Susan Cooper: Looking Back

Looking Back SUSAN COOPER

Susan Cooper (1956, English Literature) is the author of The Dark Is Rising series, not to mention many other works of fiction and non-fiction, TV screenplays, and the Broadway play Foxfire.

As a friend of mine put it: “They simply taught us to believe in dragons.”

Perhaps you have to reach old age before you find yourself wondering if, and how, Oxford managed to shape your life. Up to that point there’s no time; you’re too busy doing the living. But now that it’s 65 years since I went down from Somerville, I find myself starting to wonder.

I’m a writer, a Jack-of-all-trades – fiction, non-fiction, TV screenplays, a Broadway play, and in particular, books published for children. As a word-besotted young person, naturally at Oxford I read English – and worked on Cherwell and joined the Press Club, since I assumed the only way to earn a living as a writer was to become a journalist. The Press Club turned out to have been the most practical choice, since it gave me contacts in Fleet Street that helped me to become a reporter on The Sunday Times.

But the English School had a quiet, long-lasting influence of its own. Wildly different from its counterpart at Cambridge, its syllabus - created by J.R.R. Tolkien with the support of C.S. Lewis - had us studying hardly anything written after 1832. The stress was all on early and medieval literature. As a friend of mine put it: “They simply taught us to believe in dragons.”

I loved it all, having been a child reared largely on fairytale and myth; Britain had been busy with World War Two until I was ten years old, and few children’s books were published. And life in wartime is like a sort of active myth; it’s easy to develop a Manichaean sense of good and evil when you spend your nights in the air-raid shelter because enemies are dropping bombs to kill you.

So off I went from Oxford, from the world of Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature, into the London world of a newspaper reporter, working for the news pages and for a column written by one Ian Fleming, the tall, elegant chain-smoker who had just begun publishing his Bond books. It was a fascinating and exceedingly fact-based life. I interviewed Duke Ellington while he was eating a steak, the Archbishop of Canterbury while he was mowing his lawn; I interviewed Newcastle dock-workers whose English my Southern ear could hardly understand, and farmers in the Outer Hebrides whose Gaelic I couldn’t understand at all. Over the years I graduated from reporter to feature-writer, which gave me two pages of space but involved vast amounts of research. Once I spent months writing a scathing three-part feature series about the appalling state of most

Hard at work with Cherwell co-editor Patrick Nobes

British hospitals, only to have all its accusations blithely brushed away by the Minister of Health, a right-wing racist named Enoch Powell, because he hadn’t seen them. “I never read the Sunday newspapers,” he said silkily, smiling at me. “Not a word.”

A lot of people do read the Sunday newspapers, of course, but like many journalists I hankered to write something longer-lasting, so in the evenings I wrote a futuristic novel called Mandrake, about a sinister leader who destroys civilization by exploiting love of place. I also came across a competition launched by a publisher of children’s books offering £1,000 for a “family adventure story,” and dived in with enthusiasm because £1,000 was more than I earned in a year. Before I’d written a chapter of this story my imagination gave me a major character with distinct overtones of Merlin, so the book Over Sea, Under Stone had to go to a different publisher, but I didn’t start thinking of myself as a fantasy writer, not even when Mandrake went into paperback labelled ”Penguin Science Fiction.” I was too much involved with real life. The Sunday Times had sent me to the United States for three months, I had met an American and he had convinced me to marry him. My editor looked at me in dismay when I announced this fact. “You can’t do this,” he said. “I was about to make you Features Editor.”

Life as a features editor certainly wouldn’t have encouraged any more books of fantasy. But nor did life in America, particularly since I now had three teenage stepchildren and, within three years, two babies. My writing stayed firmly factual. I wrote a book about the United States (the only time I’ve ever had my picture in Time magazine, which hated it), I wrote a biography of J.B.Priestley and edited his collected essays; for years I wrote a weekly column about American life for The Western Mail, the Welsh daily which in those days was connected to The Sunday Times. Politically and culturally, there was no shortage of things to write about in the late 1960s.

But I was homesick. I had pulled up my roots, and they refused to replant themselves; instead they ached, and plaintively called to me. I was a classic example of the complex emotion that the Welsh call hiraeth: a deep, sorrowful yearning for a home that is out of reach.

And one day in America, in the New England winter, cross-country ski-ing with my husband in a nearby wood, I saw fallen branches shaped like antlers jutting from the snow, and they reminded me for a moment of Herne the Hunter. I found myself thinking: I want to write a story about a boy who wakes up one day into deep snow like this, but in Britain, and finds that he can work magic.

Who knows where that came from? Children endlessly ask children’s authors “Where do you get your ideas?” and there is no answer to this question. I tried to write my story and failed, but the idea niggled. It sent me in the end to the shelves in my study that held all the most precious of the books I had brought with me

I had pulled up my roots, and they refused to replant themselves; instead they ached, and plaintively called to me.

I picked out Over Sea, Under Stone and began to read, and suddenly I knew that this new story about the boy and the snow would be its sequel.

when I moved from Britain (“Jeeze!” my 14-yearold stepson had said, hauling boxes, “Why do you need all these books?”) Along with my own first books, there stood Beowulf (in Anglo-Saxon), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in Middle English), the Mabinogion and the Tain, James Fraser’s The Golden Bough, Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, half a shelf of books about Arthur, Eliot’s Four Quartets and all my other closest printed friends from my three years at Oxford.

I picked out Over Sea, Under Stone and began to read, and suddenly I knew that this new story about the boy and the snow would be its sequel in a sequence of five books, all linked, all set in my parts of England and Wales, all dealing with the overall substance of myth, the matter of good and evil, the Light and the Dark. I took a piece of paper and wrote down the five titles, the names of their main characters, the ancient times of year – like Beltane, and Hallowe’en – at which they would be set, and the overall title, The Dark Is Rising. And for the next six years I wrote those books, all the while drawing subconsciously on everything that had haunted me before and during my days in Oxford’s School of English. So did Oxford shape my life as a writer? Not exactly, perhaps, but it certainly helped. In the Dark Is Rising books and everything I’ve written since, there’s a preoccupation with the conflict in the human soul between good and evil, the Light and the Dark, that I learned from ancient tales and modern war. “The evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control,” says my Merlinesque protagonist in his last speech, to the children around him. “The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands – your hands and the children of all men on this earth….The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can turn it into a fire to warm the world.”

In a time when the conflict once more alarmingly thrives, through fear and distrust and polarization, if not overt war, let’s hope he’s right – and that today’s children would say, as one of them does in the book, “We’ll try. We’ll try our best.”

Left: Susan Cooper’s plan for The Dark Is Rising sequence. Right: The unforgettable cover to the 1976 Puffin edition of The Dark Is Rising