Tony Goldschmidt and the Freudian Influence
By Karoline Leach [Kandmleach@aol.com]
"Tony Goldschmidt and the Freudian Influence" has been adapted with permission
of author and publisher from the opening chapter of In the Shadow of the
Dreamchild (London: Peter Owen Ltd, 1999). E-mail: Aowen@peterowen.u-net.com.]
iewed historically, it is almost tragi-comic, Reed's last stand for nineteenth century
innocence, digging in the seeds of its own destruction with its endless anthem of purity
and little girls. The time for such things was over. This was 1932. The Great War had come
and gone, another war was threatening, Depression was biting, and Freud had written his
books about dreams.
The Life of Lewis Carroll was not twelve months old in its brave red binding before the
new age, asserting its own right to see its legends in its own way, had taken up the
little girls, but thrown away the purity.
The Victorians had saints; the 20th century has psychological disorders. And like every
age, we take our own delusions as the proofs of our enlightenment. For us, locked in the
prison of our materialism, disgruntled as a child who has just discovered the
non-existence of Santa Claus and who knows presents will never be the same again,
"Carroll" has become the proof that such aspirations are dangerous delusions.
The twentieth century is too smart for innocence, it looks at purity with a smile and
knows better. For the twentieth century reality means the worm in the bud. Things that
spoke to the Victorians of naivetŽ and sweetness, speak to the twentieth century of
hypocrisy and deviant, dangerous, repressed sexuality. The question of which of these
images is the more 'real' is irrelevant. What is going on here has very little to do with
reality.
Carroll as sexual deviant was ushered into existence by a young man called Anthony
Goldschmidt. In 1933 he was an undergraduate at Balliol, a gifted student who had won
himself an Exhibition. It was in that year that he turned his bright young attention to
the Lewis Carroll of Collingwood and Reed and legend. He studied the man presented there,
with his endless succession of "little girls," his social isolation, his
apparent absence of any adult connection, and concluded that he was looking, not at a
saint, or an ethereal being clothed for a while in mortal flesh, but at a repressed
paedophile. What else, after all, was to be made of a man who, it was said, could only
deal with adult women by post?
Goldschmidt published his views in a four page article in the New Oxford Outlook entitled
"Alice in Wonderland Psycho-Analysed." The hyphens and capitals testify to the
awkward newness of such a concept. His theory was that the opening section of Wonderland
was a kind of cryptic message from Lewis Carroll's subconscious. The incidents were signs
and symbols that could be decoded in the face of modern psychoanalytical understanding, to
reveal the inner workings of the author's mind.
The fall down the rabbit hole was a symbol of sexual penetration, the doors surrounding
the hallway represented female genitalia. In selecting the little door in preference to
the big, Alice (or rather Dodgson in the guise of Alice), was choosing to copulate with a
female child instead of an adult woman. Ergo, said Goldschmidt, he was a paedophile. He
continued:
It is difficult to hold that his interest in children was inspired by a love of
childhood in general, and in any case based on a mental rather than physical attraction,
in view of two facts: that he detested little boys...and that his friendships almost
invariably ended with the close of childhood. (Phillips, ed., 331)
Goldschmidt perhaps could not be expected to know that both these "facts" were
entirely baseless fallacies. But, that his arguments are still repeated today by
biographers who ought to know it very well, is a thing less easy to explain or defend.
In 1933 there was no evidence to gainsay Goldschmidt's conclusions. There was hardly any
evidence at all. So, with the publication of his seminal article, the myth of Carroll and
his sexually empty life entirely given over to little girls became converted into a
pathology.
Poor Collingwood, poor Reed; the lovingly constructed defences of a sacred reputation had
become the snares of a worse infamy than they could ever have envisaged. The whole thing
is given an air of added confusion and poignancy by the possibility that Goldschmidt may
have meant his article as a joke. His friend and fellow Carroll scholar, Derek Hudson,
claimed that his "tongue was halfway into his cheek", when he wrote it. (Hudson,
xi). Certainly, the gentle up-sending of all things Freudian did have something of a
precedent in the Oxford of the early thirties. The impact of this possibility is
considerable. For even if Goldschmidt never believed in it, many others did.
If not for him then no one from the Freudian analyst Paul Schilder to the playwright
Dennis Potter would have had their images to play with. The influence of Goldschmidt's
article can be found in almost everything that has been said about Carroll and his work
for the last sixty five years. If it was a joke then it was one of the best.
