Standing Firm Against Fantasy Foes

The caterpillar was about 2 1/2 inches long, round and fluffy, and looked as if it was upholstered in midnight-black velour. It was making its deliberate way straight toward my feet on a patio in Bel-Air the other night, a night soft with spring. Some of us had gone back to the patio after dinner because the air was still silken on the skin and the lights were sharp and clear in the valley below.

The caterpillar was plushy and luxuriant and obviously an insect with a mission. I lifted my feet so that it could crawl under my chair and someone said, “Don’t step on him. He’ll be a butterfly soon.”

“I don’t think so. I think he’ll be a moth,” someone else said. There is always someone who sees a moth when everyone else is hoping for butterflies. An attorney in the group, worldly, knowledgeable, respected, said: “Don’t tell me he won’t be a butterfly. I don’t want to hear that. The next thing I know, someone will tell me there is no Easter bunny.”

He was right. There is always someone eager to tell you that your beloved fable is not exactly true. A few weeks ago, some thin-lipped error stomper in England decided that some of Beatrix Potter’s classic animal stories were too harsh and that her illustrations were not true to life. This retiring young woman, who lived almost half of the 19th Century and half of the 20th Century, painted all of her animals from life, small animals like mice, ducks, hedgehogs, ducks, squirrels and geese, and she did it with precision.

I haven’t read anything further about the new revisions. May we hope that they sank without a trace. Poor Beatrix had a stern father who watched her every move and the small animals were her only friends.

The person who was intent on turning the Beatrix Potter stories and paintings into intellectual castor oil objected because Peter Rabbit’s father ended up in a meat pie on the stove of the evil Farmer MacGregor. So he did, which taught Peter to be very careful in the garden of Farmer MacGregor. I have always felt sorry about Peter’s father, but we are all apt to end up in cottage pies unless we exercise caution and common sense.

The new pictures were sanitized, and didn’t have the quirky personalities showing through like those of Goody and Timmy Tiptoes, Mrs. Tiggywinkle, the hedgehog with her mobcap, and dear old Jemima Puddleduck, not forgetting Jeremy Fisher, Benjamin Bunny and Peter himself, with his fine blue coat with the gold buttons.

Someone else of the same dreary stripe published a pamphlet recently setting forth the lugubrious premises that Robin Hood may never have existed and, if he did, he was a common highwayman who kept his loot from robberies to himself and that none of the Merry Men really ever were.

How silly. Of course he was real, and if he weren’t, some blessed soul would have invented him. We need to believe that there are picaresque souls who steal from the rich and give to the poor and outwit the dullards of rectitude and respectability. Of course, that is nothing to teach children as doctrine, but we all need a sprinkle of romance, daring and hairbreadth escapes in our lives.

Of course Robin Hood lived and so did Little John, that great, laughing bear of a man who fought Robin with his staff on a log bridge and tossed him into the stream. That’s when he became a member of the Merry Men. And Friar Tuck, with his flagon of ale, surely lived and trod the floor of Sherwood Forest. I loved Maid Marion and thought what a wonderful life she had, living in the forest with all those gallant men. I’ll bet she never scrubbed the pots in the stream, but she may have fixed a venison roast for the boys when they came home through the trees from an exhausting day of stealing from the bad guys.

Royce Young, the current sheriff of Nottingham, says: “I would like to see the authors of this brochure locked in the dungeons of Nottingham Castle.” You will, of course, remember that the fellow with the pheasant’s feather in his cap was in constant danger of being arrested by Royce Young’s predecessor in the 13th Century.

In the town of Nottingham, the clammy book denying the lives of these roisterers and their beautiful lady has been withdrawn by the citizenry. And good for them.