CENTENARY

Through looking glasses

Benny Green

In December 1871 the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson of Christ Church, Oxford, for reasons unknown to us and perhaps to himself also, arranged a new demonstration of his renowned Cheshire Cat technique. On the sixth of the month he disappeared before the very eyes of the world and was replaced, at least for the moment, by that altogether more congenial character Lewis Carroll. The fact that Dodgson was a snob and a prig, and Carroll an irreverent heroic rebel is fascinating but in the light of the facts hardly surprising. When a man takes the pains Dodgson-Carroll did to endow himself with two independent personas, clearly he has discovered contradictions in his own nature impossible to reconcile.

But if this consciously-induced schizophrenic condition is much less rare than we sometimes pretend it is, certainly DodgsonCarroll is the most extraordinary example of it in literature. Dodgson abased himself before royalty; Carroll turned it into a joke that looks like lasting forever. Dodgson complained to Gilbert about the latter's dubious taste; Carroll invited him to be his

collaborator. Dodgson worshipped Wordsworth's poetry; Carroll lampooned it mercilessly. Dodgson shuffled obsequiously for years before Alfred Lord Tennyson; Carroll blithely sloshed the custard pie of parody straight in his lordship's face with the crosstalk of the Rose and the Larkspur in The Garden of Live Flowers. And in December 1871 Carroll's sudden return was not only a most welcome event but one utterly unprecedented in the annals of English 'literature.

One useful working definition of a masterpiece is that it can have no sequel, but Through the Looking Glass, if it has never quite matched either the sales figures or the quotability of Alice in Wonderland, remains the only existing specimen of a sequel to a masterpiece which survives comparison with the original, so much so that there has been a growing tendency throughout this century to regard the two Alice books as parts of a single whole, which indeed in a way they are. Hatter and Hare are Hatta and Haigha, Dinah becomes the Black Kitten, and the Queen of Hearts turns into the Red Queen, "the concentrated essence of all governesses." More important, in Through the Looking Glass Carroll resorts again to the revolutionary technique he introduced in 'Wonderland.' By juxtaposing subjective psychological reality with objective physical truth, he endowed them with equal validity, thus achieving the strange twilit lucidity of dream, so that whether it is 'Pig and Pepper' or 'Wool and Water,' the effect is identical, of that release from the iron laws of the physical world which only a small child or a lunatic takes for granted. Freud did not publish The Interpretation of Dreams until 1900, two years after Dodgson's death, but it would be fascinating to know whether he ever saw the German translation of ' Jabberwocky ' which appeared in 1872.

In spite of the strong links between the two Alices, there are also several marked differences between them. It is especially revealing, for instance, that while ' Wonderland ' is a fantasy of Size, 'Looking Glass' is a fantasy of Time. Events occur backwards, the crime is made to fit the punishment, you have to run like the wind to stay in the same place, and for the first time senility, in the person of the White Knight, is depicted sympathetically. Only seven years separated the publication of one book from the other, but then Time, as the Red Queen knew, is only relative, and we will never know how much DodgsonCarroll aged in those seven years, or why. Between the appearance of 'Wonderland' and its successor seven years later, there occurred three events, two of them documented, the other purely speculative, which may have put enough iron in Dodgson's soul to stiffen Carroll's joints a little. His father died, he is said to have fallen in love, and Alice Liddell moved into puberty.

Which of these events, if any, caused the spinsterish Dodgson to touch the creatures of Wonderland with a hint of asperity is one of those bookish puzzles to which, like so many of Dodgson's own mathematical problems, there is no answer. But whatever the reason, Through the Looking Glass has a distinct flavour. ' Wonderland ' is a summer dream, 'Looking Glass' very nearly in places a winter nightmare, ' Wonderland ' has all the classic elements of a birth-dream, 'Looking Glass' several ominous intimations of death. 'Wonderland' was composed in the euphoria of Dodgson's chaste yet passionate love for Alice Liddell, Looking Glass' is the workshop of the whimsical professor.

The explanation must be linked to the fact that Dodgson-Carroll was an astounding psychological freak, one of those men who, realising at an early stage that the demands of adulthood are intolerable, resolve the problem by prolonging their emotional childhood indefinitely. The device is common enough, but Dodgson was unique because he happened to be what Edmund Wilson called a poetlogician. Not only was he able to keep

open the path to childhood long after it should have become overgrown with the weeds of experience, but he was also able to express his view of his own condition with a child's insight.