But, joke or not, the psychoanalysts had Carroll now, and with a little shaking, a little
tenderising, like Quint's shark, they swallowed him whole. Over the Depression and war
years, between the Jarrow march and the beginning of the Cold War, in a glorious effusion
of attenuated inference and extraordinary syntax, the Psychoanalysts gave Lewis Carroll
and his books the shafting of their lives. "Flamingoes and mustard become the desires
of the two sexes," opined William Empson. He thought it all came down to wombs:
the salt water {of the pool of tears} is the sea from which life arose; as a bodily
product it is also the amniotic fluid ... The symbolic completeness of Alice's experience
is, I think, important. She runs the whole gamut: she is a father in getting down the
hole, a fetus at the bottom, and can only be born by becoming a mother and producing her
own amniotic fluid...
"What was his relation to his sex organ anyway?" Paul Schilder demanded
indignantly in 1938, going on to suggest that Alice might have been a substitute penis.
Not surprisingly he and his colleagues considered the stories too disturbing for children.
The power of Dodgson's literature and the mythology of his life drove an apparently
inexhaustible ability to find within Alice and Carroll a metaphor for almost anything, a
symptom of almost every psycho-neurotic disease. John Skinner used the myth of his hatred
of adult women to infer that "Lewis Carroll remained at a childish level in his
emotional life", and that "his life seems to indicate that he did not like his
adult, masculine character and that he wished to change himself into a small, adventurous
girl..."
Martin Grotjahn used Alice to infer Dodgson's "schizoid personality, his compulsive
character traits, his often paranoid behaviour, his regressive attitude and loving
fascination by {sic} sexually undifferentiated child-actresses". Geza Roheim, on the
other hand, saw everything in Dodgson's life and work as a metaphor for latent
cannibalism:
Lewis Carroll...was the oldest child in the family, and he therefore had plenty of
opportunity to feel jealous of his younger siblings and (we conjecture) to develop
cannibalistic fantasies about the rivals who took his place with the mother ... the
successive courses at the dinner represent the siblings whom Alice wanted to eat.
(Phillips., ed., 333-433)
In this fevered, fantasy-ridden ethos, entire theories were built on nothing but other
theories, which might themselves be based on a misreading of a single sentence in
Collingwood. A kind of bitter madness gripped the Psychoanalysts, ripping like academic
vultures at one small reputation. And, bravely, through all the many and fevered insights,
the idea of Lewis Carroll's sexual preoccupation with little girls shone with a fixed and
steady beam: the one immutable certainty, the leitmotif of his life and our time: his
defining characteristic. The only question was why. Human ingenuity, freed from the
tiresome burden of weary reality, found no shortage of possible answers in the confusion
of historically baseless womb-analogies, and images of frozen infantilism. His unavoidable
psycho-pathology was confirmed again and again by authors increasingly detached from even
the bare biographical facts of his life. And then, in 1945, the first full biography to be
published in some thirteen years picked up on the new concept of Lewis Carroll the latent
paedophile and expressed it with delicate but unavoidable emphasis. Victoria Through the
Looking-Glass, called simply Lewis Carroll in the UK, was written by Florence Becker
Lennon, an American literary figure. A talented writer, and an incisive observer, Lennon
could yet only deal with the material at her disposal, and in 1945 it was still painfully
little. When her information was good, she made the best job of analysing it that anyone
had yet done. She recognised the power of Carroll's mythological significance, and its
distorting effect on the biography. She saw him enshrined as "the last saint of this
irreverent world":
those who have surrendered the myths of Santa Claus... of Jehovah, hang their last
remnants of mysticism on Lewis Carroll and will not allow themselves to examine him
dispassionately. (186)
Lennon was sincere in her attempt to bring this heretofore entirely absent
"dispassionate" analysis to her subject. But she was stymied from the outset by
the continuing reluctance of both the Dodgsons and the Liddells to provide good
documentation or talk openly to biographers. When she began her research in 1930, the
elderly "Alice" would not see her. There was one confused and equivocal
interview with her older sister Lorina. The Dodgsons were polite but unco-operative. She
was allowed no access to his diaries, or the private family papers, and the only letters
she could study were those she could somehow track down. In these circumstances, her
evidence was perforce reduced to a tradition of mythology, riddled with fallacy and
inaccuracy, dominated by Psychoanalysis, in all its apotheosis of inference, and
increasing detachment from any reality of Dodgson's life.
The "Lewis Carroll" presented for her inspection had become a hybrid of two
antagonistic cultures; the "eccentricities" had become obsessive-compulsive
neuroses, the "innocence" had become hysterical repression. It is to be
regretted that, through little fault of her own, Lennon's principal contribution was to
use her talent and her skills to make this fantastic and tangled persona into something
almost believable, and to offer an explanation for it.
