Angel in the Parlor (29 page)

Of what is this nonsense made? When John Newbery published
Mother Goose's Melody
in 1760, the rhymes were already old. Nevertheless, we find in them a highly domesticated society with customs similar to our own—courtships, weddings, feasts, fashions, and funerals—but with this difference: everything is alive and can speak for itself. The moment you allow your dishes and spoons to elope and your cats and mice to converse, all social conventions are turned on their heads. Dogs read newspapers, spiders have parlors, hens long for shoes, pots play with ladles, flies marry bumblebees, wrens conduct funerals, hawks build churches, barbers shave pigs, and ladies fall in love, not with the barber, but with the pig. Everything is alive and anything can happen:

Hoddley, poddley, puddle and fogs
,

Cats are to marry the poodle dogs;

Cats in blue jackets and dogs in red hats,

What will become of the mice and the rats?
⁵

The meter in this little poem would do any poet proud. It skips along in anapests, a foot that Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll made good use of many years later. Even the meaningless “hoddley, poddley, puddle and fogs” dances in strict time. That well-regulated babble is as essential to the poem as abracadabra to the magician. Like the wizard's charmed circle, it draws a boundary between the game and the real world and lets us make light of the most dreadful events:

The cat she seized the rat by the crown,

Heigh ho! says Rowley,

The kittens they pulled the little mouse down.

With a rowley, powley, gammon and spinach,

Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley.
⁶

Some fine books have been written on the connections between nonsense and play, and I recommend them to you.
⁷
My task here is much humbler: to look at two of my favorite nonsense writers for children, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and to consider a few of the ways they can teach writers how to start on the downward path to wisdom. It's not the wisdom of Solomon we're after here, but Blake's wise foolishness: “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”
⁸
Perhaps if I ever translate the babble on my aunt's postcard, I'll find her saying that she's having a wonderful time in the Garden of Eden, and the roses are lovely but not as fragrant as the ones in her garden in Detroit. I wish this revelation about the roses would turn out to be true. I wish paradise was all around us and finding it was as easy as recognizing it. I hope Blake is right when he says, “If the doors of perception were cleaned every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
⁹
The proper name of that celestial cleaning person is Faith, but perhaps the nickname for Faith is Nonsense.

Eighty-six years after the publication of
Mother Goose's Melody,
Edward Lear published his first book of nonsense poems and was dismayed when reviewers thought he had merely recycled Mother Goose. In a letter he writes, “I was disgusted at the
Saturday Review
Dec. 21 talking of the Nonsense verses being ‘anonymous, & a reprint of old nursery rhymes,' tho' they gave ‘Mr. Lear credit for a persistent absurdity.' I wish I could have all the credit due to me, small as that may be.” And he adds, “If you are ever asked about that Book of Nonsense, remember I made
all
the verses: except two lines of two of them … I wish someone would review it properly & funnily.”
¹⁰
Lear gave himself the title of “Lord High bosh and nonsense producer.”
¹¹
In 1865, twenty years after Lear's first book of nonsense poems appeared, Lewis Carroll published
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
and now if in some heavenly roll call the Lord High bosh and nonsense producer were summoned, I am sure both Lear and Carroll would rise to answer.

Though Lear by profession was a painter of landscapes and birds, and Lewis Carroll, alias Charles Dodgson, was an Oxford don and a logician, there are important similarities—important, I think, to the making of nonsense. Neither man ever married, but both greatly enjoyed the company of children and wrote their best work to please their child friends. Lewis Carroll told many stories to Alice Liddell and her sisters long before he told the story that was to make him famous. The grown-up Alice Liddell gave this description of Carroll the storyteller:

We used to sit on the big sofa on each side of him while he told us stories, illustrating them by pencil or ink drawings as he went along.… He seemed to have an endless store of these fantastical tales, which he made up as he told them.… They were not always entirely new. Sometimes they were new versions of old stories; sometimes they started on the old basis, but grew into new tales owing to the frequent interruptions which opened up fresh and undreamed-of possibilities.
¹²

And Gertrude Chataway, another child friend of Carroll's, remembers:

One thing that made his stories particularly charming to a child was that he often took his cue from her remarks—a question would set him off on quite a new trail of ideas, so that one felt one had somehow helped to make the story, and it seemed a personal possession.
¹³

Lear too was the “Adopty Duncle” of children whom he met on his travels or the children of friends with whom he stayed. Daisy Terry, recalling how she met Lear at a hotel, gives us a picture of a man who “glowed, bubbled and twinkled,” and sang her “The Owl and the Pussy-cat,” and every day left on the lunch plate for her brother and herself a new letter of a nonsense alphabet, which was later published under the title, “The Absolutely Abstemious Ass.”
¹⁴
The limericks in Lear's first book of nonsense were composed for the grandchildren of Lord Derby, who had commissioned him to draw the birds and animals in his private menagerie. Lear lived on his patron's estate during this time but took his meals with the servants. A friend of Lear's recalls how his sense of humor got him out of the servant's hall into society:

Old Lord Derby liked to have his grandsons' company after dinner, and one day complained that they constantly left him as soon as dinner was over. Their reply was, “It is so much more amusing downstairs!” “Why?” “Oh, because that young fellow in the steward's room who is drawing the birds for you is such good company, and we like to go and hear him talk.”