On this point, the view of Virginia Woolf is interesting. After suggesting that Dodgson remained immature because a hard crystal of childhood at the centre of his being starved the adult, she goes on:

But since childhood remained in him entire, he could do what no one else has ever been able to do — he could return to that world, he could re-create it, so that we too become children again. . . . It is for this reason that the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children.

Edmund Wilson goes much further, and sees Dodgson as the true spokesman for his age: I believe that the Alice books are likely to survive when a good deal of the more monumental work of that world — the productions of the Carlyles and Ruskins, the Spencers and George Eliots — shall have sunk with the middle-class ideals of which they were the champions as well as the critics. . . . His art has a purity almost unique in a period so cluttered and cumbered, in which even the preachers of doom . . bore the stamp and the stain of the industrial system in the hard insistence of their sentences and in the turbidity of their belchings of rhetoric. They have shrunk now, but Alice still stands.

But why, for Dodgson, did childhood "remain in him entire "? The literary analysts have been dancing gleefully on his grave for years over this issue, here tossing us an Oedipus complex, there a father-fixation, and one has to admit that if Dodgson's sole aim had been to confuse the mindbenders of a later age, he could hardly have done a better job. What could Humpty Dumpty have possibly meant by "Seven years and six months an uncomfortable age. Now, if you'd asked my advice, I'd have said 'Leave off at seven ' — but it's too late now "? The desire to squeeze through the garden door, the trip down the rabbit-hole, the pool of tears, can all these priceless symbols of the birth-dream really be accidental? Dodgson himself wisely sidestepped such issues. "Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means."

Whatever was going through Dodgson's troubled, doubled mind, the book he produced in 1871, although a companionpiece to 'Wonderland,' filtered its sunshine through a more troubled imagination. Many of the scenes in Through the Looking Glass seem to be revealed by that odd pellucid light that presages a thunderstorm. The Lion peers myopically through the murk at the Unicorn and the plum cake. Under a lowering sky Hatta sips tearfully from his teacup. Was it Carroll's prose or Tenniel's illustrations which create so strong an aura of foreboding, as though, for the creatures of Wonderland, the day had almost run its course? Whatever the reason, Looking Glass' casts a long shadow.

Over the years commentators have made much of the Berkeleyan implications of the plot, suggesting that because the Red King, by waking earlier than he did, could have obliterated Alice, then 'Looking Glass ' is a horror story. But this interpretation gives the book only the lineaments of horror, not its aura. Stories are rendered horrific, not by the mechanics of the plot but by the finely calculated pressures of conscious literary style, and no major poet of the last two hundred years had a less horrific style than Carroll in his prime. No child is ever frightened by anything •in the Alice books, because, being constantly reassured by the poetic genius of the storyteller, it is able to shelter under the umbreilla of a style so felicitous that when we first encounter it, we are unaware of its existence. Why should a line like "I told you butter wouldn't suit the works" exercise such a mesmeric effect? Why can I still hear that. faint sibilant rustle when Alice falls upon "a heap of sticks and dry leaves " ?

It might just be possible that some of Dodgson's symbols are no more than symbols of themselves, that Shane Leslie was wrong to describe ' Wonderland ' as a religious allegory, that Florence Becker Lennon, the shrewdest of all Dodgson's biographers, could be wrong to see him as a lefthanded martyr in a righthanded world. Robert Graves thinks Alice's changes of size occurred •because her mushroom was Fly Agaric. William Empson suggests that the violent endings to the Alice books express Dodgson's 'impatience with his fellow-dons. It comes as a relief to learn that the Dormouse is not Anglicanism, or Dodgson's Father, or Whistler's Mother, but only Rossetti's wombat.

Commentators may make what they can of the events of October 1950, when the Reverend Edward Charlesworth began decorating Croft Rectory, Dodgson's childhood home, finding under the old nursery floorboards a piece of clay pipe (" The Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth "), a doll's teaset lid (" It's always teatime, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles "), a small thimble (" We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble "), a handkerchief (" She waved her handkerchief to him, and waited till he was out of sight "), a left-hand shoe (" Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot into a left-hand shoe "), and a child's white glove (" It was the White Rabbit returning splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand ").

There remains the White Knight, whose physical description renders him Tweedledum to Dodgson's Tweedledee. Mrs Becker Lennon suggests that in making Alice get sentimental over the White Knight — "Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if 'it had been only yesterday" — Carroll made a rare artistic slip. Perhaps, but as the White Knight 'fades in the sunset while Alice goes on to become a Queen, it is not just the rider bidding farewell to the little girl. As it turned out, it was also Dodgson saying goodbye to Mice-Carroll-Childhood. The road back had become overgrown at last, and although he kept trying till the end, Dodgson never did find it again.