Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  Because Carroll was a writer of the highest achievement who was also widely popular, it’s understandable that his interactions with adults were sometimes marked by wariness and formality, rather than the broad affection he showed children. For them, he was whatever they wanted him to be. There is no evidence, in his diaries or elsewhere, of any long-term romantic relationships with women, which surely contributed to suggestions (however indirectly, even in his lifetime) of pedophilia. There was his affinity for taking photos of nude girls, of course. However, in the Victorian era, child nudes were not an uncommon artistic subject; it was perhaps Dodgson’s excessive ardor for little girls, and his compulsive pursuit of their friendship, that called his behavior into question. (One might regard him as a Victorian-era Michael Jackson, but that is a topic for another time.)

  Considering Dodgson’s conscientious temperament, his openheartedness, and his religious fervor, it seems likely that his sexual urges, however inappropriate, remained repressed and were never acted on. Still, adding to the intrigue are four volumes missing from Dodgson’s diaries of various periods dating from 1853 to 1863. (Nine volumes in all have survived.) What happened? Did he have something to hide? Was he chaste or deviant? Did a relative remove the diary pages after his death, to protect the family’s reputation or the author’s own? A record by the Lewis Carroll Society on Dodgson’s “Journal 8” (from the period of his burgeoning acquaintance with Alice Liddell and her siblings) comments:

  A noticeable feature of this journal is the use Dodgson makes of these pages for recording prayers and supplications to help him lead a better life. Although prayers occurred in earlier volumes, the frequency and earnestness began to take on greater proportions in this journal. There has been much speculation about the reasons and purposes of the prayers. Reading them in the context of his unfolding life, there is no clear and obvious reason which can account for them. They do show that he experienced moments of great self-doubt and guilt. Some prayers indicate that feelings of slothfulness and lack of attention to his duties as mathematical lecturer gave rise to regret. However, there are some prayers which are more personal and poignant. One gets a deep sense of Dodgson’s inability to come to terms with the troubles in his mind, and a feeling that he was unable to control these feelings which caused him such anguish and concern, whatever the cause may have been.

  In 1863, a falling-out occurred with the Liddell family, and even though the mysterious rift was mended, the relationship was sporadic from then on. Was Dodgson a man with ignominious secrets? Did this partly explain his extreme need to protect himself from the scrutiny surrounding “Lewis Carroll”? Was the shame he carried regarding his fixation on prepubescent girls the reason he never progressed from deacon to priest? Why were his diaries filled with angst-ridden contemplations of guilt, temptation, and self-rebuke?

  Taken together, these questions are no more answerable today than they have been over the past century, but Alice’s refrain throughout her journey in Wonderland—“Who in the world am I?”—resonates further when one considers the author’s complex history. For unknown reasons, Dodgson often felt tormented by his own thoughts: he once wrote of having been “haunted by some worrying subject of thought, which no effort of will is able to banish.”

  The man who loved puzzles was himself a deep mystery. Photography, which had once captivated him, was abandoned in the summer of 1880. Over more than two decades, he’d become an excellent photographer and had even considered earning a living with his hobby. He’d taken thousands of pictures, yet that year stopped the activity that had given him so much pleasure. As far as anyone knows, Dodgson never took another photograph for the rest of his life. One reason may be the unpleasant rumors that circulated about his penchant for photographing nude children. He was quite aware of how it might be perceived, telling one mother that her children’s “innocent unconsciousness is very beautiful, and gives one a feeling of reverence,” and expressing remorse if he had overstepped any bounds with them. Though he discussed plans for future portraits, they were dropped. Another, more mundane, explanation for this may have been his extreme disdain for the latest, more advanced photographic processes, which he regarded as inferior.

