The Gardner Centennial

I left my testimonial about what Martin Gardner’s writing meant for my intellectual development.

Alice in Guildford

Charles Dodgson settled his sisters in Guildford, England, and died there in 1898. In 1990, the town commemorated his most famous work by installing a couple of impressive statues.

On the grounds of Guildford Castle, near the Dodgson home, is Jeanne Argent’s statue of Alice going through the looking-glass. Details include striped stockings. The glass can make impressive effects on film.

On a river bank sits Edwin Russell’s “Alice and the White Rabbit.” Though her hair and dress may seem more modern, this Alice looks more like the real Alice Liddell.

Actual Conversation at My House

“Do you consider ‘outgrabe’ as a strong predicate or a modifier?”

“I always read it as the past tense of a verb. ‘Mome’ is in the place for an adjective.”

“Mm.”

“Oh, and in The Hunting of the Snark, ‘outgrabe’ is a verb: the Beaver ‘outgrabe in despair…’”

“That would do it.”

Vote Your Views

Last month the Boston Globe published a reader letter that managed to span two of my professional interests, so I’m quoting it on both blogs today:

Members of the Tea Party movement claim that their name was adopted from the Boston Tea Party, an act of civil disobedience against the tyrannical government of the time (“Understanding the Tea Party,’’ Letters, Oct. 12).

I contend that the name must derive from another historic tea party, namely, the one from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.’’ In that classic tale and its follow-up, “Through the Looking-Glass,’’ there exists a vast cast of characters, many reminiscent of today’s Tea Partiers who talk jabberwocky on a regular basis.

There are the twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee who bicker over insignificant issues; the Red Queen who constantly orders the beheading of anyone who displeases her; and the imbecilic White Queen. And let’s not forget the Mad Hatter.

To those offended by the current use of the term Tea Party, I suggest they shift their point of reference. They’ll find that the current movement is more than aptly named.

Whatever your views, if you’re an American citizen I hope you’ve voted by the end of the day. Otherwise, those of us who do vote don’t really have to listen to you. And elected officials will have little reason to do so.

An Impossible Thing Before Modernity

Earlier this month Fuse #8 aired this issue:

There was an interesting discussion on the child_lit listserv that I think is worth mentioning here today. In the event that a children’s author is convicted of a heinous crime like owning child pornography or abusing children, should one keep that author’s books on the shelf?

This is not a hypothetical question when you learn that author William Mayne was once convicted of abusing kids and, more recently, in Oregon author K.P. Bath (of The Secret of Castle Cant) was sentenced to six years in prison for possessing child porn. It’s an interesting question.

Castle Cant sits on my own library shelves and as a book it has committed no crime, though its author has. What is the responsibility of the children’s librarian in such a case as this then? There are no easy answers.

There was a parallel discussion at Maw Books.

I kept waiting for someone to point out that we’ve already run a version of this experiment. No public library or children’s-lit scholar would be without copies of at least two books by a man who not only possessed images that could almost certainly be prosecuted as child pornography under current US law, but produced them. That man is, of course, Lewis Carroll.

The material that Bath was convicted of possessing appears to be much more harmful to the young victims than anyone has alleged about the nude photographs Carroll made (and eventually destroyed). But the discussions don’t seem to have come close to that distinction, or the question of historical context. Most people expressed support for either “zero tolerance” or keeping “the work separate from the author.”

And Carroll’s work is merely the foundation of all modern English-language children’s literature. Once we’re done comparing and contrasting his novels to Mayne’s and Bath’s, we can move on to the fact that Plato’s Socratic dialogues, which provide much of the foundation of all modern thought, portray pederasty as one of the highest forms of human love. “Zero tolerance” is impossible.

Whenever an Appeal Is Made to Law

Late in Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, his fourth novel in the series, L. Frank Baum took a cue from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and tried to create a bitterly satirical courtroom scene. Of course, he had a different sensibility, so instead of nonsense and madness the scene was full of vaudeville cross-talk and some genuine moral questions (with the cross-talk eventually drowning out the moral answers).

