"Is there a doctor in the house?" Dr Seuss

They say, or someone said, that a writer is formed in their childhood. Which makes me worry, as my childhood was safe and happy. Where’s the capacity for art in that? Darn my parents for being reliable and loving.

Mind you Ted Geisel’s parents were loving and reliable too. His family went broke when Prohibition destroyed their brewery business, and he was once publicly humiliated by Teddy Roosevelt of all people. Being of German descent, he was chased by other kids during the First World War, yelling ‘Kill the Kaiser!’’ with real violence on their mind. So he had enough. Enough to make to make him the greatest children’s author of the modern age.

Ted Geisel is better known as Dr Seuss (which I believe he pronounced to rhyme with ‘voice’ rather than ‘juice”. Ah what would he know about pronouncing his own middle-name?) Dr Seuss revolutionised childhood literature and as such may be one of the great influences on modern western society. Not to blame him – many of us old children have forgotten his simple, powerful and sweet messages or imagine they cannot be applied. Dr Seuss is a force for good, more power to his work. He makes children want to read, and nothing can be better than that.

Anyway I don’t have to tell you about Dr Seuss, or Ted Geisel for that matter. The quality of his work and its importance (and continuing popularity) are a given. His life is of interest though.  I’ve just read Theodor Seuss Geisel by Donald E Pease. As the title might imply, this is a simple and straightforward telling of his life and work, engaging  without being compelling. There are other, bigger, biographies extant but this is a satisfying way to start.

Lewis Carroll’s childhood, according to Virginia Woolf, lodged in him entire. Dr Seuss’ did something similar. His first children’s book And to think I saw it on Mulberry Street was named for a street from his hometown. If I ran the circus takes place on a vacant block in the same town. But Seuss’ world was wilder and more wide-ranging. He created a character, the Grinch that for Americans and others I suspect is as big a part of Christmas as Santa. How many writers have pulled that off? Dickens may have been the last. He took on prejudice, politics, war, the environment, personal responsibility, society, aging, even death itself, and made them whimsical, lovely and memorable.

His adult life is not without interest either. He worked as a propagandist during WWII and some of his later work he said was to counteract the racist slurs he made against the Japanese and the Germans in that time. He then worked in advertising before finding his milieu in children’s literature. His relationship with his first wife Helen is an extraordinary story, ending in tragedy.

The other day I was reading this book and someone asked me if it was true that Dr Seuss hated children and only wrote books to shut them up. She was quite serious.  I said no, he wrote books because he thought children needed better books to read. But why would such a story start? I can only put it down to modern cynicism. It’s a cynical idea, and it allows those that have heard the story to ‘know something you don’t know’.  It made me sad to think of it. Trying to find pictures for this entry I came across pictures of the Cat in the Hat doing bongs and so on. Who are these people that feel that is funny? Or in any way needed?

They have yet to make a good movie from a Dr Seuss book and why would they? They have to expand a simple but powerful story and so fill up with fluff, poor slapstick and poobumwee jokes, because that’s all kids get. That’s where the cynicism is.

As long as we persist in having children, and expect them to read, so long will we need to put the call in for the good Dr.

"What I tell you three times is true." The myth of Lewis Carroll

Beware accepted opinion, it can lead you to believe silly things. Or miss things that are worth catching. These thoughts came to me recently when I watched Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, the 1954 adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, It’s actually a lot better than its reputation suggests.

I have written before about Lewis Carroll, and he is an author I continually revisit. Both as an author and as a person, he is fascinating. He cannot be pinned down, and any opinion about him or his work is subject to revision. The Alice books have been adapted frequently into film, television, plays, musicals and ballets. (Has there been an opera? I don’t know.) But they are a challenge to adapt. To be honest, I don’t think I have ever seen an entirely satisfactory adaptation. A lot of the magic is in the prose, which can be hard to preserve. And the books are very episodic with no real narrative drive, which presents the greatest challenge.

