Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) & Through the Looking Glass (1872)--Charlie Dodgson

When I first read these through again--I am pretty sure I read them as a teenager at some point, or at least the first book, as I found I did not recall most of the incidents in Through the Looking-Glass--I admit that my initial impression was that they were not as spectacularly brilliant as their reputation would have them be, or even as the sense I had of them in my own memory. From my vantage point as a 44 year old in the year 2014, the story and incidents, while not uncharming, felt too insubstantial, and not epic enough, and that the jokes, heavy as they are on puns and nonsense, were not making me chortle as much as I wanted them to. I wondered whether this sense I had of the book's smallness and datedness was a phenomenon of our current age, especially the enormity of confident and dismissive intellectual life one is exposed to on the internet, where even trivial exchanges offer challenges and demand a level of demonstrable intelligence and worldly competence that even the Alice books as they lay on the page do not, on a surface reading, quite seem to stack up to (though Lew Carroll himself in the discourse and activity that is recorded of him certainly comes off as quick and mentally adroit enough to have made his way somehow in the current social marketplace of intellectual talent).    



So, as with almost all of these old books, I had to remove myself psychically from my contemporary mode, in which I don't have much identifiable being anyway, and slip back into an approximation of my onetime self, circa age 25, which to some extent still lies dormant under the modern '-grade', whether up or not I am not willing to commit to an opinion on, much as (I am told), some of the older computer systems at my work are still buried under the programs that we have to use currently. The Alice books, I reminded myself, belong to literary culture and the world of reading in almost every way that I used to hold dear when I thought these things would be at the center of my life. The characters and stories are so well known as to be a shorthand, a part of the language of this pastime of literary study, usually in a way intended to express a variety of delight. It brings into this often morose community welcome exposure to a lively and enthusiastic element of intelligent people with whom I at least otherwise rarely come into contact in my pursuits. In spite of their frequent morbidity, the books are spurred by the author's strange but often captivating passions along with of course a unique and highly interesting talent and intelligence. Still, I had to slow down and allow the experience and the words and the aspects of life that are being emphasized to be absorbed over several days before I could begin to feel a genuine appreciation for the story once again.    

After I read the books through in my own lovely copy, with the Tenniel illustrations (MacMillan Children's Classics, 1937), that I bought at a library sale in Pennsylvania in 1986, I took the Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner ('one of the great intellects produced in this country in this century', according to Douglas Hofstadter, who is apparently someone I am supposed to know) out of the library, partly to see what sort of things I had missed, partly to prolong the experience of the book, which one reads through pretty quickly; even though I am at the very beginning of a list of books that I will be lucky to get through before the end of my life, and in theory should welcome any volume I can dust off in a day or two, I really do like to spend some time with them before moving on to the next one, hence movies, notes, blog postings, etc, etc. The annotations I find here to be helpful in providing a clearer sense of the social and intellectual atmosphere and ruling spirit out of which the book arose, which is what I find most interesting about it. I am still not sure how the recurrence of the number 42 enhances the meaning or the greatness of the story, but I do find it of interest that it was a number so especially favored by the author that he felt it desirable to interpose it into the story as often as he could. I liked the information that the drawling-master who was a conger eel was a reference to Ruskin, who gave weekly drawing lessons to the young Alice Liddell (and supposedly did look like a conger eel) and was also an admirer of her, making himself a rival of sorts with Carroll for the child's treasured affections. I like Ruskin's writings, which I have written about quite a bit on my other blog, but he is also the sort one likes to see made fun of a little by other smart people. It was also noted that while Ruskin made numerous references to Alice Liddell in his diaries and so on, his Oxford colleague Carroll was conspicuously never named. As to Alice Liddell, who was evidently about as captivating a young person who has ever existed, as a teenager she had a 'romance', whatever that entailed in 1870, with Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria's son, while he was a student at Oxford. In that time of course it was impossible that the prince should marry anyone other than a princess (though surely Alice Liddell's blood and other endowments were more than vital enough to enhance any royal line, especially the decrepit ones of the late nineteenth century). The prince did name a daughter of his Alice shortly after the other Alice's own wedding had taken place. So there is some good stuff in there.  

