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Of Snarks and Games...and Publishing

1991; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.0.0720

1553-1201

Beverly Lyon Clark,

Historical and Literary Studies

Of Snarks and Games...and Publishing Beverly Lyon Clark (bio) Cohen, Morton N. , ed. Lewis Carroll: Interviews and Recollections. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. Fordyce, Rachel . Lewis Carroll: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988. The story goes that Queen Victoria was so pleased with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that she asked for the author's next book—and received a treatise on algebraic determinants. The story isn't true, as we are reminded several times in Lewis Carroll: Interviews and Recollections, Morton N. Cohen's collection of reminiscences, though it is a story worthy of Carroll, with his love for playing out the lessening of lessons and other logical progressions. Carroll might likewise have appreciated the Wonderland inappropriateness of Cohen's subtitle—for there were no interviews of Carroll. (Cohen does manage to scrape up an interview or two with Carroll's collateral descendants and former child-friends.) Carroll dodged interviewers as avidly as he dodged autograph hunters: when he received a letter from one of the latter, he would get someone else to sign the response for him. Yet how many times do we need to hear that anecdote? I must admit that I didn't immediately take to the genre of "interviews and recollections"; I kept wanting Cohen to stop finding ways to delay the appearance of his much-anticipated biography of Carroll. How many times, after all, do we need to hear Evelyn Hatch tell us of Carroll's first lecture on logic at St. Hugh's Hall, of the girls "armed with note-books and pencils" (117, 121), of Carroll's bringing a large black bag from which he drew white envelopes containing cards and counters? How many times do we need to hear different people affirm that they were one of Carroll's few child-friends whose friendship survived into adulthood? Yet wait—what is the latter recurrence telling us, I start to wonder. Perhaps the non-survival of Carroll's friendships—however true it may be in the case of the original Alice, Alice Liddell—is partly a myth. Maybe our eagerness to believe that Carroll dropped his child-friends once they reached a certain age stems from our own prurience, our own desire to imagine him a dirty old man, even as we chide ourselves (in line with Cohen's sensitive and sensible introductory comments) that we shouldn't. Or perhaps as Gertrude Chataway Atkinson astutely notes, "many girls when grown up do not like to be treated as if they were still 10 years old" (139). And thus the way to read a text like Cohen's is to listen to the different voices, to let them speak to one another—Cohen has, in fact, been at some pains to seek out negative as well as positive responses to Carroll. And Cohen's exemplary annotations, like those in his superb 1979 edition of Carroll's letters, give us contexts for each speaker and correlate his or her comments with Carroll's own. Certainly an undergraduate complaint, much repeated in biographies, that Carroll was a "singularly dry and perfunctory" instructor (76) receives a better than usual context here. One former undergraduate describes Carroll as "extremely lucid" (77); another appreciatively cites his comparison of a corollary in Euclid to a fluke in billiards; and another acknowledges "the innate kindness of his disposition" (79). Or one can juxtapose comments made by Carroll's close friend T.B. Strong with the reports of Claude Blagden. Strong writes thus of his lengthy correspondence with Carroll on symbolic logic: "At first I tried to raise the general question of the relation of words and things, but he always declined to write upon this problem: if the words were clear and certain in their meaning, the results of combining them must be clear and certain too" (36). Or as Strong has earlier stated, "his skill lay rather in tracing consequences than in criticizing fundamental assumptions; and he was apt at times to exaggerate the value of side-issues" (34). Blagden's more colorful account states that Carroll "drove Strong wild with his logical conundrums." In particular, he would constantly send his servant across to...