you usually work, but these
are unusual times.
The very first bit that came to me was four lines of poetry referring to the
Snow White character in my book called Bianca de Nevada.
I am a girl who did no wrong.
I walked this side of Jesus when I could.
I kept an angel in my apron pocket.
I do not think it did me any good.
You hear in those sad lines, really, my sense of the desperation in those towers.
No matter how faithful those people were, how good or how bad they
met terrible ends because of some grinding of fate that was larger than their
belief could prevent.
Having then unleashed that little bit of poetic voice in me, I went on and
wrote five or six more. The next was the one regarding Lucrezia Borgia, the
famous poisoner from the High Renaissance.
I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope.
They say I did, at least, and so does he.
And who am I to make of the Pope a liar,
And who is he to make a liar of me?
Similarly, those lines have to do with religious authority and with individuals
bucking against it, whether it be the authority of fundamentalist Muslims or
fundamentalist Christians or fundamentalist states. This was part of my way
of marrying my anxiety about the moment to the story.
Once I'd written five or six of those poems, I realized what they were. They
weren't just poems. I'm not a poet; I don't have any pretense of being
a poet. What they seemed to be were the subconscious mutterings of my characters.
Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless you're really depressed
or something, the person in the mirror generally looks a little more competent,
a little more curious, a little more intelligent than you actually feel yourself
to be? They often look more interesting and more soulful. I realized: That's
what it is. My characters are fairly simple characters, they're pre-Freudian,
they don't have the knowledge of history behind them, but their subconsciouses,
their mirrored counterparts, are smarter than they are. This is what their mirrored
counterparts would say if they could open their mouths and speak.
That's where the poetry came from and that, in the end, is what it meant in
the novel. I don't expect anybody to recognize that, but in my mind it makes
the mirror itself a character. Mirror
Mirror is the name of the book, and those bits of poetry are the mirror
speaking back to the people who are looking.
Dave: When you started writing the poetry, did you already understand that the
book would be about Snow
White?
Maguire: I did. I was contracted by HarperCollins to do a Snow White-ish
kind of book. My editor, who is very good at selling books and knows also when
to stand out of my way when I don't want to take an opinion of hers, said, "Write
Snow White and the gay dwarves." I said, "I don't want to write Snow White and
the gay dwarves. I have no objection if Anne
Rice wants to write it, but I don't." But she got me thinking. Somewhat
against my better judgment, I agreed to write a Snow White book; for a lot of
complicated reasons, I decided to do it. But then I had to make it interesting
to myself. I had to make it an intellectual exercise.
So I thought, What is the story of Snow White really about? It's one
of our foundation myths, along with Cinderella
and Sleeping
Beauty, the main three of the fairy tales, in a sense. What is it about?
It's about truth telling. There's the mirror that tells the truth, of course,
and gets everybody in a lot of trouble. Then there's the apple, which seems
to be a poison apple, but you stop and think, When else is an apple involved
in the telling of truth? Of course it's the Garden of Eden, the apple of
knowledge. Knowledge and truth are closely aligned.
Dave: Mirror
Mirror marries those fairy tale storylines with a historical setting and
real-life characters.
Maguire: I wasn't going to make it a Biblical story, so I began to
think about when in history I might be able to set Snow White's story to have
it be about a shifting notion of the significance of honesty and truth telling.
The Renaissance made the most sense. My tax attorney always says I can
take any trip I want as long as I write a book about it, and I hadn't been to
Italy in about fifteen years — once I thought that, I thought, Great!
So I went to Tuscany, started reading about the High Renaissance, and remembered
about Lucrezia Borgia, who was well known for poisoning her husbands and her
boyfriends and her boyfriends' boyfriends, just everybody up and down the street.
It was a lot of fun to say, Here we are in the High Renaissance. Truth is
breaking out like gale force winds on all four corners of the continents. What
else is happening? If truth is breaking out, the peasant superstition is dying,
or it has to convert somehow it has to evolve if it's going to survive;
it has to evolve into science, into something.
