Gilding the lily
Kevin Crossley-Holland
The Tale of the Tales: The Beatrix Potter Ballet Rumer Godden (Frederick Warne £4.00) The Sly Old Cat Beatrix Potter (Frederick Warne 60p) Here is a new landmark in the history of bookmaking. Lavishing untold attention on their prize author (their one prize author?) Frederick Warne have published the book of the film of the book; or, more precisely, the tale of the ballet-film based on the tales of Beatrix Potter.
Having declined film offers often enough before, Warne understandably dithered when they were approached by the producer Richard Goodwin in 1969; they must now be profoundly grateful that they put their trust in him and the distinguished team he subsequently assembled (Christine Edzard, designer; Sir Frederick Ashton, choreographer; John Lanchbery, composer; and Rostislav Doboujinsky, maskmaker). Beatrix Potter's animal world, no less real, no less daunting and rewarding, yet infinitely more innocent than the world of men, is most memorably realised in this ballet-film without words, based on four tales, Jemima Puddle Duch, Pigling Bland, Jeremy Fisher, and Two Bad Mice. The very slow unfolding of the stories, with any number of set pieces (for example the moving pas de deux between Pigling Bland and Pig-wig) should by all the rules provoke children to impatience, but it does nothing of the kind; the music, based on many turn-of-the-century tunes, is wonderfully spirited; there is a wealth of humour — not belly-laughs but felicitous, sly touches. And that part of the action which was shot in the ravishing countryside around Beatrix Potter's own Lake District village of Sawtrey is so breathtaking — so green, so blue, so still — that the young Beatrix with whom the film begins and should surely end, is rightly shown to respond to it passionately. It is more than she can do to walk sedately in that place; she tears down an incline at full tilt; she sits all but motionless, watching. Then she begins to draw; and what she draws dances off the page.
Rumen Godden was the natural choice to write this book. She has long been preoccupied with Beatrix Potter; she is author of a number of particularly good books for young children about the lives of dolls; and she knows well how to tell a story just this side of sugar and sentimentality. And that is precisely what she does in the first part of The Tale of the Tales, recording the conception of the film, the preparation for it, and the making of it— everything to the last detail, the " twelve " pairs of artificial hands (hired) on which to fit paws," the comments of the dancers when they see rushes, the true mouse that terrifies Hunca Munca. The overall impression is inevitably gossipy. These pages really belong to a woman's magazine, or to a film programme: The fur was dyed and stuck on to the frills, ten hairs at a time — perhaps 5,000 tiny bunches of hairs went to one squirrel; then
so that the fur fell naturally, it was cut by apprentice hairdressers from the Vidal Sassoon Salon close by.
Christian names fall thick as autumn leaves, and overtones and undertones are discovered under every leaf: 'It won't work,' the Goodwins were told over and over again — Richard and Christine had married in 1968 and found their workshop home in Knightsbridge. — 'It can't.'
'It will,' Christine said it doggedly — perhaps an echo down eightly-seven years of Beatrix Potter's 'I think and hope my selfwill, which brings me into so many scrapes, will guard me here.' One wants to say 'Thank God for the self-will.'
The second part of the book links Christine Edzard's working-sketches, the backbone of the ballet, to a text consisting entirely of Beatrix Potter's own words, cleverly taken by Rumer Godden from the four ' lead ' tales and other sources, and also includes a number of Beatrix Potter watercolours. The book ends with forty stills from the film and a handful of Beatrix Potter's delightful letters to children.
It is all a bit much. Beatrix Potter's achievement was, after all, rooted in plainness and simplicity. It is like a breath of fresh air to turn to The Sly Old Cat, now published for the first time. This story of a selfish cat who gets her deserts at the hands of a deprived rat is in the manner of The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit and The Story of Miss Moppet a short text, an uncluttered tale intended for very young children. When Warne asked for new drawings. in 1916 (booksellers had jibbed ten years earlier at the concertina-like style in which the book was to be presented), Beatrix Potter. declined on thE grounds of failing eyesight. But as it is, her original preparatory sketches are extremely lively; they complete a delightful book.
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