differential equations
by Douglas Messerli
by Douglas Messerli
Lily Blau (developed in collaboration with Sydney Gallas) The Missing Pages of Lewis Carroll / Pasadena, California, The Theatre at Boston Court / the performance I saw was on Sunday, February 8, 2015
It has long been known that certain pages of
the private journals of Charles Ludwidge Dodgson were excised from the year
1863. One page was apparently removed by Dodgson himself, perhaps feeling that
he had expressed something too awkwardly or emphatically; another missing page
was been accounted for by his habit of mis-numbering the pages of his journals.
Yet the pages of June 27-29 of 1863 were clearly razored out, and soon after
that date it appears that his formerly close relations with the Liddell family,
whose daughters, particularly Alice, he photographed, came to an end. It is
also presumed that the Alice of his great book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, were based on
Alice Liddell—although there is much evidence to the contrary—and, since his
death, rumors have consistently arisen that, whether consummated or not,
Dodgson had had a pedophilic relationship with the young girl. In fact, it may
have been his nieces who later removed the pages from his journal, as they and
other family members attempted to wipe away nearly all evidence of Dodgson’s
relationships with women, including older women, feeling it might color the
popularity of his pseudonymous publications under the name of Lewis Carroll, in
which they also had a financial stake.Yet none of the theories surrounding Liddell and Dodgson’s relationship has ever been established, and there appears to be other evidence that he might have been attracted to Alice’s older sister or that he was courting the girls’ governess at the time of the rupture between him and the Liddells. The break in social intercourse may even have had more to do with university politics and his lack of support for Dean Henry Liddell than with his relationship with the Liddell children. The fact that he gave up photography in the same year of Alice’s marriage to the cricket-player, Ronald Hargreaves, also may have nothing at all to do with his relationship to the girl.
Yet clearly, his photographs, if nothing
else, reveal a fondness for the young Liddell daughter, and there are clearly
many links, direct and indirect, that connect the Alice of his stories with the
child whom he photographed. Is it necessarily shocking or perverse to believe
that he simply did find Alice quite attractive and even contemplated, in a day
in which youthful marriages were not uncommon,
proposing marriage to her?
The new play by Lily Blau at Pasadena’s
The Theatre at Boston Court, in various ways, explores all the possible
alternatives without dismissing any of them. And that, in turn, is what
elevates this work from a simple piece of gossipy sleuthing to a drama that, inevitably,
given what we know to be the themes of Dodgson’s Lewis Carroll works,
transforms it into a mediation on the uncertainty of all knowledge,
particularly within an age in which surety was seen as a necessity for adult
action. The British Victorians were necessarily confident—even smug—in their
acquisitions of colonies, explorations of new territories, and belief in their
societal invincibleness.
Dodgson, as least as performed by the
memorable actor, Leo Marks, was anything but confident. A man who stuttered in
front of most adults; a mathematician who was perceived by many to be a
superior intellect to those such as this play’s M. Lapin, who held higher
positions in his department; the son of a minister, who himself preached,
despite his obvious difficulties, about personal sin; and, self-evidently, a
natural skeptic who was graced, nonetheless, with humility, the Dodgson of
Blau’s play seems happier at the children’s table where he mightn’t be expected
to show a Victorian stiff upper lip.
The Dodgson of this play clearly is
delighted by Alice (Corryn Cummins), and is desperately in love with her; apparently, he has done nothing to shame
himself—except, of course, in his own imagination. But there, to use
Shakespeare’s old saw, “lies the rub.” Even if he has done nothing wrong, how
can he expect to get away with his sinful thoughts, plagued by his
religiousity, his fear of being “found out” as a social fraud, and his
terror—at least in this telling—of breaking with the conformities of his social
position? Certainly, an Oxford professor might feel perfectly free to express a
certain amount of eccentricities: Dodgson could “play” with photography, tinker
with toys, write up imagined tales, create linguistically tongue-tying poems
(which, oddly enough, The Missing Pages does
not really explore, despite Dodgson’s inability to speak straightforwardly),
even, on occasion, buy his young pupils presents, including a bright blue dress
which he awards Alice so that she might match the girl in his story books; but
there were limits that even differential calculus might demonstrate to him. As
differential equations made clear, for example, “the derivative of the momentum
of a body equals the force applied to the body.” Accordingly, whenever Alice
moved toward him, he moved further into the distance. But what he had not
accounted for is that, as she grew older, Alice might apply a force to his body
that could not equal his resistance.
Indeed, some sources, as I have suggested,
hint that his relationship with the Liddells was ended by the indignant parents
when it became clear that Alice had fallen in love with Dodgson, or, perhaps,
after Dodgson determined he could no longer resist, he asked for her hand in
marriage.
In Blau’s play these dilemmas are
melodramatized through warnings of his fellow professor, Lapin (Jeff Marlow), co-conspiring
with the white rabbit of his tale. Mrs. Liddell (Erica Hanrahan-Ball), catching up her visitor with a
mother’s insight every time he might even imagine stealing a kiss or, more
terrifyingly, conjure up an image of actual rape, becomes the Red Queen
demanding his head be chopped off. 
Blau’s play, which supposedly occurs on the
day when Alice has planned a visit to Dodgson for one last photograph before
she marries Hargreaves, is a sad one, not only because it calls up all the
quandaries of reality and imagination that, no matter how he actually lived his
life, Dodgson surely faced, but because it finally reveals that his great
failure in life was not doing some dreadful deed, but doing nothing. Alice
gently faults him not for becoming a gray-haired old man, but for refusing to
become the rather young and dashing man who unintentionally (or perhaps
intentionally) courted her as a child, and with whom she fell in love. Like Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice—whose crime is not that
he lusts after the love of another of his own sex, but that he concentrates
that unrealizable love upon the visage of a boy—Dodgson’s failure was not that
he fell in love with a bright young girl, but that he did not reasonably act upon it. If he truly
loved her, mightn’t he have simply waited for a few years to her to have become
a woman and proposed the marriage she also sought? Or did he, her parents
horrified by the ilmplications ?Or did he refuse her, after all, because he was
a pedophile who could love only girls of a certain age?
The playwright proffers no answer, but
hints at it through the apparent emptiness of Dodgson’s life. In the end, after
giving up even his hobby, he has little life left as Dodgson, having become a
literary figure, instead, for all times, dying as a nonexistent being (Lewis
Carroll) who expressed sorrow for having written his books, a man who looked
perhaps too deeply into a world which existed, as brilliant as it was, only in
his imagination.
Los Angeles, February 9, 2015
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