The 13 Clocks

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The 13 Clocks

Author	James Thurber
Illustrator	Marc Simont
Cover artist	Marc Simont
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Fantasy
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Publication date	January 1, 1950
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	124 pp
ISBN	ISBN 978-0-44-040582-5

The Thirteen Clocks is a fantasy tale written by James Thurber in 1950 in Jamaica, while he was completing one of his other novels. It is written in a unique cadenced style, in which a mysterious prince must complete a seemingly impossible task to free a maiden from the clutches of an evil duke. It invokes many fairy tale motifs.^[1]

The story is noted for Thurber's constant, complex wordplay, and his use of an almost continuous internal meter, with occasional hidden rhymes — akin to blank verse, but with no line breaks to advertise the structure. Previous fantasy books by Thurber, such as Many Moons, The Wonderful O, and particularly The White Deer, also contained hints of this unusual prose form, but here it becomes a universal feature of the text, to the point where it is possible to predict the word order for a given phrase (for example, "the Golux said" vs. "said the Golux") by looking at the pattern of emphasis in the preceding phrase.

The tale includes two mysterious beings: the Golux, who describes himself as "the only Golux in the world, and not a mere Device" (although he is extremely useful to the plot) and the Todal, "an agent of the devil sent to punish evildoers for having done less evil than they should". The word "Golux" comes from "Green Code", one of the five codes used by the U.S. State Department at the end of World War I, when Thurber served as a code clerk. The word "golux" meant "period".

By this time, Thurber was blind, so he could not draw cartoons for the book, as he had done with The White Deer five years earlier. He enlisted his friend Marc Simont to illustrate the original edition. The Golux is said to wear an "indescribable hat". Thurber made Simont describe all his illustrations, and was satisfied when Simont was unable to describe the hat. When it was reissued by Puffin Books, it was illustrated by Ronald Searle.

The story was set to music and appeared in 1953 as the 5th episode of "The Motorola Television Hour", with Basil Rathbone as the evil Duke.^[2] It was also adapted and produced by Stephen Teeter for use in the 1960s in a production in Berkeley, CA. Later it was adapted and produced by Frank Lowe for stage, and published in 1976 by Samuel French, Inc [ISBN 978-0-573-65122-9]. Audio recordings have also been produced, performed by Lauren Bacall, Peter Ustinov and Edward Woodward. The BBC produced a radio version of the story with Heron Carvic as the Golux.

In 2008, the Jackson County Stage Company, located in Carbondale, IL, produced an adaptation of the book into a musical. The show is set to premiere on May 23, 2008 and is directed by John Lipe.

[edit] Plot summary

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In a medieval time in an undisclosed country, the evil Duke of Coffin Castle lives "in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill" with his niece, the beautiful Saralinda, who is "warm in every wind and weather," whereas the Duke is "always cold." Within the castle walls are thirteen clocks that stopped at "ten minutes to five", along with the Duke's own watch; it is explained that "they had all frozen at the same time, on a snowy night seven years before". After many failed attempts to get them working again the Duke has decided that he killed Time.

In the traditional manner, suitors to the hand of Princess Saralinda are ordered to perform incredible (and in every case impossible) tasks, none of which have yet been accomplished, and in many cases suitors have been slain by the Duke over trifles or over slight (or even imaginary) insults.

Saralinda is about to turn 21 when a mysterious minstrel named Xingu (names which begin with X are criminal in the eyes of the Duke), who is really "the youngest son of a powerful king ... yearn[ing] to find in a far land the maiden of his dreams", arrives in the town where the castle is located. After a humorous exchange between the minstrel and some local townspeople in the local tavern, the minstrel hatches a plan to gain access to the castle by singing a silly song about the Duke. In the midst of this plan, the mysterious Golux appears and announces his intention to help both the minstrel and the Princess because he "must always be on hand when people are in peril." Although the Golux admits he forgets things and makes mistakes, he is "on the side of good"; he gives the minstrel advice on how to deal with the Duke and mysteriously vanishes as the Iron Guards of the Duke arrive to arrest the minstrel.

The next day the minstrel is brought before the Duke, but the minstrel uses the Golux's advice to keep the Duke from killing him outright. Instead, the Duke decides to set the minstrel to perform another impossible task, even though the minstrel points out that "only princes may aspire to Saralinda's hand.".

Back in the dungeon, the minstrel encounters the Golux, who has mysteriously appeared claiming to have forgotten to tell the minstrel something important. He tells the minstrel to convince the Duke to make the intended task a search for 1,000 jewels, and it is now revealed that the minstrel is actually Prince Zorn of Zorna. Zorn believes that the only place to find 1,000 jewels is in his father's "casks and vaults and coffers", and that the task will take 99 days to complete: "three-and-thirty days to go, and three-and-thirty days to come back here ... [and] it always takes my father three-and-thirty days to make decisions."

