Angel in the Parlor

by Nancy Willard

  TO MAKE GOSKY PATTIES

  Take a pig three or four years of age, and tie him by the off hind-leg to a post. Place 5 pounds of currants, 3 of sugar, 2 pecks of peas, 18 roast chestnuts, a candle, and 6 bushels of turnips, within his reach: if he eats these, constantly provide him with more.

  Then procure some cream, some slices of Cheshire cheese, 4 quires of foolscap paper, and a packet of black pins. Work the whole into a paste, and spread it out to dry on a sheet of clean brown waterproof linen.

  When the paste is perfectly dry, but not before, proceed to beat the pig violently with the handle of a large broom. If he squeals, beat him again.

  Visit the paste and beat the pig alternately for some days, and ascertain if, at the end of that period, the whole is about to turn into Gosky Patties.

  If it does not then, it never will; and in that case the pig may be let loose, and the whole process may be considered as finished.18

  If you play by the rules—that is, if you follow the rules of syntax and grammar and if you write in a regular meter and stanza form—you can walk the thin line between chaos and nonsense without a qualm. When Lewis Carroll included “Jabberwock” in Through the Looking Glass, he could scarcely have imagined what James Joyce would borrow and transform in Finnegan’s Wake. For every unfamiliar word in “Jabberwock,” Carroll has not only a definition but an explanation:

  ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

  All mimsy were the borogroves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

  “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

  Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

  The frumious Bandersnatch!”19

  Some of Carroll’s neologisms are, like Lear’s Quangle Wangle, names for things that never were. Having never seen a tove, I take Carroll’s word for it that it is something like a badger, a lizard, and a corkscrew, which nests under sundials and lives on cheese. But “slithy” is an invention of a different kind. It means lithe and slimy. It is, we are told, like a portmanteau; there are two meanings packed up into one word. Nonsense was never so clearly taught, I think, as in this passage from Carroll’s introduction to The Hunting of the Snark:

  … take the two words “fuming” and “furious.” Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If your thoughts incline ever so little towards “fuming,” you will say “fuming-furious”; if they turn, by even a hair’s breadth, towards “furious,” you will say “furious-fuming”; but if you have that rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious.”20

  Playing with words leads to playing on words and a whole range of puns, malapropisms, and intentional misunderstandings. One of the commonest misunderstandings among children—and one that Carroll makes use of—is taking a figure of speech literally. When my son was about five or six, we were finishing our dinner at a restaurant and the waiter glided over to our table and magnanimously announced, “Dessert is on the house.” A look of panic came over my son’s face. Was that dish of chocolate ice cream worth the danger of scaling Howard Johnson’s orange roof? Such logical misunderstandings run through both the Alice books. In Through the Looking Glass, the White King asks Alice if she can see either of his messengers on the road:

  “I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.

  “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”21

  The inappropriate word as a literary device comes into its own with Edward Lear. We have all heard people misuse words, often choosing not the right word but a word similar to it in sound. A passage from Lear’s “The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World” shows this device in its glory, with a few of Lear’s invented words thrown in for good measure:

  The Moon was shining slobaciously from the star-bespangled sky, while her light irrigated the smooth and shiny sides and wings and backs of the Blue-Bottle-Flies with a peculiar and trivial splendor, while all Nature cheerfully responded to the cerulean and conspicuous circumstances.22

  The more high-flown the rhetoric, the greater the incongruity between what the writer seems to say and what he actually says.

  When Lewis Carroll uses the wrong but similar-sounding word, he depends on our knowing the right word so that we can enjoy the incongruity, just as we enjoy the parody of a poem more when we know the original. In the Alice books, a word that seems wrong to the reader may be exactly the right word to the speaker. How the Liddell sisters must have enjoyed the Mock Turtle’s discussion of his schooling in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For them, a proper education included reading and writing; the different branches of arithmetic—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; geography; history, ancient and modern; Latin and Greek; drawing; sketching; and painting in oils. And what did the Mock Turtle study?

  “Reeling and writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Ugli-fication, and Derision,”…

  Alice … said, “What else had you to learn?”

  “Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers,“—Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.”

  “What was that like?” said Alice.

  “Well, I can’t show it to you, myself,” the Mock Turtle said: “I’m too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.”23

  The Classical master, we are told, taught “Laughing and Grief,” and the lessons lasted “ten hours the first day … nine the next, and so on.” When Alice observes that this is a curious plan, the Gryphon explains, “That’s the reason they’re called lessons … because they lessen from day to day.”24 The only connection between what the Mock Turtle studied and what the Liddell sisters studied is the sound of the words themselves. But in nonsense that connection is an essential one.

