THE IMAGINATION OF LEWIS CARROLLWilliam Todd Seabrook. Rose Metal Press, $12 chapbook (44p) ISBN 978-0-9887645-7-6
A few of
the beloved characters in Wonderland make cameos in The Imagination of Lewis Carroll, but William Todd Seabrook focuses
the chapbook on Carroll’s life outside his writings. As the collected shorts reveal, however, this
separation is not entirely possible. We
see Carroll split between two lives, that of logician and deacon Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson and that of the household name and pseudonym Lewis
Carroll. We quickly see that he feels
his true identity is as Carroll.
Seabrook
is not writing biography. The shorts
break into the fantastic and the satirical, creating what might be described as
biography-fueled imagination. We see
Carroll as prankster, chess player, game inventor, dueler, opium user,
photographer, and control freak. We see
his inappropriate attachment to Alice Liddell.
We see him run from the Jabberwocky and recoil from the Dodo, as the Red
King lurks in the corners.
Appropriately, the book often dwells in nonsense, strange logic, and
dark humor. Carroll’s watches include
one the runs fast, one that runs backwards, one stuck at 8:34 that he checks
twice a day, and one made of paper gifted to him by Alice. When he mistakes a public execution for a
public performance, he bursts into applause thinking, “What great minds we
have…to come up with such delight.” He
gives a three-day sermon that ends in a two-minute amen. When a Bishop tells him his jokes alone won’t
get him into heaven, he replies, “That is if you assume that this life is not
already a joke, Your Excellency.” And one
short is written entirely backwards, the title mirroring the previous page.
But as
the shorts develop, we see that beyond the play and the Wonderland-ian turns,
Carroll is a disconnected man. When
reflecting on a trick he performs with an apple that leaves tiny holes in the
skin, he thinks: “But children didn’t often see those imperfections, unlike the
harsh, penetrating eyes of an adult.” In
one of the most poignant and complicated shorts, “The Solutions of Lewis
Carroll,” he develops a nude photo of Alice Liddell – “He did not wear gloves,
as he had no need to in the presence of Alice” – and discusses eternal
life. Alice wants Carroll to take a
picture of himself as well so he can also live on forever. When she says, “At some point you’ll be the
only one who doesn’t know what it’s like to die,” Carroll replies, “Better to
be dead than to be lonely.”
This mix
of the dark with the ridiculous sets the perfect tone for the project. The Imagination of Lewis Carroll is a quick and interesting read,
and another beautifully made chapbook with the solid and well-crafted fiction
that Rose Metal Press is known for. (August 2014)
Purchase
The Imagination of Lewis Carroll HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Christy Crutchfield is the author
of the novel How to Catch a Coyote. Her work has appeared in Mississippi
Review online, Salt Hill Journal, the Collagist, Newfound,
and others. Visit her at christycrutchfield.com
