In Stefan Zweig’s 1927 novella Confusion, a venerable German scholar of literature learns he will be celebrated in a Festschrift to mark thirty years of academic teaching. “They meant well, my students and colleagues in the Faculty,” Roland ruminates. Perusing the contents of this handsomely bound volume, he adds:

Thus begins Roland’s spectacular confession, as Zweig’s narrator retraces his spiritual and intellectual formation, in particular the influence of his own great mentor and teacher. Unlike our revered narrator Roland, this man – we are told – goes unremembered now, except, of course, in the pages of Roland’s testimonial (now in the reader’s hands). Zweig’s darkly comic novel traces the brief but intense friendship between the two men: the wayward undergraduate and his charismatic teacher. The simmering eros of their intellectual union culminates with the young man sleeping with his professor’s wife and ends with a cathartic parting kiss between the two. In the final lines of Zweig’s novella, Roland confesses to the reader that, “I have more to thank him for than my mother and father before him or my wife and children after him. I have never loved anyone more.”2

As the Calvinist American author Marilynne Robinson explains in “A Theology of the Present Moment” in the New York Review of Books, the seventeenth-century English Puritan theologian and writer John Flavel believed that “we will be judged twice, once when we die and once when everything we have said or done has had its final effect”.3 We understand this idea in a secular sense today, as we reflect upon the impact of our human actions on the fragile health of our environment and climate. Even those without a palpable sense of eschatology may feel Flavel’s words ring true when we imagine our lasting impact on family, friends, colleagues, peers, and even strangers. For teachers, this “final effect” is traceable for generations yet to come. Education lifts individuals, families and communities from poverty, increases health and life expectancy, strengthens economies and states. Beyond the gaze of maps, graphs and statistics, teachers daily bring meaning and purpose to human lives. So it was for the two great teachers of Zweig’s novella, whether publicly celebrated in a Festschrift like Roland, or in the quiet devotion of the old scholar as he recalls the one who kindled the fires of his own understanding. I hope that Bruce will, like Roland, read the pages of his Festschrift with schoolboy pride. I would not presume to reveal the impenetrable “true core” of any man, but instead propose to share what Bruce means to me.

In 2001, I commenced my undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney. Against the wishes of my more ambitious high school masters, I spent my substantial Universities Admission Index – as the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) was then known – to enrol in a Bachelor of Arts and majored in English literature, instead of pursuing the Law degree that many of my peers preferred. Many are now happily ex-lawyers and a few became English teachers too. I had been warned to expect less warmth and personal attention from university teachers than I was accustomed to getting from school teachers, and early lectures with hundreds of other similarly lost undergraduates felt much like drowning in cold seas. There were prowling posses of preternaturally assured first-year English students, striding through the John Woolley Building, brandishing the works of Martin Amis and Bret Easton Ellis like talismans of literary masculinity, or extravagantly (re-)reading Ulysses in readiness for Bloomsday. Yet soon I found my tribe. I recall sitting in the back row of the lecture theatre and exchanging scribbled lines in Entish with a brilliant young peer who would become Dr Olivia Murphy, one of Australia’s great Austen scholars. Soon I would befriend the future Dr Timothy Hanna, Dr Tessa Lunney, Dr Hannah Croke, Dr Phil Johnson, Dr Sascha Morrell. How strange to write these words two decades on and think of all those seeds sown in the minds of our eighteen-year-old selves! Like many of this cohort, I regard my four years in the Woolley Building as among the happiest of my life, and our Honours Year an annus mirabilis.

Lifelong friendships were forged in the Woolley Building’s cranial labyrinth, yet it took longer to discern which lecturers and teachers would claim our hearts and minds. I wish I could recall the first time I heard Bruce teach, but I suspect it was when he appeared as a guest lecturer in one of my first-year subjects. Now, as then, I am a hypersensitive learner. Like a young child, restless, even sleepless, at the prospect of a looming birthday party, or a lover restless, sleepless, at the thought of their beloved’s return, I still find myself flushed and trembling when I encounter words that move me deeply. At times I hear Young Werther’s cry for help, “You ask if you shall send me books. My dear friend, I beseech you, for the love of God, relieve me from such a yoke! I need no more to be guided, agitated, heated.”4 Zweig captures this exhausting rapture, as the ageing scholar Roland recalls the spiritual intoxication and visceral punch of his own beloved teacher’s first lecture on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Stage. Decades later, Roland still recalls how, “I felt I had been pierced to the heart … I felt the blood hot in my veins, my breath came faster, that racing rhythm throbbed through my body, seizing impatiently on every joint in it.”5 Returning to his apartment transformed, the young Roland turned to Coriolanus as if for the first time. As he recalled:

It was Bruce’s rumination on the works of Lewis Carroll that pierced my heart. It sounds strange to write it now, but that was the first time I had heard anyone take writing for children seriously. I recall introducing myself to Bruce at the end of his lecture to offer my thanks. Did he sense the change his words had wrought in me? That night I re-read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with fresh eyes, yearning to discern its mysteries and secrets. Bruce’s teaching pushed me to think deeply about the nature and development of children’s literature and its relationship to education, psychology, and shifting social and political attitudes to childhood. I devoured Philippe Ariès Centuries of Childhood for the first time and delved into the work of Iona and Peter Opie and their delightful “ethnographies” of childhood through an exploration of schoolyard rhymes and games. Around that time, my first writing for children was published, a series of non-fiction picture books for primary-school aged readers. These books were commissioned works and did not reflect any abiding literary passions, except the thrill of seeing my name in print for the first time. I was also hard at work on a draft of what would become my debut novel for young readers, Empire of the Waves (Penguin), although it would take more than a decade to see that book to publication. Captivated and not a little intimidated at that time, I enrolled in the first course I was able to select that came under Bruce’s purview. To this day, the Course Reader for Bruce’s “Children’s Cultures: Learning Ways to Mean” still lies close at hand to my writing desk, not as a memento, but a touchstone and a guide. It was during that course that Bruce transformed my understanding of childhood and the thematic and linguistic possibilities of literature for young people. And it was then that I resolved my “long essay”, or “honours thesis” as we portentously preferred to called it, would explore these questions further.

In my maturity I agree with British geologist Herbert Harold Read’s dictum that “the best geologist is he who has seen the most rocks”. I read widely in the hope of becoming a better reader, writer and teacher. Yet in my subject choices for my undergraduate degree, my youthful prejudices were on spectacular display. With some notable exceptions, writing from the twentieth century was out, especially the latter half of the century, and most especially anything postmodern.

I recall entering Bruce’s green office – a place seemingly as immaculate as the man himself and visually at odds with the Woolley Building’s uniformly drab aesthetic – to ask whether he would consent to be my supervisor for my honours thesis. And I recall his delighted yes. Lewis Carroll was already the subject of a vast body of impressive scholarship, his work fastidiously annotated by the brilliant mathematician and writer Martin Gardiner, so I would explore the works of that other great purveyor of nonsense, Edward Lear, author of A Book of Nonsense (1846) and Nonsense Songs (1872). Lear had been the subject of biographies by Vivien Noakes and Peter Levi, yet there was soil to be tilled. In his lifetime (1812–1888), Lear had drawn the praise and friendship of the Tennysons and Wilkie Collins and other giants of his age. John Ruskin had named Lear’s A Book of Nonsense as his favourite book and, as the pre-eminent ornithological draughtsman of his day, Lear was invited to teach young Victoria to paint. During the twentieth century, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, G.K. Chesterton and Anthony Burgess all penned appreciations of Lear. And yet, compared to the kaleidoscopic infinities of Carrolliana, Lear remained largely untouched by academia and Hollywood alike (for which we can be thankful). Even then, the affinities between Bruce and Lear subliminally stirred inside me, although I would not have dared to air them. As Humphrey Carpenter wrote of Lear’s revolutionary early writing, “a lone voice was beginning to mutter, chiefly into the ears of children. Its message was that the public world was vindictive and intolerant and that the man of vision, the true artist, must alienate himself from society and pursue a private dream.”7 Like Lear’s poetry, Bruce’s teaching proved a playful refuge from a vindictive and intolerant public world, yet neither dream would be entirely private. Transcendence from the world is not retreat, as the legion of future teachers who emerged transformed by Bruce’s pedagogy will attest.

Challenging the didacticism of popular mid-nineteenth-century English children’s literature, Lear had set himself in opposition to the Rev. Isaac Watts and Charles and Mary Lamb. Lear published A Book of Nonsense pseudonymously as the “Old Derry Down Derry”, a character from the mummers’ plays, the first of his many holy fools. Lear did not write to promote the “all-endearing cleanliness” beloved by the Lambs, nor did he yearn to teach children to “love working and reading”, like the industrious and pious Watts. Rather, Lear’s Derry writes because he “loved to see little folks merry”.8 As Bruce noted in one of our many illuminating conversations about Lear, there were echoes here of William Blake, whose “Laughing Song” in Songs of Innocence had portrayed children’s laughter resounding in what seems to be the world to come. As Blake writes, “Come live, and be merry, and join with me / To sing the sweet chorus of ‘Ha ha he!’”.9 Blake imagines peals of laughter in defiance of the mortal darkness enveloping so many of the children in his poems. Annihilating forces prowl the pages of A Book of Nonsense, depicted as an all-seeing and all-judging They. In a typical example, the Old Person of Buda is destroyed for his disruptive behaviour.

