|
It's whoppingly good material from which to build a novel,
and Roiphe (who is best known for her provocative nonfiction)
does beautiful work here, with a prose style whose sensual slowness
drips with a sense of the forbidden. Here, for instance, is a
splendid passage in which Dodgson finds himself flummoxed by
a newspaper article about young girls being sold to 'depraved
gentlemen':
He couldn't stop the pictures of a shabby girlchild in an
overbright room. He thought of sweet chloroform filling her lungs
and washing through her head an artificial peace. He saw her
go limp, as an unnamed gentleman watched. And then he saw a row
of doors along the hallway with other girls inside the rooms
in various states of drugged acquiescence. He saw it as clearly
as if the article had been accompanied by photographs. A line
from his own story ran inexplicably through his head: All
little girls are serpents.
The creepiness factor in that decidedly explicit passage is
a bit deceptive when it's taken out of context, actually, since
Roiphe manages to make virtually everything in the novel
feel like the work of a gauze-and-yellow-filter-addled cinemaphotographer
intimately familiar with the work of David Lynch (or Adrian Lyne,
for that matter). Witness, for example, what she makes of a simple
walk to Dodgson's rooms:
As Dodgson walked diagonally toward his rooms, his notes tucked
under his arm, he saw a hole that had been dug for a pipe. Improvements
were being made. He stood at the edge of the hole, which was
approximately the size of a dinner plate, and peered down the
sides, the ripped surface glossy, almost black, bits of root
sticking through, the dirt rough, shiny specks of mineral glittering
in the sun. If he had not been looking he could have fallen in,
he thought to himself, annoyed.
He looked down into the hole, the dark brown shading into
black. He couldn't isolate the precise moment where it was too
dark to see, only witnessed the tunneling, experienced the end
of sight, the anxious straining of the eye. There was no bottom,
only a looming blackness, and suddenly he felt his stomach lurching.
The dark hole in the earth seemed to threaten, to gape and to
yearn, but for what? The ten feet of pipe that was going to fill
it? Metal. Progress. He was perfectly capable of stepping around
it and walking confidently on to his rooms, but he didn't. He
stood at its mouth, stuck and falling at the same time.
Wonderful writing, that.
As well-written as it is, though, one wonders, perhaps inevitably,
whether this sort of book would be as appealing without such
famous figures as its subjects. Would Roiphe's Dodgson rise to
Humbert Humbert's level if his real-life inspiration hadn't written
the Alice books? Would her Alice match Lolita? The questions
are unfair, I suspect. (How, after all, do we separate the historical
Dodgson from the novel's Dodgson?) Still, one can't help thinking
that Still She Haunts Me might seem a bit slow-developing
and even solemn, without its historical resonance. But Roiphe's
characters--with or without their historical referents--are so
well-drawn and so complex (and yes: lifelike) that the book would
work as a novel simply because of them even if the writing weren't
so lyrically powerful, I think.
Perhaps surprisingly, Roiphe's Dodgson may not be the book's
most successful character--but that's a relative comparison.
He's certainly a compelling enigma. Indeed, his most intriguing
quality may be his tantalizing blend of enigmatic allure and
potential danger. The son of an overbearing parish priest whose
many children, Roiphe writes, were "visible signs of sin,
fleshly manifestations of unspeakable acts," he finds himself
repelled by adult women and rendered virtually speechless by
his shy demeanor and his stubborn stuttering. Whether he understands
fully his own secrets she leaves unanswered, and this certainly
helps her as a novelist writing about a relatively distant figure.
Unfortunately for readers who like closure, it leaves the central
question--was Dodgson a pederast?--without a definitive answer.
(She has implied outside the novel that it's simply not an answerable
question, since it's set solidly in a contemporary rather than
Victorian context.) But the way she has other characters--particularly
Alice's mother--fret and wonder about his intentions creates
a wonderful atmosphere of nervous suspense. Indeed, as strong
as Roiphe's Dodgson is, her work with Alice's mother is even
stronger, particularly when it comes to feelings of empathy and
understanding.
But the strongest character in the book is, fittingly, Alice
herself: the object of Dodgson's desires (whatever their form)
and, by extension, ours. And again, Roiphe's work with Alice
is distinguished by the complexity of her character development.
Alice is no mere victim of Dodgson's illicit desires; she is,
even when she first appears in the novel as a four year old,
fully cognizant of both the way people see her and the way she
can manipulate her own image for their benefit (or shock). Feeling
the men watch her in that first scene, Roiphe writes that Alice
"stuck out her stomach" and "turned to stare in
a way he [Dodgson] had never seen a child stare."
Far from offering a simple victim / violator relationship,
Roiphe draws out a decidedly more complicated one in which the
expected roles are reversed: Dodgson silent and flummoxed, Alice
cool and teasingly manipulative. Even when they are alone and
Dodgson is most comfortable, the power structures in the relationship
are pointedly even, if not actually tipped Alice's way. Here,
for example, is a superb scene in which Alice sits in Dodgson's
lap and listens to a story he's making up for her benefit:
Alice felt his legs underneath her, more fragile and birdlike
than her father's. She played with his collar as he spoke. She
knew he was telling the story just for her, that he was making
each moment up to please her. Oysters wearing shoes. Her mother
served oysters at a party. He anticipated her desires even before
she knew what they were, and she felt her presence in the story
itself, her imprint on its invisible, muscular form. I weep
for you, the walrus said: I deeply sympathize. With sobs and
tears he sorted out those of the largest size. What does
Alice want? She could feel Dodgson thinking as he spoke, underneath,
and that question, that anticipation was it: her participation.
The ideas thrown up from the depths just for her. This was something
she understood right from the beginning, the collaboration of
the story. These stories were not just for her, they were from
her.
Still She Haunts Me isn't a mere re-imagining of a
collection of historical figures and events. Nor is it a fanciful
novel wholly divorced from its historical setting. Roiphe has
written something that honors both history and the novel, and
its sustained tonal complexity is impressive, to say the least.
|