The story of Mirror
Mirror is in many ways a story about evolution. It's about the evolution
of a child into an adult. It's about the evolution of those dwarves into something
a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. It's about the evolution of
history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age
of Reason.
Dave: You use a similar device in Confessions
of an Ugly Stepsister, taking elements of a fairy tale and planting them
within a historical context. There the setting is seventeenth-century Holland.
Where is that marriage born, taking the fantastical elements and planting them
within a historical time and place?
Maguire: Let's say I've decided to marry a fairy tale with an adult
concept or theme that I think the fairy tale is really about. In the instance
of Mirror Mirror,
it was the telling of truth and the story of Snow White. In the instance of
Confessions,
it was the story of Cinderella and the notion of How do we equate different
kinds of beauty?
First, I have to decide that there's a marriage to take place. I have to look
at a fairy tale and say, What is this about? In the case of Confessions,
the two elements getting married are the Cinderella story, such as we know and
love, and the notion that there is no objective value of beauty. You cannot
easily say that the beauty of a young girl is more worthwhile than the beauty
of a tulip than the beauty of a High Renaissance painting than the beauty of
a moral gesture — but you can ask the question.
So where will I have the ceremony? Well, of course, I'll have it in Holland
at the height of the Dutch Renaissance because this is the first time in history
where the middle class began to emerge with some disposable income and cared
enough about the beauty of their homes to hire painters right, left, and center,
to paint for them; to paint themselves, to paint genre scenes, to paint flowers,
to paint historical and less so religious scenes, and to stuff
their houses with paintings high and low. That's why we have so much Dutch painting: because it was a commodity; there was a market for it.
I love to read and stick my nosey nose into the air to sniff the tides; I
didn't sniff that Girl
in a Pearl Earring and Girl
in Hyacinth Blue were both coming down the pike about a year after my book.
But I did remember about the great tulip boom and bust in 1627 and 1628 in Holland,
where just like the Great Depression in 1929 fortunes were lost and lives were
ruined because of a drop in the market, in this case for these beautiful, elegant, basically
disease-ravaged tulip bulbs. (They were disease-ravaged because the diseases
themselves made the tulips more beautiful.) A whole house could be exchanged
for the price of a single tulip bulb that would produce one blossom. That's
what a bubble of investment it was. That was the reason I chose Harlem in the
1620s.
Dave: I know that you didn't initially set out to write a book about
The
Wizard of Oz. Would it be fair to say that Oz was simply your choice of
setting for the story you were trying to tell?
Maguire: It's absolutely fair to say.
The first thing I set out to do was to write a story about a character that
was truly evil. In a way, I failed at my aesthetic intention. I had an idea
of doing something more like having a Hannibal
Lecter or Humbert
Humbert as a character. I wanted to write a fully evil character and make
them comprehensible maybe not forgivable, but comprehensible. And I couldn't
do it.
I thought of the Wicked Witch of the West. I thought, Next to Hitler, she's
about the scariest creature in my subconscious. The minute I had that idea,
I realized I was on to something good, if not necessarily big. It would only
be big if I did it well, but it was certainly good; even if I did it poorly,
it was a good idea.
I came up with the idea of marrying the story of The Wizard of Oz with
this notion of exploring evil at one and the same time. But then the story had
to take place in Oz because the story is Oz, in a sense.
Dave: You take on a certain amount of responsibility attempting to
tell the story of a character with whom people already have strong associations. On the
other hand, there's a potential advantage to working with what may be a natural
curiosity of the reader.
Maguire: I have a different intention than my publisher does. I'm not
a writer because I want to make money. I'm a writer because I'm a very slow
thinker but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with
any kind of finesse is by telling stories. This is how I was raised to think.
It's how my family was raised to converse. My publisher on the other hand is
interested in selling books and making money. I don't mind accidentally making
piles of money when it happens, but we go into it with a different agenda.
