More monsters, can you believe it? It’s like I have shelf after shelf of monster books or something.
This is The Beasts of Never (1968), by Georgess McHargue, and, to my knowledge, it’s her first published book. It’s illustrated throughout by Frank Bozzo in expressionistic watercolors that I quite like but would probably not cut it in terms of preconceptions about quality in a similar sort of book today (more’s the pity about modern publishing, honestly). There’s a second expanded edition from 1988 that got nominated for a National Book Award, but there is something about the look of this edition that I prefer. Perhaps it was the fact that it was on my library shelf, though when I was a kid, I wasn’t super interested — that “Never” business was too contrary to my deep wish for monsters, even something like Bigfoot or Nessie, to be real.
She covers Nessie, though, at the end of the book, as a way to suggest perhaps there are monsters out there. Along the way, she also devotes time to dragons, both Eastern and Western, the Phoenix, the Basilisk, the Unicorn and a myriad of creatures of the sky and sea. She is most interested the meaning of the monster, not necessarily in the context of myth or legend, but what it might have meant to a person telling the tale beside a campfire. She ruminates and the book is poetic, even if it isn’t poetry. Speaking of the Phoenix, she says, “We will never find answers which are true in the same way the answers to mathematical problems are true.”
In the introduction, she says one of the most perfect things about monsters I’ve ever read. “[…] these imaginary animals, these beasts of never, have a real importance, and this is not merely because they hold a place in history and legend. It is because they are truly magic. By this I mean that the men who invented them were expressing the hopes and fears of themselves and their friends. In doing so, they made their fears less terrible and their wishes more possible. The man who first told of the winged horse Pegasus had created a creature that ought to be—a stallion swift and beautiful and tireless, whose shining wings would carry his master ever higher, beyond the noise and dust of the everyday world. That is more like true magic than anything done by a wizard with his wand or a scientist with his lenses and test tubes.”