David R. Slavitt

Just because you're writing about Lewis Carroll is not enough to justify writing nonsense.

At least three novels have been written about Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, and why their friendship came to an abrupt end in 1863. Each, naturally, has to come up with an explanation for the event, since we have no knowledge of what actually happened, and none of them seem interested in the explanation that makes most sense (that Alice's parents asked Dodgson to back off a little, and he, in a way typical of people with autism, escalated the conflict until the relationship was cut off). All instead insist that Dodgson's relationship with girls and young women was based on lust and was diseased, and then spin a hypothesis based on that premise. In this case, the hypothesis is that Alice's little sister Edith was jealous when Dodgson made Alice the hero of his book, and falsely accused Dodgson of inappropriate behavior. It's psychologically very improbable, but the other books' hypotheses aren't much better.

Let's start with the disclaimers that a lot of scandal-loving people don't want to hear. First, not one of Dodgson's child-friends ever accused him of inappropriate behavior (except in one instance of a relatively innocent kiss in wrong circumstances). Second, Dodgson was not interested only in girls under twelve; it is true that his early friendships were all with young girls -- but, when he could, he stayed friends with the young women when they grew up. Gertrude Chataway, possibly his closest friend after Alice, wrote that they were "warm friends always," and they spent time together when she was 28. One of the last half-dozen letters he wrote, and almost the very last not to a member of his family, was to Beatrice Hatch, of whom, it is true, he took a nude photo when she was a child -- but who was, by the time of that letter, 31 years old. Did Dodgson lust after young girls? It's possible. But it's only possible, and it is absolutely certain he never did anything untoward. Everything he did was acceptable at the time; this was before Lolita changed our perceptions; it was a time when respectable books of poetry were often full of pictures of nude "fairy" children, when parents would commission nudes of their children, when child-marriages were still common! Many of Dodgson's writings to his child-friends make me cringe -- but they weren't illegal, they were just yucky.

But ignore all that. Let's assume he was a potential child-molester. That doesn't relieve author Slavitt of the need to get his history right. The book is a strangely mixed bag in that regard. He seems to know things about Caryl Hargreaves (Alice's son) and his wife that I haven't seen elsewhere. But there are a number of errors. For example, page 198 claims that Alice's sister Rhoda was her parents' "last child." She wasn't -- she wasn't even the last daughter. Violet Liddell was the last daughter, and Lionel Liddell the last child. Page 77 has a character say, "That's when I met Lewis Carroll." But girls did not meet "Lewis Carroll." They met the Rev. Charles Dodgson -- who might reveal that he was the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (one of his standard ways of meeting children was to give them a copy of the book, which is not what happened on page 77). But Dodgson would not answer to "Carroll." And if Dodgson cared only about Alice and Edith Liddell, and not their older sister Ina (p. 195), then why do Ina and Edith have exactly equal mentions in Wonderland, and never appear in Looking Glass?

Those are nitpicks, but one error makes a hash of the whole book. One major theme is Alice's decision to sell Dodgson's original manuscript copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground -- one of the most important literary sales in history. The book claims that the reason was to secure Caryl's financial situation. But we know why the book was sold: The sale was arranged shortly after Alice's husband Reginald Hargreaves died. Reginald had been born rich, but didn't know how to manage money; by the time he died, he had a substantial property (his home of Cuffnells), but not much cash. He was like an American planter in the antebellum period: "rich" in terms of property owned but with little in the way of negotiable assets. And Britain in 1926 was still trying to pay off the debt from the Great War. The inheritance tax was fierce -- and neither Alice nor Caryl Hargreaves (who inherited effectively everything; Alice was left with no home and only a few other properties to live on) had any way to pay off the debt. The manuscript was sold to pay off the inheritance tax. This failure to understand why Alice sold her single most valuable property utterly distorts what is going on.

And I really didn't enjoy all the time spent discussing child prostitution!

And after all that... this just doesn't strike me as a very good novel. The historical characters (Alice Liddell Hargreaves, Reginald Hargreaves, Caryl Hargreaves, and Isa Bowman) all strike me as quite artificial and quite damaged. It is true that Alice's biographers seem to think that her life was marked by sorrow, even before two of her three sons were killed in the Great War -- but the plot here just doesn't make any sense. If Alice really still cared about Dodgson seventy years later, she certainly had the chance to re-establish their friendship once she was in her twenties -- and she didn't. So: Bad novel. Bad history. And, even for someone who is always trying to find the true answer to understanding Charles Dodgson, bad waste of time.… (plus d'informations)

Sometimes trashy fiction is better than you expect it to be. I expected this to be lurid, but although it had some horror elements (tame by today's standards) it also had a surprising amount of history and mythology worked into the plot.

The plot is the hoary "academic comes across mysterious book with dire consequences," hardly original even in 1978. I confess I am a fan of the genre, but unlike many of the novels about, say, the Voynich manuscript, what was in this mysterious book was decipherable by our intrepid professor, and the secret was properly original and horrific.

