Tilting against trendy views of Carroll

An Alice from the fabulous pen of Mervyn Peake
wonderful illustrator and author of the Gormenghast trilogy;
see more of his work at mervynpeake.org

Two in one, three in one

As someone who fell in love with the Alice books at five, I've enjoyed the many articles of late about that precocious young miss, and about those two interesting, contradictory yet identical people, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Lewis Carroll. I say identical because so many writers suggest that they were two, as they are frequently contradictory in manner and writings. But are we not all one with our reversed image in the mirror? A logician and mathematician who loved to present children with number and "river-crossing" puzzles, Dodgson well knew that 1 x 1 = 1.  Most important of all, how big a trick is it to be both Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Lewis Carroll, when the man is a deacon in the Anglican Church and acknowledges with frequency in public and before God that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one?

An ideal from which we are barred

Let's consider the wholly bizarre-to-us idea that Dodgson could enjoy tea and boating parties with little girls and photographing little Victorian girls, sometimes in the "attire of Eve," without being an incipient pedophile. Is this possible? Is it possible for a Victorian artist to enjoy the beauty of naked form without feeling even a tiny urge to ravage, ravish it?

Our own times are quite odd about the matter of childhood and sex. Our young teen models and actresses with their revealing designer clothing bind together childhood and sexuality. Revelations about the abuse of little children are commonplace. And yet we still live in a world where tiny children love to toss off their clothes and dash about in the freedom of nakedness. I remember an Irish poet telling me that men must bathe their tiny daughters to help their wives, but also because the children's bodies are so radiant--delicious and beautiful. I leave off his name because such sentiments in our post-Freud times have the power to shock many of us. The lyrical family photographs of Sally Munger Mann in her private, rural Eden of river and woods have caused dust-ups and argument in the world of museums and the fine arts.

So can we go back to and enter into an era in which the upper class of the culture held up images of children as unstained innocence and loveliness? Can we ever see through their eyes? Or is there a peculiar angel of time barring our way to that Edenic concept? Of course, things in Victorian times were not sweetness and light for children scrambling up chimneys or living in workhouses; nevertheless, a child world of sweetness and light formed an upper class, educated ideal, one that Carroll photographed.

Our culture, shocked by the celibate

Could it be that what offends the current sensibility of Western minds--our sex-and-youth-exalting media, our worship of movie celebrities and their changing lovers, our insistence on freedom in our pleasures--is the idea that someone could choose to set aside his sexuality, whatever its nature? The mistrust of Dodgson among many critics may, at least in part, be rooted in his distance from our own sensuous culture through his position as a celibate deacon in the Anglican church. Imagine that degree of renunciation and discipline; it's not only quite uncommon in our time, but frowned upon by many educated people, both in and out of the church. Can many critics in our current culture consider Dodgson-Carroll without feeling almost a disgust for his celibacy, a thing that challenges our own culture's values in multiple ways? I think not.

Alice's adventures last

Neil Gaiman on why stories last

Stray thoughts on Mervyn Peake

To go down one's own proper path in words or images is sometimes to forego wide popularity and warm acceptance, and one must be very determined not to be swayed by the desires and would-be directions of other people. If this is one's call, well, one must tread that weird, singular path or else make a botch of what one is given to do. Yet it was hard for artist and writer Mervyn Peake to have little reward--to have children and be uncertain of how to feed and clothe them.

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He did not let go of his strange, unconventional muse but followed her over hollow lands and hilly lands, even though it caused him sorrow--he gave the gift but clearly often felt that it was not received. Then he died in 1968 of a rare degenerative neurological and psychiatric disease. It's hard not to think that the mad figures of Gormenghast were a kind of prefiguring of his own early degeneration. I have seen what it is like to be with someone dying by inches of such a thing--my father died of a dreadful neurological disease--and the pain of slow slippage, the ability to interact and to do the work one is meant to do draining away into nothingness.

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My mother gave me the books when I was in high school . . . But it wasn't until I was nineteen that I discovered more of Peake's illustrations and fell in love with the marvelous Alice drawings. It wasn't so easy, back then, to see the scope of an artist's work.

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In the BBC Bookmark film, it's recounted that he once sat on the bed of a dying girl, drawing her face and abruptly feeling astonished at his own ability to do so, to bear it, to be calm in the face of what he was seeing and doing . . . Hasn't every writer or artist felt the same, that the curious, examining, describing part of the brain was guilty of looking at people in a wrong, blameworthy way? And yet his imagination could never get over that visit to Bergen-Belsen, could never forget what his eyes saw.

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He became ill; he saw the end of all his dreams, and his work had not become beloved--as it would be shortly after his death. It's as sad as any story of a Melville or a Bruno Schulz. Today he is an artist and writer treasured for his singular way of seeing and making, but the change and popularity came too late for him to have its sweet reward. He left us such magical gifts. When in the world's madhouses and still able to know himself, he ended his longing, loving letters home to artist Maeve Gilmore and their three children with "God bless you all."

Books, deadlines, & truffles

Deadlines and minor panics have been sprouting up for several months, but now at least the current round of college applications is done--much more to do there, but at least we hit the eleventh hour with submissions on Friday. Make that the eleven fifty-ninth minute. And The Throne of Psyche has gone to Mercer University Press. I made the deadline of Friday; then my mother (wonderful persnicketiness!) found some glitches, and so I tinkered some more and turned it in again last night. I guess that's called not quite making the deadline. I got a reward anyway: last night my husband flew home from Houston with a giant purple box of Vosges (haut chocolat, indeed!) truffles, and I discovered that an announcement of chocolate brings the very speediest responses to facebook status lines . . .

Soon I hope to do some more posts on friends-with-new-books since a bumper crop has come along lately. I have a rather daunting stack, but it's not the best of times in Book Land, and one must do one's little bit to help. Yesterday I had lunch at Alex and Ika's with two local writers who just received excellent reviews in the not-defunct-after-all Kirkus: Peg Leon of Cooperstown, whose second book, A Theory of All Things, is forthcoming from Permanent Press; Alice Lichtenstein of Oneonta, who also has a second book appearing, Lost, from Scribner's. Both books have March pub dates and sound like fine reads. I'll get to them.

Meanwhile, I have decided that I don't quite like the first third of my third--perhaps my last, as I have written one for each of my children--novel for children. So I shall be getting back to that soon. The rest of the book has great swing and momentum, but the first third seems a bit mired in molasses. The pacing is a tad off, and the introduction of the various characters comes too slowly.

From a review of the anthology Enemy of the Good (U.K.: P. S. Publishing) in Tangent:

“The Red King Sleeps” by Marly Youmans weaves a vivid fantasy dreamscape of romance, death, decay, and the dangerous power of the mind to create worlds. This story is not long, but Youmans makes every word count. The imagery she presents is as beautiful as it is eerie. It is not surprising that she mentions that this story was “written in the seizure of a dream.” This story will seize anyone with a taste for the dark and surreal. --Maggie Jamison

That's the Tenniel Red King sleeping at the top of the post, of course. I was given the Alice books when I was five and read and reread them endlessly. My Red King doesn't look much like this one. He doesn't even look like a Mervyn Peake illustration--and I adore Peake's Alice illustrations (and what wonders he did with Bleak House and other books!)

And now since I appear to be truffleable, or worthy of being truffled, I will go have a very small bite to eat . . . If you were here, I would share. Alas. As it befalls, I am alone with a large number of helpless truffles. First I shall recite "The Walrus and the Carpenter," waving my handkerchief as I do. Then: a nibble or two. Good cheer!