  In no way did this curious mathematician add up. He was a distinguished member of society, though he wore his hair longer than was considered proper for a Victorian gentleman. His letters alone were often works of genius, as exhilarating and imaginative as his Alice books, yet many who knew Dodgson found him stodgy and dull. “He held himself stiffly,” a relative recalled, “one shoulder slightly higher than the other; in his almost overemphasized erectness there was an old-fashioned seriousness, an air of punctiliousness.” Even Alice Liddell remembered him as having “carried himself upright, as if he had swallowed a poker.” In the company of adults, if he knew someone well and felt at ease, he appeared handsome, charming, funny, and confident; yet one colleague called him “peculiar and paradoxical, and the topics on which he loved to dwell were such as would bore many persons.”

  Dodgson was quite odd. He wrote most of his books, including Alice, while standing up. (He calculated that he could work standing at his desk for up to ten hours.) His contradictions, eccentricities, and obsessive routines were truly astonishing—apart from standing to write, he would map out entire journey routes well in advance, determining the precise time required to complete each leg of the trip. He also tallied the amount of money he would need at each stop, for each potential activity, and planned accordingly. Even his tea-brewing was a fanatical ritual: it must be steeped for exactly ten minutes, not a second more or less, or he would consider it undrinkable. And as it brewed, he would walk up and down his sitting room, swinging the teapot gently back and forth—always for precisely ten minutes. When he entertained dinner guests, he prepared a seating chart and kept records of their dining preferences for future events. (“By keeping the cards,” he wrote, “one gets materials for making up other dinner-parties, by observing what people harmonise well together.”) As a mathematician, he was fascinated by theories of randomness, but in life he was indefatigably controlling.

  He loved taking long walks—sometimes for twenty miles—as an aid to problem solving, composing verse, and reflection. During his treks, he liked to time himself, record his average speed, then compare the numbers with those from previous walks. It makes sense that his mathematician’s mind would have found satisfaction in this self-tracking; it’s harder to understand why he took extensive notes on the condition of his feet after each walk.

  Steeped as he was in logic and science, Dodgson believed that Tuesday was his lucky day and forty-two his lucky number. He was a charter member of the Society for Psychical Research and the Ghost Society. He collected books about fairies and the occult.

  Charles Dodgson would have been a fascinating subject of study had he done nothing but produce the Alice books. One could spend years dissecting them and attempting to “know” the man whose phenomenal imagination made them possible. For those accomplishments alone, his name—or, rather, Lewis Carroll’s—would have been embedded in the popular psyche for generations to come. But he spent his lifetime bursting with acts of invention, none of which adds up to a cohesive whole.

  Where to begin? Dodgson can be credited with the idea of printing the title of a book on the spine of its dust jacket, which he conceived for The Hunting of the Snark. (That innovation proved fairly influential, to say the least.) He also developed, in his late forties, a system to correct flawed voting procedures that resulted in unjust outcomes; elements of his “Parliamentary and Proportional Representation” theory are still used in elections today. He also applied it to lawn tennis tournaments in which superior players were unfairly eliminated in early rounds, and in 1883 he published the treatise Lawn Tennis Tournaments: The True Method of Assigning Prizes. (This from the guy who wrote “Jabberwocky”?) Then there was his role as Common Room Curator at Christ Church, which was not curatorial in any ar
tistic sense; Dodgson spent an inordinate amount of time organizing the wine cellars, creating accounting systems, conducting audits, and doing other tedious but important administrative tasks.

  But wait, there’s more: Dodgson lobbied for government support to relocate to Australia or the Cape the residents of Tristan da Cunha, an archipelago off the coast of South Africa considered the most remote inhabited locale in the world. (He’d adopted this as a political cause after his youngest brother, Edwin, had served as an Anglican missionary there in the 1880s.) He wrote both “serious” poems and comic verse. He spoke out on the benefits of vaccinations. He invented a portable chessboard. He was a passionate theatergoer and had corresponded with W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan—as in Gilbert and Sullivan—about a collaboration to set his poems to music and produce a musical Alice. (It never happened.) He created sketches to improve a kind of three-wheeled cycle known as the velociman, making it easier to steer. Shunning celebrity himself, he enjoyed meeting famous people of his time such as Trollope, Tennyson, and Ruskin. Portmanteau words such as “chortle” and “galumph” originated with Dodgson. He invented a new kind of postal money order, double-sided adhesive strips, a method for right-margin justification on a typewriter, an Alice in Wonderland postage-stamp case, a variation on conventional backgammon, a mnemonic system known as Memoria Technica for recalling dates and events, a writing tablet called a Nyctograph that could be used for taking notes in darkness (take that, iPad!), brainteasers, and word games, including an early version of what endures today as Scrabble.

