Inconceivable: The Princess Bride

The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version, Abridged, by William Goldman, 1973. Edition I read: Bloomsbury 2008.

William Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride describes itself as the “Good Parts Version”, whittled down from a purported “classic tale of true love and high adventure” by one Samuel Morgenstern. It is in fact a tongue-in-cheek and multi-layered game evoking and exposing not only the mystique of classic writing and the fantastical novel tradition, but also the conflicting impulses of a contemporary commercial writer. Goldman commences with an account of why he edited Morgenstern to reconfigure his book, his “favourite” novel even though he has never “read” it, from the political satire it was originally intended as. A hive of ironic elements is soon found lurking within the novel, waiting to sting the reader. These ironies include the fact that Goldman is responsible as author for the entire work. The text’s sardonic approach also reflects seriously on the nature and purpose of reading and writing, and permeating the novel is Goldman’s sarcastic, knowing, even obnoxious authorial voice. This voice mediates the investigation of narrative and the underpinning values of the kind of storybook tale his novel reproduces.


In the Introduction, Goldman explains how Morgenstern’s novel was first read to him by his father during a childhood bout of pneumonia. This was a transformative experience for a sports-mad boy and future author, and also a key moment in his relationship with his father, a barely literate immigrant barber who gives to his son the gift of a canonical work of literature from his homeland, the country of Florin. Of course, there is no such country as Florin, and the “real” William Goldman cannot have roots there. Goldman nonetheless presents this detail, as well as his relationship with characters encountered on the page, including his favourite teacher, Miss Roginski, whom he recalls having once tried in vain to develop a literary streak in him, and to whom he sent his first novel upon publishing it, hoping she would still remember him and appreciate her part in his success. The sentimentality of this aspect, the student paying tribute to the inspirational teacher, is offset by the obnoxiousness with which Goldman endows himself, as a kid and as a man. We also meet his wife and son, agent and producer, in the Introduction, which plays as ostensible autobiography, making reference to his real-life work, including not only his first novel, The Temple of Gold, but also his works as a screenwriter. Goldman credits Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride as an inspiration for a famous scene in his script for the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and also imbuing him with a sense of the power of storytelling, as opposed to the analytical values of elevated literature. And yet this is truly due to his father’s selective reading of Morgenstern’s work.

William Goldman, drawn by Bo Hampton, with Westley as the Man in Black and Buttercup.

“Life imitating art, art imitating life; I really get those two confused,” as Goldman confesses, yet The Princess Bride is about the tension between the two. Goldman’s literary voice delivers a gruff, worldly perspective on a fantasy that nonetheless still packs a still-vital punch for him, all the more attractive when life lets him down. The Introduction, whilst technically a minor part of the novel, nonetheless tempers reception of all that follows, as Goldman recounts how, frustrated and lonely in Los Angeles, far from his New York home, dealing the problematic and painful exigencies of negotiating with Hollywood big shots, meets the beautiful starlet Sandy Sterling, who makes an obvious come on to him, hoping he can help her career. Goldman, panicked, diverts his desire into an increasingly desperate attempt to track down Morgenstern’s book. He wants to get his own son, Jason,, to read it, but he finally does get hold of it, he discovers its true, discursive form, and sets out to reedit it according to his father’s model. Goldman is driven to do so because he feels alienated from his son and seeks the kind of catharsis it once offered in his own youth. The vignette of Goldman’s dinner table, with the author frustrated at every turn by his wife and son, sees his anxieties over health, sexuality, parenting styles, and class all revealed incidentally in the dialogue, giving a picture of Goldman suspended uneasily between worlds. Whilst this, and Goldman’s subsequent fury at his son giving up on reading The Princess Bride, is played out as comedy in which Goldman willing casts himself as an aggressive, but actually powerless, patriarch at the centre of the family unit, nonetheless the emotions mooted here radiate through the book.


The Princess Bride, that is, Morgenstern’s work, is a presumptive satire of the decline of European feudalism into arbitrary authoritarianism, played out in the form of a hyper-clever, Ruritanian chivalric adventure. A young woman named Buttercup, living on a remote farm with her mutually loathing parents, and their young farmhand known only as Boy at first, although his name proves to be Wesley, comes to the attention of one the most powerful man in Florin, Count Rugen, who travels with his wife and entourage to take a look. Whilst Rugen finds the stories of Buttercup’s beauty unexaggerated, his wife finds Wesley her male equal. Buttercup, who had relentlessly bossed and degraded Wesley, now, hanks to the Countess, recognises his quality to, and when she confesses it clumsily to him, learns that he willingly acquiesced to all her commands, always with his signature statement, “As you wish,” because that phrase actually meant, “I love you.” Wesley decides to go to America and make his fortune so that he can return and marry Buttercup, and departs, but Buttercup soon learns that Wesley’s ship was captured by the Dread Pirate Roberts, the one who never takes prisoners. Buttercup is heartbroken, and attains a persistent melancholia that serves only to make her the world’s beautiful woman.