Some have shoehorned a heavy-handed metaphor onto the work such as Alice growing up with the jabberwocky representing all her fears (this was the basis of a 1980s mini-series and a more recent theatrical adaptation, which was more an adaptation of the mini-series than the book. I wondered if the adaptor had read the books, to be honest.) Tim Burton took the memorable characters and shoved them into a dull quest movie in the latest film. The best adaptation I saw on stage was Christopher Hampton’s ‘Alice’s Adventures underground’, which examined the relationship between Carroll and his supposed muse through the books, with the characters represented by actors wearing Victorian costume, no animals or masks in sight. It worked rather well. He may have stolen the idea in part from Jonathan Miller’s BBC version, which was proposed as a children’s show for Christmas but became more adult in flavour. Either of Dennis Potter’s takes on the books, one for TV and the other for the cinema are also worth seeing.

The book can appear to modern eyes as rather creepy and nightmarish. However, this may be our more limited imaginations. My grandmother thought it was a lovely fairytale. When I first read it, around age twelve, I didn’t care for it much. I reread both books when I was about twenty, and haven’t stopped reading them since. What I particularly love is how the books touch on fascinating and profound ideas then just as quickly move on. It’s why they are so re-readable.

One reason people find them creepy is the idea the Lewis Carroll was a repressed paedophile, an idea that also drives many adaptations. If he was a repressed paedophile, then three cheers for Victorian sexual repression! More recently argument has been made that Carroll preferred the company of young women in their early twenties. However, this meant they were having tea and worse, visiting the theatre, behavior that should have been leading to marriage. However, he had no such intention, but he did enjoy their company. Such activity could ruin the reputation of a girl at the time, and so Dodgson referred to them as his child friends, to give the impression they were much younger and so keep their reputations, and his own, intact. After he died, his family emphasised his actual, and genuine, child friendships as evidence of his innocence and purity, perpetuating the deception that his only relationships were with children. It was only in the second half of the Twentieth century that our collective dirty minds began to put the worse possible spin on that. However, argument rages on this point.

In any case, the Alice books were written to amuse children, and the Disney film does that very well. The books themselves are so immortal that like Shakespeare’s plays, no amount of bad adaptations can kill them. And this isn’t a bad adaptation. It’s funny, visually striking, and the characterisations and voice work are strong. Our picture of Alice in blue dress with white pinafore comes more from this movie than any other source. The Tulgey Wood is one of the more interesting sequences. I think it’s inspired by the chapter The Wood with No Names in Through the Looking Glass, and is full of animals that would not look out of place in a Muppet movie. I can give no higher praise. And I have to say that The Cheshire Cat in this movie leaves the Tim Burton/Stephen Fry Cat in its wake. This movie uses incidents I’ve never seen in other adaptations, such as The Wood of No Names and the mother bird screaming “Serpent!” at the over-tall Alice. And it nicely gets past the problem of losing the narrative voice in one scene by creating a talking doorknob on the door into the Garden. All in all, enjoyable.

And while I’m bending your ear, can we get past the idea that Lewis Carroll wrote on drugs? The evidence for it is so slim; actually to call it slim is to exaggerate the amount available, and to use the word ‘evidence’ is to compliment its quality. Yet how many times do I hear people talk about doing a ‘dark’ adaptation, ‘drugs and all that’? How sad that confronted with a unique imagination, the only explanation we can come up with is drugs and/or sex. When did we as a people become so dull?

Here’s a tip; if you want to write a dark version, tot up the number of jokes about death in the book. Actually the Victorians were much more comfortable about death than we are, which is why Carroll could joke about it with children, and no-one thought to comment on it. But that is another topic, for some other time.  I could also discuss the common idea that Disney films are sanitised versions of fairytales and at the same time too dark and traumatic for children to watch. Oh I could go on and on – and often I do.

"I'm not dead yet." Neil Gaiman and (kinda) Douglas Adams

Phew! After two world wars and the Holocaust – not to mention one of the angriest men to get on a playing field – I was happy to find lighter reading: two novels of fantasy. Both have enormous popular and critical followings, and both bridge the popular and literary genres. They like killing off characters who sometimes aren’t nearly as dead as they appear to be - sometimes. They have something else in common.

Television and film are not the only areas happy to trade on past glories, remaking classics and relabelling old material and presenting it to us as new. They are all after money and a market and the easiest way to sell something is to sell something the buyer already knows and likes and wants more of. And it’s a lot easier than thinking of something new.