The case began when people suspected Dorothy’s pet kitten Eureka of eating a piglet. Princess Ozma, still relatively new at ruling, did her best to bring about justice.

“I will summon the Court to meet in the Throne Room at three o’clock,” replied Ozma. “I myself will be the judge, and the kitten shall have a fair trial.”

“What will happen if she is guilty?” asked Dorothy.

“She must die,” answered the Princess.

“Nine times?” enquired the Scarecrow.

“As many times as is necessary,” was the reply. “I will ask the Tin Woodman to defend the prisoner, because he has such a kind heart I am sure he will do his best to save her. And the Woggle-Bug shall be the Public Accuser, because he is so learned that no one can deceive him.”

“Who will be the jury?” asked the Tin Woodman.

“There ought to be several animals on the jury,” said Ozma, “because animals understand each other better than we people understand them. So the jury shall consist of the Cowardly Lion, the Hungry Tiger, Jim the Cab-horse, the Yellow Hen, the Scarecrow, the Wizard, Tik-tok the Machine Man, the Sawhorse and Zeb of Hugson’s Ranch. That makes the nine which the law requires, and all my people shall be admitted to hear the testimony.”

They now separated to prepare for the sad ceremony; for whenever an appeal is made to law sorrow is almost certain to follow—even in a fairyland like Oz.

I mention this episode because at this moment I’m reporting for jury duty.

Feeling Grateful for Martin Gardner

I was sorry to read yesterday of the death of Martin Gardner, longtime columnist for Scientific American and, somewhat surprisingly, one of my favorite childhood authors.

I may have first come across Gardner’s name as coauthor of The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was, which Michael Patrick Hearn built on to create The Annotated Wizard of Oz. Gardner also wrote introductions to most of Dover’s 1970s reprints of L. Frank Baum’s non-Oz fantasies, and I was abundantly pleased to follow in his footsteps in introducing a centenary edition of John Dough and the Cherub a few years back.

But Martin Gardner stimulated my growing brain even more outside the Nonestic world. My parents had a copy of The Annotated Alice, and I read and reread that book many times—eventually only the annotations. Gardner later assembled another volume of Alice annotations and a short Annotated Hunting of the Snark, though the original contained his best material. I ended up writing my undergraduate thesis on Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark.

Another book I reread several times was Gardner’s The Incredible Dr. Matrix, collecting his columns about a fictional numerologist and con man. Like the Wizard, Dr. Irving Joshua Matrix is a charming humbug—but in his tales there’s always the whiff of money changing hands. The essays in that volume and some later additions are now in The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix.

Gardner’s books showed me how stories, even children’s adventures, could be read at many different levels, some possibly intended by the author and others just for fun. They showed that storytelling and mathematics didn’t have to be separate disciplines, though I must admit I didn’t even try most of the puzzles. Gardner’s amused take on Dr. Matrix fed my interest in con men and how people delude themselves.

One of my most important lessons from Gardner was skepticism. In 1974, he wrote a Dr. Matrix column about “pyramid power,” parodying ideas that had circulated in France for some decades. Soon American authors published books titled Pyramid Power, trumpeting how this marvelous discovery had been discussed in Scientific American! In The Incredible Dr. Matrix Gardner laid out that sequence of events for me, thoroughly amused by the folly.

Story Museum Tells Half of the Story?

Fuse #8 offered a link to the Story Museum, devoted to Oxford, England’s rich tradition of children’s literature. The website calls the city “A world centre of language and learning, home to some of the best-loved children’s writers and illustrators in the world – from Lewis Carroll, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis to Philip Pullman.” A July 2009 handout from the museum also mentions Kenneth Grahame, who attended school at Oxford but wasn’t allowed by his guardian to go to the university.

Right now the Story Museum is its website, handouts, and school visits program, “taking lively storytelling performances, hands on exhibitions and creative activities to schools and family venues and offering training and resources for teachers and parents.”

On my first visit to England, I stayed with friends in Christ Church College at Oxford. And by that I mean I stayed in the college, with a view of Alice Liddell’s garden from the window above my bed. I was thrilled. So I appreciate the city’s heritage of children’s literature.

