In yesterday’s scramble to learn what I could about the novelist Adrian Barnes, I happened upon several interviews and essays in which Barnes names Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as his favorite book. “Thanks to Alice’s strange world,” he writes, “I can face a disconnected world.” (As I mentioned yesterday, Barnes is dealing with a form of brain cancer that has robbed him at times of his memory.) About halfway through Nod, Barnes inserts a poem by Lewis Carroll—a “hate poem,” he calls it—that I don’t remember having read before. Titled “A Sea Dirge,” it begins:
There are certain things—as, a spider, a ghost,
The income-tax, gout, an umbrella for three—
That I hate, but the thing that I hate the most
Is a thing they call the Sea.
I love Carroll when he’s in this mode: upending conventional judgments, shrugging about wonder. He gives us license to call down up, to call backwards forwards. (“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the White Queen tells Alice in Through the Looking-Glass.) And I love that Barnes has given me an opening to highlight something I’ve been meaning to highlight all year on this blog: 2015 marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of the first Alice book. (I know, 2015 ends in about six hours. Bear with me.)
I tried to make it to the Morgan Library’s “Alice: 150 Years of Wonderland” exhibit this fall, but the stars never quite aligned. I did find my way to a similarly themed exhibit at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Library, “Curiouser and Curiouser: Exploring Wonderland with Alice,” where I encountered, among other marvels, Nabokov’s Russian translation of Alice and a pop-up illustration of Alice’s exit from Wonderland. (Quoth Alice the Levelheaded: “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”)
And I spent a recent afternoon paging through Princeton UP’s new edition of Alice’s Adventures, featuring illustrations by Salvador Dalí. Random House commissioned Dalí to illustrate Carroll’s work in 1969—but until now the illustrations have only been available in limited (and expensive) editions. The pairing of Carroll and Dalí is an inspired one: we get two disconnected worlds, speaking to each other across a language and a century.
But my God, it’s almost the New Year! A time for hope and change. Here’s a benediction of sorts from Michigan writer Jerry Dennis:
Even the Wind (December 31)
Everything’s frozen this morning. The earth in its whirl, the trees, the waves on the bay, even the wind, frozen. I can feel myself not getting older. My nails and hair not growing. No cells sloughing from my skin. My longing for desert vistas, oceans, loved ones dancing around a fire in the equatorial night, Wednesday night basketball again, hawk’s wings, trout stream in the backyard, fluent outpouring of song any time I want like water springing from a canyon wall—all frozen. Any moment now the earth will start to turn again and this beautiful skin of ice will shatter.