However, literature is not immune from this concept. For a while there, it looked as if we were under attack from the League of Living Dead Writers. Virginia Andrews would not lie down, Alistair McLean kept publishing, and Desmond Bagley apparently took his typewriter to the grave, sending his agents new manuscripts.  Closer inspection of the covers of these would reveal other authors “from an idea by” or “based on the characters of”.  To be honest, I’m not sure how many ideas Virginia Andrews had before she died but they seemed to be awfully similar. And these were all genre writers and one could argue how distinctive they were in the first place. Still, one is tempted to brand all this as somewhat cynical.

Douglas Adams however seems a different case. A beloved writer, almost to the point of cult worship in some cases, he had a distinctive voice and worldview. It would seem almost blasphemous to attempt to write more of his material, yet it was his widow Jane Belsen who let Eoin Colfer do just that. In 2009, he released ...and another thing, the sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.

Adams’ last book Mostly Harmless was in his own estimation a bitter and dark book, written during a bitter and dark period of his life. He killed off everyone of his beloved characters. And he often said he wanted to write a sixth book, but his early death circumvented that. So on the 30^th anniversary of the publication of his first novel, Colfer’s addition was published, as a commemoration and celebration. There is no attempt to fool us even briefly that this is Adam’s work. The title and the author’s name are the largest print on the cover by far. The series and Adam’s name appear at the top of the dust jacket. It is Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series, writing a story using Douglas’ characters.

This was a big risk for the Belsen and Colfer. If it failed, they would look at best ridiculous, at worst greedy and cynical. Happily, it does not fail. (I’ve no idea how well it sold.) It comes across as a solid Adams book, laugh out loud in parts, but perhaps lacking those moments that Adams could do. Like his hero Lewis Carroll, Adams would include throw-away jokes or stories that would suddenly suggest enormous ideas about life, the universe, and well, everything. But it’s great to be back with Dentarthurdent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Breeblebox, and Trillian. To add a cherry to the cake, the god Thor appears, but sadly, Marvin the Paranoid Android does not. The book has an open ending with Arthur seeing familiar yellow ship appear in the sky. This is of course where we came in, and I suspect this is where we say goodbye – for the last time.

Neil Gaiman is far from dead – I hope. But he is also a man who likes to recycle and revisit old stories and old characters, his own as well as myth, legend and fairy tale,  and fashion something new from it. His novel Neverwhere is based on the TV series he wrote for the BBC, which was televised in 1996, the same year the book was published. I have not seen the series, but I am assured the book contains much that was cut from the series for time, budget and other considerations.  I often find that stories are best encountered in the format the creator first envisioned for it ie the novel is better than the movie, unless the movie came first in which case the novel is dire. Gaiman seems to have been writing the novel and series concurrently so each is the original version – a situation that seems appropriate to the author.

Neverwhere is story of a man who falls through an act of kindness into London Below, a mysterious world with odd parallels and enormous differences to the city above. There are black friars under Blackfriars, an Earl and a Raven in their respective courts, an angel named Islington, and more. We meet some of these characters, others we only hear of, but it is a world that is magical, frightening, both alluring and forbidding. And our hero, with a dream of being killed by a great beast, may or may not survive to return to his safe life in London Above.

I love Gaiman’s writing, and this book lived up to my expectations. I read it in hours. It doesn’t have the scope of his later novel, American Gods, but has the imaginative dazzle of Gaiman’s best work. It’s also had another life as a graphic novel, adapted by another writer. I preferred the book. None of the pictures from the TV or the comic have lived up to the ones in my head. I guess that’s why we keep returning to words, words, words.

"A plague on both your houses!" Farewell my concubine

I have a plan to write a musical based on the Oxford English Dictionary, simply because it's about the worst idea I could imagine. "What's that supposed to mean?" would be the opening number. I think the show may simply be called OED! or O! E! D! or something along those lines.

What on earth brought that up? Oddly, a novel about Chinese history of the 20th century. Which I had to read in translation, Chinese being one of the blind points in my education. Along with French, Russian, German, Greek (Ancient and Modern), Spanish, Anglo-Saxon and any number of other languages that has meant I have had to read many books and poetry in translation.  I can feel the writers in other languages berating me, like the Baker in "The Hunting of the Snark".

