“The Drifting Dream Is Done” – Pogo, Lewis Carroll, and the Age of Coronavirus

I don’t remember what birthday it was that I received The Pogo Stepmother Goose as one of my presents.  Maybe the eighth?  The ninth?  That was about the age that I adored the now mostly forgotten comic strip “Pogo” by Walt Kelly.  So much so, that I made a little pennant out of flannel and, lettering “POGO” on it in glitter, hung it up over my bed.

If you’re too young to remember “Pogo’s” glory days, mostly the 1950s but spilling a little bit into the 60s, here are the basics:  It was set in the Okefenokee Swamp, which despite its funny name really does exist, part of it in Georgia and part in Florida.  Its cast of characters, bewilderingly large, consisted entirely of anthropomorphized animals.  Foremost among them were Pogo the possum with his striped shirt, Albert the alligator with his omnipresent “see-gar,” Churchy La Femme the turtle, Howland Owl with his conical wizard hat and huge spectacles.  Nearly all were male, though they sometimes cross-dressed to take female roles.  An exception, who much excited my prepubescent imagination, was Mam’selle Hepzibah, a glamorous, bosomy skunk with a heavy French accent.

The strip, given to dazzling and sometimes erudite word-plays and political satire that only occasionally transcended mildness–as in 1953, when a sinister bobcat named Simple J. Malarkey and bearing a striking resemblance to Senator Joseph McCarthy, put in his appearance–had a mostly lighthearted quality.  The Okefenokee’s critters were at bottom children parading as grownups, living on their own with no one to order them around, and having great fun at it.  I wished they were real.  I wished I could be there with them.

Then I read The Pogo Stepmother Goose.

Unlike most of the Pogo books that came out in the 50s, this wasn’t just a compendium of the past months’ daily or Sunday strips.  It was a collection of fresh stories and poems by Kelly.  These mostly utilized the familiar characters, though in settings far removed from the swamp (like pre-Revolutionary Russia) and in getup to match.  And the book had a chill gravity which much disturbed me as a child, and which has stayed with me more than 60 years later.

The dedication page set the tone.  For Lewis Carroll and the Children; and three of the child-characters of the strip (as opposed to the nominal grownups like Pogo and Albert) are shown poling a rowboat through the swamp.  Diapered Grundoon, Rackety Coon Chile, and Albert’s nephew the little alligator Alabaster, who’s fishing off the boat even as it runs aground–they look serene and content.  It’s a familiar Pogo scene, down to the rowboat’s whimsical name (“The Kathryn Barbara”).  But what comes next is not.

“The gentle journey jars to stop.
The drifting dream is done.
The long gone goblins loom ahead;
The deadly, that we thought were dead,
Stand waiting,
every one.”

And in the drawing below, the three little animals, holding hands but looking terrified, prepare to enter a dark woods where the towering trees, grinning evilly, stretch out their barren, clawed limbs to grasp them.  “Stand waiting, every one.”

Which, let’s admit it, is the way that many and perhaps most of us feel today.

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The Pogo Stepmother Goose was published in 1954.  An author’s note at the end of the book is dated to March of that year.  This was the month that the Army-McCarthy hearings, which eventually were to lead to McCarthy’s downfall, first convened.  Simple J. Malarkey–sorry, Joe McCarthy–whom Kelly loathed and dreaded, was at the peak of his power and influence.  He was soon to fall from it, but when Kelly conceived and drew the stories for The Pogo Stepmother Goose, he didn’t know that.

(Actually, the title hints at something sinister, doesn’t it?  In the fairy tales that inspired the book, the stepmother is always cruel; the replacement of “Mother Goose” by “Stepmother Goose” is not exactly a hopeful sign.)

There’s a subtext to that dedication page.  With his drawings, with his words, Kelly surely intended to evoke another “gentle journey” by boat, nearly 100 years earlier–

“A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July–

“Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear–“

–this being the boating excursion on the Thames in 1862 when Lewis Carroll first told his “children three,” 10-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters, the story that blossomed into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  It’s an idyllic scene, evoked in the opening lines of the poem that Carroll published nine years afterward at the end of Through the Looking-Glass.  (The poem is an acrostic: the opening letters of its lines, taken together, spell ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL.)

But the idyll turns dark and cold.  The sunny sky pales.  July is “slain” by autumn frosts.  Carroll is left alone, haunted–in no very pleasant way–by images of “Alice moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes.”  The dreaminess with which the poem began takes on a sinister, drugged-out quality:

“In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die.”

And now the dream is done.  The goblins loom ahead.  Carroll felt it; Kelly felt it.  We feel it today.