But right now the Story Museum gives short shrift to part of that heritage: the female side. Though the organization has many female supporters, its literature emphasizes the male, donnish aspect of British children’s literature and gives little attention to women’s historic contributions.

The museum website doesn’t mention Beatrix Potter, Kate Greenaway, Edith Nesbit, Enid Blyton, or Lucy M. Boston, as far as Google can tell. None has a strong Oxford connection, but of course as women they didn’t have the same university opportunities as their male contemporaries. (Similarly, I suspect that female dons at the women’s colleges in the mid-1900s would have suffered worse harm to their scholarly stature if they’d written children’s books than Tolkien and Lewis did.)

But what about female authors who did attend Oxford? Susan Cooper went to Somerville College and received an MA from the university; she was the first woman to edit the university’s newspaper. Diana Wynne Jones graduated from St. Anne’s College at Oxford. Their names don’t appear on the Story Museum website, either.

(I’m not bringing up women like Philippa Pearce of Cambridge or J. K. Rowling of Exeter. I understand how choosing to go to another university might be unforgivable.)

Remembering Simple Joe Malarkey

In last weekend's New York Times Book Review, the usually incisive Caleb Crain looks askance at a recent collection of mid-20th-century children's literature from the radical side: Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature, edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel. Crain writes:

It is one thing to convince your child that no individual owns the sandbox and that it is better for all children that it is so. It is another to hope that when he grows up he will donate the family home to a workers’ collective. . . .

[Mickenberg and Nel] have nonetheless found 44 texts that attempt to attach children to social justice permanently. As they note in an introduction, the tentacles of the left reach deep. Crockett Johnson, creator of the innocuous-seeming “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” was an editor at The New Masses, a Communist weekly. Syd Hoff, known for “Danny and the Dinosaur,” wrote for The Daily Worker. . . .

In fact, so permeated is children’s literature by progressive ideals that Mickenberg and Nel were forced to narrow their scope by focusing on texts that have fallen out of print. They group their rediscoveries according to such themes as economics, unionization and respect for individual difference.

Crain finds Hoff's Mr. His, published under the name A. Redfield, to be a charming tale of a union-busting plutocrat, who presumably gets his comeuppance and may even learn a valuable lesson about life. He praises some other projects before moving into categories he calls "Insufferable" and "Inappropriate."

In the latter grouping, Crain finds fault with Walt Kelly's adaptation of the nonsensical trial at the end of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. I think the only inappropriate quality there is that Kelly was drawing a political cartoon for adults, not really a book for children. (It was published by Simon & Schuster's adult division, I believe.) What Crain finds inappropriate:

The King of Hearts is drawn as a burly, sinister cat with the face of Senator Joseph McCarthy. To show that the McCarthy cat is evil, Kelly gives its eyes no pupils. It has a 5 o’clock shadow, and there’s hair--fur?--on the backs of its hands. The effect is grotesque, of a feline Tony Soprano brutalizing and carnalizing Carroll’s delicate surrealism. I imagine it would give children nightmares.

I grew up with images of this character, Simple Joe Malarkey, from my uncle's Pogo books and then my own. I never had nightmares. To be sure, the men in my family have hairy arms, and my mother's great-uncle was Joseph Welch, the counsel in the Army-McCarthy hearings who helped take the senator down. But if making a bad guy look bad is "inappropriate," then a lot of cartoonists have a lot to answer for.

The Clerical Strain in British Children's Literature

While in London last summer, I visited the Science Museum's exhibit on British technological progress in the 1950s and 1960s, which was "branded" with the characters of the Dan Dare comics series.

I didn't think the exhibit made a good case for linking the comics' sci-fi with the creation of radios only slightly larger than shoeboxes, even if they did appear at the same time. But I suppose the familiar faces made the exhibit more interesting for people who grew up reading Dan Dare.

The thought that struck me hardest as I learned about Eagle, the magazine that published that comic, is how the line of British fantastic literature for children includes several notable books from clergymen:

• Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland. (I should note that Dodgson worked as a college professor rather than a minister, but he was ordained.)
• George McDonald, author of The Light Princess and The Princess and the Goblin and a Congregationalist minister.
  