She had read Collingwood's 72 pages about the "child-friends'" she could not
know that half of these "children" were in their teens or twenties. She had read
Reed's portrait of a man who obsessed about little girls and rejected womanhood; she could
not know that this was a complete invention. She spoke to the surviving members of
Dodgson's family, who assured her that his diary (which they would not let her see)
contained "no evidence of any love affair. She could not know anything about a
document she was not allowed to read. She received the impression of a man with no adult
life at all. All she was told about, all anyone was talking about was the children.
Given what she was told, what she could possibly know, her conclusions were almost
inevitable. She almost had to see Charles Dodgson as a man who could not, or would not,
grow up. So in her elegant and incisive style she gave shape and depth to what she saw.
She described "Peter Pan". She described a sad disjointed man with "his
emotional clock ...jammed" in incessant childhood, who had no interest in and could
not form adult relationships, who "protested audibly when his child-friends
matured", who was in effect an emotionally retarded paedophile. In a defining
sentence she announced the coming of age of the new orthodoxy: "People have wondered
what he did with his love-life. Now it can be told. He loved little girls." And,
having thus so delicately established his paedophilic credentials, her conclusion that:
"He had no adult love life at all; and nothing in his published writings shows an
adult understanding of love", (187, 191)
followed very naturally. Lennon was convinced of the truth of this, and this conviction
coloured everything she said about his life, and perhaps more importantly, his work.
Lennon was the first biographer to bring anything like proper analysis to Lewis Carroll's
creative life, the first to give any consideration to any work of his beside the two
Alice's and perhaps The Hunting of the Snark. It seemed to have become part of the legend
that Lewis Carroll had never written anything else. Lennon was the first to consider the
Sylvie and Bruno novels, and the serious poetry. Because no biographer had ever done so
before, her views were to be highly influential. She set the tone for almost everything
that was to be said about these works thereafter. And everything she believed about his
life influenced her understanding of his work.
If one begins with a belief in a man "with no adult love life" it is only a
small step to the conclusion that his published writings show no "adult understanding
of love". Therefore when she analysed his love poetry, she almost had to find it
unbelievable. After all, how could Peter Pan describe mature sexual love? How could Lewis
Carroll, an eternal child, locked in the prison of his manifold strangenesses, possibly
write about adult passion? It was a laughable idea and Lennon laughed at it.
She tore through his love poems with a devastating contempt; witty, vitriolic, almost
cruel, almost hysterical. Her dismissal was wholesale; she took no prisoners, her
conclusions were absolute; Lewis Carroll's serious work was the inky trash of an immature
mind. It had no story to tell but the tale of his own inadequacy.
This crushing indictment still stands for most modern analysts. It helped persuade several
generations of scholarship to entirely ignore Lewis Carroll's serious poetry as an
expression of his art or as a source of biographical insight. This has had the bizarre
result that while the Alice's have been picked bare for the tiniest nuance of accidental
autobiography, or strangely encoded confession, his serious poetry and massive two-volume
novel have hardly received any attention; the assumption being, as Lennon herself had it,
that everything but Alice is simply "too bad to be based on personal experience"
(189) (implying presumably that Shakespeare once had family troubles in Denmark or that
Coleridge must at some time in his life have spent a
long time at sea with an albatross round his neck).
It would be nice if life were so simple, and our best work was always our truest. But
unfortunately, autobiography is liable to be found in dross as much as anywhere else. But
Dodgson's serious poetry is nothing as simple as dross. It is uneven, it is strange, but
it has both artistic merit and considerable biographical significance. Its wholesale and
continued dismissal has had a serious effect on the progress of understanding his life. It
has helped cement the idea in the academic and popular mind that Alice is Carroll, and
Carroll in his entirety, is Alice.
By the middle years of this dying century, the modern popular and scholastic image of
Lewis Carroll was more or less complete. It is the image you will still find in the most
recent and most well-respected biography. But it is, and can easily be shown to be,
largely a fantasy, created by fantasists: unhistoric and completely unsupported by
evidence. Through a kind of selective amnesia that seems to be rooted in some Jungian
collective unconscious, through invention and a quasi-religious drive to believe,
posterity had acquired the Carroll it wanted. In appropriately looking-glass tradition, it
was only after this cycle of creation had been completed that the prima facie evidence
about his life began to emerge. In 1953 an edited version of
Dodgson's private diary was published in two volumes. This meant that for the first time
since his death the public and scholarship alike had access to some evidence about Dodgson
the man. Sixteen years later the entire MS diaries were sold to the British Library. A
published edition of Dodgson's letters followed in 1979. But the next twenty years were to
show too clearly that an octogenarian mythology isn't intimidated by a few bits of paper.
