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.
92
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.
Mark Twain (real name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens) had a good deal of trouble writing Huckleberry Finn. It's doubtful that he knew, when he had finished, that it would turn out to be, along with Thoreau^ Walden [80], one of the two central and generative books of the American nineteenth century. In a way he wrote it out of his unconscious, through which the great river that had nourished his early imagination still rolled and flooded. Into it he put his youth—but also, perhaps without quite knowing it, the youth of the Republic. He did more. The division in Huck's mind between his natural social genius (for Huck is a genius as well as a boy; indeed this boy is a great man) and his distaste for "sivilization" mirrored a split in our national soul. We, too, as a people have been torn and are still being torn between a desire, based on our frontier heritage, to "light out for the territory," and our apparently stronger desire to convert that territory into one great productive mill. Furthermore, Huck reflects the racial tensions still vibrating in the national conscience; reread the chapter in which Huck debates whether or not he will turn in Jim, who is that criminal thing, an escaped slave, but who also happens to be a friend.
In this book there is no sentimentality. The preindustrial "natural" America it depicts is one of violence, murder, feuds, greed, and danger. The river is supremely wonderful but also, as this ex-pilot author knew, supremely treacherous and even sinister. Nevertheless, no grownup American who loves his country, its present no less than its past, can read Huckleberry Finn without a poignant sense that it is a kind of epic celebra- tion of a lost paradise. We ali feel, North and South, that with Appomattox a certain innocence, a certain fresh and youthful freedom left us forever. The sophisticated Periclean Greek, reading his Homer [2,3], must have felt somewhat the same way. Huckleberry Finn is our Odyssey.
Mark Twain, referring to the greatly inferior Tom Sawyer, called it "simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." That is also true of Huckleberry Finn. It is a hymn to the strange, puzzled, disorderly, but still rather beautiful youth of our nation.
Hemingway implied ali this in his statement. But he also meant something more precise. He meant that Mark Twain was the first great American writer to use the vernacular (indeed a dozen vernaculars) creatively. Huckleberry Finn deliberately destroyed the conventional English literary sen- tence. It introduced a new rhythm that actually followed the twists and turns of our ordinary speech, without trying for phonographic accuracy. It showed us what can be done with a de-academicized language.
For ali his later worldliness and big-city culture, Mark Twain was one of those "powerful, uneducated persons" saluted by Walt Whitman [85]. This does not make him any the less a great writer. But it makes him a great writer who heads a tradition radically different from that headed by his contemporary Henry James [96]. They reflect two powerful forces in our literature and our thought. The first is native, humorous, and in the best sense, popular. The second is Anglo-European-American, deeply analytic, and in the best sense, aristocratic.
C.F.
93
HENRY ADAMS
1838-1918
The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams was born with a complete set of sterling silver in his mouth. A scion of what is probably the first family of the United States, he was the great-grandson of John Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, and the son of Charles Francis Adams, who represented us at the Court of St. James. The fascination of his life lies in the unexpectedness of what he did with his inheritance.
The family tradition of service virtually demanded that he grow up to wield high political power for his country's good. The presidency itself would not have been inconceivable. Henry Adams became a scholar, a major historian, an influen- tial teacher, a philosopher, a marvelous letter writer, a world traveler of genius, and the author of the finest of American autobiographies. He never became a leader. His influence has been profound, but it has been indirect. At one point he remarked, "So far as [I] had a function in life, it was as stable- companion to statesmen." Acquainted with everyone of impor- tance here and in England, he rarely departed from his role of ironic observer, the irony directed inward as well as outward.
From one standpoint (and it was also his own) he was a fail- ure. From another, he was a success, though largely a posthu- mous one. His failure lay in disappointed ambitions, in his inability to live up to the family tradition. He felt—this is a major motif in the Education—that his eighteenth-century upbringing, with its emphasis on humane letters and strict moral accountability, had ill-equipped him for the twentieth century, with its emphasis on energy, science, and industry. His success lay in the fact that this very dissatisfaction with himself (a dissatisfaction out of which he made a virtual career) led him to probe deeply the age for which he was tempera- mentally unsuited. His books, particularly the Education, are pearls produced by irritation.