Or Fan Letters and Flights of Fancy
It seems like every time I go somewhere, I end up somewhere else. My mind is like a toddler in a mall, always wandering off and getting lost… I have an internal PA system constantly reminding me to come to the information booth to pick it up.
Flights of fancy are never overbooked and there’s no waiting at the gate.
Alan Lee and I were sitting drawing little pictures last August in London for the Fellowship Festival organiser, Louise Henry, when I noticed Alan’s hands.
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Not that I hadn’t noticed that he had hands before, you understand, but I had never paid much attention to them, being as there are two, conveniently and conventionally situated on the ends of his arms, one on each, and endowed with the requisite number of fingers and thumbs, but it suddenly got me thinking. What a great story, thought I, The Man Behind The Hands. Thus I was transported back in memory to my parent’s lean-to shack (well, okay, it was a cabin, but shack sounds more romantically destitute and backwoodsy) in the remote Canadian West of my even more remote youth.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fan…
I have most of Alan’s books. “The Mabinogion”, which he illustrated in Wales in the 6th century, (though thoughtfully he has provided an English translation). The book “Castles”, a guidebook to the castles which Alan has designed and built over the last few thousand years. (Many of the ruins can still be visited today.) “Merlin Dreams”, written by Merlin and illustrated by Alan, (probably around the same time he was living in a cave in early medieval Wales researching for the Mabinogion. Alan is from Devon, after all, so he has been around since the Devonian Period, which places him happily above the Silurian and just below the Carboniferous). “Tolkien’s Ring”, where he has included all the illustrations that inspired JRR Tolkien to create Middle-Earth, and of course the Lord of the Rings itself, fifty-odd pictures on which Tolkien based his epic story. (Tolkien had already written the Hobbit based on another set of his pictures.) The first book I have of his is naturally “Faeries”, which is all about fairies, a word he had some trouble spelling. Alan also invented holograms, but only exploited them in a couple of children’s books before letting the patent go public.
Long before that, Alan was also seeking the meagre shade of the walls of Troy (he spent the full ten years there, as opposed to Brad Pitt, who was there for a week at the most, which is an exploit in itself and must have taken a lot of sunblock) and then had the bad idea of hitching a ride with Odysseus for the return trip, which took years and soaked a lot of his sketchbooks (and undoubtedly required a lot more more sunblock). Homer liked the pictures so much he wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey, though I’m not sure how they split the royalties.
As yet unaware of the sheer longivity and prolific nature of all this I dashed off a fan letter from my parent’s backwoods cabin (well, okay, it was a ranch, but cabin sounds more deepwoodsy and romantic) to the illustrator himself in his faraway land of faeried and fabled Albion. A letter witness not only to the boundless and bubbling enthusiasm of my youth, but a heartfelt and unprecedentedly honest expressing of my sincerest admiration and earnest determination to be just like him when I grew up.
He never replied.
(So I decided not to grow up, but to dwell, Peter Pan-like, in a world of fantasy. Thus I busied myself to that end, and cloaked my mundane little ugly duckling self with the bright trappings and brocade cloak of make-believe, but that’s another story…)
By the time I finally met Alan, he was diligently doodling in a sketchbook (undoubtedly he had dried them out over a radiator on returning from Ancient Greece) upstairs in a 747 en route to Auckland in early 1998. After that memorable meeting at 30,000 feet, where I enquired as to the letter he owed me (he never replied; the stewardess interrupted with drinks) we spent a happy and industrious time diligently doodling away in the outskirts of Wellington, where those hands drew countless amazing sketches, strummed a curious collection of most unusual and spontaneously acquired guitars and wrote many long letters to reply to fans. (But not to mine… Those hands were also involved in complicated exploits involving helicopters and orange juice, but more on that another time.)
So, after that flight of fancy, I turned to Alan to ask “Say, do you remember that letter I wrote in ‘76?” Unfortuntely, we realized at that crucial juncture that we were BOTH drawing pictures of Gandalf for Louise, so he quickly changed the drawing to a portrait of Galadriel or Saruman – and forgot to answer my question.
We’re scheduled to do a workshop and some Q & A sessions together in Bristol in late March. I plan to sneak into the audience at some point. I’ve got a question all ready.
THE BULL BY THE HORNS
Full of New Year’s resolve to actually do something, I have been replying diligently since the beginning of the year to a minimum of three letters a day, and squirming in self-reproach when I see the dates on the letters.
In the ever-optimistic category of things to do/not to do any more, I will also include:
Not using cheques as bookmarks.
Not filing away originals with old newspapers to go to the recycle bin.
Endeavoring to begin letters with “Thank you very much for your lovely letter, which I received yesterday…” rather than “Thank you very much for your lovely letter; please excuse me for taking more than a year to reply…” (But, all things considered, I’ve waited 28 years for a reply to my first fan letter, so what’s the big deal?)
IN PRINT
The LAST issue of The Lord of the Rings Fan Club Official Movie Magazine is out. Despite having a title designed by a committee, this was really a lovely magazine – intelligent texts, innovative layout, good photos and interviews, the very opposite of most magazines of this kind, which are basically merchandising thinly coated in editorial content – but destined to have a limited life span.
This article is in the last issue.
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HOCKEY NIGHT IN CANADA
This was the subtitle I was pushing hard to impose for the Canadian documentary… no it’s not, I’m kidding, but it sure would have got people tuned to the box in my home and native land.
The team is deep into post-production and due to hand in the finished film in February.
Latest news here.
Personally, it’s the music I can’t wait to hear.
