Great Eccentric

VICTORIA THROUGH THE LOOKINGGLASS: The Life of Lewis Carroll--Florence Becker Lennon -- Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

"In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter: and in that direction," waving the other paw, "'lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."

"But I don't want to go among mad People," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How d'you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

How Did It Happen? In 1865 a Lon don Athenaeum critic was vexed by a new book called Alice in Wonderland -- "a stiff, overwrought story," he complained, which would make "any real child more puzzled than enchanted." In 1932, when Alice invaded the Chinese province of Hunan, the sensitive provincial war lord was even more shocked. "Bears, lions, and other beasts cannot use a human language," he barked, and banned Alice as "an insult to the human race." In 1936, an eminent Austrian psychiatrist recoiled, shuddering, before Alice's "oral sadistic traits of cannibalism" and "continuous threat to the integrity of the body."

Meanwhile, the general public, unabashed, continues to read Alice by the millions. Distinguished mathematicians revel in the "logic" of its nonsense; psychologists acclaim it as a brilliant Freudian freak; politicians, editors and divines habitually use it to score points against their opponents; earnest translators bend to the task of rendering it into foreign nonsense.*

In 1928, the MS. of Alice fetched -L-15,400 at auction, and to date, in its 80 years of life, Alice has sold uncounted millions of copies. "How did it happen." asks Florence Becker Lennon, "that the Reverend Charles Dodgson, 30 years of age, lecturer on mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford . . . gave birth to one of the most famous stories of all time?"

Mousetraps and Notepaper. In the 387 pages of Victoria Through the Looking-Glass, Author Lennon, a minor U.S. poet and a student of anthropology, tries to answer her own question. To the tantalizing riddle of literary genius she has no answer, but she has brought together a fascinating collection of facts that show clearly the fantastically divided nature of the deacon who was equally a rigid, exemplary don and perhaps the most brilliant eccentric of his era.

Christ Church students, to whom Charles Lutwidge Dodgson lectured for 40 years, knew him only as a gawky, dull professor who could not utter the letter "p" and who left the room if he overheard a single indecent or irreverent remark. But visitors to his rooms were bowled over by what they found. Rugs and coats were stuffed against cracks in the door (Dodgson had a horror of draughts). Instructions for lighting an amazingly complicated gas lamp were pasted to the door--though no one was ever allowed to light the lamp.

Ten Minutes for Tea. There was a darkroom jampacked with photographic materials (Dodgson was one of the most talented amateur photographers of his day) ; mousetraps of his own design with sliding doors and "humane" compartments for drowning; boxes of notepaper in five different sizes for letters of reply ("Let me see," he would say, "for this letter I will use number three size; that should meet the case exactly"); clockwork bears, mice, frogs and bats. Stacked on the shelves were copies of the scores of pamphlets he loved to write, their titles ranging from Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter Writing to The Formulae of Plane Geometry and Suggestions as to the Best Method of Taking Votes where More than Two Issues Are to Be Voted On.

When his visitors were seated, the tall, timid don (invariably dressed in black clericals) would produce a memorandum book, quickly draw a diagram of the room, and note in it precisely the position of each chair and its occupant's name. If he nervously pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, a cascade of carefully graded pennies, shillings and half crowns was likely to stream onto the floor. At this, he would hurriedly fill the teapot and pace up & down swinging it, for ten minutes exactly --"he claimed the tea was better so."

Men without Women. "Men cut off from the influence of women," says Author Lennon, with a faculty for understatement that any Briton might envy, "seem nearly always to develop eccentricities." The psychiatrist who felt that the country of Wonderland was "a continuous threat to the integrity of the body" was simply putting in the wrong nutshell the Reverend Dodgson's own anxiety about the dangers of everyday life. Son of a stern archdeacon, eldest of eleven children, only two of whom married and nine of whom were girls, young Charles seems never to have got over the belief that there was "something ugly and even cruel in masculinity." And "masculinity after all," remarks Author Lennon precisely, "is half of sex."

The Rev. Mr. Dodgson loved romance -- but all he did about it was write a sad little satire about a young man who, on seeing a sign reading "Shop of Romance-ment," joyfully became an apprentice --only to find that the sign really read "Shop of Roman Cement." He loved the theater -- but when he met beautiful Actress Irene Vanbrugh he could think of nothing to talk about but the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. Of dazzling Actress Ellen Terry he made what was probably the most passionate declaration of his life: "I can imagine no more delightful occupation" he said, "than brushing Ellen Terry's hair!"

