Angel in the Parlor

by Nancy Willard

  ME: Because the youngest is always obedient and virtuous?

  ANON: Right again. But why is the youngest always obedient and virtuous? Because in the world of magic, innocence is a virtue. A worldly man does not share his last crust of bread with a beggar. He has bills to pay, he has promises to keep. But the innocent—and it is easier to believe that the hero is innocent if he is young—takes no thought of the morrow. He lives in the present tense, and so he befriends the beggar who turns out to be—

  ME: A helpful wizard in disguise?

  ANON: Right again. Kindness in the fairy stories is properly rewarded. Now back to the princess. We left her quailing before the book that had predicted such good fortunes for her sisters. They dragged her up to the book and she read, “The youngest daughter of this king will be married to a pig from the north.” Her sisters tried to comfort her. “When did it ever happen,” they said, “that a king’s daughter married a pig?”

  ME: It happens all the time in fairy tales.

  ANON: So she marries the pig and settles down and lives unhappily ever after?

  ME: No. The pig is really a prince in disguise.

  ANON: Since you already know this story, I don’t suppose you want to hear any more.

  ME: I don’t know the story. I only know the rituals in the story. Or should I call them symbols?

  ANON: Call them whatever you like. You are not listening to my story because it has symbols. You are listening because you care about the world I’ve invented and the characters who people it. And if I bring on a six-foot pig with a wedding on his mind, it’s not to make your blood run cold, it’s to make the youngest daughter wiser for having to face him. And if I add a witch who offers to break the spell for her, it’s not to make all the girl’s wishes come true but to help her choose between good and evil. The greatest writers for children know that fairy tales are not only for children. One evening Hans Andersen was leaving the theater after a play, and he overheard someone say that the play ought not to be taken seriously as it was only a fairy tale. “I was indignant,” exclaimed Andersen. “In the whole realm of poetry no domain is so boundless as that of the fairy tale. It reaches from the blood-drenched graves of antiquity to the pious legends of a child’s picture-book.”16 Isn’t it odd that so simple a story can carry our deepest fears and desires in so small a space?

  So our conversation ends. I think of the story of the princess and her pig. None of the ideas in it are new to me. Is that why I like stories that hide ideas, so that I can find them again, like a ring lost in the house, all the more precious when I find it because I had forgotten it? When I was a child, my sister used to blindfold me and lead me about our house, letting me guess through which rooms we passed before she took off the blindfold. In that brief moment of surprise when I saw where I was, everything looked strange to me. Is it for the pleasure of discovering what we already know that we hide familiar things in fantastic stories where straw turns into gold, words into spells, and ourselves into heroes?

  11

  The Game and the Garden: The Lively Art of Nonsense

  I once had an aunt whom everyone admired as a fountain of good sense, except in matters of travel. She bought tickets to well-known places—Paris, Bermuda, Berlin—but she seemed never to arrive in them, for on her postcards she always wrote of places that could never be found on any map. Portapooka. Pannyfanny Islands. And what she did in these places was a perfect mystery:

  Arrived in Portapooka last night and had a delicious feel of mesh bears. Have taught a new crock to take me up in the morning.

  My mother explained to me that my aunt’s secret life in these places was the result of her bad handwriting, and when we’d translated this nonsense we would find out what she’d really been up to.

  Arrived in Puerto Rico last night and had a delicious meal of fresh pears. Have bought a new clock to wake me up in the morning.

  I found her nonsense much more entertaining than her sense. How delightful to feel a mesh bear and to travel by crock every morning! Even after the misunderstanding was explained to me, her encounters with crocks and bears seemed quite as real as her purchase of clocks and pears, perhaps because I had already picked up the habit of hiding common sense with nonsense. If, for example, our family was entertaining guests and either my sister or I saw anything resembling a cockroach, we had been instructed to say, “There is a Turkish mosquito in the pantry.” Because of the braces on her teeth, my sister found it hard to close her mouth and sometimes during conversation would sit with it hanging open. This gave her a vacant air that did not at all reflect the liveliness of her mind. Whoever noticed this first was to say, “Good morning, Mrs. Smith,” at which signal it would snap shut like a steel trap. If I chattered too much in the presence of guests, anyone in on our game would say, “Go fetch the long matches,” and I instantly fell silent—and fetched nothing.

