I have loved Alice for as long as I can remember. I don’t know how many times I borrowed The Annotated Alice from the public library when I was in grade school; I read it so many times that I knew Gardner’s humorous, thoughtful commentary nearly as well as the text. (His multi-page, ramified analysis of “Jabberwocky” is particularly fine).
One of the best Christmas gifts I ever received, even better than the Lego Galaxy Explorer, was my own copy of AA. Even now, it sits on a bookshelf with the rest of my Carroll collection, between the lesser-known More Annotated Alice and a not-particularly-complete, leatherbound Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. Despite its sentimental value, its place on my bedside bookshelf has been supplanted by the magnificently-produced Definitive Edition. When arriving home late, the clock approaching midnight, I’ll often read a chapter or two after climbing into bed.
My mother, mercifully, did not approve of Disney movies. My first encounter with the horrible, horrible thing that those bowdlerizing bastards did to poor Alice was a Disneyized picture book at my cousins’ house. I recall well that surge of shock and contemptuous, righteous wrath at the inane perversion of a wonderful story.
But back to Carroll: the library also had a copy of the Complete Works, which I explored as I grew older. I was quite interested in the handwritten manuscript of the original Alice’s Adventures Underground, but the rest seemed thin and unappealing. I tried Sylvie and Bruno several times, but it was distressingly boring, and I felt strongly that Carroll shouldn’t be boring. The one redeeming feature was the recurring Gardener’s Song, stanzas of which are woven through the text.
He thought he saw an Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
‘A fact so dread,’ he faintly said,
‘Extinguishes all hope!’
This year, I determined to read all the Carroll in my collection, and it’s been quite an interesting experience. The poetry is largely dreadful, with occasional flashes of wit. Wonderland and Looking Glass retain their depth, whimsy, and charm, and Snark is as superb a piece of meaningful nonsense as has ever been written in English.
He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand
“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!
“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank”
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!”
The piece I have found most affecting, though, is Sylvie and Bruno.
It’s awful.
Terrible.
I wanted to like it . . . but it’s a horrible conglomerate of cloying sentimentality; Carroll’s idosyncratic, obtuse, Christianish moralism; and miserable poetastery. What little story exists is tedious and poorly plotted, and the “Tottles” poem is almost physically painful to read. The least unpleasant aspect of the books is the Victorian conversations, which at least have some elements of interest.
If Alice is a fairy-tale for everyone, Sylvie and Bruno is a fairy-tale for Lewis Carroll.
Carroll’s prefaces to Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded only compound the distasteful impressions: above, I compared Disney to Dr. Bowdler, but Carroll actually proposes bowdlerizing Bowdler!
. . . A “Shakespeare” for girls: that is, an edition in which everything, not suitable for the perusal of girls of (say) from 10 to 17, should be omitted . . . Neither Bowdler’s, Chambers’s, Brandram’s, nor Cundell’s ‘Boudoir” Sharespeare, seems to me to meet the want: they are not sufficiently ‘expurgated.’ Bowdler’s is the most extraordinary of all: looking through it, I am filled with a deep sense of winder, considering what he has left in, that he should have cut anything out!
Alice is timeless, despite all her references to Victorian culture; Sylvie and Bruno come through as the fantasies of a particular, not very happy man who is very much clamped by the mental shackles of his own time.
I’m not sorry to have read it, but Carroll’s infatuation with Sylvie and his loving portrayal of the unpleasant Bruno have left a bad taste behind. Perhaps in a few years I will give it another try. For the moment, though, I’d rather re-read Little, Big; John Crowley uses S&B as one of many threads in his weft, and I’m curious to see what new facets might be revealed upon a new reading.
It’s been eighteen years since the publication of that auxiliary tome of Subgenius sacred aesthetics, High Weirdness by Mail. It was a perfect core sample of the peculiar, and still makes for bemusing, slackful reading.
Over my last few lunches I’ve been reading Hollow Earth, by David Standish. It’s a nice overview, tracing the the idea of habitable lands inside the Earth from Edmund Halley through modern fiction. I was particularly pleased by this passage on Giacomo Casanova’s Icosameron, a peculiar utopian tale published in 1788. I quote Standish’s description:
