The Princess Bride & the Melting Pot

When I was fourteen years old, in the eighth grade, our noble teacher made sure we got a good grounding in Greek mythology, poetry and short stories (including, one memorable Halloween day, A Rose for Emily). The last unit of our literature class that year was a novel: William Goldman’s The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love & High Adventure. In tiny letters on the cover, it adds “A Hot Fairy Tale.” 

Having literally studied The Princess Bride, I’d say I know it pretty well. But I’m only human, and sometimes I make mistakes. Once I confused the movie and the book, and babbled on about the Kid (Billy) listening to a story read by his grandfather. My eighth grade teacher gently corrected me. In the original book, Billy isn’t listening to his grandfather. 

He’s with his father. 

Goldman isn’t just spinning a grand old adventure yarn. I think he’s playing with a prominent trope of American literature: the immigrant experience over successive generations. Let me explain.

The writer Goldman (WG) conjures up a frame story within a frame story. In the frame story’s flashback, Goldman’s fictitious father is a first-generation immigrant from Florin. Where is Florin? Europe, somewhere. The “Old Country.” 

In the Old Country, Goldman Senior was a brilliant man, but in being translated to English, to American, well, that’s a different story. The writer conjures it thus: “The facts are when he was sixteen he got a shot at coming to America, gambled on the land of opportunity and lost.” Worse than the indignity of becoming a barber, when he might have been a lawyer, is this: Goldman Sr. can barely connect with his son, the embodiment of the brighter future for which he’d come to America. 

What interest grips little Billy Goldman’s heart? Sports. (In 1973, he hangs onto the radio to catch a football game; in 1987 in winter, he’s playing a baseball video game.) When his father comes to his sickbed with a ponderous volume in hand, Billy’s first question is “Has it got any sports?” 

Goldman Sr. tries to sell the book with sports— “Fencing, fighting, true love, strong hate—” and Billy concedes that he’ll try to stay awake. (Many years later, in the tongue-in-cheek half-sequel called Buttercup’s Baby, WG will paint The Princess Bride as the enduring epic of Florinese literature. Like The Three Musketeers, with all the swashbuckling and honor that implies. It’s got its own museum, for goodness’ sake.) But at the moment, in 1973, there is only a battered old book and the old barber’s memory of a brilliant author. 

Billy is unimpressed. 

At first. 

It’s not clear in the book where the magic exactly kicks in, but it does. And it endures. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that Grandpa assures Billy “She does not get eaten by the eels at this time,” (it’s sharks in the book), and you noticed that the little moppet was indeed clutching his blankets in anxiety. Billy loves the book, in the movie and the original novel alike.

The novel elaborates, as novels can. When Billy gets a little older, he requests readings from his father— “How about the duel at the Cliffs of Insanity?” It seems like sharing the book was the way that they showed affection for one another. And as Billy grows up, he grows to love all stories to do with swordplay and derring-do. That leads him naturally to the world of film.

And only slightly less naturally, it leads to our 1973 version of William Goldman— he’s a Hollywood success who seems to have it made. But he is on the verge of forgetting his son Jason’s tenth birthday. At that crucial juncture, The Princess Bride haunts him in his father’s voice. It reminds him of honor. Of duty. Of what really matters. In light of money, fictional William Goldman may be a success. But in light of Morgenstern’s epic, the guy’s kind of a sad sack, hitting on starlets at poolsides, despising his wife, incapable of connecting with his own son. If he’s his father’s second gamble at the American Dream, then he won, but— yeesh! Such a cost! 

Fortunately, this is all fictional. (Double-fortunately, Buttercup’s Baby gives Jason a future life that’s squeaky-sparkle-happy-clean; if you ask me, it rings just a bit false.) Best of all, in the 1987 movie, the vision is a great deal more optimistic all around. Grandpa in the movie is no sad sack— he’s Columbo! Billy suggests that Grandpa come back tomorrow to read the book, and Grandpa’s reply, “As you wish,” indicates the beginning of a beautiful new love language. This is a portrait of two souls connecting.

The point is, there's probably a whole essay to write about how Goldman in the novel is drawing off tropes about how immigrant parents and their children connect, or fail to connect. Probably you could get even more specific and put The Princess Bride in on the shelf of works about the Jewish experience in twentieth-century America. The first generation reaches America and tries to honor the old ways; the second generation is torn between being as American as possible and reaching for the culture that’s already almost gone. The third generation is… well, that’s a good question. 

The true origin of The Princess Bride is that William Goldman’s daughters asked for a bedtime story: one requested a princess, the other one a bride. Goldman’s answer led to one of his best books. 

Maybe that’s the later generation’s place in all this— every later generation. When you’ve got an education and you’re even leisured enough to study writing—what are you going to do with it? One thing you’ve got to do is make sense of your history. How the Old Country transitioned into the New Country via an Atlantic passage. How honor and True Love became flag pins and coupons. That’s some of the stuff you hand down to your kid, whether you’re a teacher, a parent, or both. An understanding of your past and your present. 

Until next time, I will still be striving to make sense of the past and present. My tools include milquetoast late night comedy, a shelf of empty notebooks, a Word document where I archive pandemic memes, and the hodgepodge city of illusions known as my bookshelf. Goldman has gone on to the Great Amphitheater in the Sky, but the closing words of his frame story still resonate: “And now I give it to you. What you do with it will be of more than passing interest to us all.”