JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

Mystical Beasts: Elusive Creatures of the Pen

Monsters have a habit of disappearing. They are often, like Grendel and Fafnir, exterminated individually, but that is the superfluous work of glory-hunters. Time defangs monsters, or else adds invisibility to their superpowers. No one ever defeated Scylla and Charybdis; having instead defeated the idea of being eaten by sea monsters, scholars now squint at Sicilian cliffs and pretend to see their mortal remains. Modern monsters tend to be there-but-not, less in the cave than in the closet: nightclub vampires, hit-and-run aliens, zombies distinguishable from mindless shoppers only by the pungent lack of Axe body spray. Dragons are back in fashion, but nobody believes they still lurk in fens and mountain woods. Especially because fens and mountain woods don’t exist anymore, either. Maybe it was all habitat loss.

Disappearance is the basis of an evolutionary theory of monsters that I’m hoping to get taught in Kansas schools: Mythoflage. The theory proposes that species adapt to look like mythological creatures, thus making them invisible to all but a few harmless crackpots. This perfect camouflage allows the species to perpetuate in peace. Mythoflage is why dinosaurs looked so much like dragons; T. rexes are probably still alive, but no one knows it because, fully adapted, they now have wings, breathe fire and appear to be nonexistent. The only reason gorillas, surely the most mild of mammals, have survived is because they look like Bigfoot. The Kentucky Derby will become a footrace among very short people once horses evolve into unicornism. Vampire bats are trying hard, but have a long way to go.

Yep, amusing oneself is what monsters are for. We learn that as kids, before we’re old enough to know how stark and piteous teratology can be. Like any other child, I cultivated an attraction-repulsion relationship with monstrosities. I owned a book about “real-life” monsters that I demanded to possess and was too scared to read. I had to hide it, lurid cover safely face-down, before I could sleep in the same room with it. Not that I was credulous—I had very refined opinions on the probability of various legendary monsters’ true existences. (Loch Ness Monster—a strong maybe; Mothman, not so much.) I was reading another monster book at the time, the Bible, while attending a Presbyterian church; my earliest conception of Heaven was a place where an omniscient God would satisfy my curiosity as to which monsters were really real. (Hopefully I would remember to ask about that most elusive of creatures, the presbyter.)

Mystery, rather than sheer monstrosity, was the real attraction. That’s why monsters fit so well into the food pyramid of my childhood reading diet, which was fortified with Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie. I ended up a Protestant mystic and a scientific rationalist (not to mention a journalist), which amount to the same thing: an eagerness to learn how weird the world is and a belief that the undergirding truth of it all will be revealed to me personally.

“The Mystical Beast” became a treasure of my life for bringing all of these strains together. This delightful 1976 children’s book is, quite simply, about a monster that mysteriously disappears.

There is much to love about “The Mystical Beast.” A killer opening line: “Standing at the bus stop just in front of Henry was a girl with a cabbage tied to her head.” A brisk plot pitting three children against evil witches and a “Warlock General” in a hunt for the titular beast. Memorable weirdness, such as malignantly stinging puffs of fog known as Pringles, which can be dispelled only by hyacinth-scented hairspray. Playful illustrations, including handwritten notes in the text. A rebellious stance in which good-hearted screw-ups and white magic win out over power-hungry old people.

The beast itself is ill-defined and unnamed, a kind of griffin/dragon hybrid known only as the Mystical Beast. Enormous magic power is its most notable trait. I used to puzzle over why it was not called the Magical Beast. Re-reading it yet again with my jaded adult brain, the answer is obvious. The Beast is the subject of a mystery, and all mysteries are mystical, all are allegories for the ever-elusive truth. And as a fabulous monster, the Beast is symbolic of all of its kind and our longing for them. Unaware of what the Mystical Beast even looks like, aside from a single glittering scale it left behind, the book’s child heroes faithfully quest to regain its magic and monstrosity for the world. That is mystical indeed, a grail odyssey worthy of any child, and any adult who has not forgotten childhood.

That is probably why “The Mystical Beast,” while long out-of-print, continues to be remembered fondly by a cult readership willing to pay $30 a copy on Amazon. It is why my original copy, bought nearly 35 years ago at some school book fair, its cover wrinkled and punctured, its pages browning, still sits in an honored place on my bookshelf.