Two years later, Buttercup agrees to marry Florin’s crown prince, Prince Humperdinck, although she knows she will never love anyone else. Which is fair enough, as Humperdinck loves nothing but hunting. He looked for a local bride, and accepted Count Rugen’s suggestion, after his parents, the king and queen, tried to arrange a marriage between him and a princess of Guilder, the country neighbouring Florin, who was unfortunately, accidentally revealed to be bald during a state banquet in her honour. Shortly before the wedding is to take place, Buttercup is kidnapped by a trio of criminals, led by the hunchback Sicilian Vizzini, so clever he seems to be psychic in anticipating the thoughts of others. His team is rounded out by Inigo Montoya, the world’s greatest swordsman, who became such in his determination to track down and kill in combat his father’s murderer, and the colossal Turk Fezzik, who can crush many men with his bare hands. They plan to murder Buttercup on the Florin-Guilder frontier, thus sparking a war between the nations. But they find they are being pursued by a mysterious man in black, and in spite of Vizzini’s belief that it is “inconceivable” anyone could catch up with them and prove a problem, the man in black succeeds at both. Vizzini, to outpace this masked rival, has his two henchmen wait in turn for him, bringing to bear their specific gifts with the blade and the fist, whereupon the narrative digresses to explain the backstory for each man – how they got to be the men they are, and why they, as good men, are working for the dastardly Vezzini.

“Morgenstern” had thus written a pastiche of a romantic adventure novel, and used it to examine the evils of feudal aristocracy and Old World corruption through sarcastic metaphors like bridal luggage and marriage rites. “Goldman” uses the Morgenstern narrative to cast an eye on the anxieties of a successful second-generation immigrant and family man, and also on the business he works in, the creation of fiction in novels and Hollywood movies. “Barber’s sons, if they hustled, maybe got to be IBM salesmen, but writers? No way,” Goldman says in nurturing that ambition and his awareness of its improbability. The veneer of gruffness he maintains in surviving this alien world, just as his father survived in a new world, is a survival mechanism. Goldman identifies himself with Morgenstern in defending a mutual fondness for anachronistic-seeming dialogue and dislike for critics. When Goldman makes overt reference to Morgenstern’s Jewishness and the quality of shtick which infuses the Miracle Max portions, the basis of Goldman’s style in Jewish humour also presents itself. Part of the novel’s intent is not merely to pay homage to adventure stories, of which films starring Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks Snr seem unavoidable inspirations. Such films represent a genre that Brian Taves boiled down to being about “the valiant fight for freedom and a just form of government, set in exotic locales and the historical past”. But Goldman also reveals his debt to the reflexes of Jewish comedians from the Marx Brothers to Mel Brooks, and more “serious” writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, as Morgenstern supposedly did, immigrated to the US.

Map of Guilder and Florin, with the locations of the novel's incidents marked.

For one thing, the business of family, and especially that between fathers and sons, echoes throughout both the meta-narrative and the “proper” story. Swordsman Inigo, dedicated to avenging his father, elucidates a simple, purified version of family responsibility, just as Westley’s love of Buttercup and Humperdinck’s malevolence present vividly polarised versions of emotions that are usually more mixed and peculiar in lifelong relationships. Goldman’s encounter with Sandy Sterling, the beautiful and tempting starlet, echoes but also contrasts the passive beauty of Buttercup, who in the story’s latter stages comically embodies the lady fair patiently awating the arrival and victory of her true love. Count Rugen, in planting his assessing eye on Buttercup of acting as a kind of Hollywood casting agent for the role of potential Queen. Sterling’s presence, and threat, stirs Goldman’s frantic effort to find Morgenstern’s book and its promise of becalming fantasy, a fantasy which the Goldman whose voice we hear throughout the book needs all too badly. The central imbalance of strength (Fezzik), skill (Inigo), and brains (Vizzini), evokes the imbalance of sporty young Goldman’s personality, and his ignorance of the imaginative. Goldman makes fun of the true love found in Morgenstern novel by referring snidely to his own true love being porterhouse and enchiladas, just as Miracle Max favours cough drops. These story elements are both mocked but also given new urgency by the pathos in Goldman’s self-castigating vignettes.


The Princess Bride is more than a funny, exciting book: it’s the sort of work that can serve as a perfect introduction to some of the thornier aspects of modern literary theory, in a fashion that barely makes you conscious of it. Goldman considers the moral problem of believing in literature, which can construct worlds where life is fair and things turn out well, in high contrast to the world he actually lives in. Yet what values are authentically preserved and transmitted? If, as Michel Foucault said, “the notion of author constitutes the privileged moment of individualisation in the history of ideas, (and) knowledge, literature,” Goldman stretches the limits of the writer’s role to make the reader aware of the limits of that individualisation. He pays heed to the common pool of elements a writer can access, in the father’s recounting of juicy elements in the novel (“Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies.”) and in his own use of one in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In his way, Goldman confirms that the text is what Roland Barthes described as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” What such cultural heritage means, to anyone engaged in the act of passing heritage on through family, and to the writer, mediating agreed storytelling elements to the audience, is part of the texture of The Princess Bride. The way in which Goldman’s father gives a national classic to his son, and which Goldman then tries to give to his own offspring, makes this aspect specific and personal. The pertinent element of Morgenstern’s novel as a cultural article is cut out first by Goldman’s father and then by Goldman himself in reconstructing The Princess Bride as an idealised genre tale which is an encomium to the pure love of “what happens next”. Whilst the satire of Morgenstern’s novel was relevant to some other place, in the entertainment industry only the story retains its interest. “Everything is about story,” Goldman said himself, in an interview in 2001.