  Sometimes a single remark became shorthand for a complicated event that we all remembered. Who could forget the day my father nearly peeled the paint off an adjacent car while trying to park his own? Who could forget my aunt calling out from the back seat, “You haven’t got space for a sheet of toilet paper!” Custom shortened her advice to a single phrase, and what made sense to us must have confounded the sideswiping taxi driver to whom my aunt shouted, over the roar of traffic in downtown Detroit, “Toilet paper! For God’s sake, toilet paper!” Though she may never have read Through the Looking Glass, my aunt was a faithful disciple of Humpty Dumpty, who tells Alice, “When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”1

  I especially treasured one postcard from my aunt that no one could ever reduce to sense. The picture showed a formal garden: an elegant maze of shaped hedges, arbors, beds of herbs and flowers. On the reverse side she had scrawled her message:

  You’d love this place. The roaring shillilies san sea whet all and the pappasnippigoo are zooming.

  It’s right and fitting that a sensible garden and a nonsensical message should be two sides of a single card. Nonsense is both logical and absurd, like the games we play as children. Some years ago I was out walking and found myself treading on a game of hopscotch, chalked out on twelve squares. The last square, which we called “Home” when I played the game, was marked “Heaven” in this one. I am told by those who play this version of hopscotch that it’s harder to get into heaven than to go home. You must throw your stone into heaven, jump to the eleventh square, pick up the stone, jump to the spot where it landed, and recite at top speed the alphabet forward and backward, your name, address, and telephone number, your age, and the name of your boyfriend or girlfriend. If I were to tell a clergyman that I got into heaven by throwing a stone into it, he would say, “Nonsense!” In life, yes, but in the game, no. In the game it makes perfect sense. Nonsense too is a game, and a great part of learning to write it is learning to play it.

  When I was little and the prospect of reaching heaven seemed closer than it does now, I heard the story of the Minotaur, half man, half bull, whom King Minos kept in a maze and to whom every year the most beautiful young Athenians were sacrificed. I didn’t know that when Theseus killed the Minotaur, the Athenians celebrated by drawing the maze on the ground and dancing through it. I didn’t know that hopscotch may have come down to us from that custom.2 Where else but in children’s games and nursery rhymes do the ancient and the modern so amiably link hands?

  The grandmother of nonsense is Mother Goose, and many a modern poet writing for adults has acknowledged his debt to her. Auden praises her songs for being almost infallible as memorable speech. Roethke, defending the difficult poems in his sequence, “The Lost Son,” claims for their literary ancestors German and English folk literature, “particularly Mother Goose.”3 But none praises her so well, I think, as Muriel Rukeyser:

  Mother Goose does not come into our lives when we are young children just having learned to speak. She is there before, before language. We come to language through her, and to mystery and
laughter and action. To poetry. She is only one of many ways, of course, and she has her equivalent in all cultures.… It is this figure, Mother Goose, who bends over the early days of many of us … with her babble … It is syncopated, to both white children and black children, and must be read that way.… Who, having heard “Thislittlepigwenttomarket,” can say as an adult that he can’t get the rhythms of contemporary poets or Gerard Manley Hopkins?4

  Of what is this nonsense made? When John Newbery published Mother Goose’s Melody in 1760, the rhymes were already old. Nevertheless, we find in them a highly domesticated society with customs similar to our own—courtships, weddings, feasts, fashions, and funerals—but with this difference: everything is alive and can speak for itself. The moment you allow your dishes and spoons to elope and your cats and mice to converse, all social conventions are turned on their heads. Dogs read newspapers, spiders have parlors, hens long for shoes, pots play with ladles, flies marry bumblebees, wrens conduct funerals, hawks build churches, barbers shave pigs, and ladies fall in love, not with the barber, but with the pig. Everything is alive and anything can happen:

