Books: 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?