In 1959, a 19-year-old undergraduate tried to write a novel, as 19-year-olds with ambitions to be writers are wont to do. The next year, the 20-year-old had his novel published by Viking, a major press—which happens to many fewer of those would-be writers. Reviewed in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Daily Tribune, the book was received fairly well. The consensus seemed to be that it was clever, charming, and slight. Still, given the author's age, the novel promised great things. If a young man could write this at 19, what wonderful things would he write at 30?
The author, in case you haven't already guessed, was a young New Yorker named Peter S. Beagle. The novel was A Fine and Private Place, and, if anything, the reviewers underrated it. Charm has always been Beagle's besetting vice, but in A Fine and Private Place his pursuit of charm served a purpose, drawing the reader into genuine fondness for the ghost-seeing, cemetery-dwelling Jonathan Rebeck—together with the cynical raven who steals food for him and Mrs. Klapper, the widow who befriends him. Beagle's thoughts on death ended up not much more profound than the average 19-year-old's, so the fantasy elements were forced to carry the story. But A Fine and Private Place proved a sweet book, suggesting a genuinely American form of the magic realism that critics were just beginning to recognize in literature. It promised a literary career that would produce many great American novels.
Beagle never quite managed to become the writer he could have been. Promise is such a deadly word, and the history of literature contains more than one marvelous boy, more than one young writer who suddenly sprouted up into a green tree before going to seed. If Beagle hadn't been celebrated as a prodigy, we would happily label his career a real success—a real success, that is, for a genre writer with some ups and downs as he progressed through 50 years of writing. It's just that, given his talent, we can't help but feel a small disappointment. To read any of Peter Beagle's good work is to wonder why we aren't reading great work.
Arguably, his third book is his great book. Published in 1968 when Beagle was 29, The Last Unicorn has sold millions of copies over the years and been translated into more than a dozen languages. Its name is always found high on lists of classic fantasy novels, and it remains his best-known book by far. That's not to say The Last Unicorn is a pleasant story. Dark even for the genre, it tells the adventures of a unicorn who sets out to discover whether she is the last unicorn in the world. Along the way she encounters a possibly insane, possibly angelic butterfly who tells her where to go. A witch who runs a traveling carnival that holds its animals and performers captive. An aging magician who decides to help. A noble prince who has been adopted by a tyrant. And a red bull who is ridding the world of magic.
Sentence by sentence, The Last Unicorn is beautifully done: a rich, metaphor-driven prose that fulfilled the promise of A Fine and Private Place. And as a piece of well-developed fantasy, The Last Unicorn is hard to beat—more akin to William Morris's The Well at the World's End, a psychological allegory, than J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, with its thick-universed religious themes, but still redolent with a sense of meaning. The Last Unicorn reads as though it is speaking to us on a level beyond the story's ebbs and flows.
As an entry in the writer's career, however, The Last Unicorn signaled a wrong turn. Beagle wouldn't write another novel until The Folk of the Air in 1986 (even that book he is reported to be rewriting for a new release) and The Innkeeper's Song in 1993. He wouldn't produce another real novel till Tamsin in 1999—and then not another till Summerlong in 2016. Beagle did write the screenplay for the 1978 animated movie version of The Lord of the Rings, and he's prepared various television scripts over the years, with his screen credits adding up to a nice career for a fantasy writer.
A fantasy writer, that is, who isn't Peter Beagle—the man who was supposed to be something more than a successful writer of occasional fantasy stories. Good as it is, The Last Unicorn marks the point where Beagle began to go astray—the point where his magic realism fell over entirely into fantasy, his charm began to serve no purpose other than charm, and he seemed to have nothing but mood to convey with his writing.
Proof might lie in the fact that he has been incapable of escaping unicorns. He's written a novella called "Two Hearts" that forms a sequel to The Last Unicorn. A short story titled "Julie's Unicorn." A young adult book named The Unicorn Sonata. And now, at age 77, he has produced yet another unicorn story: In Calabria, a small book about Claudio Bianchi, a grumpy middle-aged farmer and poet who finds a pregnant unicorn on his Italian farm.
In Calabria is closer, in some ways, to magic realism than some of Beagle's fantasy works—although that's mostly because the prose is so much more realistic. Gone are the charmingly rich sentences of The Last Unicorn. In Calabria has a much flatter tone, aiming at something nearly drab enough to reflect the book's protagonist as he grumps at the meddlesome mailman Romano Muscari and his young sister Giovanna (who is in love with the older Claudio).
Given the genre and Beagle's general desire to please, readers will not be surprised that Claudio gradually falls for both Giovanna and the golden-white unicorn who wants to have her foal on his land. La Signora, he names the unicorn, vowing to keep her and her colt safe. And her presence seems to illuminate not only his life but his work, as he begins producing more (and happier) poetry. Claudio successfully defends his farm from tourists and media figures who want to see the unicorn, but there are other, even less salubrious characters after La Signora. His struggle against the Mafia-like 'Ndrangheta forms the tension of the short novel's second half.
Like Summerlong, this new work is a tale of an aging man suddenly finding a new joy, a new reason for living and working, in the love of a younger woman and the appearance of a new magic in his life. Given that In Calabria is Beagle's second work in two years after a long dry spell in his fiction, the metaphors of a late spring of rebirth may have more than a little self-reference to them.
At least, one hopes so. Without that, without a final flowering, Peter S. Beagle would stand mostly as a cautionary tale in American literature: a young man of talent who never quite found a use for his talent. A man of promise—oh, the deadly word—who never quite fulfilled the promise he showed us all at age 19 with what remains his most charming book.