The novel shows its age not by its setting but through a couple gratuitous sex scenes, cardboard (sex fiend) female characters, and instances of casual racism, all of which would have been inconspicuous in the '70s, but are uncomfortably noticeable now.

All in all, worth a read if you are a fan of light, trashy fiction. If you're also a fan of ancient history, you might learn something, too.… (plus d'informations)

In Lives of the Saints by David R. Slavitt an unnamed journalist tries to come to terms with the loss of his wife and little daughter, Leah and Pam, in a car crash four months earlier. A former college professor, he now works for a tabloid newspaper, which thrives on the most absurd types of stories, with headlines such as "DIETER GOES BERSERK TRIES TO EAT DWARF", or "MAN DIES, REVIVES, 16 TIMES", etc. The chief editor gives him a job he feels he is not up to, but nonetheless takes: to write a series on the victims of a mass murder killing spree.

There are no logical reasons why the murderer, John Babcock, instead of killing the youths who crossed his lawn drove to the local Piggly-Wiggly and opened fire, killing a random six people: Amanda Hapgood, Hafiz Kezemi, Roger Stratton, Laura Bowers, Ambrosio Marquez Martinez and the three-year old Edward Springer. He makes visits to each of these people's relatives to try to find out more about them, specifically asking to see their personal possessions, which he gradually comes to see as relics.

Relics are all child's toys, which are holy things. Transitional objects, psychiatrists call them. They offer solace if not security and are reminders of a better time. p.91

and later, describing grief therapy the possession of a special object that links (...) to the dead person, such as a piece of jewelry... These objects are symbolic tokens jointly 'owned' by both the mourner and the deceased person. p.207

The veneration of the dead and their relics leads to a parallel obsession for saints and their attributes.

The deaths of Leah, Pam and the six victims defy logic. They are wiped out. Their lives were just erased, as if they had been pictures on a Magic Slate.

The absurdity of their deaths links the six victims to Leah and Pam. He manages to see John Babcock in prison, but can only confront the killer of his family, the drunk driver James Macrae in his dreams, which are rare anyways, as he mostly has sleepless nights. Perhaps in that dream he came closest to what one of the victims, Hafiz Kezemi, a devout Muslim, would call erfan a momentous insight into the "mystical knowledge of the true world," a mystic belief which proclaims every person a sign of God.

His search for the truth runs in circles, returning again and again to the philosophical works of Nicolas Malebranche whose seminal work The Search After Truth provides the philosophical and religious underpinning for the idea that there is no causality, and that everything that happens in the world is the will of God. It denies the logic of cause an effect, as well as the epistemology of common sense, very much like Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The more taunting, because Malebranche's philosophy supposes the inevitability of progress toward the general good. Man's inability to see this, his innocent belief in the senses, is the punishment for the Fall. Shame and guilt did not exist in the prelapsarian state.

His ramblings are not productive, and do not lead to a solution. They are more like the subterranean rumblings of the mind. Both the journalist and the editor are fired, as a new editor comes in and cleans up, to make for a new, better start. Eventually, that is also what the main character must do. Throw away old relics, make a clean slate and catch up on a new life, through hard work and love.

A difficult, but interesting novel.… (plus d'informations)

This novel by [[David Slavitt]], his fiftieth, no less, is like a modern [The prince and the pauper]. An obscure, depressed, and utterly unsuccessful academic, is invited to a spend a year at a writer's residence program in Italy, as a result of mixed up correspondence with his namesake, a famous history professor, at the same university.

John Smith, is an unsuccessful writer, who teaches at an American college, and worries about his job. One day, he receives a letter, which is mistakenly delivered to him. The addressee of the letter is another John Smith, who also works at the same campus. The other John Smith is an eminent scholar in Italian history, working on a book about the death of Mussolini. The letter contains an invitation to spend a summer as a writer-in-residence in a villa in Bellagio in Italy. When John Smith hears that the other John Smith is incapacitated, and will not be able to take up this offer, he decides to take it up himself.

Thus, John Smith arrives at the artists’ colony in the Villa Sfondrata, and mixes in with the crowd, pretending that he is working on his book about Mussolini. His greatest fear is being exposed as a fake, but the irony, throughout the book is, of course, that he fits in perfectly, which could be taken as a critical reflection on the general practice of having such artists colonies.

The idea is very promising, but the relatively short novel, is not very interesting. Throughout the book, the main character is worried about being found out as a fake. Nothing much happens.

The novel develops like a comedy, describing various antics, and introducing a rather transparent disappearance. The plot and theme do not seem to justify the large number of characters. Many puns and sub-plots are only vaguely indicated (e.g. Marx & Engels). The high-flown language distracts from the main theme. The book is interesting, but difficult to read.… (plus d'informations)