The question of transformation became inescapable in the final book, The Last Battle, when Lewis started dismantling Narnia. (My favourites were the middle ones in the series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Silver Chair, where Narnia was least whirled about by the turbulence of beginnings and endings.) The stars fall, the inhabitants of Narnia troop past Aslan and are divided into the saved and the damned, giant lizards eat all the trees and grass, a tidal wave drowns the bare land, and then, when the ‘dreary and disastrous dawn’ comes up over the empty sea, Aslan says to Father Time, ‘Now make an end.’ ‘He took the Sun and squeezed it in his hand as you would squeeze an orange. And instantly there was total darkness.’ After that, there was nowhere to go but through the great Door with the characters into what Lewis presented as an even better Narnia, with a strange Platonic geometry about it which meant it got brighter and more vivid with every step into it they took, ad infinitum. This really was Heaven; and Aslan reveals to Peter, Lucy, Edmund, Eustace, Jill, Digory and Polly that they have died in a train crash, and can stay for ever. ‘And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion …’
The Last Battle upset me: I re-read it far less often than the other six books. From the very beginning of the book, when Shift the Ape finds a lion-skin and begins scheming to impersonate Aslan, new tones of moral failure and shoddiness are admitted into Narnia that were never allowed to be there before. Narnia suddenly becomes a world where the villainy of villains is no longer contained and demarcated by a limited story-set of emotions, but can spread out to confuse the innocent, and to taint the story’s world. The destruction of Narnia begins long before the giant’s hand crushes out the sun; it has already become un-Narnian by breaking the rules that tacitly governed it till then. Lewis, I think, intended the disappointment and bewilderment you feel about this as a child, reading, to make you ready to migrate out of Narnia. He wants its rather sudden corruption to lead you into endorsing his rejection of it. You are supposed to be glad that it is replaced by a better, Platonic Narnia where the apples are yet applier, and old friends from the previous books appear, yet more characteristically themselves.
But the killing of Narnia remained traumatic for me because the promise of the shining land beyond the Door didn’t seem very different from the promise Narnia had held out before. I thought I already had a place that would remain forever rich and full, not because it had passed into eternity, but because the story had said it was so. Lewis might have felt the need to abolish his imaginary island, but his reasons were obscure to me; and when he pushed me to choose, I found that I didn’t want to go through his Door into death. In the end, I did not want to be transformed. I wanted to linger on the island, not swim out to sea.
*
I did experiment, sometimes, with bringing Narnia back over the line into this world. I imagined dryads in the woods at Keele, smoothing out their shining hair with birch-bark combs. My friend Bernard and I swapped Narnian trivia and called ourselves Narniologists. I scattered white rose petals in the bathtub, and took a Polaroid picture of the dinghy from my Airfix model of the Golden Hind floating among them, to recreate the lily sea. But I never felt I had connected to the live thing in Narnia which could send a jolt through my nerves, except once. I had the poster-map of Narnia by Pauline Baynes up on the wall on the upstairs landing at home. In the top right-hand-corner, she’d painted Aslan’s golden face in a rosette of mane. Once, when no one was around, I crept onto the landing and kissed Aslan’s nose in experimental adoration – and then fled, quivering with excited shame, because I had brought something into the real world from story’s realm of infinite deniability.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Town
I was speeding down an unfamiliar country road, like Milo in Norton Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth, who assembles the purple kiosk he received in the mail, and drives past it in his small electric car, to find himself abruptly elsewhere. Only I was not on my way into Juster’s lovely territory of paradox and logic games, the only twentieth-century counterpart to the two kingdoms Lewis Carroll invented for Alice. I was bound for a place where all the riddles were concrete, and human, and sociable. I was going, in fact, to another kind of island: an island of people in a sea of prairie emptiness. Mile after mile, the two-lane highway unreeled across South Dakota. As we steered from a long straight into another long, smooth curve, the big Oldsmobile swayed liquidly on its springs. Every mile, dirt roads to left and right marked off the boundaries of another square field of maize or soybeans. (From the air, when I was flying in, they had looked like green carpet worn down till the brown backing fibre showed through.) Every two or three miles, the prairie rose up to a gentle crest, from which you could look forward to a new horizon identical to the previous one. Once this was an ocean floor. The water was gone, but the land rolled on with oceanic sameness. Puffball clouds overhead drifted southwards in inexhaustible ranks, and nothing changed, for mile after mile after mile, until we reached the town of De Smet, pronounced Dee Smett, where I was due to write a newspaper feature about Laura Ingalls Wilder, who settled here with her family in the 1880s, and fifty years later immortalised this town, among all the prairie towns of the Dakotas, in the later books of her Little House series. The town is small, but thanks to Laura Ingalls Wilder the number of people who have heard of it is huge. All seven of the Little House books appear in the list of the top thirty bestselling children’s books of all time. The most popular two of them have cumulative paperback sales, in America alone, of six million copies; the others have all sold around four million.