• Marcus Morris, vicar and founder of Eagle magazine.
• W. V. Awdry, vicar and creator of Thomas the Tank Engine.
• G. P. Taylor, retired vicar, author of Shadowmancer and numerous press releases.

In addition, these British authors of Very Important children's novels also published widely read books of theology:

• Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's Schooldays.
• C. S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series.

And there might be more.

I can't think of any equivalents in American children's literature. I'm not thinking about people who wrote religious books for captive young audiences, but authors who were either religious professionals or respected theologians and also created books that a significant number of children from other faiths have enjoyed.

What Did You Do in the Oz-Wonderland War, Grampa?

Earlier this month Bully at Comics Oughta Be Fun! offered a comprehensive (read: image-heavy) look at Oz comics, with particular attention to DC's 1986 miniseries Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! in The Oz-Wonderland War Trilogy.

That came out just after I stopped buying comics for a long time, so I obtained my copies a few years ago at an International Wizard of Oz Club convention.

Carol Lay's art is quite inventive: a melding of John R. Neill, John Tenniel, and the usual depiction of Captain Carrot and his team, who are cartoon animals that spoof superheroes and thus borrow a bit from both genres.

The plot involves--what else?--the Nome King's attempt to take over Oz. He's already turned most of the country's celebrities into ornaments for his palace. And not a chicken in sight. But Dorothy Gale, the denizens of Lewis Carroll's dreamlands, and Captain Carrot and His Zoo Crew still stand in his way.

You really do have to see it to understand the madness.

Graphic Novels, Some More Graphic Than Others

This will be COMICS WEEK at Oz and Ends since I’ve built up a bunch of thoughts on that topic and have nowhere else to put them.

To start, here are two links related to recent comics uniting Dorothy Gale of the Oz books, Wendy Darling from Peter Pan, and Alice from Lewis Carroll's dream adventures.

ImageText, an online journal of "interdisciplinary comics studies," has released an issue on Comics & Childhood. Among the items is a roundtable discussion of Lost Girls, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Melinda Gebbie. Contributions from moderator Philip Sandifer, Kenneth Kidd, Chris Eklund, Charles Hatfield, and Meredith Collins include sexually explicit language and topics, of course.

Hatfield concludes about Lost Girls:

Many who merely hear about it will be offended by the very idea. But, to be honest, the novel's revisionist and erotic take on Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy isn't that radical. This kind of take has already been prepared for – even in comics, where revisionist if not erotic treatments of Alice and Oz are common to the point of dullness. . . .

Unfortunately, as a novel Lost Girls strikes me as fundamentally unpersuasive. It seems to me that Moore & Gebbie have trouble getting beyond the titillating "novelty" of reinterpreting their source stories pornographically, and I can't escape the feeling that, for all its smarts, handsomeness, and high hopes, the project is a boondoggle. . . .

Yet from a novelistic viewpoint, I think Lost Girls obviously, spectacularly, fails. It fails to do something genuinely subversive with the art of pornography, that is, it fails to tell a credibly human story. Instead of such a story, it offers a baroque monument to the idea of sexual-cum-spiritual freedom – pursued naively, unrelentingly, and at exhausting length.

The other responses are more admiring of the enterprise. Everyone likes Gebbie's art.

In less high-falutin' news, the third issue of Cheshire Crossing is now available on the web. Click on the thumbnail above to go right to it. Writer-artist Andy Weir is shifting among the three heroines with every switch of a page. Interesting that in this digital medium the single page is the defining unit, as opposed to the page spread.

Alice Doesn't Live There Anymore

In The King in the Window, Adam Gopnik appropriates Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. I don't mean he alludes to the earlier book, or brings in some details in homage the way Cornelia Funke's Inkheart makes use of Tinkerbell, or even creates a sequel like the several about Peter Pan.

Rather, this fantasy purports to tell us the truth behind Carroll's Alice stories. That seem superfluous, but could be entertaining if executed gracefully. Alas, the Carroll connection is just another ingredient that seems tossed clumsily into an overly flavored stew.