I find the first book, Alice's Adventures, to be much the superior of the two. Of course I have just begun the annotations to Looking Glass, so maybe my feeling on this will change. However, I do think the first book is warmer, has better and more natural characters and a more interesting progress, and is funnier. The real Alice was twenty by the time the second book came out, and it has in places much of the feeling of trying to recover or grasp hold of something that was lost or in the process of being lost, which gives it a lot of poignancy, but does not have the same sense of immediacy and fun as the first book. My favorite character is the queen of hearts. She reminds me of my wife. The Mad Hatter is probably my second favorite. I like this verse also:

"In my youth', said his father, 'I took to the law,

And argued each case with my wife; 

And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw

Has lasted the rest of my life." 





Do you think she dresses up and acts out scenes from The Magic Mountain?

I was listening to a radio program in the car the other day on which the energetic self-help guru Tony Robbins was briefly a guest. As someone completely devoid of personal dynamism, who has had to live with the consequences of that, I have always thought it might be a nice gesture of the gods if I could be reincarnated, on Earth or in Elysium, with a Tony Robbins-like personality, even if only for a short period, a single human-length year or two. My wife, who has more of the New England skepticism about people who exude positivity, would likely argue that something is off about Robbins, that his persona cannot be real, that no one who acts like him is truly a happy and well-adjusted person and that he is massively overcompensating for some emptiness or perceived deficiency in his life. I find his ability to compensate so effectively to be compelling, though I do not believe, as many people seem to, that I could will myself to be as habitually gregarious as Tony Robbins is all the time if I really wanted to.   

My object in introducing Robbins here is that the interviewer asked him at one point if he had observed, among the many high end performers he had worked with over the years, including presidents, billionaires, superstar athletes and entertainment figures, any common quality that set them so far apart even from the mass of ordinary successful people, to which Robbins replied "hunger". This is certainly widely believed and promoted as true, and perhaps it is always so at the extreme right end of the achievement tail, which is what we all should be aiming for, after all. Literature however has an unusually large (number) of notables who are not at that extreme tail, and who do not give off an air of being consumed by Tony Robbins's idea of hunger to any great degree, who nonetheless hold a place of some honor therein. Carroll strikes me as a man of this class. The happiest day of his life, which he kept coming back to for the remaining 35 years of it and which provided the inspiration for producing the two works for which he is remembered, was passed in gliding along a river--I presume it was the Thames--in a rowboat with a group of little girls. This does not sound like a man burning with a relentless ambition to dominate anything, yet he was still able to achieve significant things. Maybe this could not be repeated today however, certainly beneath a very high social level (though Carroll certainly belonged, comparative to the mass of the populace of his time, to a pretty exalted station, though he was not considered well-born by most of the people with whom he associated).   

It does not need to be said, but the Tenniel illustrations are a great gift to the world, or at least its students of literature, and never fail to provide me with some delight in the possibilities, however rarely realized in my own self, of existence.

The Challenge

After a very paltry challenge last time out, we were able to attract a huge field for this installment, though almost exclusively of obscure books, most of little interest to me, as well as devoid of much in the way of signs of merit. I wonder if the Google apparatus (I do not flatter myself by saying people) has figured out my game and is feeding me reams of junk for its own amusement. Look at this mess:

1. The Nesting Place--Myquillen Smith............................................................329

2. Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco--Burrough & Helyar......189