I didn't decide to write Wicked
based on The Wizard of Oz because I thought everybody would buy it, but
I did think that because it is a familiar subject and people have a preconception
they might be intrigued to follow and see whether their preconceptions hold
any water. That's what I was intrigued in, too. They might feel the same as
I do. Oh, the Wicked Witch of the West. Gee, we don't know much about her,
do we? She wears black and she's kind of ugly; she doesn't seem to take care
of her skin very well; but she's still interested in those ruby slippers. Why?
There's a complication there. What is it?
She always tells the truth. In the movie, the Wicked Witch might be scary, but she never
lies. Glinda, in a sense, lies to Dorothy; Glinda knows from the beginning that
the shoes can take Dorothy home, and she doesn't bother to say anything. She
puts Dorothy in danger. And the Wizard lies all over the place; that's his job
really, like any unelected public official; it's all propaganda. But the
Wicked Witch doesn't lie.
Even as a kid, I was aware of that. I thought, What's behind that? Why
is she like that? What's this all about? It just happened that my interest
was matched by the interest of what is probably now about 750,000 people, to
read and find out, well, what is she about? It was awfully lucky. It was an
awful good stroke of luck the day that I thought about that.
Dave: As someone who has had a lot of success repurposing old stories
to tell new ones, how is it now for you to watch the Broadway adaptation of Wicked, in which
someone has adapted your work and turned it into something different?
Maguire: It is very different. I suppose if there were a Broadway play
up and running right now based on my children's novel called Missing
Sisters or my adult novel called Lost,
I would probably feel a lot more proprietary about it and a lot more dismayed
for any way that it deviated substantially from my original storylines and characterizations.
However, I do feel that I'm a bit of a bricoleur. I've taken bits and pieces
and made an assembly out of them for my own curiosity, and it seems to have
struck a chord with other people. Now for me to say, "Okay, the story of The
Wizard of Oz and the character of the Wicked Witch of the West was invented
in 1900, hit the stage in about 1903, had a first film of it with Oliver Hardy
as the Tin Man in 1914 or thereabouts, then the famous film version in 1939,
multiple parodies, The Wiz in 1975, then my novel Wicked
in 1995 where the witch finally gets rehabilitated a little bit — and here evolution
must stop." You know? As much hubris as I have, I don't have that much.
It seems to make perfect sense to me that I should now stand out of the way
and let the story even my story go on and develop some grandchildren.
I feel like I stand in an avuncular, grandfatherly relation to the Broadway
play. It does do some things to the story that I wouldn't have done myself,
and that I didn't do myself — that I actually considered and rejected —
but that's not to say that I disapprove of them. I recognize that it's
another generation, and in the next generation down there will be new characteristics.
It's not a clone; it's something else.
Dave: You mentioned Lost.
It was funny to read Mirror
Mirror, then Wicked,
then Lost. It was somewhat jarring to suddenly encounter a character using
a cell phone. Wait, this is contemporary.
Maguire: I'm very proud of Lost,
and I'm delighted when I go into bookstores increasingly I get nice crowds
at bookstores, which is very agreeable — but usually when Q&A time comes,
somebody will raise their hand and say, "What about Lost?" And there
are a number of people who start curling their lips and vomiting into their
hands. But there are always a couple of people who will say to me later, "Lost
is my favorite among your books." And partly because they think it's the most
original.
I don't know that it's my favorite or my least favorite, but it is different.
Because it relies less on a recognized template of an older story, it required
more of me to find and finesse. I'm very proud of it. I hope it is considered
not just an aberration. Oh, he must have been very depressed that year; he
had a temporary lobotomy and didn't know what he was doing. I would love to continue to write stories in all different kinds of genres,
including some I haven't attempted yet.
Dave: An author who made a spectacular crossover from children's books
to adult fiction last year is Mark
Haddon.
Maguire: I didn't know he had written children's books!
Dave: He's published about fifteen in Britain.
Maguire: I never knew that.