Sweet Companionship. To fill this gap in his life, the nervous, affectionate professor sought the companionship of little girls -- "of course there isn't much companionship," he admitted sadly, "but what there is, is sweet -- and wholesome, I think." For 40 years he took them walking and boating, gave them elaborate tea parties, corresponded with them, drew and photographed them in the nude ("I confess," he said, "I do not admire naked boys . . . they always seem to me to need clothes"), carried tiny scissors for snipping off locks of their hair, talked to them tirelessly with the utmost tact and kindliness. Face to face with strange little girls, the shy don who blushed and stammered in the presence of adults became an assured, understanding human being who won a child's confidence instantly with his grave humor. "May I offer you this?" he once said with a bow to a little girl who had fallen into the sea, holding out a scrap of blotting paper torn from his notebook.

Soon, he said, little girls were "three fourths of my life." Had they not been, English literature would have lost one of its great classics. For one day, after he had enchanted little Alice Liddell, daughter of a famed Oxford professor of Greek, with a story of "Wonderland," she begged him to write it down for her. Dodgson went home at once, sat up all night writing, and soon presented Alice with the famous original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland, beautifully written in his own hand and illustrated with his own drawings.

Soon after, he decided to publish it, but with his usual shyness concealed his real name. Charles Lutwidge, Latinized, be came Carolus Ludovicus, which, reversed and put back into English, became Lewis Carroll. Published with the now famous illustrations by John Tenniell, Alice was an instant success.

Gloves and Kittens. But the lonely, disjointed professor found little pleasure in being a celebrity. While he was becoming a household word, his adored little girls were growing into women, and, as a rule, passing out of his life forever. "He always used to say that when the time came for him to take off his hat [on meeting] one of his quondam child friends . . . it was time for the friendship to cease." And the public could hardly realize that the pixiness that gave enchantment to his books was, in real life, a subtle form of self-defense. When a too-adult girl sent him "a sack full of love and a basket of kisses," he neatly turned the danger into play by thanking her warmly for "a sack full of gloves and a basket of kittens." On the other hand, intelligent understanding of the things he liked charmed him at once. A young man once entered the professor's apparently empty room and heard a low growl from under the table. He at once dropped on hands and knees and growled back fiercely. The Rev. Mr. Dodgson emerged immediately, followed by three little girls, and the young man became one of Dodgson 's few intimate male friends.

Victorian Rebel. When his little girls had gone to bed and the lonely bachelor was alone in his rooms, he would find himself face to face with what Author Lennon believes was the other major problem of his life -- his religious beliefs. To be a rebel in Victorian England required unusual boldness, and while such doughty fighters as Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Samuel Butler were openly questioning the authority of the Church, the Rev. Mr. Dodgson was doing his utmost to quiet the tormenting questions that filled his brilliant, inquisitive mind. Cursed with insomnia, he would put himself to sleep by endless inventions of games, gadgets, toys, puzzles in mathematics; by day he would take a daily walk of 20 miles at top speed. At best, he would find release from "the sin of thinking for himself about religion" by turning his worries into innocent literary fantasies -- such as the remarkable passage from his lesser-known children's book, Sylvie and Bruno:

"Sylvie was arranging some letters on a board -- EVIL. 'Now Bruno,' she said, 'what does that spell. . .?'

"'Why, it's LIVE backwards!' he exclaimed. (I thought it was indeed.)

" 'How did you manage to see that?' said Sylvie.

" 'I just twiddled my eyes, ' said Bruno, 'and then I saw it directly.'

Wonderland at Last. "It is a characteristic of British thinking, on the whole," says Author Lennon, in her book's most discerning passage, "that each man thinks for himself, yet all reach the same conclusions." But Lewis Carroll, she believes, belongs with that strange, not-quite-sane minority of British child-humorists (Charles Lamb, Charles Kingsley, W. S. Gilbert, James Barrie, Edward Lear) who "have all been to the Never Never Land at the Back of the North Wind, to the Snow Queen's country -- to the edge of insanity, [and fetched] a treasure from the borderland for readers who are too busy or too timid to explore for them selves the cold, dark, lonely places of the spirit."

"Take away those pillows; I shall need them no more," said Dodgson on his deathbed. "Wonderland at last!" said the nephew who buried him.

* Sample stanza from a French translation of Jabberwocky (Le Jaseroque) by Frank L. Warrin, which appeared in the New Yorker in 1931:

Il brilgue: les taves lubricilleux Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave, Enmimes sont les gougebosqueux, Et le momerade horsgrave.

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