  The secret heart of nonsense is the amiable incongruity. One of the ways I first discovered this was through a game, “Peter Coddle’s Trip.” The game involves a printed story and a pack of cards on which are named a miscellaneous assortment of things: a yellow nightcap, an insane bedbug, an intoxicated clam, an old hairbrush, a red wig, an elderly porcupine, and so on. The leader reads the story aloud until he comes to a blank. One of the players draws a card and what is written on that card fills the blank and becomes part of the story. The story describes Peter Coddle’s trip to New York, and if the player were to draw the cards I have just mentioned, Peter’s description of the Statue of Liberty would read as follows:

  Squire Mildew wanted to go down to the Statue of Liberty, which loomed up down the bay like an elderly porcupine … As we came near the statue the hand holding the torch seemed about the size of an old hairbrush. We landed and went up into the head. On the way up we met some people coming down the narrow winding stairs; one of them said it was as close as an intoxicated clam. I thought the lights were no better than a red wig. From the head we had a splendid view. We saw a steamer passing out of the harbor; … she was going like an insane bedbug.25

  Literary nonsense differs from the game I’ve just described in this way: the nonsense writer needs a reason other than chance for linking incongruous things together. He needs an arbitrary convention that will free the words from the categories of everyday use and from our sense of what belongs with what. One of the most useful of these conventions is alliteration. In Through the Looking Glass, Alice plays a game that both Carroll and Lear use in their poetry:

  “I love my love with an H,” Alice couldn’t help beginning, “because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous. I fed him with—wi
th—Ham-sandwiches and Hay. His name is Haigha, and he lives——”

  “He lives on the Hill,” the king remarked simply, without the least idea that he was joining in the game …26

  Lear builds many of his nonsense alphabets around alliteration, which leads him to some very odd combinations:

  The Melodious Meritorious Mouse,

  who played a merry minuet on the

  Piano-forte.

  The Visibly Vicious Vulture,

  who wrote some Verses to a Veal-cutlet in a

  Volume bound in Vellum.27

  Students in search of subjects for nonsense can turn to the yellow pages of the telephone directory and read the categories at the top of adjacent pages. In our directory I discovered a Burglar Bus, a Calculating Canvas, Chimney Churches, Cleaning Clergy, Dancing Dentists, Karate Kindergartens, and Musical Nurserymen. Sometimes when I bring nonsense poetry into a class of very sensible people, I say, “For the next hour I am going to ask you to make some changes in your vocabulary. Instead of the word door, I want you to use the word rainbow. Instead of the verb to open, please use the verb to skin. For the word light, please substitute the word cat. And for the verb to turn on, use the verb to hassle. Remember: the door is the rainbow, to open is to skin, the light is the cat, to turn on is to hassle. Now, in this new language please tell me to open the door and turn on the light.”

  A deep silence follows. And then very slowly, somebody says, “Skin the rainbow and hassle the cat. Please.”

  “Thank you. What else can you say about the door and the light?”

  “The cat is by the rainbow.”

  “The rainbow is already skinned,” adds another student.

  Though we would sound like lunatics to a visitor, we understand each other. Following the rules of nonsense, we speak a common language. The most inspired example of this double talk I know occurs in a Spanish folk tale, “The Shepherd Who Laughed Last,” which I will quote nearly in full, since it is brief:

  Tomas, the owner of a little roadside inn in Spain, loved to have a good laugh.…

  One night a shepherd came to the inn.…

  After he had served some wine to the shepherd, Tomas winked at his cronies.

  “Here is one who will be easy to fool,” he whispered.

  The others watched delightedly as Tomas, settling himself before the charcoal fire and lighting his pipe, said to the stranger:

  “In this part of Spain, you know, we have different names for things. You had best learn them before you go any farther.… For example, here we call a bottle a Fat Boy. The blood pudding we call Johnny. The rooster we call the Singer; the hen, the Dancer; the cat, Our Neighbor; the chimney chain, Forbearance. We call the bed, Your Honor; the fire, Happiness; and the master of the house, Always With Us.”…

  They were still laughing and the shepherd was still repeating the names when the inn closed for the night. Tomas went upstairs to bed, and then the shepherd lay down beside the fire to sleep. He kept one eye open, however, and when the black cat came in, he watched her. She went over to the fire for warmth and, getting too near it, set fire to the end of her tail. The pain maddened her, and yowling loudly, she began to climb up the chain into the chimney.

  The shepherd rose, took two bottles of wine and the blood pudding from the cupboard, the hen and the rooster from their corner, and thrust them into his pouch.

  Then walking to the door he called out:

  “Arise, Always With Us, from the heights of Your Honor. For there goes Our Neighbor up Forbearance pursued by Happiness. As for the Fat Boys, Johnny, the Singer, and the Dancer, they go along the road with me!”

  “What can the simpleton be saying?” Tomas thought opening his eyes for a moment. Then he turned over and went to sleep again.

  And the shepherd unlatched the door and went off into the night, laughing.28

  Suppose all the story were lost except the shepherd’s final speech. What would we have? The private ravings of a madman? The broken speech of the brain damaged? In the first formal speech actress Patricia Neal gave after recovering from a stroke, she describes how she passed through nonsense while learning to speak again:

  I became an expert at double-talk. Once when I was very cross with Roald, I said, “Get out! Get out! You … you jake my dioddles!” And instead of saying. “Tell me once more,” I would say, “Inject me again!”