  Hoddley, poddley, puddle and fogs,

  Cats are to marry the poodle dogs;

  Cats in blue jackets and dogs in red hats,

  What will become of the mice and the rats?5

  The meter in this little poem would do any poet proud. It skips along in anapests, a foot that Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll made good use of many years later. Even the meaningless “hoddley, poddley, puddle and fogs” dances in strict time. That well-regulated babble is as essential to the poem as abracadabra to the magician. Like the wizard’s charmed circle, it draws a boundary between the game and the real world and lets us make light of the most dreadful events:

  The cat she seized the rat by the crown,

  Heigh ho! says Rowley,

  The kittens they pulled the little mouse down.

  With a rowley, powley, gammon and spinach,

  Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.6

  Some fine books have been written on the connections between nonsense and play, and I recommend them to you.7 My task here is much humbler: to look at two of my favorite nonsense writers for children, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and to consider a few of the ways they can teach writers how to start on the downward path to wisdom. It’s not the wisdom of Solomon we’re after here, but Blake’s wise foolishness: “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”8 Perhaps if I ever translate the babble on my aunt’s postcard, I’ll find her saying that she’s having a wonderful time in the Garden of Eden, and the roses are lovely but not as fragrant as the ones in her garden in Detroit. I wish this revelation about the roses would turn out to be true. I wish paradise was all around us and finding it was as easy as recognizing it. I hope Blake is right when he says, “If the doors of perception were cleaned every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”9 The proper name of that celestial cleaning person is Faith, but perhaps the nickname for Faith is Nonsense.

  Eighty-six years after the publication of Mother Goose’s Melody, Edward Lear published his first book of nonsense poems and was dismayed when reviewers thought he had merely recycled Mother Goose. In a letter he writes, “I was disgusted at the Saturday Review Dec. 21 talking of the Nonsense verses being ‘anonymous, & a reprint of old nursery rhymes,’ tho’ they gave ‘Mr. Lear credit for a persistent absurdity.’ I wish I could have all the credit due to me, small as that may be.” And he adds, “If you are ever asked about that Book of Nonsense, remember I made all the verses: except two lines of two of them … I wish someone would review it properly & funnily.”10 Lear gave himself the title of “Lord High bosh and nonsense producer.”11 In 1865, twenty years after Lear’s first book of nonsense poems appeared, Lewis Carroll published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and now if in some heavenly roll call the Lord High bosh and nonsense producer were summoned, I am sure both Lear and Carroll would rise to answer.

  Though Lear by profession was a painter of landscapes and birds, and Lewis Carroll, alias Charles Dodgson, was an Oxford don and a logician, there are important similarities—important, I think, to the making of nonsense. Neither man ever married, but both greatly enjoyed the company of children and wrote their best work to please their child friends. Lewis Carroll told many stories to Alice Liddell and her sisters long before he told the story that was to make him famous. The grown-up Alice Liddell gave this description of Carroll the storyteller:

  We used to sit on the big sofa on each side of him while he told us stories, illustrating them by pencil or ink drawings as he went along.… He seemed to have an endless store of these fantastical tales, which he made up as he told them.… They were not always entirely new. Sometimes they were new versions of old stories; sometimes they started on the old basis, but grew into new tales owing to the frequent interruptions which opened up fresh and undreamed-of possibilities.12

  And Gertrude Chataway, another child friend of Carroll’s, remembers:

  One thing that made his stories particularly charming to a child was that he often took his cue from her remarks—a question would set him off on quite a new trail of ideas, so that one felt one had somehow helped to make the story, and it seemed a personal possession.13