Lear’s words offer no details of the Old Person’s conduct, yet his illustration depicts the man standing on one leg. For Lear, this simple act was a symbol of all non-conformist behaviour, writing to his friend Fanny Coombe that “the uniform apathetic tone assumed by lofty society irks me dreadfully … [there is] nothing I long for half so much as to giggle heartily and to hop on one leg down the great gallery – but I dare not.”11 For no more a crime than this, the Old Person is marked for destruction. Whereas Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations meticulously materialised Carroll’s world in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lear’s drawings frequently disrupt his text. He was, like William Blake, a brilliant innovator as an author-illustrator. Lear writes, for example, that the Old Man of Ancona “found a small dog with no owner”, whilst the dog, as drawn, is terrifyingly large.12

If adult language in Victorian England was governed by grammar, decorum and an imperial immutability, then language in Lear’s disruptive childhood realm was exuberant, dynamic, malleable and elusive. Notice the disdain on the onlooker’s face in Lear’s illustration as the Old Person of Wick explodes with a nonsensical, “Tick-a-Tick, Tick-a-Tick / Chickabee, Chickabaw”.13 Lear’s characters are doomed to live and die behind the bars of the limerick’s claustrophobic five-line structure, scrutinised like specimens in a museum or zoo, whilst the reader becomes complicit in the gaze of the destructive They. Consider the fate of the Old Man of Whitehaven, “smashed” because he “danced a quadrille with a Raven”.14 There is no question, of course, where Lear’s sympathies lie. Lear’s poetry seeks the dignity of the outsider, understanding, like Montaigne, that “what we call monstrosities are not so to God”.15 Perhaps the most peculiar assembly of characters in English literary history, A Book of Nonsense constitutes Lear’s very own festum stultorum, a Rabelaisian jamboree of holy fools and rebels. Lear was sceptical of efforts to “explain” his verse and protested that “critics are very silly to see politics in such bosh”,16 yet the mere creation of Lear’s poetry was a revolutionary act in the history of English language children’s literature.

Death haunts Lear’s limericks, yet there is another side to Lear’s nonsense. Equally radical, Lear’s later poetry offered up a vision of emancipation. Whereas Blake had moved from innocence to experience, Lear’s vision seemed to lighten with the drift of time. Despite his chronically poor physical and mental health, Lear travelled widely in Italy, Malta, Corfu, Albania, Egypt, Greece, Palestine and Lebanon, always sketching, painting, writing and making new friends. Lear’s most famous nonsense song, “The Owl and the Pussy-cat”, was composed in Cannes, and in 1870 Lear purchased a home in San Remo, where he would pass his final years. Lear’s later poetry is drenched in sunlight. Unlike Blake, Lear did not have to wait for the coming of the eschaton to dwell in the light of Heaven. To Emily Tennyson in 1865 Lear wrote: “I loathe London by the time [I] have been here a month. The walking – sketching – exploring – noveltyperceiving and beautyappreciating part of the Landscape painter’s life is undoubtedly to be envied … the contrast of the moneytrying to get, smokydark London life – fuss – trouble & bustle is wholly odious, & every year more so.”17

“The Owl and the Pussy-cat” is a tale of star-crossed lovers. One expects less serenading and more carnage. Yet Lear’s lovers set sail in a “beautiful pea-green boat”, become engaged, and are married by a Turkey in the “land where the Bong-tree grows”.

Lear’s later Nonsense Songs brims with such rapturous escapes. Thus does the Quangle Wangle find bliss with his companions upon the Crumpetty Tree, where “at night by the light of the Mulberry moon / They danced to the Flute of the Blue Baboon”.19 Yet even in Lear’s later songs, the constricting “They” seeks to reassert its hegemony of good manners. The spirited Nutcrackers and Sugar-tongs are mocked for their “awful delusion” by a scolding Frying-pan,20 whilst the Jumblies depart home “in spite of all their friends could say”.21 Lear’s sieve-as-boat is the ultimate metaphor for the impossible dream made possible by the sheer determination of the dreamer. The revolution, impossible in Lear’s limericks, is finally fulfilled. There is something divine in the vision of love and reconciliation in the later songs of Edward Lear, recalling Isaiah’s prophesy of that holy day when “the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together … the lion shall eat straw like the ox”. Reflecting on “The Owl and the Pussy-cat”, Anthony Burgess wrote that “[Its] joy is unqualified … the grace of a great light in the sky and an eternal ocean – on whose verge the bridal pair dare to dance – sanctifies all impossibilities. Life is bigger than Victorian England. Nonsense means what we cannot understand. God is nonsense.”22