I told you in German, I told you in Dutch

I told you in Hebrew and Greek

But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much)

That English is what you speak.

Translation, like navigation, is always a difficult art. Seamus Heaney, having translated "Beowulf" into modern English, called translation ‘breaking rocks for pleasure’. The art is to translate creative works into a different language while preserving the style and the idiomatic and poetic qualities of the original. And it’s difficult. When "Summer of the Seventeenth Doll" enjoyed overseas success, one commentator wondered ‘How do you translate “You little trimmer!” into Swedish?” Not many of us can do Clive James’ trick of learning new languages expressly to read in them. And so we depend on the skill of the translator. In the end, the perfect translation that conveys all the nuance of an original work cannot exist. Much as I love ‘"Cyrano de Bergerac" I know that in a sense I can never know it in the same way that a French speaker can.

A similar but very different problem exists when adapting works from one form to another. The book I have just read was "Farewell my concubine" by Lillian Lee, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter. I first encountered this work as an extraordinary 1993 film, directed by Kaige Chen. I remember being astonished by this film, although I have not seen it since. I did not even know it was based on a novel until I saw it in my local library. The film is faithful to the story of two boys trained in the Peking Opera, who survive the Japanese invasion, World War Two, the Chinese Civil War and the excesses of the Communist regime. There are some differences, particularly the ending but this is to be expected. What works on the page may not work visually, and vice versa.

Chen Diayi and Duan Xialou meet as children at a training school for Peking Opera. The training is strict and brutal. The stronger Xialou takes Diayi under his wing and their friendship lasts into their adulthood when they become the two biggest stars of the Opera. Diayi falls in love with his friend, a love that cannot be returned and is threatened when Xialou marries. All their lives are cast into chaos as history envelops them. They suffer imprisonment, war, and the mindless violence of the Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution was one of the horrifying events of the Twentieth Century but we in the West have all but forgotten it. Children were instructed to overthrow all the cultural baggage of centuries of Chinese history. Valuable artefacts, art works and books were destroyed and thousands, if not millions, were tortured, imprisoned and worse. The director of the film was one of those children, and betrayed his own father into prison. His film was in part his act of contrition.

Again I was left to wonder why people can still call themselves left-wing without any of the opprobrium attached to someone who calls themselves right-wing. Left-wing governments were a development only of the Twentieth Century, yet their body count exceeds all the governments that preceded them. Technology may account for some of that number but by no means all. In Russia, China, and Cambodia they killed their citizens with a randomness and ferocity unmatched even by Hitler’s Germany. Still today North Korea keeps its citizens in poverty while the leaders live a life of luxury. If the Twentieth Century taught us anything it was that no political outlook has an exclusive claim on justice and right, yet we seem intent on ignoring that lesson.

What little Chinese literature I have read always strikes me as having a dry objective tone. I have no idea if this is a quality of Chinese writing or its translation into English. Even so, it still has its haunting qualities. The novel takes its title from the opera most performed by the two protagonists, about a Chinese general surrounded by his enemies, deserted by all but his concubine. The lyrics in part run:

                                  My horse cannot advance.

My horse cannot advance, what can I do?

I cannot define why, but I find those lines very affecting. That’s poetry I suppose - even in translation.

"(and he meant it.)" Lewis Carroll's other book

is unusual but by no means unique. James Joyce started ‘Finnegans Wake’ midsentence, and ended in the same way. (The two fragments make sense as one complete sentence, making Finnegans Wake a book you can read over and over for the rest of your life.) But he was not the first writer to start a book this way. He may have got the idea from his favourite work of Lewis Carroll’s, Sylvie and Bruno.

Never heard of Sylvie and Bruno? Or its sequel, Sylvie and Bruno concluded? Not many people have. Despite Carroll considering them his best and most important works, they were a failure when published and have languished in obscurity every since. It’s not surprising. They alternate between the tedious and the twee. Each book is longer than both Alice books combined. They have three stories which are difficult to follow despite none of them having a particularly strong plot. The lead characters are a brother and sister team of cavity-causing sweetness, and Carroll has Bruno talk throughout in baby talk e.g. ‘oo’ for ‘you’ and ‘welly’ for ‘really.’ The books meander, bog down in philosophical discussion, and often bewilder. To get through them requires more perseverance than enjoyment.