  Lear too was the “Adopty Duncle” of children whom he met on his travels or the children of friends with whom he stayed. Daisy Terry, recalling how she met Lear at a hotel, gives us a picture of a man who “glowed, bubbled and twinkled,” and sang her “The Owl and the Pussy-cat,” and every day left on the lunch plate for her brother and herself a new letter of a nonsense alphabet, which was later published under the title, “The Absolutely Abstemious Ass.”14 The limericks in Lear’s first book of nonsense were composed for the grandchildren of Lord Derby, who had commissioned him to draw the birds and animals in his private menagerie. Lear lived on his patron’s estate during this time but took his meals with the servants. A friend of Lear’s recalls how his sense of humor got him out of the servant’s hall into society:

  Old Lord Derby liked to have his grandsons’ company after dinner, and one day complained that they constantly left him as soon as dinner was over. Their reply was, “It is so much more amusing downstairs!” “Why?” “Oh, because that young fellow in the steward’s room who is drawing the birds for you is such good company, and we like to go and hear him talk.”

  Like a wise man, instead of scolding them and after full inquiry, he invited Lear to dine upstairs instead of in the steward’s room, and not only Lord Derby, but all his friends were equally delighted with him.15

  If you want to play the game of nonsense, the best way to start is by playing with words. Imagine that nonsense is like hopscotch and to reach the first square you must invent twenty-five words, all recognizable as parts of speech. That is, the reader or listener must be able to recognize a verb, an adjective, and so on. To Lear, the gift for playing with language came so easily that it overflows from his poems into his letters. Of the weather he writes, “The day is highly beastly & squondangerlous” and “The views over the harbour are of the most clipfombious and ompsiquillious nature.”16 From his “Nonsense Cookery” you may learn how to make crumbobblious cutlets and an amblongus pie—easy, if you can find an amblongus. And what is an amblongus? Lear never tells. It is not customary for a writer of recipes to stop and define his ingredients; he merely tells you what to do with them. If you invent imaginary things, you must also invent names for them. Lear’s long poem “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat” introduces a congerie of imaginary creatures so matter-of-factly that you feel in some far corner of the known world they must have always existed:

  I.

  On the top of the Crumpetty Tree

  The Quangle Wangle sat,

  But his face you could not see,

  On account of his Beaver Hat.

  For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide,

  With ribbons and bibbons on every side,

  And bells, and buttons, and loops, a
nd lace,

  So that nobody ever could see the face

  Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

  …

  And besides, to the Crumpetty Tree

  Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl;

  The Snail and the Bumble-Bee,

  The Frog and the Fimble Fowl

  (The Fimble Fowl, with a Corkscrew leg);

  And all of them said, “We humbly beg

  We may build our homes on your lovely Hat,—

  Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that!

  Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!”

  V.

  And the Golden Grouse came there,

  And the Pobble who has no toes,

  And the small Olympian Bear,

  And the Dong with a luminous nose.

  And the Blue Baboon who played the flute,

  And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute,

  And the Attery Squash, and the Bisky Bat,—

  All came and built on the lovely Hat

  Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.17

  The Pobble, the Attery* Squash, the Bisky Bat—fantastic creatures all—could I have met them in dreams? Not likely. There’s nothing dreamlike about their appearance here. Strict meter and form keep each thing in its place, much as the squares in hopscotch order the moves of the players. None of these images are allowed to run together, the way images do in dreams; they are introduced, one by one, in a stanza that is both a litany and a catalog.

  Lear writes in conventional forms about unconventional things. A useful exercise for writers who wish to do the same is the nonsense recipe. The conventions are familiar enough. Turn to any cookbook: combine and mix well, chop, season the mixture with, beat these ingredients until they are blended. Following a complicated recipe always makes me feel a little like a magician preparing a potion. Lear’s recipe for Gosky Patties persuades me that the connection between cooking and magic is closer than Julia Child would have us believe: