When I heard "Puff the Magic Dragon" by Peter, Paul, and Mary the last verse of the song was always a bummer:
A dragon lives forever, but not so little boysPainted wings and giant's rings make way for other toysOne gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no moreAnd Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roarHis head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rainPuff no longer went to play along the cherry laneWithout his lifelong friend, Puff could not be braveSo Puff, that mighty dragon, sadly slipped into his cave
The idea being that the kid grows up and abandons Puff because he's got grown up stuff to do. The Loggins & Messina song "House at Pooh Corner" has a similar melancholy vibe about imaginary friends:
As our days disappeared all too soonBut I've wandered much further today than I shouldAnd I can't seem to find my way back to the woodSo help me if you can, I've got to getBack to the house at Pooh Corner by one
I hadn't really thought about this much for books until I was reading Lawrence Block's collection of Bernie Rhodenbarr short stories. The final story, "The Burglar's Future" has the author go to Bernie's used bookstore. There Bernie laments that there are no customers because everyone buys books online these days. And Bernie can't steal stuff because there are cameras and stuff everywhere. Worse, unlike Block's other long-running character, Matthew Scudder, Bernie doesn't age in real time, so he's forever about 35, thus he can't retire. And the author, in his mid-80s now, no longer has the stamina to write any new stories.
Like Puff or the characters at Pooh Corner, Bernie's friend in the real world gets older and no longer can hang out with him. Like our stuffed animals or other toys, most authors inevitably have to put away their characters too. Sometimes it's by design and sometimes it's simply that the author dies and thus can no longer continue the series.
That's how it was with another series I finished recently, the Dortmunder series by Donald Westlake. They were a fun series of 14 books (with an additional volume of short stories) about a criminal mastermind and his associates who usually succeed at some great theft only to somehow get shortchanged. Westlake died in 2008 so there haven't been any more books since then.
In many cases like with the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew or James Bond or Jason Bourne they hire someone else to continue the series, but it's usually just a hollow pursuit to try to wring more money from the public. As much as I like Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr books or Westlake's Dortmunder books, I don't really want to read someone else doing them. Nor would I want to try to continue them myself.
Really it is a bit comforting to think that Bernie is still in his bookstore with his cat and best friend Caroline. Or that Dortmunder and his associates are still in the back of the OJ Bar & Grill plotting schemes. It's much like how we find comfort in the afterlife, thinking that someone is on a cloud playing a harp or whatever you believe.
While I've pitched sequels for the Scarlet Knight or Chances Are stories, I've never really had much interest in doing it. I left Emma and Stacey and their family, friends, and acquaintances in a good place. Their universes more or less work in real time, so they're more like Matthew Scudder than Bernie Rhodenbarr. There really seems no need for me to upset the balance. It's good that unlike Westlake with Dortmunder, I was able to pick where I wanted to end, just like Lawrence Block basically chose where to end things with Bernie. Most of us in real life don't get lucky enough to decide that for ourselves.
The titular track of country-folk singer John Prine's final album was called the "Tree of Forgiveness" about what he would do when he got to Heaven. Then he died in 2020 during the early days of the Covid outbreak. So maybe now he's able to do all this stuff. It seems like an appropriate song for this theme:
I'm gonna shake God's hand
Thank Him for more blessings than one man can stand
Then I'm gonna get a guitar
And start a rock-n-roll band
Check into a swell hotel
Ain't the afterlife grand?
Vodka and ginger ale
Yeah, I'm gonna smoke a cigarette that's nine miles long
I'm gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl
'Cause this old man is goin' to town
I'm getting back into show business
I'm gonna open up a nightclub called "The Tree of Forgiveness"
And forgive everybody ever done me any harm
Well, I might even invite a few choice critics
Those syph'litic parasitics
Buy 'em a pint of Smithwicks
And smother 'em with my charm
Vodka and ginger ale
Yeah I'm gonna smoke a cigarette that's nine miles long
I'm gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl
Yeah this old man is goin' to town
6 comments:
I think imagination, like any muscle, atrophies with disuse. I like to tell stories in my Dungeons & Dragons games. I think that having a player base and immediate feedback on the stories I'm essentially telling (only with interactive characters) keeps my mind fresh. However, I do think that writing by and large is probably going to go back to the gatekeeping model of agencies and big names with the mid-list ones virtually gone. And it essentially has to do with narcissistic supply. The mid-list just doesn't get enough narcissistic supply that punches hard enough to keep most authors going. The big ones like J.K. Rowling get heaps of it, people calling them genius, the best looking actors and actresses in the world begging to star as their characters, people basically mailing them money... Imaginations need fuel just like everything else. For what it's worth, I bet you'd make a great Dungeon Master for a Dungeons & Dragons game. You got a lot of ideas going on.
The first time I heard "Puff the Magic Dragon" it caused a few tears. Since our characters (imaginary friends) are made up by us we can also think of them as being happy somewhere even if we have moved on. Life is always changing and moving forward. Most kids move away from imaginary friends, but they continue to like movies, books and video games and other forms of escape made by other people who never lost their imagination.
I'm not sure if you didn't understand what I wrote or you simply didn't read more than the title.
I'm starting to think I picked a poor title for this entry. It's not really about losing imagination so much as physical limitations like the two authors and one musician I mentioned who got old and in two cases actually died. In my own case for some stories it isn't that I lost my imagination so much as I just felt I had done enough with those characters and it was time to move on.
Thanks so much for the kind words about my work. But may I take a moment to correct your assertion that Donald Westlake's Psrker series was continued by other hands? This is simply not true; Parker's career ceased with my good friend Don's death on the last day of 2008. I suspect you may have confused his Parker books, written as you note under his Richard Stark pen name, with the several series written by Robert B. Parker—and continued by any number of other hands, some deft and other clumsy, since Bob Parker's death. Don would have been appalled at the idea of other people mucking about with his characters, as indeed would I; I've no idea how Bob Parker would have felt, but his heirs evidently have no problem with the whole thing.
Thank you so much for reading my humble blog. I'm sure you're right. I'll correct the post.
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