Authors and After Words

Joseph Campbell understood myths as living paradigms that give shape and meaning to our lives. In his understanding, the key to what one might call "mythic" living was a single, simple direction, namely to "Follow your bliss." That sounds good, especially when flavored by dark chocolate, but surely the bliss Campbell is talking about is a much deeper psychological or even metaphysical phenomenon. In time Campbell’s bliss must lead to a resonant intuition that the route of ultimate achievement leads one to an ever increasing sense of authenticity which in turn bolsters our innermost comprehension about how we are to relate to each other and to the rest of the world and its creatures. Where are we to find examples of such authentic bliss? May I suggest Beatrix Potter as one?

Beatrix Potter was born in 1866. As a child, she was a virtual prisoner in her parents’ home. Her parents both came from nouveau riche families and had inherited enough to live well without having to work. Surrounded by nurse maids and tutors, Beatrix had no friends her own age – except for her little brother Bertram who soon enough disappeared when he was sent away to school.

Now, it must be said that Beatrix Potter’s mother, Helen, was a harridan. Obsessed with upward mobility, on the one hand she tended to ignore the children while, on the other hand, she was relentlessly intrusive, domineering and controlling. As a result, Beatrix had no where to go but to her sanctuary on the third floor of their London home. There she took refuge in her bliss, namely her studies, her painting and her pets. From early on, however, her concern was to be able to produce drawings that were rich in realistic detail and she soon displayed a prodigious command of her craft. It was through these pursuits that she would build the strength of character that would come to rattle her mother for the rest of the woman’s life. Eventually these pursuits would allow Beatrix to garner a life of her own.

Beatrix’s third floor refuge, however, was not the only escape from her overweening mother. In the summer, as an upward mobile family, the Potters sought relief from the city in the countryside. In the early years, they headed north to Scotland, then later to the Lake Country where it seems that Beatrix and Bertram were able to run rather free, despite their mother’s rigidity. During these summers, the children treated their surroundings like a living laboratory in which they studied in great detail the local flora and fauna with Beatrix producing finely drawn records of their adventures. Later, the knowledge gained in the countryside would inform her work to the degree that she would present her animal characters and their surroundings in precisely observed representations. At one point, she and her brother found a dead fox which they put to the boil in order to study its skeleton. As a result of this kind of unrestrained curiosity, her illustrations show a far stronger grasp of animal anatomy than of human anatomy. It’s been said that rather than to present humans as animals – as, for example they appear in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows – Beatrix presented animals as humans. As a means of developing her own take on the world and of protecting her thoughts from prying eyes, Beatrix took to keeping a journal that was written completely in code.

It must be admitted here that the success with which Beatrix was able to protect her pursuit of artistic and intellectual bliss was at least in part due to the fact that her mother never manifested the least curiosity about the natural world. Nor did she take Beatrix’s art at all seriously – until Beatrix was in her 30s and had the temerity to step beyond the household to sell her water colors as greeting cards and then actually to publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit at first privately and soon afterwards, in June of 1902, publicly through the firm of Frederick Warne & Company. That publication was so successful that it established one of the longest running relationships between author and publisher on record. Beatrix became the most popular writer of children’s stories, and her work was translated into over 30 languages. But with that success came a great conflict for as Beatrix and Norman Warne worked on the production of her books they became so fond of each other that in 1905 Norman asked Beatrix to marry him.

To Helen, Beatrix’s association with a "tradesman" like Warne was irritating. But to consider marriage to such a person was appalling! It didn’t help that earlier on, Beatrix had rejected all the potential suitors that her mother thought eligible. Sadly for Beatrix but ironically for Helen, Norman died before the marriage could occur. For Beatrix, Norman’s death was a turning point. Soon after, she left her parent’s house in London to live in the Lake Country where she remained for the rest of her life. It was her success as a writer and illustrator that allowed Beatrix to make that final break. Her mother never really understood what her daughter had achieved. That achievement was due to the fact that Beatrix steadfastly pursued her bliss, which was to remain true, not only to herself but also to her art.

Once she removed herself from London, Beatrix Potter’s life took a remarkable turn. As she became more and more acquainted with the Lake Country and its culture, she became more and more interested in the future of both, especially as they were threatened by development. Once again, in pursing her bliss, indeed her passion to protect that land, she found a helpmate in her barrister, one William Heelis. In 1913, at age 47, and much to her mother’s dismay, Beatrix married, and quite symbolically too, for after 23 books, she was no longer interested in continuing as a writer. She ceased being "Miss Potter" and to one and all became "Mrs. Heelis!"

It was Mr. and Mrs. Heelis who ultimately left over 4,000 acres of preserved land to the National Trust and it was Mrs. Heelis who became instrumental in restoring the native sheep to the Lake Country. In so doing, Beatrix seems to have turned away from one bliss to follow another. But consider the following: all of Beatrix’s stories are animal stories, and all arose from her imagination out of the countryside and out of her interactions with the rabbits, mice, hamsters and whatever else she kept in that third floor animal refuge in London. In effect, her move to the Lake District was a return to the landscape of her imagination, the landscape of her bliss.

Is it any wonder that in such a return she should embrace the land and use her fortune to keep it and its culture pure and intact? Is it any wonder that in her return she should find a man who should become her helpmate in that great enterprise? And is it any wonder that a writer who had featured the countryside and its animals in her fiction should find her ultimate bliss in raising the very animals who were unique to that landscape? I see no inconsistency in the arc of this life. Of such is the nature of bliss as Campbell understood it. As such it must lead to the salvation of our species and the world which is our home – one life at a time.