The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Some may think Lewis Carroll has strayed into this rather for- midable list through some error. But he belongs here, for he proved, possibly not quite knowing what he was doing, that the world of nonsense may have strange and complex relations with the world of sense. I do not include him because he is a juvenile classic, for in that case we should also have Grimm and Andersen and Collodi and E.B. White and a dozen others. I include him because he continues to hold as much interest for grownups as for children.

In fact he is more alive today than he was in the Sixties and Seventies of the last century, when the two Alice books were published. He continues to fascinate not only ordinary men and women of ali countries and races, but the most sophisti- cated intellects: critics such as Edmund Wilson, W.H. Auden [126], Virginia Woolf [111]; logicians and scientists such as Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Arthur Stanley Eddington; and philosophers, semanticists, and psychoanalysts by the score.

His real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (pro- nounced Dodson). The son of a rector, he had seven sisters, a circumstance that may in part account for his seemingly arrested masculinity. From age nineteen to his death he passed his life at Christ Church, Oxford, as student, mathematics mas- ter, and ordained dean. He remained, as far as we know, chaste. His life was proper, pleasant, and donnish, marked by fussy little academic controversies, many hobbies (he was a first-rate pioneer photographer and invented something very much like Scotch Tape), and the one passion of his life, an apparently innocent attraction to little girls.

He was a dull teacher, a mediocre mathematician, but a rather exceptional student of Aristotelian [13] logic—defective syllogisms are among the many slyly hidden features of Alice. A queer chap on the whole, kind, testy at times, prissy, shy (he even hid his hands continually within a pair of gray-and-black gloves), with a mind that seems to be quite conventional, but which in his letters and diaries flashes forth from time to time with some startling insight that it is hard not to call Freudian [98] or Einsteinian.

Doubtless, like many Victorians, he was an internally divided man, and some of these divisions and tensions can be traced by the careful and curious reader. In Alice four worlds meet, worlds that he knew either consciously or intuitively. They are the worlds of childhood, dream, nonsense, and logic. They partly fuse, drift in and out of each other, undergo mutual metamorphoses. Their st range interaction gives Alice its complexity and, more important, its disturbing reality. The adult reader continues to delight in its fanciful humor but feels also that this is more than a chikTs book, that it touches again and again on half-lit areas of consciousness.

Many years ago I wrote an essay on Lewis Carroll, from which I extract this sentence: "What gives the Alice books their varying but permanent appeal is the strange mixture in them of this deep passion for children and the chiWs world, with an equally deep and less conscious passion for exploring the dream world, even the nightmare world, filled with guilts and fears, which is a major part of the chiWs life, and therefore a major part of our grownup life."

C.F.

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MARK TWAIN

1835-1910 Huckleberry Finn

Many of us who read Huckleberry Finn in our youth still think of it as a "boys' book"—which of course it is, and a very good one, too. Against this view place Ernest Hemingway's [119] famous statement: "Ali modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn" Somewhere between these two judgments lies the truth. But it lies much closer to the second judgment than to the first.