3. Beguilement--Lois McMaster Bujold............................................................159

4. Cache a Predator--M. Wiedenbrenner..........................................................148

5. The Queen of Attolia--Megan Whalen Turner...............................................119

6. The Fetch--Laura Whitcomb............................................................................76

7. A Curse Dark as Gold--Elizabeth C. Bunce.....................................................65

8. Alice, the Enigma--Christina Croft...................................................................47

9. A Ruby Christmas.............................................................................................42

10. Hush: An Irish Princess Tale--Donna Jo Napoli............................................38

11. Finding Lost Season 6--Nikki Stafford...........................................................26

      The Sly Company of People Who Care--Rahul Bhattacharaya.......................26

13. Stewie Bromstein Starts School--Christine Bronstein.....................................24

14. True Confessions of a Heartless Girl--Martha Brooks...................................18

15. Naked--Michael ian Black...............................................................................13

16. The Spiraling Worm--Conyers & Sunseri.......................................................12

17. Tis the Season--Ellen Emerson White..............................................................9

18. Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes--Fadiman, etc......................................................8

19. The Tempest For Kids--Lois Burdett................................................................6

20. 365 Easy Chicken Recipes................................................................................4

21. Dynamic Chess Strategy--Mihai Suba..............................................................2

      Perry Mason Solves the Case of the Haunted Husband--Erle Stanley Gardner.2

      Book of the London International Chess Congress 1922..................................2

      Book of the New York International Chess Tournament 1924..........................2

      Webster's New World Essential Vocabulary.....................................................2

26. Denslow's Humpty Dumpty................................................................................1

Volumes receiving a score of 0: Samovski Zabovnik by Dragoslav Andric, Book of the Hastings International Masters Chess Tournament 1922, The Crime Club by W. Holt White, Dilemmas by A. E. W. Mason (the 2nd time this little known book has appeared in the challenge), The Pig Brother by Laura E. Richards, The Mediterrenean by Bonney, Ball, Traill, etc, Blood of the Zombies by Ian Livingston, Clara in Blunderland by Caroline Lewis, 1,000 Mythological Characters Briefly Described by Edward S. Ellis, and Humorous Readings and Recitations, by the Albion Reciters.

The winner is a frilly, frothy book about home decorating. I think I will pass again.

There was an unusually crowded and competitive Film Challenge this time, featuring an extremely close finish and a major upset over the heavily favored entrant that had not only the home post advantage going for it but the backing and imprimatur of the all-powerful Walt Disney Corporation:

1. Dawn of the Dead (1979)......................................742

2. Alice in Wonderland (1951)..................................732

3. Something Wicked.................................................263

4. Denise Austin: Shrink Your Female Fat Zones.....215

5. Queen to Play........................................................143

6. Brooke Burke Body: 30 Day Slimdown...................68

7. Denise Austin: Get Fit Fast.....................................34



The music challenge likewise did not lead us to any rarified pocket of the achievements of that realm:

1. Back to the Future Soundtrack........................................................76

2. Resistance: Rise of the Runaways--Crown the Empire...................24

3. Magic--The Jets.................................................................................4



So after immersing myself in the world of Alice and some of the innumerable exegeses devoted to it for a further week, my belief in its greatness and brilliance (and humility at my own littleness) is almost fully restored. It is not one of the books that is uniquely mine, and that I love intimately, and it never will be, because of limitations on my own part, but it gives me some happiness to reunite with it at intervals of years, to see as much as I can that it holds up as well as I remember it and exchange a jest or good-natured greeting with it, to affirm that some positive connection exists between us. This is what reading mainly is for me now. 

Booth Tarkington--Alice Adams (1921)