I returned to that bookshelf a few months ago, as I often do in one of my nostalgic moods. As the familiar soft rectangular bulk of “The Mystical Beast” lay in my palm, I once again wondered about Alison Farthing, as I have done for nearly my entire life. Her name is on the cover as the author of “The Mystical Beast,” but my cheap softcover edition included no biographical information. I had vaguely imagined her as a somewhat hip, 30-something schoolteacher. Indeed, I am so accustomed to wondering and imagining about Farthing, that I nearly forgot what decade I was living in. I looked to my desk, where sits a veritable supercomputer plugged into most of the world’s libraries and all of its nattering zeitgeist. The Web would soon tell me all about Alison.

Google failed. Wikipedia was page-less. Alison Farthing was a non-presence on the Internet.

I was astonished. Granted, the Web still suffers from amnesia for events prior to 1994, but it’s slowly coming around, and this is a formerly mass-market, now cult-favorite author. Google did not simply reveal the absence of Alison Farthing. It also told me that someone else had noticed, and had made “The Mystical Beast” a watchword for tantalizing obscurity.

“The Mystical Beast” was the name of a blog about easily available but little-known pop music, created in 2003 by a New York City music writer known as Dana. The blog was named for the book, and in a 2004 post, Dana explained why: “It was all part of a complicated metaphor having to do with the fact that the book The Mystical Beast (which isn’t a masterpiece, but does have a strange quirky charm) isn’t rare, but you can’t find much of any info about it or its author on the internet….”

When Dana ended his “Mystical Beast” blog in 2005, his farewell post was positively plaintive: “And I never did manage to find out anything about Alison Farthing, who wrote the book that gave this blog its name. I wonder whatever [sic] happened to her.”

The author of “The Mystical Beast” had become one herself, another magical being gone missing, her book the glittering scale left behind. Alison Farthing was one of the authors who taught me the value of seeing a mystery through; now I was the writer, and she was the mystery. I took up the challenge. I had to.

The thoroughly unelectronic 1970s loomed before me like a bank vault door with a forgotten combination. There was the possibility that “Alison Farthing” was a dead-end pen name. But at least it was extremely unlikely that I would be opposed by a Warlock General.

I headed for the old-school paper archives—first the University of Massachusetts Boston library for an old journal called “Something About the Author: Facts and Pictures About Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People.” Then to Amazon to pay a pretty ridiculous sum for a hardcover first edition of Farthing’s first book, “The Queen’s Flowerpot” (another fantasy about a child’s adventures in a secret world of witches), and its author bio on the dust jacket.

They provided a colorless sketch—and I could find no contemporary interviews to flesh it out—but one with recognizable details. There was Farthing.

Born May 11, 1936 in Gloucester, England. She attended London’s Froebel Educational Institute, a college that trained teachers in the progressive methods of Friedrich Froebel, the guy who invented the term “kindergarten” and its pedagogy. She became a teacher of young children at schools in England and Switzerland. When her first book was published in 1968, she was married and had a young daughter. Her bibliography also includes the children’s books “The Hollyhock Race” (1969), “Skip Saturday” (1972) and “The Gauntlet Fair” (1974). “The Queen’s Flowerpot” was featured in 1969 on the popular BBC children’s show “Jackanory,” where actors read books aloud.

As of 1986, Farthing’s home address was 23 Bolton Gardens, Teddington, Richmond Upon Thames (then postal county Middlesex) in London, England. Through the modern magic of Google Street View, I was able to see that the address is half of a nice, bay-windowed duplex on a small, leafy street. Borough property records indicate that the home last sold about five years ago, and the current residents and owner do not include Alison Farthing. The residents did not respond to my request for any information they may know about her time there.

Teddington is not far from Kew Gardens, which plays a prominent role in “The Queen’s Flowerpot.” Even closer to Kew is Rosemary Lane in Mortlake, which may be the real-life inspiration for the street of the same name that serves as the mundane scene for the opening and closing of “The Mystical Beast.” It even has the novel’s bus stop. (My imagination’s version of Rosemary Lane is a street in a mini-suburb near that old Presbyterian church of yore.)

The sole modern Internet presence I could find for Farthing was her set-to-public contact on the Web site of the Society of Authors, a UK professional organization. There she is listed as “Mrs. Alison Farthing.”

I went back to the flotsam of my original Google search and refined it for “Mrs.” There was one hit—a photo of a creative wedding cake of daisy-spangled chocolate, topped with edible spring-weather-gear galoshes, credited with thanks to one “Mrs. Alison Farthing.”

The image, rather incredibly, was on the Web site of Perou, a top celebrity, fashion and fetish-culture photographer known for his work with Marilyn Manson (who has painted a portrait of him in return) and appearances on such reality TV shows as “Make Me a Supermodel.” Even more incredibly, the cake photo was from Perou’s own 2007 wedding.

