Feature

Alice's American Cousin

story by Stuart Mitchner

photography by Andrew Wilkinson

Once upon a time an eight-year-old girl living in upstate New York received a birthday present that changed her life. The girl’s name was Joyce and the gift from her paternal grandmother was the 1946 Junior Library edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, illustrated by John Tenniel. It was a match made in literary heaven, from the companionable sight-rhyme of Joyce and Alice to Alice’s idea that there “ought to be a book written about me....And when I grow up I’ll write one,“ a goal her American cousin Joyce shared and fulfilled many times over when she grew up.

In her essay, “First Loves from ‘Jabberwocky’ to ‘After Apple Picking,’” reprinted in The Faith of a Writer (2003), Joyce Carol Oates calls her Grandmother Woodside’s gift “the great treasure of my childhood and the most profound literary influence of my life.” It was “love at first sight,” not only with Alice (“with whom I identified unquestionably”) but with “the phenomenon of Book.” Six years later, Grandmother Woodside gave Joyce her first typewriter, a Remington portable.

On view in the grown-up author’s Princeton study is her artist friend Dallas Piotrowski’s colorful reworking of the Tenniel sketch showing Alice “opening out like the largest telescope there ever was,” having just eaten the Eat Me cake. The altered Alice has a pencil in one hand and a book in the other and a face not unlike that of the study’s inhabitant. Joyce’s title for the picture of herself as Alice is “Curiouser and Curiouser,” which is what Alice is saying as the cake has its way with her.

LOOKING FOR THE GARDEN For Joyce, the growth spurt precipitated by the Alice books was no less spectacular, the longterm consequence being a body of work of wondrous variety and formidable proportions. Like Alice, who took a chance and ate the cake because she thought it “quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way,” Joyce was looking for the key to the beautiful garden, or some magnificent, probably impossible equivalent. As she puts it in “First Loves,” having “plummeted headfirst down the rabbit hole” and “climbed through the mirror,” she, “in a manner of speaking, never entirely returned to ’real’ life.”

And since she also happens to be an author with a compelling interest in the dark side of human experience, it is only natural that, looking back, she will admit to having been “unconsciously...thrilled with the girl-heroine who had such astonishing adventures, some of them terrifying, but none of them quite enough to defeat or even discourage her.”

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