On page 165 we discover that young hero Oliver goes to sleep to the sound of Lewis Carroll's Alice books because he's an insomniac. On page 22, Oliver does have trouble falling asleep. That would be a perfect place to establish his insomnia and listening habit, but Gopnik skips the opportunity, leaving the impression that his protagonist is unusually sleepless because of the magical events he's just experienced. Oliver falls asleep with no problem on page 99 and page 134.

On page 131 Oliver notices that his elderly friend Mrs. Lucy Pearson has a spoon with the initials "LL" engraved on it. She also reads Through the Looking-Glass in French. After many episodes, on page 269, he guesses that her name was originally Lucy Liddell, and she confirms, "Yes, I am Alice's granddaughter."

This opens the door to revealing, supposedly, what the playing cards and Tweedledum and Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty actually were. Naturally, Gopnik tells us that the "truth" is darker than the books that Charles Dodgson wrote in an attempt to soften Alice's traumatized memories. As in The Looking-Glass Wars, the unsettling power of nonsense isn't allowed to exist on its own; there must be malevolence behind it.

But that's not all. In Chapter 12 Mrs. Pearson returns to the small house near Oxford where Alice Liddell and she had both grown up. By going through the mirror there, she actually meets her grandmother, returned to a catatonic girlhood.

As long as we're talking about what actually happened, Alice Liddell and her sisters grew up in the deanery of Christ Church College, Oxford. (She spent summers at a house in northern Wales.) I've had the honor of staying overnight in that deanery. It's not a house; it's part of a massive stone building with its own crenellated towers. Check out this virtual tour of the college.

But for the purposes of this novel, I can accept that Gopnik's fictionalized Alice is different from the real Alice, just as the girl John Tenniel drew doesn't look like young Alice Liddell. As long as The King in the Window has an internal logic, then it can stand on its own as entertaining fiction.

But the story doesn't have an internal logic. If Lucy Liddell changed her last name to Pearson when she married, then her grandmother Alice and her mother would have changed their names, too. Mrs. Pearson would never have had the last name Liddell, and Oliver would not be able to deduce that she had. Dodgson was an expert in both logic and nonsense, and he would never have stood for such a mix.

Looking ahead and back at Looking Glass Wars

Dial is preparing to publish The Looking Glass Wars, by Frank Beddor, which has already been fairly successful for Egmont in the UK. The property's UK website and US website and other publicity (Beddor, with his background in show business, has generated a lot) offer some interesting remarks.

According to Publishers Weekly this month:

Beddor says his first spark for the idea of the book came seven years ago when he was visiting the British Museum and saw a deck of illuminated cards. It was his first real introduction to Carroll’s oeuvre, as he says he was “definitely not a fan” of Alice as a boy.

Once the spark was lit, Beddor locked himself away in an old Art Deco building in Los Angeles. He commissioned a visual artist to help flesh out the world he was imagining, and after two years of research and five years of writing, he had the first volume in his planned trilogy.

Back in July 2004, Beddor offered the Independent an additional reason for rewriting the Alice stories:

I guess I didn't realise how beloved Lewis Carroll's classic was. I was just seeking revenge. My grandmother and my mother made me read this book when I was 10 or 11 and I thought it was a terrible girls' book. This is my revenge; I wanted to rewrite it as a book boys would also enjoy.

No matter that Alice in Wonderland has been continually popular with many (but not all) children for over a century. "A book boys would also enjoy" seems to mean:

• violence--lots and lots of violence
• a graphic novel version on the way
• good versus evil rather than Alice versus nonsense, which isn't really the same thing

On SF Site, Nathan Brazil wrote this review of the British version:

Clearly writing with the movie and game versions in mind, Beddor dispenses with complexities like characterisation and devious plot twists. Instead, what is presented is a tale where everyone is exactly who they seem. Black and white, good and bad with no shades of grey to trouble readers.

Contributors to Wikipedia and this video mashup on YouTube note similarities between The Looking Glass Wars and the American McGee's Alice videogame, which as of April was said to be becoming a movie for Universal Studios. There's also a John Le Carré novel called The Looking Glass War, of course.