There is deep truth in nonsense, so it is unsurprising that many of the most radical and innovative writers of the twentieth century embraced Lear and Carroll. In his essay “The Precession of the Simulacra”, Jean Baudrillard recalled Jorge Luis Borges’ one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science” in which an imperial power seeks to design a map on a scale of 1 to 1. As Borges writes:

Baudrillard called Borges’ tale “the finest allegory of simulation”, depicting a world in which systems of knowledge and classification replace reality itself.24 Of course, Baudrillard’s frightening contention was that the map today precedes the territory itself, that in our postmodern age there is no longer any underlying truth at all. More hopefully, Borges foresees a time when the map is ultimately deemed “Useless”, antithetical to feeling and the complexity of truth. The map is seen as “not without some Pitilessness”. Animals and beggars now dwell in the ruins of the map in the barren “Deserts of the West”. Borges concludes by noting that “in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography”.25 The map lies broken and discarded in the desert sands like Shelley’s Ozymandias, the relic of a fallen empire and a once hegemonic way of seeing.

Borges borrowed this striking vision of mapmaking as an instrument of imperial control from Lewis Carroll’s 1893 novel Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. Meeting a strange Germanic visitor from another world called Mein Herr, Carroll’s narrator, the Historian from London, learns of a land where the art of mapmaking has been elevated to the highest science:

It is a Romantic notion lingering in Carroll’s late Victorian vision of a world consumed with the pursuit of scientific rationality, that the farmers might object to the rolling out of this all-seeing map. Writing in the aftermath of the Darwinian revolution, Carroll was also attuned to the dangers of eugenics. It is no coincidence that Mein Herr’s world is as preoccupied with the mapping and control of human bodies as it is with the mapping of terrain.

Mein Herr adds that in a further millennium of scientific breeding, his people expect to be lighter than air itself. That Baudrillard should draw from Borges who drew in turn from Carroll is not surprising. The nonsense of Lewis Carroll and his predecessor Edward Lear remain prophetic. Both exposed the cruelty and hypocrisies of a society that sought – and seeks – to impose its totalising pursuit of knowledge on bodies, minds and language. There is no mercy in the map. To be free, Lear’s characters must leave and cross the waves to reach the light of the Jelly Bo Lee and Great Gromboolian Plain, to lands beyond the map itself.

In preparation for my contribution to this festschrift, I revisited my honours thesis for the first time in years. I have sought to excavate some key ideas, to close one loop between the present and the past. I find myself writing in the company of my earlier selves, writing in the company of Bruce Gardiner and Edward Lear. One thing that struck me most was the absence of theoretical maps in my thesis, what in my Master’s degree and PhD in the social sciences we would call “a framework of analysis”. Although there is much secondary literature cited in my thesis – too much I now believe! – that long essay was, above all, a personal encounter between myself and Edward Lear. As Georges Poulet writes of the alchemy of reading:

Not coincidentally, it was Bruce who introduced me to Poulet. Perhaps our words bring us closer to the true core of one another’s being than the narrator of Zweig’s novella will allow.

So many of Bruce’s former students share the memory of the care he took in crafting feedback through his elegantly penned epistles on our papers. He engaged our work as we sought to engage his words and the novels and poems we read together. The loyalty and love that this inspired transformed minds into deeper and more generous thinkers and, I believe, inspired deeper and more generous lives. Such an encounter between consciousness and consciousness is what elevated Bruce’s teaching to the sublime. At a time when reading and writing are increasingly reduced to the technology of neoliberalism – assessed in Australian schools through the microscope of standardised testing such as NAPLAN – a Gardinerian re-enchantment is urgently required. The idolatry of data is the madness of the map, as Borges and Carroll understood. The fact that Bruce, of all teachers, was compelled for so many years to actively justify his role at a university obsessed with data instead of the testimony of peers and students sums up the tragedy unfolding in our places of education this century. But if the old seventeenth-century Puritan John Flavel is right and we are judged a final time when all that we have said and done has had its last effect, then Bruce’s teaching will keep the light of learning burning for a long time yet. In “Edward Lear”, Auden wrote of Lear’s flight from the “the legions of cruel inquisitive They”. The poet crossed seas to find his peace, then “children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.”29 Bruce offered me and so many students an education forged in love, intelligence, integrity, and the opening of one mind to another. For me, as for so many, Bruce too “became a land”.

Bibliography