  Despite all that he accomplished in his life, he was always modest. Dodgson wanted his work, regardless of context, to stand alone. When a friend once inquired about what The Hunting of the Snark “means,” he replied in a letter, “I’m very much afraid I didn’t mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I’m glad to accept as the meaning of the book.” (Humpty Dumpty was just as cagey in explaining the meaning of his utterances. As he told Alice, “When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”)

  In his final years, Dodgson continued lecturing, sketching, writing letters, juggling work projects, and making time for the friends he cherished. He suffered increasingly from bronchial trouble, and he died on January 14, 1898, two weeks before his sixty-sixth birthday. He left instructions that his funeral be “simple and inexpensive, avoiding all things which are merely done for show,” and that there be “no expensive monument. I should prefer a small plain head-stone.”

  As someone who had always drawn gossip with what might gently be called an unconventional lifestyle, Dodgson did little to dispel the rumors that swirled around him. Despite ugly whispers about his relations with children, he gave widely to charities that advocated on their behalf—and kept all his donations private. He supported more than two dozen child-welfare organizations, and was so generous in giving away money that he incurred debt; a bank manager had to set limits on his overdrafts. As Morton N. Cohen noted in his excellent 1995 biography, Lewis Carroll, Dodgson never judged himself based on the opinions of others:

  Charles recognized earlier than one might suppose that his inner springs differed from most men’s, that his heart beat to a different drum, that in order to be true to himself he would be compelled to lead a life that was not only outside the norm but would come under particular scrutiny and raise suspicions, one not generally condoned and subject to severe reprimand, sneers, lampoons, and ridicule. Be that as it may, he determined to follow his own star in spite of raised eyebrows and possible social censure. “Let them talk” was his answer; his own conscience would be his only judge.

  “People want Carroll to be some sort of mad hatter,” the chairman of the UK Lewis Carroll Society said in a 2010 interview. “They find it difficult that somebody who could write something as crazy as Alice in Wonderland could still be a jolly decent chap.”

  He was a profligate spender who smoked forty cigars a day

  Chapter 5

  Mark Twain & SAMUEL CLEMENS

  How the protean Samuel Clemens became the world’s most famous literary alias will never be known for sure. Sly and droll, never one to shy away from the making of his own myth, Clemens claimed that his pen name derived from the years he spent working on riverboats, where water at a depth of two fathoms, or twelve feet, was considered safe for the boat to pass over. This distance was measured on a sounding line, a length of rope with lead on the end. The crew would call out, “Mark twain!” (meaning the mark on the line was at two fathoms) to indicate clear passage.

  Look up the archaic word “twain” in the Oxford English Dictionary and you will find an interesting entry. The adjective is defined as “[o]ne more than one, two; forming a pair, twin.” “Consisting of two parts or elements; double, twofold.” “Separate, apart; estranged, at variance.” As in the eighteenth-century hymnal by the priest and Oxford tutor John Keble: “Five loaves had he, / And fishes twain.” Or, from the Shakespearean sonnet, “We two must be twain, / Although our undivided loves are one.” The noun is defined as “[t]wo persons or things identified contextually.” In a nautical context, “[t]wo fathoms. Esp. in mark twain, the two fathom mark on a sounding-line.”