That said, they are not without their charm and magical Carrollian moments. One character invents a map scale of 1:1, but he can’t use it due to complaints from farmers – it covers the entire country. So they use the country as its own map, and it does nearly as well. The Mad Gardener’s song, which is often anthologized, appears at fits and starts throughout both books. (“What Tottles meant” is rather good as well.) Bruno observes that evil is live backwards. It’s like watching one of Shakespeare’s lesser-performed plays; it becomes apparent why they are lesser-performed but they still have moments of which lesser writers can only dream.

The structure of the novels is complex. The narrator, known only as Sir, passes through three levels of existence. There is the real England, a fantasyland Outland, and the Fairy Kingdom. Sir, an elderly bachelor who may suffer from narcolepsy, passes from one world to the next without a word of warning to the reader, sometimes surprising himself. Sometimes the other characters in the other worlds are aware of him, at other times they are not.

In Outland, the Warden leaves his children, Sylvie and Bruno, to be cared for by his brother the Vice-Warden and wife, Tabikat, while he travels to Fairy Land. In his absence, the brother declares himself Emperor; In England, Sir follows the progress of a romance between his friends Arthur and Lady Muriel. The romance is interrupted by the attentions of another man, and an outbreak of disease in a nearby village. This is the most conventional part of the book, but also provides Carroll with opportunities to discuss his opinions on God, religion, sin, government, atheism, self-sacrifice and many other topics not usually found in a book aimed at children; In Fairy Land, the Warden becomes the Fairy King and Sylvie and Bruno have adventures. 

As far as plot goes, that’s about it.  As Carroll stated in his introduction, these books were an attempt to link together different materials, poems, stories, lines of dialogue and thoughts collected over many years into a single book. He calls the result ‘litterature’.  As a result the book is much more self-conscious but perhaps also more revealing.

Sir is not the only character who moves between worlds. Sylvie and Bruno appear in all three.  The Professor in Outland is Mein Herr in England and an eccentric in both. Lady Muriel is almost too good to be true. She is beautiful, intelligent, patient, loving, curious, and generous; maybe Carroll’s ideal woman. To make things more confusing, there is a strong implication that she and Sylvie are one and the same character, despite encountering each other in the real world. But Tabikat, Muriel’s shadow counterpart in Outland, is a fat, vain and foolish woman. One some level, Muriel, Sylvie and Tabikat are one and the same person – an idealised child, an idealised woman and a nightmare woman.

What this says about Carroll’s attitude towards women is anyone’s guess. Although long accepted as a repressed paedophile, more recent research suggests that this is a distortion, if not an outright slander, on Carroll’s character. Carroll enjoyed the company of many women of mature age, some of his relationships bordering on the scandalous. One theatre director (Carroll loved theatre, also scandalous for a Victorian clergyman) described Carroll as ‘a greying satyr in sheep’s clothing’. Sylvie and Lady Muriel are equally idealised in the novel, but I get the clear impression that Sir would much prefer to stay with the woman and not the child.

Carroll was aware of his fame as a writer for children and his role as a clergyman. As he got older, if he didn’t actually become more conservative, he certainly played the part. The ‘Alice’ books are famous in part because they have no moral. Sylvie and Bruno is dripping with them. Carroll used these books in part to preach to his audience – and they are the worse for that.

These are difficult books to read. It is no wonder that those who turn to these books looking for more Alice are disappointed. But this is not what Carroll set out to do. Carroll was an inventor in many areas, none more so than in his writing. With ‘Alice’ he thought he was ‘striking a new path in fairy-lore’ as indeed he was.  Having been down that path once, (well, twice) he had no intention of going there again. His experiment, though failed, was bold. He may have even been ahead of his time. The Sylvie and Bruno books with their multiple plots in diverse worlds, surrealism, ad-hoc structure, and self-referential nature are, it’s been suggested, the first post-modern novel. They are certainly like no books of their time and structurally sit more comfortably in the Twentieth Century. Which brings me back to James Joyce. Ending an essay like this