Dave: It brings me to the idea of being storyteller,
jumping not only from a historical setting to a contemporary setting to
a fictional setting but also speaking to different audiences, whether they're
defined by age or genre or something else. How many kids' books did you write
before you published Wicked?
Maguire: At least eight or ten, or twelve maybe, of what are known
in the industry as chapter books. Think A
Wrinkle in Time or Charlotte's
Web, roughly that length of book and for roughly that kind of audience,
one that is at the top of its reading game — but before hormones have started
to corrode their intellectual abilities, at least temporarily. The best reading
audience in the world, I think, is that thirteen-year-old reader.
I'm just now putting the finishing touches on a novel called The Final
Firecracker. It is the last in a series of seven comic novels I've been
writing for children. They begin with Seven
Spiders Spinning, then they count down: Six
Haunted Hairdos, Five
Alien Elves, Four
Stupid Cupids, Three
Rotten Eggs, A
Couple of April Fools, and this one, The Final Firecracker. My brother
Joe the mathematician says, "This is called 'a decaying series.'" I'm sure he's
only talking of mathematical properties, not literary.
This book takes place in Vermont. It involves a couple of genetically mutated
chicken eggs that have turned into dragons, a rogue Siberian Snow Spider
who defrosted out of a glacier, and the ghost of a baby elephant who died choking
on a peanut in India. At the same time, it's also about graduation and children
having to move on from grade school into middle school, the fear of that as
well as the challenge and excitement about it.
Every book that I write, no matter its intention, whether it's a comic lark
and a spree and a romp, as these books are, or a serious meditation using the
guise of a children's story but the depth and complexity of an adult interpretation
and apprehension of the world, every story is a kind of road trip for me. It's
a way for me to turn my back temporarily on my comfortable home, on my three
noisy preschool children, on my devoted partner, on the politics of Massachusetts
and the Supreme Judicial Court this particular month, and on the upcoming election,
and the fact that I'm graying and my teeth are giving me trouble. I love taking
road trips, and I don't want to take the same one each time.
I want to go on vacation every year to Maine with my family; I want to go
to the same house and do the same things. They love it. It's a tradition. But
I don't want to write the same book.
Writing different things and writing for different audiences, writing comedy
and writing tragedy — and indeed I'd like to try to write for the stage
soon — is a way for me to make sure that I'm not dead yet, marrying two
new creatures and finding a new place to hold the ceremony so that I can be
amazed and amused and learn something as well.
Dave: If you could have written one book that you didn't, what might
that book be?
Maguire: A book that's already written? There are three that
spring to mind immediately. There's one book published in the mid-seventies
for teenagers called Unleaving,
as from the Gerard
Manley Hopkins poem, Margaret, are you grieving / Over golden grove unleaving?
It's by the English novelist Jill
Paton Walsh. This is one of the most beautiful novels for children or adults
that I've ever read in my life. I just reread the last few pages of it a couple
days ago so it's very much on my mind. It's a brilliant novel, beautiful and
moving, and not as well known as it ought to be.
I love The
Once and Future King by T.
H. White in another mode entirely. And indeed, I suppose that once I decided
to write Wicked,
to the degree that I had a model in mind, it was The Once and Future King,
which is noble, profound, funny, bawdy, serious, sentimental, romantic, and
knowledgeable, all at once.
Finally, another book that I've only read once, but I read it in a moment
of some distress...I was in Cambodia adopting my first son and there
was a little bit of a political problem; I wasn't sure what was about to happen
in the next day. I had brought with me a novel by Ron
Hansen called Mariette
in Ecstasy. The writing in it was so beautiful that it saw me through a
hard patch, that particular day. But then, sadly, I had five other paperback
books to read the rest of the trip and none of them measured up. I couldn't
read anything after it.
Just pulled off the top of my head, those are three books I admire hugely.
I would be happy to go to my grave having written any one of the three. Gregory Maguire
spoke from his home in Massachusetts on February 27, 2004.
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