This could not be the end of my quest. Could it?

“Yes. Mrs. Alison Farthing is my mother-in-law. And she is the author of ‘The Mystical Beast,’” Perou wrote to me in an e-mail response to my questions. “I don’t think she was aware of her cult status in the States, but recently we’ve been hearing about how loved her books still are. Which is great.”

A bit more fiddling with Google revealed that Perou’s wife is Lucy Farthing. (“Lucy” is the name of the heroine in “The Queen’s Flowerpot.”)

As for Alison Farthing herself, she did not respond to my interview request kindly passed along by Perou, nor to one I sent via the Society for Authors. That is, of course, her prerogative, and still a most fitting end to my quest. The heroes of “The Mystical Beast” at first believed they were fighting to become the good “keepers” of the Beast. In the end, they realized that true heroism was freeing the Beast and leaving it to its own devices. For once, the Beast remains, and the heroes disappear.

The Mystical Beast doesn’t need us. It is we who need the Mystical Beast. And once we have found it, we go home again, forever changed, to Rosemary Lane.

Return of the Mystical Beast

“It is always good to hear from readers and I am so pleased that people are still enjoying ‘The Mystical Beast,’” Alison Farthing wrote to me in an e-mail shortly after this column was published. She told me that she eschews interviews, but she graciously agreed to answer some of my questions about the book and her writing career. It turns out that I was right about her books’ origins in oral storytelling, and wrong about the real-life Rosemary Lane. And it seems that editors and publishers were a bigger threat to the Beast than any Warlock General. The following are the full answers that Mrs. Farthing shared in this rare, perhaps unique, background sketch of “The Mystical Beast”:

“Writing stories down was a progression from oral storytelling to children—in part to stimulate their imagination—which we all always enjoyed immensely.

“My published books were written whilst my children were young, before returning to full-time teaching which then claimed too much time and energy. That said, I think most writers find it hard not to write, and I am no exception.

“I have to confess that I have not yet read any of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, but I definitely think it is very good for everyone that she reaches out to so many different readers at this time, when traditional books and publishing are changing so radically. There is, of course, a long tradition of tales of witchcraft, mystery and fantasy, at all levels of sophistication, in many parts of the world.

“The illustrator for ‘The Mystical Beast’ [Anne Mieke¹] was chosen by the editor at Chatto [Chatto & Windus Ltd., the book’s original British publisher]. I do feel the pictures are slightly cosy, and I would have relished a more Gothic Beast.

“I wrote the book in a corner of the living room, on a typewriter, laborious and frustrating. How much simpler and quicker to use a word processor!

“The Sixties and Seventies were very imaginatively creative—think of Peter Blake’s cover for the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ album—and I think the ideas in ‘The Mystical Beast’ are of their time in that they are just the product of free-wheeling imagination!

“The locations also. You asked specifically about Rosemary Lane; it is the sort of name you might find in any English village or town. I live in London, and since writing the story I have passed Rosemary Lane in Mortlake, and it is not at all the sort of road I had in mind!

“In fact, when the book was published by Scholastic in the U.S., they wanted to change the name to ‘The Magical Beast,’ saying that ‘mystical’ would not do for American readers. (They were wrong, of course.) I insisted because I felt that ‘magical’ was overworked, prettified, obvious, and ‘mystical’ was the more complex word and better expressed what I wanted.”

¹ I also attempted to find Mieke for this column, and I believe I may have located her through a certain gallery, but I did not receive a response to my questions about the book either way.

Significant sources not fully cited in the text include: The Froebel Educational Institute Web site at www.froebel.org.uk; “The Internet Movie Database” Web site listing for “Jackanory” at www.imdb.com; the Land Registry, UK, Web site at www.landregistry.gov.uk; the London Borough of Richmond Upon Thames Web site at www2.richmond.gov.uk; “The Mystical Beast” blog at http://mysticalbeast.blogspot.com; Perou’s Web site at www.perou.co.uk; the Society of Authors Web site at www.societyofauthors.org; “Something About the Author: Facts and Pictures About Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People,” Anne Commire, ed., Vol. 45, 1986, p. 74 (copies provided by Marilyn Day, supervisor, Curriculum Resource Center, Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, Mass.). Many thanks to Mrs. Farthing and Ms. Day for extraordinary assistance. Posted June 27, 2010. Updated June 28 and July 26, 2010.

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