Whilst of course what Goldman is doing is not self-conscious in an academic sense, he is still exploring not only the way texts transmit ideas and questioning what ideas and ideals retain validity as time passes, but also the nature of his job as a commercial writer, as an entertainer who must reduce his concerns to provoke immediate, personal sensations and maintain a grip on the audience. Throughout the novel, his digressive inserts explain where and what he’s cut material out from Morgenstern’s novel. He is, then, demonstrating the screenwriter-adaptor’s job, slicing out anything that stalls pace, distorts plot impetus, and frustrates the broad audience. Goldman argues this is always an aspect of reading, pointing to the way readers skip pedantic chapters in Melville’s Moby-Dick. The nominal audience of the edited The Princess Bride is Jason Goldman. Now, of course, we come to the crux: Goldman in fact has no son, but two daughters. So perhaps he means everyone’s son. “There is one place where this multiplicity (of writings) is focused and that place is the reader, not as was hitherto said, the author,” as Barthes said, and Goldman is concerned with both how the author is also a reader, and a conduit of ideas. And yet he also revels in his complete control over those ideas within the limits of his work, even when hiding behind the guise of another writer and a false persona.

André "The Giant" Roussimoff as Fezzik, Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, Wallace Shawn as Vizzini, and the hand of Robin Wright as Buttercup, in Rob Reiner's 1987 film of The Princess Bride.

The uneasy relationship between Hollywood and literary custom is similarly exposed here in a fashion that reveals through Goldman’s father’s experience the cultural problem of popularly coherent narrative. The father takes on a role not dissimilar to a Hollywood mogul, searching for the good story and the way to sell it. William Goldman’s prickly adopted persona, on the other hand, is that of a seasoned player, used to his love of pure creation and story diluted and assaulted by the collaborative, commercialised nature of both big publishing and cinema. He is the survivor of such unromantic, ideal-stripping processes, just as he is disillusioned with family life. He uses inserted comments to not only explain how the book made him understand that life is not always fair, but also to play games with narrative expectation, even threatening to violate the cardinal rule of the happy ending, to pinpoint the disparity between art and life. Yet he also validates the power of such stories to create a sense of a receptivity and shared experience. Goldman repeatedly states he does not believe in the novel’s principles, and yet wants to, and to share that credulity with his audience. Genre works, as Leo Braudy formulated it, “essentially ask the audience, ‘Do you still want to believe this?’ Popularity is the audience answering, ‘Yes.’” Goldman’s novel then asks a further question, what and why do we believe in such stories? Here the whole art of the storyteller is both turned inside-out, yet validated. The final irony is that Goldman creates a highly critical work out of the building blocks of pure entertainment.


The most remarkable aspect of what Goldman pulls off is that he manages to be so sarcastic and satiric, and yet achieves the trickiest feat that he set for himself, managing to build to the expected emotional and storytelling crescendos of a great adventure yarn. Goldman both exaggerates and delights in recreating the beautifully, absurdly elaborate set-pieces of the adventure story, in the hilarious, riveting passages in the Fire Swamp and the Zoo of Death, and most of all in the long sequence in which the Man in Black – who is Westley, of course, and also the Dread Pirate Roberts, but that’s a long story – has to surmount the formidable yet incomplete strengths of Inigo, Fezzik, and Vizzini. That leads to the epic piece of pseudo-logic that Vizzini employs in trying to outwit Westley, only to fall foul of a double-bluff he’s too single-minded to escape. Inigo’s final battle with the Count counts as a classic genre scene regardless of the context, evoking a meta-textual will from the reader to the character in overcoming his wounds to defeat the villain in the same way that kids cheer from the audience for Tinkerbell to live, and indeed Goldman's method serves to make this all the more palpable. The open-ended finish is a little less persuasive, convincing less as a final ironic deconstruction of the genre than of a reticence on Goldman’s part as to what point he finally wanted to make. For the rather lacklustre, skit-like film version by Rob Reiner, Goldman at least solved that fault, by transplanting his spiel about the world’s most perfect kisses from early in the book to towards the end.

Bibliography

Altman, R. Film/Genre, London, BFI Publishing, 1999.

‘A chat with William Goldman’ 2001, CNN.com, Cable News Network

Barthes, R. (trans. S. Heath) 1977 ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text, Hill and Wang, New York.

Foucault, M. 1984 ‘What is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, Pantheon, New York.

Taves, B. 1993 The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies, Jackson, University of Mississippi Press.