[REVIEW] The Imagination of Lewis Carroll, by William Todd Seabrook

Winner of the Eighth Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest

56 pages, $12

Review by Caitlin Corrigan

In a recent radio interview with Minnesota State University (MNSU), William Todd Seabrook described his latest, prize-winning chapbook, The Imagination of Lewis Carroll as both “magical realist biography” and a kind of “fan fiction of a historical person.” Seabrook, a PANK contributor, is also the author of two other prizewinning chapbooks of biography (on Joan of Arc and J. Robert Oppenheimer, respectively). His work toys with our ideas of cultural mythmaking, while also creating space for Seabrook to bring his own sense of playfulness to lives whose details have already been committed to our cultural memory, for better or worse.

In these two dozen flash vignettes, Seabrook mixes fact and fabulism to bring Lewis Carroll to life using spare, imaginative prose. Writes Michael Martone, judge for the Eight Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest, “Carroll, the logician and mathematician, saw language as an analog calculating machine. Seabrook recalibrates here, bringing to the language a digital elegance, the repeating replication, the algorithmic grace of aughts and ones.” The stories here are tight little delights, but Seabrook doesn’t shy away from probing some of the darker nuances of Carroll’s life.

In “The Games of Lewis Carroll,” Seabrook writes:

After his death they found stacks of notes cataloguing over 5,000 card games of his own invention, the majority of them versions of solitaire. Among the piles of papers, a small chessboard was uncovered. All the kings, queens, bishops, knights, and rooks had been replaced with pawns. Under the board was a picture of Carroll sitting alone, staring at the air, while in his head he toyed with the world.

Isolation rears its head throughout these biographical vignettes; even when Carroll is surrounded by people, his vivid imagination (and opium use) serves as a buffer between external reality and internal landscape.

In “The Solutions of Lewis Carroll,” Seabrook depicts Carroll and a semi-clothed Alice Liddell watching as an image of her developing in Carroll’s studio. Alice notes that there are now two version of her, and Carroll, delighted by this observation, remarks that one of the versions will exist forever. Alice asks Carroll why he won’t have his own picture taken, to which he replies, “My life is already split,” he said. “And I can barely keep track of one life, much less two.” Seabrook devotes several stories to Lewis Carroll’s “real” name and the origins of his pseudonym, but, in the end of “Solutions,” seems to allude to Carroll’s desire to live only in one, finite world:

“But I don’t want to be the only one living forever. I imagine it’d get lonely,” Alice said. “At some point you’ll be the only one who doesn’t know what it’s like to die.”

“Yes,” Carroll said with a fading smile. “Better to be dead than to be lonely.”

Carroll’s relationship with Alice, and several other young girls, many of whom were the subject of his photography, has long been a source of speculation. Seabrook takes on these concerns as he does with the rest of the details of Carroll’s life presented in this book—at a slant. In one of the final flashes of this slim chapbook, “The Apple Trick of Lewis Carroll,” Seabrook describes the way in which Carroll could cut an apple in half by using a needle and thread, leaving only the smallest holes in the apple’s skin. The effect is as if one has cut an apple without touching the skin at all, since “…children didn’t often see those imperfections, unlike the harsh, penetrating eyes of an adult.”

Seabrook’s The Imagination of Lewis Carroll is, like Carroll’s work and life, full of both whimsy and darkness, with plenty of room for the reader to fill in the gaps with their own imaginative guesses. One piece imagines Lewis Carroll sawing off his own limbs at a production of Alice in Wonderland; another envisions graphic graveside humor, complete with quips about letting Carroll’s corpse be quartered by unicorns. These are memorable moments, made larger by their interaction with our existing ideas about the man behind such ubiquitous, innovative storytelling, and I hope Seabrook’s fixations and fandoms continue to bring us such delicious bites of hybrid biography.

***

Caitlin Corrigan lives in Portland, ME. Her fiction has appeared in Word Riot, Wyvern Lit, SmokeLong Quarterly, Printer’s Devil Review, the Tin House “Flash Fridays” feature, and elsewhere. Reach her at www.caitlincorrigan.com or on Twitter at @corrigancait.