This is another book that really carries us back into the lost past, in more than one sense in my case. Even to read the first page is to be suddenly dropped, in a manner reminiscent of Mr Rogers's television show, away from everything relevant to current life into the ever vanishing world that was our country in the early years of the 20th century. There is urbanization, there is industrialization and pollution, there is big business, or at least localized variations of it, there are even automobiles and trolleys. However we have not come yet to radios, air conditioning, movies (in this book at least), widespread high school completion, and a host of modern psychological refinements, with regard at least to people who actually aspire to respectability, in areas such as race, self-awareness and presentation, and socio-economic expectations and entitlement. It is also a world where Booth Tarkington is one of the most popular and acclaimed novelists in the country, considered wise and a cultural leader by many, the winner of two of the first four Pulitzer Prizes awarded, one of which was for this book, Alice, as everyone will know now, was published the year before the appearance of Ulysses and The Waste Land, and the year after Fitzgerald had heralded the arrival of the Lost Generation writers with his wildly succesful debut, compared to all of which people and work Tarkington's writings and concerns, as well as those of his readers, almost at once appeared hopelessly quaint and out of date by anybody with any literary sensibility, and his reputation gradually declined, though he remained a name that was accorded some respect among the second rank of authors and readers, which level was still of a fairly high quality, and does not really have a parallel, certainly in terms of mass, among the reading public in our day, up to the 50s. Here is the original cover for Alice Adams, which is set contemporaneously (one of the characters at least mentions that he was recently out of service after the war, though his war experience plays no role in his character, nor the war itself in the character of the book), The design is not exactly looking forward towards modernism or any other movement afoot and about to burst out all over in the 1920s, but evokes a kind of middle American charm and nostalgia for what was understood even at the time to be neither charming nor anything worth being nostalgic for. Even thinking in terms of 1921 I am sure that the image gives the sense of looking at the present through a frame or eyes that have not fundamentally adjusted their way of perceiving for twenty or thirty years past, even if there are late model cars and storefronts pencilled into the scene. But I am all right with that, which I guess really is a problem with me.

        

I read this many years ago (this is the other incidence of return to a lost past), when I first attempted to go through this list as a teenager and was drawing the titles out of a plastic bowl to determine what to read next. At the time I thought it quite good. It is a simple book, very easy to understand, yet the descriptions of scenes and the feelings of the characters are good enough that it feels like you are reading something intelligent and worthwhile, especially I suppose when you are a teenager. This time around I was a little more attuned to its shortcomings, both in the writing and overall conception and execution, though there were still some things I liked about it. In the first part of the book I enjoyed the full immersion in the world of the 1910s which really does not reach out to you across the ages but lies as if buried in a chest, or on the dark shelves of a library storage area, requiring you to come to it, though in the second half the relentlessness of the social failure and humiliation with which this pitiful family is afflicted becomes rather painful even for the reader to endure, and I found myself dreading approaching scenes in which the various disasters that the Adams's attempts to hold themselves a little higher than they ought to have dared must inevitably play out. Are people really that bad? I guess they would be, if any of us aspired to break into society that was as far above us as the people Alice wants to hang out with are above her. I was also taken much more aback on this reading by the general crudeness of the thoughts and speech and manners and mindsets of the society depicted in the book. It does not feel as if the author is exaggerating or straining to write in an affected way to make a point, as someone like Mark Twain might be inclined to do; the dialogue and the thoughts have a simplicity and naturalness about them that give a sense that this is what it was really like much of the time. It is not that people are not crude in this way now, of course, but most of them are not really trying to be respectable in the way that Alice and her parents are. People of this type would go to college and be exposed to such  media now as would smooth down their rawness and unrefinement to something a little less obvious. The book is extremely racist, in a casual and largely incidental way--that is, it is not about black people at all, but when they appear or are alluded to in passing the attitude taken is always contemptuous--which I had even noted as a teenager. Alice Adams's ne'er do well brother is known to hang out at jazz joints and shoot dice with the black kitchen workers in the back of the establishment. In a modern book set in this time he would undoubtedly take on the persona of a cool and sympathetic character who 'gets' something (perhaps it), but it is pretty obvious that Tarkington intends to demonstrate by this that he is thoroughly disreputable. By means of comparison, a lot of people say that, for example, Faulkner is racist. He probably is by most current standards, but even if it is so his racism is worlds more sophisticated than Tarkington's. Faulkner's black characters, or at least numerous of them, have qualities, and strengths and individual histories and personalities, as well as personal deficiencies that are their own and not necessarily relevant to other black people. All of this was absent in Tarkington. Things like civil rights and integration were not big themes in the Faulkner books I have read, though I sense that part of the message of his 30s books is that in southern society black and white are more intimately and subtly intertwined than people commonly acknowledged. At the same time he was one of those authors who tried to apply an exacting and unflinching eye to things, and he seemed to find the circumstance that blacks were oppressed and legally and socially inferior without being able to do much about it or at that time offer any kind of threat--and not even necessarily of a violent quality--to the status quo to be telling, and something of an indictment, against the community designated as black. I am assuming it is in this aspect that the accusations of Faulkner's racism and the insistence that he cannot be considered a great writer if this is the extent of his belief and understanding of the matter come from. But it is still a considerable leap forward from Tarkington's attitude.