  A cigarette was an oblogan. “A dry martini” came out “a red hair dryer, please.” And so on. Mind you, this was after weeks of practice, when I was getting really good at talking.29

  The writer who uses double talk has taken a road that, followed far enough, leads to surrealism. It should come as no surprise that when André Breton wrote his pamphlet, What is Surrealism? in 1936, he named Lewis Carroll among its patron saints.30 What especially interested Breton was Carroll’s ability to invent stories without knowing where they came from or where they would end: “Sometimes an idea comes at night, when I have had to get up and strike a light to note it down … but whenever or however it comes, it comes of itself. I cannot set invention going like a clock, by any voluntary winding up; nor do I believe that any original writing (and what other writing is worth preserving?) was ever so produced …”31 Breton tells an anecdote that would have delighted Carroll. “Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: THE POET IS WORKING.”32

  Breton recommended automatic writing as a way of bringing to the conscious act of writing the unconscious freedom of dreaming. “Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else.… Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written.”33 In automatic writing, the freedom of association found in dreams becomes the ability to make connections between remote parts of one’s experience. Robert Bly calls this “leaping,” and what he says about “leaps” in poetry would have interested Lear and Carroll. “In a great ancient or modern poem, the considerable distance between the associations, the distance the spark has to leap, gives the lines their bottomless feeling, their space …”34 He takes Wallace Stevens as an example of a poet in whose poems the content is the distance between what the poet was given as fact and what he made of it. The spectacle of a Yale commencement may have started Stevens writing “On the Manner of Addressing Clouds.” But what started with hoods and mortarboards ends up, in the poem, as “Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,” a line that Carroll and Lear would have admired.

  God only knows what Kenneth Patchen was watching when he wrote “because the zebra-plant bore spotted cubs”:

  He grabbed the beanpot off the clothesline

  And poured hot maple syrup into his parade sneakers;

  And still it was a mess! (Hear footnote above.)—

  Like frantic horsemen trying to exchange nightgowns on a lake.

  “Today,” announced the kindlingwood, “September begins.”

  And the sinkstopper growled: “Wha-at! on April 10th!”

  “It is a mite late this year,” admitted a swansnail,

  Ruffling up its shell and trying ineffectually to scowl.

  “Shut up!” commanded Grover Clevewater Giraffe. “Let’s

  Everybody get on this here blade of grass;

  Then the one with the handsomest neck will

  Be given all the jellybuns. How’s that?”

  The old philosopher slowly lowered his stone:

  “Suppose,” he said, “you were a wisp of sour loneliness

  Stuck to the wrong side of a life; would you right away

  Have someone locked up for trying to lap your hand?

  Someone, that is, who had spent thirty-five years

  Pasting vile-tasting labels on cans in

  A dog-meat factory. Yes, they say there are rooms;

  That there are reasons; that things make sense … Yes, woof! woof!

&n
bsp; But it will all come right; yes, it will end.

  The last cruel wag to a cruel tale.

  Ah, no … life is not a story that children

  Should ever be allowed to hear about.”35

  Free of the order imposed by meter and rhyme, the images run together, as in a dream. Even the White Queen, who maintained she could believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast, might find herself taxed by Patchen. Believing the impossible isn’t easy. While sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office recently, I overheard a mother trying to entertain her young daughter with a game in a children’s magazine. The game was, How many things can you find wrong with this picture? I could not see the picture, but the conversation had me riveted.

  MOTHER: What do you mean there’s nothing wrong with the picture? Look at the tree. It’s full of carrots.

  CHILD: Maybe it’s a carrot tree.

  MOTHER: You know carrots don’t grow on trees. Now, what’s wrong with the train?

  CHILD: Nothing.

  MOTHER: You don’t see it? The train has wings. Choochoo trains don’t have wings.

  I felt sure the child knew the right answer, but who among us would not like to see a carrot tree or ride a train with wings? And I thought of the child Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, who muses on red roses and white roses, cream and pink and lavender roses. “But you could not have a green rose,” he tells himself, adding wistfully, “But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.”36

  Perhaps among the roaring shillilies and the pappasnippigoo on my aunt’s postcard, a green rose is growing. I’ve never been to the Garden of Nonsense to see for myself. But one night I dreamed myself in a very different garden, and persisting in my folly, like the fool in Blake’s proverb, I woke a little wiser. Since the dream took the shape of a story, let me tell you the story.

  Once upon a time at the edge of town grew a garden about which I knew nothing except that some called it the Garden of Reason and I was forbidden to go there. Eve conversing with the serpent was not more curious than I, and I headed straight for the garden the first chance I got. The gatekeeper was a magician, and the gatehouse was his cottage. He let me into the house and told me I must wait to be admitted but I might sit at his table and drink a cup of tea while I waited. This I declined to do, as the table was cluttered with papers and dirty dishes, and I could not find a clean cup. Suddenly a young woman rushed in, clutching a book and pounding the title with her fist: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SHEILA HOROWITZ.