Zorn is worried about other possible obstacles and difficulties in the task's completion, especially after the Golux reveals that his mother was a mediocre witch and his father a wizard who "lacked the power of concentration," but the Golux reassures him that he has "other plans than one." They get some sleep until midnight, when a guard appears to summon the Prince to the Duke's presence (the Golux mysteriously vanishes again). Before the guard escorts the Prince to the Duke, he tells him about the Todal, a creature that "looks like a blob of glup ... makes a sound like rabbits screaming and smells of old unopened rooms ... an agent of the Devil, sent to punish evildoers for having done less evil than they should," and which is "waiting for the Duke to fail in some endeavor, such as setting [the Prince] a task that [he] can do." If the prince succeeds in his assigned task, the Todal will glup the Duke.

The next encounter with the Duke takes place in a black oak room, where the Duke, accompanied by two of his spies (one a man in a velvet mask, cloak and hood called "Hark" and one called "Listen" who is completely invisible) reveals the task to the Prince (finding 1,000 jewels and bringing them back to the Duke). However, there are certain stipulations: the prince has only 99 hours to complete his task, not 99 days, and when he returns all 13 clocks must be striking five o'clock. The Duke also reveals that he knows the minstrel's true identity and tells the prince more about the Todal: "It's made of lip. It feels as if it has been dead at least a dozen days, but it moves about like monkeys and like shadows ... The Todal can't be killed." Before the Prince leaves on his quest, Saralinda appears to say, "I wish him well." The Duke has placed a witch's spell on her, so she cannot say anything else in his presence; the Duke mockingly warns the prince not to trust the Golux too much. As the prince leaves the castle, Saralinda throws a rose to him from her window.

Not far from the castle, the Golux reappears and reveals himself to have been the Duke's spy Listen all along. After discussing possible ways to complete the Prince's task, the Golux comes up with what he believes is a sure-fire plan: they will find a woman named Hagga who was given the magical power: to weep jewels instead of tears. With the prince's rose showing them the correct directions, they travel for two days until they reach Hagga's hut on Hagga's hill. The Golux is afraid that Hagga may either "dead or dying", but she is actually only 38 or 39. Unfortunately, she has been made to weep so much in the past by people who wanted jewels that she is now no longer able.

Inside Hagga's hut, after several failed attempts at tears, the Prince and the Golux find an oaken chest filled to the brim with jewels. Hagga tells them that these are "the jewels of laughter", but that they will be of no use, since they "always turn again to tears a fortnight after," whereas "the jewels of sorrow will last beyond all measure," and that the jewels in the chest were wept from laughter in her sleep a fortnight earlier to the hour. The jewels turn back to tears as they watch. The Golux and the Prince try to make Hagga laugh and fail, but then, "without a rhyme or reason, out of time and out of season," Hagga laughs uncontrollably until the hut is ankle-deep in jewels. The Golux and the Prince gather 1,000 jewels, thank her and go, accidentally leaving the magical rose behind them.

Back at the castle later, with the task's time limit due to expire in less than an hour, the Duke, with Hark in attendance, is waiting in the black oak room impatiently counting down the Prince's remaining time. He reveals his intention to marry Princess Saralinda himself when she has turned twenty-one; when Hark objects, he reveals that Saralinda is not really his niece, but the daughter of a king whom he had kidnapped when she was a baby. Unfortunately for him, Saralinda's nurse "turned out to be a witch who cast a spell upon [him]," the terms being that he cannot marry Saralinda until she is 21, that he must keep her in a chamber where she is safe from him, that he "must give and grant the right to any prince to seek her hand in marriage," and, most importantly, "she can be saved, and [the Duke] destroyed, only by a prince whose name begins with X and doesn't." The Duke feels himself safe, but Hark gleefully reminds him that Prince Zorn of Zorna had been disguised as a minstrel named Xingu ... so Zorn of Zorna is the prince whose name begins with X and doesn't.

The Duke becomes worried that the Prince and the Golux have secretly gotten into the castle and orders all his guards (each of whom had been guarding a clock) to follow him in a search of the castle's upstairs. Once the room is deserted, the Golux and Princess Saralinda enter through a secret passage, and the Golux figures out how Saralinda can start the clocks again.

The Duke and Hark, while searching the secret passage, hear the clocks begin ticking. When they enter the black oak room, Prince Zorn, Saralinda and the Golux are waiting for them, with a pile of jewels on the oak table (Zorn having handily defeated all eleven of the Duke's guards and locked them up in the Tower room). The clocks all chime five, but the Duke insists on counting the jewels to make sure that there are indeed 1,000. While the Duke is counting, the Golux and Hark reveal that Saralinda's father is the good King Gwain of Yarrow, the same king who gave Hagga the power to weep jewels. Hark also reveals himself to be a servant of King Gwain who was forced to work for the Duke and unable to save the princess himself due to being under a witch's spell.

The count completed, the group leaves the castle: the Prince and Princess to journey together to Yarrow and then to Zorna, Hark to remain a fortnight longer to run out his curse, and the Golux to mysteriously disappear again after magically producing two white horses for Zorn and Saralinda and bidding farewell to Saralinda.

A fortnight later, the Duke is gloating over his jewels when they turn back into tears. The room is plunged into darkness, and the Todal appears to fulfill its function. Hark enters the room a little later to find the room completely deserted except for the Duke's sword, a small mysterious black ball stamped with scarlet owls and a puddle of tears on the table.