Alice

Like Lewis Carroll, I flourish on telling preposterous, imaginative stories to intelligent women. Their response has inspired me to attempt impossible feats of intellectual daring. It is my substitute for conventional economic, moral, sexual or political display. Unlike Carroll who appears to have suffered from arrested sexual development I was capable of combining both intellectual and sexual attraction and satisfaction. Until 1970 my previous attempts to come across an Alice had failed. At the critical times when my career and home base were destroyed I was abandoned and betrayed by those I had trusted most. More a case of Malice in Blunderland. At this time in 1970, when I was casting around for a fresh start, I was introduced by the Anglican Chaplain at Melbourne University (another echo of Lewis Carroll) to a romantic young classics undergraduate named Alison. After very carefully studying me and my mother, who was on a visit at the time, she finally made her move. Alison became Alice, my spellbound love-slave. She stood beside me as the storms of frenzied and irrational hatred of the student power elite broke over me again and again as I tried to continue my fun revolution. Without her they would have succeeded in their desperate need to drive me off the campus. Instead, against immense organised opposition at noisy mass meetings, the University Union finally published my collection of short provocative articles entitled The Wizard’s Nonsense Almanac of 1974. Now I could set off on my great adventure.