Nonfiction
Lewis Carroll:
A Biography
By Morton N. Cohen. Knopf. 577 pp. Illustrated. $35.00
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the creator of the most unusual children's books of the 19th century, seemed a curious figure to his contemporaries, and time has not simplified him. Even as a child he was remarkable: he read "The Pilgrim's Progress" when he was seven, composed accomplished humorous verse while still an adolescent and demonstrated an extraordinary talent for advanced mathematics.
In 1855, at the age of 24, he was appointed Mathematical Lecturer at Oxford University. Despite his obvious talents, Dodgson struck many of his colleagues as eccentric. In most groups he was awkward or diffident, often giving the impression that he longed to be somewhere else.
That somewhere else frequently involved children. Dodgson, who never married, had a lifelong fascination with them. He sought them out, invented games for them, took their portraits (clothed and sometimes nude) and most famously, told them stories. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland began as one such tale, told to several young sisters during a summer outing in 1862. Several years later Dodgson published a much expanded version, using the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, and despite the book's immediate critical and popular success he refused to publicly identify himself as the author.
Was he a pedophile? Morton Cohen thinks not, and is quietly persuasive. This shrewd, sympathetic, superbly researched biography illuminates many corners of Dodgson's life, offers a sharp reading of his works and gives a vivid panorama of academic and literary life in Victorian England. It is the best portrait we have yet had of this brilliant, sad, shy man, who seemed to come fully alive only in the presence of children.
On the Eve of the Millennium:
The Future of Democracy Through an Age of Unreason
By Conor Cruise O'Brien. Martin Kessler Books/The Free Press. 166 pp. $12.00 trade paperback
Conor Cruise O'Brien, a journalist, politician and historian, has recently taken a close, long look at the state of the world, and what he has seen appalls him. The causes of his alarm are not, however, what one might expect: there's little in these pages about, say, the degradation of the environment, or the collapse of former nations into warring factions.
O'Brien takes it for granted that the 18th Century Enlightenment was a watershed in human history, the point at which a belief in rationality, in individual worth, in free expression, most strongly asserted itself against a variety of enemies. Democracy, he argues, is the most enduring expression of the Enlightenment. And it is now coming under attack by a loose coalition of fundamentalist religious groups, what he dubs an "Alliance for the Repeal of the Enlightenment."
At the forefront of this Alliance O'Brien places Pope John Paul II. He detects, in the Pope's overtures to Islamic groups, in what he perceives as a hostility to women and an adamant opposition to contraception shared by the Catholic Church and some Islamic states, a large and very dangerous conspiracy to repeal many of the essential rights of the individual. Other symptoms of decay concern him: the decline of democracy into "an endless series of popularity contests," the "witless complacency" of many citizens of democratic nations, and the moral degeneration of the West, as demonstrated by the rise of such academic hobbyhorses as multiculturalism, political correctness and "similar intellectual delights."
On the Eve of the Millennium comprises a series of lectures O'Brien delivered on radio in Canada in 1994, and their origin is frequently apparent: these are passionate, often intensely provocative pieces, composed of assertions and sweeping statements rather than carefully annotated ideas. However, the work accomplishes what I suspect O'Brien set out to do: arouse us, challenge us, stimulate the spread of some form of meaningful debate. He offers few answers, preferring instead to urge us to use the advent of the next century as an occasion for "self-questioning, for rational apprehension, above all for trying to clear our heads, before it is too late," before the violent irrationalities of an earlier time triumphantly return.
The All-American
Skin Game,
or, The Decoy of Race
By Stanley Crouch. Pantheon. 267 pp. $24.00
Whether he's writing about race and the Simpson trial, the careers of Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, the films of Quentin Tarantino, the sociology of W.E.B. DuBois or the novels of Saul Bellow, Crouch is always working, with considerable zest, to discard layers of cant and confusion, to return every debate to first causes, to identify the essential features of any question.
Crouch first gained recognition for his writings on jazz, and there is a wonderful improvisational energy to his prose, a free flowing and very deft interweaving of precise observation and frank autobiography. There are also echoes in his prose of the two writers he most admires, Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison.
Throughout these pieces Crouch is at pains to remind his readers that our increasingly dogmatic and ill-formed concepts of race are distracting us from coming to grips with the core problems we face. He is, nonetheless, guardedly optimistic: "It seems to me that we are rising, head first...to a world far more complex and rewarding." If that's so, it very likely owes something to the bracing clarity and force of Stanley Crouch's work.