  Clemens liked to explain that his appellation had been swiped from a man named Captain Isaiah Sellers—a well-known steamboat man and sometime river correspondent for New Orleans newspapers. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain wrote that the captain “was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them ‘MARK TWAIN,’ and give them to the New Orleans Picayune. They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable. . . . At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner’s discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands—a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.”

  There are other stories and legends as to how “Twain” came to be. Perhaps to varying degrees all versions are true, perhaps none. Some have ascribed to Clemens a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature; some have remarked on pseudonymity as a conventional choice for Victorian humorists, especially those tilted sharply toward satire. Perhaps both are true. One thing is beyond dispute: Twain is the best-known author in America’s history, and his work is taught in every high school and college. With his pitch-perfect ear for the American vernacular, he is unrivaled (or, at least, secure among the all-time greats). “I am not an American,” he wrote in his notebook in 1897. “I am the American.”

  Adopting a pseudonym was for Clemens an exercise in playfulness, in fooling the public simply because he could. “Some people lie when they tell the truth,” Clemens once said in an interview. “I tell the truth lying.” (The poet, philosopher, and critic George Santayana once described truth as “a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light”—an aphorism that Twain would surely have endorsed.) And because he was someone who occasionally made enemies with his writing, having the pseudonymous cloak gave him a small measure of protective cover.

  The jocular master of obfuscation was savvy about his own brand, eventually registering his alias as a trademark. He was his own best publicist and marketing director. He even incorporated himself under his nom de plume, so he officially became Mark Twain, Inc. He also trademarked the slogan on a box of “Mark Twain”–branded cigars that read “MARK TWAIN: KNOWN BY EVERYONE—LIKED BY ALL.” Although this pen name was the one that stuck, it was not his first: he’d previously experimented with other names, including “W. Epaminondas Adrastrus Blab,” �
��Rambler,” “Josh,” “Sergeant Fathom,” and “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.”

  Among his contemporaries, the use of pseudonyms was not only common practice but considered a fashionable accessory. Humorists in particular adopted pen names: Charles Farrar Browne was a famous writer and lecturer who signed his writing as “Artemus Ward”; he was greatly admired by Abraham Lincoln and known for his delightfully awful puns. Other popular humorists included David Ross Locke, who wrote as “Petroleum V. Nasby”; and Robert Newell, whose pen name “Orpheus C. Kerr” was a pun on “office seeker.”

  “Mark Twain” was born in 1863, but Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, in a two-room rented cabin. The red-haired infant’s arrival was two months premature and he narrowly survived his birth. He spent his first four years frail and bedridden. Even his mother later admitted, “I could see no promise in him.”

  He was one of seven children, three of whom would die young, and was raised in the nearby riverside town of Hannibal. “If you are born in my state, you pronounce it Missourah,” he once said. “If you are not born in my state, you pronounce it Missouree. But if you are born in my state, and you have to live your entire life in my state, you pronounce it misery.”

  He adored his mother, Jane, and avoided his stern, aloof father, John, whom he could not remember ever having laughed. (John died of pneumonia when Clemens was eleven years old.) He was a high-strung child, a sleepwalker, and he suffered from nightmares. Yet he was as exuberant, magnetic, and funny as his father was austere. It’s no wonder that Clemens struggled to escape the provincial, restrictive milieu of his boyhood and went in search of a more expansive world. Despite being a poor student, he displayed an early knack for language and mimicry and a great love of storytelling. If he found little enchantment in his own house, he cultivated it endlessly through his fertile imagination. At sixteen, he was already working for a small newspaper, the Hannibal Western Union, and writing humorous sketches. And the first in a lifelong series of get-rich-quick schemes hooked him at the age of eighteen—he had a quixotic plan to sail the Amazon, where he would make a vast fortune in “a vegetable product of miraculous powers” that he’d read about. It was said to be “so nourishing and so strengthening that the natives of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up hill and down all day on a pinch of the powdered coca and require no other substance.” This claim about being able to tramp up and down hills all day was undoubtedly true. “Coca” is better known today as cocaine.