Like a wise man, instead of scolding them and after full inquiry, he invited Lear to dine upstairs instead of in the steward's room, and not only Lord Derby, but all his friends were equally delighted with him.
¹⁵

If you want to play the game of nonsense, the best way to start is by playing with words. Imagine that nonsense is like hopscotch and to reach the first square you must invent twenty-five words, all recognizable as parts of speech. That is, the reader or listener must be able to recognize a verb, an adjective, and so on. To Lear, the gift for playing with language came so easily that it overflows from his poems into his letters. Of the weather he writes, “The day is highly beastly & squondangerlous” and “The views over the harbour are of the most clipfombious and ompsiquillious nature.”
¹⁶
From his “Nonsense Cookery” you may learn how to make crumbobblious cutlets and an amblongus pie—easy, if you can find an amblongus. And what is an amblongus? Lear never tells. It is not customary for a writer of recipes to stop and define his ingredients; he merely tells you what to do with them. If you invent imaginary things, you must also invent names for them. Lear's long poem “The Quangle Wangle's Hat” introduces a congerie of imaginary creatures so matter-of-factly that you feel in some far corner of the known world they must have always existed:

I.

On the top of the Crumpetty Tree

The Quangle Wangle sat
,

But his face you could not see,

On account of his Beaver Hat
.

For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide
,

With ribbons and bibbons on every side
,

And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace
,

So that nobody ever could see the face

Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

…

And besides, to the Crumpetty Tree

Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl;

The Snail and the Bumble-Bee,

The Frog and the Fimble Fowl

(The Fimble Fowl, with a Corkscrew leg);

And all of them said, “We humbly beg

We may build our homes on your lovely Hat,
—

Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that!

Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!
”

V.

And the Golden Grouse came there,

And the Pobble who has no toes
,

And the small Olympian Bear,

And the Dong with a luminous nose
.

And the Blue Baboon who played the flute
,

And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute
,

And the Attery Squash, and the Bisky Bat,
—

All came and built on the lovely Hat

Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.
¹⁷

The Pobble, the Attery
*
Squash, the Bisky Bat—fantastic creatures all—could I have met them in dreams? Not likely. There's nothing dreamlike about their appearance here. Strict meter and form keep each thing in its place, much as the squares in hopscotch order the moves of the players. None of these images are allowed to run together, the way images do in dreams; they are introduced, one by one, in a stanza that is both a litany and a catalog.

Lear writes in conventional forms about unconventional things. A useful exercise for writers who wish to do the same is the nonsense recipe. The conventions are familiar enough. Turn to any cookbook:
combine and mix well, chop, season the mixture with, beat these ingredients until they are blended.
Following a complicated recipe always makes me feel a little like a magician preparing a potion. Lear's recipe for Gosky Patties persuades me that the connection between cooking and magic is closer than Julia Child would have us believe:

TO MAKE GOSKY PATTIES

Take a pig three or four years of age, and tie him by the off hind-leg to a post. Place 5 pounds of currants, 3 of sugar, 2 pecks of peas, 18 roast chestnuts, a candle, and 6 bushels of turnips, within his reach: if he eats these, constantly provide him with more.

Then procure some cream, some slices of Cheshire cheese, 4 quires of foolscap paper, and a packet of black pins. Work the whole into a paste, and spread it out to dry on a sheet of clean brown waterproof linen.

When the paste is perfectly dry, but not before, proceed to beat the pig violently with the handle of a large broom. If he squeals, beat him again.

Visit the paste and beat the pig alternately for some days, and ascertain if, at the end of that period, the whole is about to turn into Gosky Patties.

If it does not then, it never will; and in that case the pig may be let loose, and the whole process may be considered as finished.
¹⁸

If you play by the rules—that is, if you follow the rules of syntax and grammar and if you write in a regular meter and stanza form—you can walk the thin line between chaos and nonsense without a qualm. When Lewis Carroll included “Jabberwock” in
Through the Looking Glass,
he could scarcely have imagined what James Joyce would borrow and transform in
Finnegan's Wake.
For every unfamiliar word in “Jabberwock,” Carroll has not only a definition but an explanation:

'
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogroves
,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

“
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!
”
¹⁹

Some of Carroll's neologisms are, like Lear's Quangle Wangle, names for things that never were. Having never seen a tove, I take Carroll's word for it that it is something like a badger, a lizard, and a corkscrew, which nests under sundials and lives on cheese. But “slithy” is an invention of a different kind. It means lithe and slimy. It is, we are told, like a portmanteau; there are two meanings packed up into one word. Nonsense was never so clearly taught, I think, as in this passage from Carroll's introduction to
The Hunting of the Snark:

… take the two words “fuming” and “furious.” Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If your thoughts incline ever so little towards “fuming,” you will say “fuming-furious”; if they turn, by even a hair's breadth, towards “furious,” you will say “furious-fuming”; but if you have that rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious.”
²⁰

Playing with words leads to playing on words and a whole range of puns, malapropisms, and intentional misunderstandings. One of the commonest misunderstandings among children—and one that Carroll makes use of—is taking a figure of speech literally. When my son was about five or six, we were finishing our dinner at a restaurant and the waiter glided over to our table and magnanimously announced, “Dessert is on the house.” A look of panic came over my son's face. Was that dish of chocolate ice cream worth the danger of scaling Howard Johnson's orange roof? Such logical misunderstandings run through both the Alice books. In
Through the Looking Glass,
the White King asks Alice if she can see either of his messengers on the road: