11

The Game and the Garden: The Lively Art of Nonsense

I once had an aunt whom everyone admired as a fountain of good sense, except in matters of travel. She bought tickets to well-known places—Paris, Bermuda, Berlin—but she seemed never to arrive in them, for on her postcards she always wrote of places that could never be found on any map. Portapooka. Pannyfanny Islands. And what she did in these places was a perfect mystery:

Arrived in Portapooka last night and had a delicious feel of mesh bears. Have taught a new crock to take me up in the morning.

My mother explained to me that my aunt’s secret life in these places was the result of her bad handwriting, and when we’d translated this nonsense we would find out what she’d really been up to.

Arrived in Puerto Rico last night and had a delicious meal of fresh pears. Have bought a new clock to wake me up in the morning.

I found her nonsense much more entertaining than her sense. How delightful to feel a mesh bear and to travel by crock every morning! Even after the misunderstanding was explained to me, her encounters with crocks and bears seemed quite as real as her purchase of clocks and pears, perhaps because I had already picked up the habit of hiding common sense with nonsense. If, for example, our family was entertaining guests and either my sister or I saw anything resembling a cockroach, we had been instructed to say, “There is a Turkish mosquito in the pantry.” Because of the braces on her teeth, my sister found it hard to close her mouth and sometimes during conversation would sit with it hanging open. This gave her a vacant air that did not at all reflect the liveliness of her mind. Whoever noticed this first was to say, “Good morning, Mrs. Smith,” at which signal it would snap shut like a steel trap. If I chattered too much in the presence of guests, anyone in on our game would say, “Go fetch the long matches,” and I instantly fell silent—and fetched nothing.

Sometimes a single remark became shorthand for a complicated event that we all remembered. Who could forget the day my father nearly peeled the paint off an adjacent car while trying to park his own? Who could forget my aunt calling out from the back seat, “You haven’t got space for a sheet of toilet paper!” Custom shortened her advice to a single phrase, and what made sense to us must have confounded the sideswiping taxi driver to whom my aunt shouted, over the roar of traffic in downtown Detroit, “Toilet paper! For God’s sake, toilet paper!” Though she may never have read Through the Looking Glass, my aunt was a faithful disciple of Humpty Dumpty, who tells Alice, “When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”¹

I especially treasured one postcard from my aunt that no one could ever reduce to sense. The picture showed a formal garden: an elegant maze of shaped hedges, arbors, beds of herbs and flowers. On the reverse side she had scrawled her message:

You’d love this place. The roaring shillilies san sea whet all and the pappasnippigoo are zooming.

It’s right and fitting that a sensible garden and a nonsensical message should be two sides of a single card. Nonsense is both logical and absurd, like the games we play as children. Some years ago I was out walking and found myself treading on a game of hopscotch, chalked out on twelve squares. The last square, which we called “Home” when I played the game, was marked “Heaven” in this one. I am told by those who play this version of hopscotch that it’s harder to get into heaven than to go home. You must throw your stone into heaven, jump to the eleventh square, pick up the stone, jump to the spot where it landed, and recite at top speed the alphabet forward and backward, your name, address, and telephone number, your age, and the name of your boyfriend or girlfriend. If I were to tell a clergyman that I got into heaven by throwing a stone into it, he would say, “Nonsense!” In life, yes, but in the game, no. In the game it makes perfect sense. Nonsense too is a game, and a great part of learning to write it is learning to play it.

When I was little and the prospect of reaching heaven seemed closer than it does now, I heard the story of the Minotaur, half man, half bull, whom King Minos kept in a maze and to whom every year the most beautiful young Athenians were sacrificed. I didn’t know that when Theseus killed the Minotaur, the Athenians celebrated by drawing the maze on the ground and dancing through it. I didn’t know that hopscotch may have come down to us from that custom.² Where else but in children’s games and nursery rhymes do the ancient and the modern so amiably link hands?

The grandmother of nonsense is Mother Goose, and many a modern poet writing for adults has acknowledged his debt to her. Auden praises her songs for being almost infallible as memorable speech. Roethke, defending the difficult poems in his sequence, “The Lost Son,” claims for their literary ancestors German and English folk literature, “particularly Mother Goose.”³ But none praises her so well, I think, as Muriel Rukeyser:

Mother Goose does not come into our lives when we are young children just having learned to speak. She is there before, before language. We come to language through her, and to mystery and laughter and action. To poetry. She is only one of many ways, of course, and she has her equivalent in all cultures.… It is this figure, Mother Goose, who bends over the early days of many of us … with her babble … It is syncopated, to both white children and black children, and must be read that way.… Who, having heard “Thislittlepigwenttomarket,” can say as an adult that he can’t get the rhythms of contemporary poets or Gerard Manley Hopkins?⁴

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:

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.

“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”²¹

The inappropriate word as a literary device comes into its own with Edward Lear. We have all heard people misuse words, often choosing not the right word but a word similar to it in sound. A passage from Lear’s “The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World” shows this device in its glory, with a few of Lear’s invented words thrown in for good measure:

The Moon was shining slobaciously from the star-bespangled sky, while her light irrigated the smooth and shiny sides and wings and backs of the Blue-Bottle-Flies with a peculiar and trivial splendor, while all Nature cheerfully responded to the cerulean and conspicuous circumstances.²²

The more high-flown the rhetoric, the greater the incongruity between what the writer seems to say and what he actually says.

When Lewis Carroll uses the wrong but similar-sounding word, he depends on our knowing the right word so that we can enjoy the incongruity, just as we enjoy the parody of a poem more when we know the original. In the Alice books, a word that seems wrong to the reader may be exactly the right word to the speaker. How the Liddell sisters must have enjoyed the Mock Turtle’s discussion of his schooling in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For them, a proper education included reading and writing; the different branches of arithmetic—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; geography; history, ancient and modern; Latin and Greek; drawing; sketching; and painting in oils. And what did the Mock Turtle study?

“Reeling and writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Ugli-fication, and Derision,”…

Alice … said, “What else had you to learn?”

“Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers,“—Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.”

“What was that like?” said Alice.

“Well, I can’t show it to you, myself,” the Mock Turtle said: “I’m too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.”²³

The Classical master, we are told, taught “Laughing and Grief,” and the lessons lasted “ten hours the first day … nine the next, and so on.” When Alice observes that this is a curious plan, the Gryphon explains, “That’s the reason they’re called lessons … because they lessen from day to day.”²⁴ The only connection between what the Mock Turtle studied and what the Liddell sisters studied is the sound of the words themselves. But in nonsense that connection is an essential one.

The secret heart of nonsense is the amiable incongruity. One of the ways I first discovered this was through a game, “Peter Coddle’s Trip.” The game involves a printed story and a pack of cards on which are named a miscellaneous assortment of things: a yellow nightcap, an insane bedbug, an intoxicated clam, an old hairbrush, a red wig, an elderly porcupine, and so on. The leader reads the story aloud until he comes to a blank. One of the players draws a card and what is written on that card fills the blank and becomes part of the story. The story describes Peter Coddle’s trip to New York, and if the player were to draw the cards I have just mentioned, Peter’s description of the Statue of Liberty would read as follows:

Squire Mildew wanted to go down to the Statue of Liberty, which loomed up down the bay like an elderly porcupine … As we came near the statue the hand holding the torch seemed about the size of an old hairbrush. We landed and went up into the head. On the way up we met some people coming down the narrow winding stairs; one of them said it was as close as an intoxicated clam. I thought the lights were no better than a red wig. From the head we had a splendid view. We saw a steamer passing out of the harbor; … she was going like an insane bedbug.²⁵

Literary nonsense differs from the game I’ve just described in this way: the nonsense writer needs a reason other than chance for linking incongruous things together. He needs an arbitrary convention that will free the words from the categories of everyday use and from our sense of what belongs with what. One of the most useful of these conventions is alliteration. In Through the Looking Glass, Alice plays a game that both Carroll and Lear use in their poetry:

“I love my love with an H,” Alice couldn’t help beginning, “because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous. I fed him with—with—Ham-sandwiches and Hay. His name is Haigha, and he lives——”

“He lives on the Hill,” the king remarked simply, without the least idea that he was joining in the game …²⁶

Lear builds many of his nonsense alphabets around alliteration, which leads him to some very odd combinations:

The Melodious Meritorious Mouse,

who played a merry minuet on the

Piano-forte.

The Visibly Vicious Vulture,

who wrote some Verses to a Veal-cutlet in a

Volume bound in Vellum.²⁷

Students in search of subjects for nonsense can turn to the yellow pages of the telephone directory and read the categories at the top of adjacent pages. In our directory I discovered a Burglar Bus, a Calculating Canvas, Chimney Churches, Cleaning Clergy, Dancing Dentists, Karate Kindergartens, and Musical Nurserymen. Sometimes when I bring nonsense poetry into a class of very sensible people, I say, “For the next hour I am going to ask you to make some changes in your vocabulary. Instead of the word door, I want you to use the word rainbow. Instead of the verb to open, please use the verb to skin. For the word light, please substitute the word cat. And for the verb to turn on, use the verb to hassle. Remember: the door is the rainbow, to open is to skin, the light is the cat, to turn on is to hassle. Now, in this new language please tell me to open the door and turn on the light.”

A deep silence follows. And then very slowly, somebody says, “Skin the rainbow and hassle the cat. Please.”

“Thank you. What else can you say about the door and the light?”

“The cat is by the rainbow.”

“The rainbow is already skinned,” adds another student.

Though we would sound like lunatics to a visitor, we understand each other. Following the rules of nonsense, we speak a common language. The most inspired example of this double talk I know occurs in a Spanish folk tale, “The Shepherd Who Laughed Last,” which I will quote nearly in full, since it is brief:

Tomas, the owner of a little roadside inn in Spain, loved to have a good laugh.…

One night a shepherd came to the inn.…

After he had served some wine to the shepherd, Tomas winked at his cronies.

“Here is one who will be easy to fool,” he whispered.

The others watched delightedly as Tomas, settling himself before the charcoal fire and lighting his pipe, said to the stranger:

“In this part of Spain, you know, we have different names for things. You had best learn them before you go any farther.… For example, here we call a bottle a Fat Boy. The blood pudding we call Johnny. The rooster we call the Singer; the hen, the Dancer; the cat, Our Neighbor; the chimney chain, Forbearance. We call the bed, Your Honor; the fire, Happiness; and the master of the house, Always With Us.”…

They were still laughing and the shepherd was still repeating the names when the inn closed for the night. Tomas went upstairs to bed, and then the shepherd lay down beside the fire to sleep. He kept one eye open, however, and when the black cat came in, he watched her. She went over to the fire for warmth and, getting too near it, set fire to the end of her tail. The pain maddened her, and yowling loudly, she began to climb up the chain into the chimney.

The shepherd rose, took two bottles of wine and the blood pudding from the cupboard, the hen and the rooster from their corner, and thrust them into his pouch.

Then walking to the door he called out:

“Arise, Always With Us, from the heights of Your Honor. For there goes Our Neighbor up Forbearance pursued by Happiness. As for the Fat Boys, Johnny, the Singer, and the Dancer, they go along the road with me!”

“What can the simpleton be saying?” Tomas thought opening his eyes for a moment. Then he turned over and went to sleep again.

And the shepherd unlatched the door and went off into the night, laughing.²⁸

Suppose all the story were lost except the shepherd’s final speech. What would we have? The private ravings of a madman? The broken speech of the brain damaged? In the first formal speech actress Patricia Neal gave after recovering from a stroke, she describes how she passed through nonsense while learning to speak again:

I became an expert at double-talk. Once when I was very cross with Roald, I said, “Get out! Get out! You … you jake my dioddles!” And instead of saying. “Tell me once more,” I would say, “Inject me again!”

A cigarette was an oblogan. “A dry martini” came out “a red hair dryer, please.” And so on. Mind you, this was after weeks of practice, when I was getting really good at talking.²⁹

The writer who uses double talk has taken a road that, followed far enough, leads to surrealism. It should come as no surprise that when André Breton wrote his pamphlet, What is Surrealism? in 1936, he named Lewis Carroll among its patron saints.³⁰ What especially interested Breton was Carroll’s ability to invent stories without knowing where they came from or where they would end: “Sometimes an idea comes at night, when I have had to get up and strike a light to note it down … but whenever or however it comes, it comes of itself. I cannot set invention going like a clock, by any voluntary winding up; nor do I believe that any original writing (and what other writing is worth preserving?) was ever so produced …”³¹ Breton tells an anecdote that would have delighted Carroll. “Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: THE POET IS WORKING.”³²

Breton recommended automatic writing as a way of bringing to the conscious act of writing the unconscious freedom of dreaming. “Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else.… Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written.”³³ In automatic writing, the freedom of association found in dreams becomes the ability to make connections between remote parts of one’s experience. Robert Bly calls this “leaping,” and what he says about “leaps” in poetry would have interested Lear and Carroll. “In a great ancient or modern poem, the considerable distance between the associations, the distance the spark has to leap, gives the lines their bottomless feeling, their space …”³⁴ He takes Wallace Stevens as an example of a poet in whose poems the content is the distance between what the poet was given as fact and what he made of it. The spectacle of a Yale commencement may have started Stevens writing “On the Manner of Addressing Clouds.” But what started with hoods and mortarboards ends up, in the poem, as “Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,” a line that Carroll and Lear would have admired.

God only knows what Kenneth Patchen was watching when he wrote “because the zebra-plant bore spotted cubs”:

He grabbed the beanpot off the clothesline

And poured hot maple syrup into his parade sneakers;

And still it was a mess! (Hear footnote above.)—

Like frantic horsemen trying to exchange nightgowns on a lake.

“Today,” announced the kindlingwood, “September begins.”

And the sinkstopper growled: “Wha-at! on April 10th!”

“It is a mite late this year,” admitted a swansnail,

Ruffling up its shell and trying ineffectually to scowl.

“Shut up!” commanded Grover Clevewater Giraffe. “Let’s

Everybody get on this here blade of grass;

Then the one with the handsomest neck will

Be given all the jellybuns. How’s that?”

The old philosopher slowly lowered his stone:

“Suppose,” he said, “you were a wisp of sour loneliness

Stuck to the wrong side of a life; would you right away

Have someone locked up for trying to lap your hand?

Someone, that is, who had spent thirty-five years

Pasting vile-tasting labels on cans in

A dog-meat factory. Yes, they say there are rooms;

That there are reasons; that things make sense … Yes, woof! woof!

But it will all come right; yes, it will end.

The last cruel wag to a cruel tale.

Ah, no … life is not a story that children

Should ever be allowed to hear about.”³⁵

Free of the order imposed by meter and rhyme, the images run together, as in a dream. Even the White Queen, who maintained she could believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast, might find herself taxed by Patchen. Believing the impossible isn’t easy. While sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office recently, I overheard a mother trying to entertain her young daughter with a game in a children’s magazine. The game was, How many things can you find wrong with this picture? I could not see the picture, but the conversation had me riveted.

MOTHER: What do you mean there’s nothing wrong with the picture? Look at the tree. It’s full of carrots.

CHILD: Maybe it’s a carrot tree.

MOTHER: You know carrots don’t grow on trees. Now, what’s wrong with the train?

CHILD: Nothing.

MOTHER: You don’t see it? The train has wings. Choochoo trains don’t have wings.

I felt sure the child knew the right answer, but who among us would not like to see a carrot tree or ride a train with wings? And I thought of the child Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, who muses on red roses and white roses, cream and pink and lavender roses. “But you could not have a green rose,” he tells himself, adding wistfully, “But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.”³⁶

Perhaps among the roaring shillilies and the pappasnippigoo on my aunt’s postcard, a green rose is growing. I’ve never been to the Garden of Nonsense to see for myself. But one night I dreamed myself in a very different garden, and persisting in my folly, like the fool in Blake’s proverb, I woke a little wiser. Since the dream took the shape of a story, let me tell you the story.

Once upon a time at the edge of town grew a garden about which I knew nothing except that some called it the Garden of Reason and I was forbidden to go there. Eve conversing with the serpent was not more curious than I, and I headed straight for the garden the first chance I got. The gatekeeper was a magician, and the gatehouse was his cottage. He let me into the house and told me I must wait to be admitted but I might sit at his table and drink a cup of tea while I waited. This I declined to do, as the table was cluttered with papers and dirty dishes, and I could not find a clean cup. Suddenly a young woman rushed in, clutching a book and pounding the title with her fist: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SHEILA HOROWITZ.

“Don’t tell me this is the way it’s got to be!” she shouted. “Tell me there’s more to my life than this book!”

The magician folded his hands over his chest, unmoved. If to be admitted I had to accept the magician’s version of my life, then I would go back the way I came. But now I saw that the front door had vanished and the only door open to me led into the garden itself. The magician turned his back on me for an instant, and I jumped up and fled through the door.

The garden was as formal as that in my aunt’s picture: a maze of hedges, beds of herbs, long walks under wisteria arbors. But hers was empty and this one was full of people. I knew from their clothes that some had come here a long time ago. Those old men in Greek togas—how many hundreds of years had they wandered these paths? That handsome woman in flowered brocade skirts and a farthingale—what was she looking for? Weren’t we all looking for the same thing, the way out?

Far behind me I could hear the magician beating down bowers and running through rosebeds, shouting, “You have not been admitted! You have not been admitted!” Suddenly I spied two familiar figures ahead of me, Martin and Alice Provensen, who in our waking lives had just finished the illustrations for our book A Visit to William Blake’s Inn.

“If we don’t hurry, the magician will catch us,” I said.

“If we don’t look back,” said Alice, “the magician won’t catch us.”

A high, smooth wall let us know we had reached the back boundary of the garden; reason has its limits. Against the wall leaned an old ladder, which was not even suitable for apple picking; the rungs were broken.

“Let’s put our feet where the rungs were,” suggested Martin.

My common sense said, What nonsense! But my uncommon sense whispered, If a fool persists——

One by one, under our feet, the rungs healed themselves and grew whole enough to hold us. Now we stood on top of the wall. Facing us was an angel so tall that we brushed the hem of its gown like grasshoppers.

“You are free,” said the angel. It pointed over trees and fields, to the far-off world-town we’d started from, sparkling on the horizon. Sunlight slanted from its sleeve, touched down in the world-town. On that broad road of sunlight we slid like children playing, all the way back to the beginning.

* Attery: Venomous, poisonous. (C.E.D.)