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Kelly ends The Pogo Stepmother Goose with an even more explicit evocation of Lewis Carroll.  This is an illustrated version of the last two chapters of Alice in Wonderland, the trial of the Knave of Hearts for stealing the Queen’s tarts, as performed by the denizens of the Okefenokee.  Pogo, in dress and apron and curly blond wig, plays the role of Alice.  Churchy La Femme is the hapless Knave.  And a blank-eyed, malevolent Senator J. McCarthy–sorry, Simple J. Malarkey–decked out in crown and ermine robe, presides over the Knave’s trial as King of Hearts.

About midway between the beginning and the end of the book is the strangest, most disturbing story of all.  It’s the only one in the book that makes no use of the familiar Okefenokee crew.  It’s set “millions of years ago in the Land of Tomorrow and the Next Day,” although the characters’ garb is mostly (not quite consistently) medieval, and the characters are all human.  Except, of course, for the monsters.

The title is “The Town on the Edge of the End.”

The town is afflicted by a plague of monsters–goblins, demons–who lurk everywhere and control everything, darkening the very skies.  The townsfolk are helpless against them.  Then one day a mysterious Piper appears, a youngish black man–

(Why black?  What was Kelly trying to convey?  Surely something important, but I don’t know what it was.)

–who offers to relieve the citizens of their ills.  Which he does, exactly as the famed Pied Piper of Hamelin did with the rats: piping them away.  Relieved at last of the goblins, “the sky was becoming blue! … The leaves of the trees were lifted!  … There was sunlight on the roadway … and a bright peace was on the town.”

It doesn’t last.

The monsters are gone.  But the grownups of the town become monsters themselves.  Earlier in the story they’d looked a bit weathered and battered, but still presentable adults.  Now they’re drawn as grotesque, nauseating in their ugliness, as they tyrannize over their beautiful, innocent children.  If the kids misbehave, say the adults–which is to say, act as normal children–the plague may return.  So the liveliness must be spanked and shaken out of them.

Slowly, subtly, the town grows dark once more.

That’s how the Piper finds it when he pays a visit.  Once more he relieves the townspeople of their problem, in Pied Piper fashion, by piping away their children.  They’ve lost the only bit of light and life they had–and they’re glad to see it go.  “He’s saved us a second time,” says the elderly mayor, oblivious to what they’ve lost.

The town sinks into unending darkness.  “On the Edge of the End,” indeed; and as the story concludes, they’ve toppled off into that End.  As, in 1954, it must have seemed to Walt Kelly that the whole country and possibly the world were about to do.

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Of course we didn’t.

In times like these, when we feel ourselves on the edge of the End, it can be comforting to remember: we’ve felt this way before.  I’ve blogged on how the current crisis has given me a sense of deja vu to being in Israel in 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out and the prospect of superpower war no longer seemed as remote as it had in the golden summer that was past.  Oil, and with it mobility and warmth, were suddenly scarce commodities.  Those who controlled them, who could dole them out, were the world’s masters.  Prosperity ebbed; old hatreds surfaced.  Although I didn’t have The Pogo Stepmother Goose with me in Israel, I remembered and felt anew the chill of its opening words–

“The long gone goblins loom ahead;
The deadly, that we thought were dead,
Stand waiting, every one.”

–and I felt small and frightened like those three little swamp critters, facing the ranks of menacing, possibly carnivorous trees.  No Lewis Carroll equivalent to shepherd or console them.  In this version of the “gentle journey,” the “children three” are on their own.

Yet for all its gloom and foreboding, The Pogo Stepmother Goose ends on a note of hope that reverses, perhaps even cancels out its grim opening.  “Who cares for you?” Pogo/Alice cries out on the last page, to the King of Hearts and his bloodthirsty toadies.  “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”  And that’s all they are; or actually, not even cards but dead leaves falling on her face as she wakes from her doze.

And the whole nightmare scenario turns out to be just that: a “drifting dream” that Alice, and we, are a lot better off without.  When its done, when Wonderland fades away into wakefulness, sunlight and sanity can resume.

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I wouldn’t push the point too hard.  COVID-19 is no dream, much as I wish it were.  “The deadly, that we thought were dead”–or at least beaten into submission by our array of miracle medicines–turn out to be alive and well.  Now they’ve come for us.

Yet is it wholly a nightmare forest that we face?  Or does it offer its own hope, a potential for reshaping our human future?  One of the few pleasant surprises of the past two months has been how readily, how quickly nature begins to heal from the outrages we’ve inflicted upon her.  The skies of India turn blue.  The canals of Venice turn clear.  The cap of pollution that lay over China, once visible on satellite photos, is gone.

A bit like the Town on the Edge of the End after its liberation from the monsters.  The sky becomes blue; there’s sunlight on the roadway.

So are we the townsfolk or the monsters–or both?  Have we awakened from our dreaming, to shudder and crumble before the reality?  Or to make the reality something new and better than what we’d dreamed?

Nobody knows.  We hope and wait.

by David Halperin
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