Tom's Midnight Garden

Something happened when I was in the garden Wednesday, although I would be hard put to put that something into words. Of course, this is the Ur-Garden, the garden behind the door in the wall, the garden Tom Long escapes to on his nocturnal adventures with Hatty Melbourne. And it had changed. But at the same time, it had not changed, and I found myself struggling with that duality, becoming… unanchored somehow.

Fortunately, that hasn't interfered with my ability to work, but it has interfered with just about everything else, including my ability to sleep.

Tom's Midnight Garden is essentially a book about time travel. It's a very specific type of time travel though, mediated not by some clunky improbable machine but by the hypnogogic dreams of an old woman who's very close to death.

Children are concretistic thinkers. A 'midnight garden" is a metaphor for the dream state, but in the respective storylines of the novel's two main characters, it's also the superimposition of two quite different respective external realities, a place where the present can play freely with the past.

As a child, Tom is mired in the reality of the garden. He doesn't notice when it starts to change. Or rather – he notices, but what he notices has a curious elastic quality. On one of his very first visits to the garden, one of the huge yew trees is struck by lightening and falls. On his subsequent visits to the garden, however, the yew tree is still standing. (In fact, I believe it's the same yew tree that Hatty falls out of, injuring herself and jumpstarting her romance with Barty.)

Then there's the skating trip to the cathedral in Ely. The skates, I suppose, are the one real point of external conjunction between their two worlds until the very end of the novel. Hatty puts them under a loose floorboard in 1890, and Tom finds them under those loose floorboards in 1950 with a note, written in a strangely formal copperplate hand: To whomever may find this. These skates are the property of Harriet Melbourne, but she leaves them in this place in fulfillment to a promise once made to a little boy. As it turns out, the night Hatty puts the skates under the floorboard is also the night the yew tree is struck by lightening.

Tom's Midnight Garden has one of the most moving endings not just in all of modern children's literature but in all of modern literature, I think. Children don't like old people, and anyone who is over the age of 35 is old to a child. So when Tom has the epiphany that ancient Mrs Bartholomew is really his playmate Hatty, just removed in time, and he races back up the stairs and embraces her, it is just extrordinarily moving. (My memory is that this scene is actually narrated by a secondary POV character, the foolish and fluttery Aunt Gwen. Which makes it more powerful.)

Two things. I expropriated the plot mechanism from Tom's Midnight Garden for the Steinbeck novel. The entire town of Monterey is under the malign power of the dreams of a very ancient Chinese woman who was left for dead when the Italian fishermen burned down the Chinese village on Point Alones in 1906. She doesn't die, but her rage and horrible sadness transfigure her into a kind of supernatural being, invented by moi called a shenshi. Shenshis feed on doom and sadness and existential despair. of course, at the same time, she's also human, living in San Francisco and running a whore house. Some of the more unmanageable parts of the plot involve Steinbeck and Campbell's various trips up to the city to try to get her to lift the spell.

Second, on Monday night I actually talked about my own trip to the Ely Cathedral in 1970-something. It was when Steve and I were cycling through Britain during what we later discovered was the rainiest summer in a century, and of course, I went to the cathedral because of Tom's Midnight Garden.

I saw a ghost.

It was an old priest with filmy weird eyes, and yes, the cathedral vault seemed colder when it passed — though it was pretty cold to begin with – and it carried a cane which it tip-tip-tipped over the 14th century cobblestones, even though there was a sign advising visitors to stay off the 14th century cobblestones.

It went up to a table and lit a candle.

I elbowed Steve. "Look at that weird guy!"

"What are you talking about?"

"The old blind guy? I guess he's a priest –"

"There's no one there, Patty –"

But I continued to see him and the candle he lit continued to burn, and I ascertained at least that yes, Steve could see the candle –

The priest didn't shimmer and fade out or anything weird like that. One minute he was there. I turned away to talk to Steve, and when I looked back, the priest was not there. So either a ghost or a very vivid hallucination.

Ray, the composer at the Memorial Day barbecue, grew up in a house with ghosts.

I have no idea what ghosts are, but I think they're definitely around. I suppose it's like my belief in astrology: No, the sun doesn't revolve around the sun; yes, it's scientifically wrong. Yes, I believe in it. No, I'm not going to argue about it with you.