White-Stone Days

THE DIARIES OF LEWIS CARROLL (2 vols., 604 pp.)--Edited by Roger Lancelyn Green--Oxford ($7.50).

The Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was one of the busiest mathematical dons Oxford had ever known, but he was much too cranky to want to be well known. Letters addressed to him under his pen name,

"Lewis Carroll," went back to the post office with the indorsement "not known"; photographers were rebuffed ("Nothing would be more unpleasant . . . than to have my face known to strangers"); an editor of reference books was entreated "not to put my name in," and even articles "on myself as a writer" were ignored as "not healthy reading, I think."

To these testy quirks Parson Dodgson added a formidable string of prejudices, e.g., against ill-natured satire, preaching sermons, "bandying small talk with dull people," "jesting and flippancy on sacred topics," negligence on the part of college servants. He wrote dozens of indignant letters to the newspapers--once, at least, under the surprising pseudonym of "Dynamite." A staunch Tory, he liked nothing better than to lie awake making corrosive anagrams on the detested name of Liberal William Ewart Gladstone, e.g., "Wild agitator! Means well."

The wonder is that, with so much to dislike. Dodgson had any room left for pleasure. Yet his Diaries, now published for the first time, show that when Dodgson was not sunk deep in indignation, he was full of buoyant zest. If his Diaries make dull reading, it is partly because the author of the Diaries is not "Lewis Carroll" or even "dynamite." He is a shy professor who talked with a stammer and had an honest heart and a love of anonymity. About this man the Diaries are a mine of information.

Pursuit of Heaven. Dodgson was hardly out of Oxford (and back into it again as a lecturer) when he decided that the world was all vanity and vexation of spirit. He believed that God had wisely implanted in man a "yearning" towards the world-to-come. in which place alone would man find an "eternity of happiness . . . the only perfect happiness." Since, however, man could not escape a period of earthly sojourn, it was up to him to make it as much like Heaven as possible.

Strangely enough. Dodgson believed that the London theater was the nearest thing to Heaven. Again and again he went to performances of what must have been his favorite play. Shakespeare's Henry VIII--"the greatest theatrical treat I ever . . . expect to have." He loved this play 1) because it showed the transitory nature of worldly greatness. 2) because it dramatized his yearning for divine bliss. Dodgson "almost held my breath to watch" when the deposed Queen Katharine of Aragon saw in a vision "a troop of angelic forms" hovering about her. "So could I fancy (if the thought be not profane), would real angels seem to our mortal vision." he wrote. And when the queen awoke and found the vision gone. Dodgson all but "shed tears" as she cried aloud:

Spirits of peace, where are ye? Are ye

all gone, And leave me here in wretchedness behind ye?

As he grew older, Dodgson learned the art of finding or creating "spirits of peace" that alleviated earthly wretchedness. Alice in Wonderland is the bright vision by which he is known, but it is a mere fragment of the whole--a solitary chip off the imagination of a man who built wonderlands in every spare moment. First in his fancy came the new and magic world of photography, and only the large shadow thrown by Lewis Carroll has prevented the Rev. Mr. Dodgson from being famed as one of the greatest of early photographers. He was also fascinated by anagrams, cipher writing, riddles, word games, puns, fantastic figures and puzzles. He loved to stir up disagreement among mathematicians with such fanciful posers as his "Problem of the

Monkey and the Weight."-And his practical inventions included a plan for simplifying money orders, "a new and better rule for Lawn Tennis," a new form of backgammon, a folder for postage stamps. He was delighted to sit up "till 4 a.m., over a tempting problem sent me from New York, 'to find three equal rational-sided right-angled triangles' ... I found two . . . but could not find three."

Such activities gave him many happy days: When he was simply too happy for words, he would do as the Romans did and write in his diary: "I mark this day with a white stone, "t In so far as these Diaries cover his life (they have been shortened, and several volumes are lost), they show that Bachelor Dodgson was unspeakably happy on exactly 27 days. On 23 of these he had spent part or most of the day among the little girls to whom "Lewis Carroll" was dedicated.

Psychologists have had a lot to say about this Dodgsonian kink. What the Diaries make clear is that immature girls were, to Dodgson, the nearest thing on earth to angelic "spirits of peace." It is easy to imagine his indignation when, on taking a great fancy to little Alice Liddell and her sisters (daughters of the dean of his own college, Christ Church), he was accused by gossips of chasing "the governess. Miss Prickett."

Bachelor's Bliss. Dodgson cultivated little girls as methodically as he worked out mathematical puzzles. Sometimes he met them in the homes of friends, often he picked them up in parks and on beaches. If he liked them, he went straight to their mothers, bowed politely and asked permission to take them for walks or to pantomimes. Then he began "taming" them, i.e., drawing them into intimate friendship. His Diaries record the "taming" of scores of little girls, a few of whom created the rare "whitestone" days in the life of the visionary mathematician. But he seems to have preferred quantity to quality. In 1877 he records and cites by name and nickname a record haul--35 tamed or half-tamed little girls in the course of one short summer holiday. He also records the most shocking blunder of his life--chastely kissing little "Atty" Owen, a "child" who turned out to be 17. "Mrs. Owen treats the matter quite seriously! She adds, 'We shall take care it does not recur.' "

Mrs. Owen was not the only mother who was frightened by Parson Dodgson's passion for "the sweet relief of girl society." Nor can the mothers be blamed, for the Rev. Mr. Dodgson's way with "angels" was not orthodox. "Are they kiss-able?" he would write gaily to a mother. "I hope you won't be shocked at the question, but nearly all my girl friends ... are now on those terms with me (who am now 64). With girls . . . over fourteen ... I usually ask the mother's leave."

By the time Charles Dodgson died, in 1898, he had seen dozens of his kissable angels grow up into wives and mothers--not one of whom ever so much as hinted that life-with-Dodgson was anything but sheer heaven. He tamed angels to the very end, but in his last years the beautiful abstractions of algebraic logic became equally attractive to him. Three months before his death he marked with a white stone a day when he had not seen a little girl at all. His reason: "I have actually superseded the rules discovered yesterday" for "dividing a number by 9, by mere addition and subtraction."

-Given a monkey and an equivalent weight, one at each end of a rope running frictionless over a pulley attached to the ceiling, what would happen if the monkey tried to climb up the rope? Dodgson dodged a firm answer, t A Roman symbol for a day of auspicious good fortune.

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