But getting back to Alice Adams, I wanted to touch on some of the things about it that I liked. Here is a passage where Mr Adams is lying in bed at dawn after a largely sleepless night that makes me feel I am right there in the room in 1920:

"He heard the milk-wagon drive into the cross-street beneath his windows and stop at each house. The milkman carried his jars round to the 'back porch,' while the horse moved slowly ahead to the gate of the next customer and waited there...His complaint was of the horse, who casually shifted weight with a clink of steel shoes on the worn brick pavement of the street, and then heartily shook himself in his harness, perhaps to dislodge a fly far ahead of its season. Light had just filmed the windows; and with that the first sparrow woke, chirped instantly, and roused neighbours in the trees of the small yard, including a loud-voiced robin. Vociferations began irregularly, but were soon unanimous...Night sounds were becoming day sounds; the far away hooting of freight-engines seemed brisker than an hour ago in the dark."

There was another passage which was of some of Alice's thought processes which I meant to mark down at the time as pretty good but I cannot find it now.

The Adams family does not seem to have any kind of intellectual life, in the sense that they don't read at all, other than perhaps local newspapers, nor do they do anything with music. They were not well enough off to send their children to college, which they looked at however as more of a desirable social marker than an opportunity for exciting scholarship. Their mental energies are entirely focused on money, business, and social status. Again this is not in itself unusual, but the circumstance that it is presented so matter-of-factly is unusual. The absence of books in the activity of the family is not even pointed out by the writer, it is something I noticed myself. I feel like most writers either would not be able to write about such characters at all or would feel compelled to do so as if they were oddities or otherwise alien. Tarkington does write about them as if they are normal people that anyone might know or would write a novel about. This feels like something of an achievement because writers are too overeducated to do it now.

I had forgotten about the at the time well-regarded 1935 movie based on the book that was directed by George Stevens and starred a young and surprisingly cute Katharine Hepburn as Alice and that old dog Fred MacMurray as Arthur Stevens, the handsome young man from a good family. The clips from it on the internet are fairly enticing, though the Adams's house certainly looks a lot nicer in the movie than I had imagined it in the book. Katharine Hepburn does kind of look like what I imagined Alice to be. 

There was also a 1923 silent movie. I don't know whether this is still extant as a whole, but there are stills from it floating around on the internet.

If I had more time to spend on these--I think it is very interesting how the forms that people with social insecurities take change over time, you know the particular things that bother them or the characteristics that they have, The Honeymooners is another example of this. There are not really a lot of guys in form like Ralph Kramden nowadays, that particular loud blowhard type who is obnoxious and not very successful but nonetheless occupies a definite social niche. Yet I feel that this personality was more common in his generation. That type of thing...

The Challenge

Almost an un-challenge. I thought this would be an interesting one too. The magic words for Alice Adams however were so generic that in combination their searches turned up hardly any titles at all:

1. The Iron Queen--Julie Kagawa.................................331

2. The Hate Factory--W.G. Stowe..................................39

3. Hospitality Financial Accounting--Weygandt, etc.......4

The winner belongs to the 'Harlequin Teen' series, so I think I had better pass on it. 

A movie challenge did emerge as well, and it was an odd matchup as usual:

1. The Amityville Horror (1979)..................................308

2. Tomorrowland...........................................................57