De Smet is leafy now. The hydrophilic cottonwood trees the settlers brought with them have grown till they shade the streets of white woodframed houses, and limit the dominion of the big sky. Main Street, which I knew from Little Town on the Prairie as a strip of mud and raw lumber perched on the open grassland, is old, as old goes in South Dakota, showing a century of history in its double row of buildings between the highway and the railroad line. This is an island well furnished with amenities. A town of 1500 people in England might have a pub and post office; but it’s 35 miles from De Smet to the next settlement of any size, so here there are stores and garages, a motel and a hotel, a high school and a hospital and a National Guard armoury and a café called the Pie-o-neer. The wooden surveyor’s cabin where the Ingalls family spent the winter of 1879 in By the Shores of Silver Lake has been brought into town – Silver Lake was drained – and is the headquarters of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society. De Smet ladies in mobcaps, and De Smet girls wearing sprigged muslin, guide a steady flow of pilgrims round the Ingalls sites. It’s a girly heritage, and most of the visitors are female, though not all. ‘We had two men looking around last week, without any women making them,’ say the ladies. There comes a moment on every tour, apparently, when the guides can pick the lovers of the books out from the fan club of the Little House TV series. ‘We show them the portrait of Charles Ingalls,’ say the ladies – and those who were expecting Laura’s Pa to look like Michael Landon, with his seventies big hair and his acres of tanned muscle, see instead a plain and slightly pop-eyed Victorian gent with a spade beard. ‘They go, “Oh, what? Wow!”’ The tour takes in the surveyor’s house, then the site of the building where the family huddled through the seven famine months of The Long Winter, and finally the comfortable Victorian home where Pa and Ma Ingalls achieved a modest prosperity in the un-narrated years after Laura Ingalls married Almanzo Wilder.
Also, the town puts on a pageant every year for Independence Day, out on the edge of the prairie beside Pa Ingalls’ original homestead site. The sun goes down behind the next western swell of the prairie, and Big Slough fills up with shadow. (It’s pronounced ‘sluff’, it seems: as a child I always thought of it as a ‘slao’.) While eager mosquitoes feed on the audience, the townspeople re-enact the stories, with horse-drawn wagons, and speeches lip-synched to a pre-recorded soundtrack broadcast from a big PA system. Of course, the Little House connection is an asset whi
ch the town is shrewdly exploiting. It gives De Smet an insurance against the ups and downs of the farm economy that its neighbours just don’t have. But the use modern De Smet makes of its past isn’t merely cynical. There is still a continuity of values you can distinguish, between the settlers who celebrated the Fourth of July here for the first time, and their great-great-grandchildren who do the same, and sell their celebration as I watch in the summer of 1998. Here you still see, as you do in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, the aboriginal American civility and idealism that belonged to Jefferson’s republic of farmers and merchants.
It shows in public rituals: when the cast of the pageant sing ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee’ on the darkening prairie, the audience spontaneously, unselfconsciously join in.
My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing …
It shows too in the manners of individuals. People in De Smet wave to passers-by, presumably because, out here in what the nineteenth-century cartographers named ‘The Great American Desert’, other people are valuable. Children wave. Women wave. Men moseying down Main Street in their pick-ups see a stranger waiting to cross the road and raise their hand solemnly to an imaginary hat-brim. Even De Smet’s teenage boys, doomed to cruise round and round the street grid at dusk for the five thirsty years between the driving age and the drinking age, set aside their raging hormones for long enough to wave at you.
After dark on Independence Day I found myself at the gas station, smoking Costa Rican cigars with the photographer assigned to the feature. Into the forecourt pulled an expensive-looking four-wheel-drive, packed with what seemed to be every female member of a large family; two generations of them, I thought, but it was bizarrely hard to tell, because from the fourteen-year-olds to the forty-year-olds, they were all dressed in the same moussed cowgirl style. Like a lot of people in a state without a city in it, they were all dressed up with absolutely nowhere to go. Night had arrived as a dismal challenge to find some entertainment: any entertainment. My, they were bored. But here was a stray Englishman! The sequence of what followed is blurred in my mind, but somehow I progressed from showing off my accent, to singing in it, to doing bunny hops between the pumps in the middle of a line of temporarily not-bored cowgirls. All of De Smet’s youth had pulled their cars into the gas station too and formed a fascinated circle. The mother – if she was the mother – seemed to be urging me together with a cowgirl of about sixteen – if she was sixteen. I waved my wedding ring with increasing desperation. The photographer looked on with an expression somewhere between amused and aghast. ‘I’ve got everything I need,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll hit the sack and drive outta here early tomorrow. Are you sure you’re all right?’ No, I wasn’t sure. Being agreeable seemed to have got me, yet again in my life, into a situation of vague and many-sided embarrassment, from which I knew I was going to slink away to the motel, leaving puzzlement behind in the minds of people who had not, after all, asked me to make a dancing fool of myself. I’d volunteered. It seemed I hadn’t learned De Smet’s lesson too well, though I knew what it was: Be Steadfast.
Usually Americans focus on the future, and kick yesterday impatiently out of tomorrow’s path. On the prairie, on the other hand, people shrewdly suspected that the past had survival value, and they were, to boot, stubborn. You had to be stubborn to stay. You had to be stubborn to go on making the farmer’s bet against drought and deluge every year. I met one living relict of the Ingalls. Mr Harvey Marx was ninety-one years old. He’d been a pallbearer in 1941 at the funeral of Grace Ingalls, Laura’s youngest sister. It took me a little time to digest this information, and fit it together with the enclosed world of the stories, where the hands and faces of Pa and Ma and the girls are lit by Laura’s remembering attention as if by lamplight. This was Baby Grace, who had a swan’s-down hood for Christmas! He helped bury Baby Grace! Mr Marx lived in Manchester, ten miles west, an object lesson in what happened to a prairie town that failed to thrive. Only four houses were still occupied. The Stars and Stripes were flying on Mr Marx’s lawn for Independence Day, and he had a photograph of Richard Nixon on his wall. A couple of days before I called on him, he’d checked himself and his wife Lucille out of the old people’s home in De Smet. She needed constant nursing care, so he was providing it. ‘I said for better or for worse,’ he explained. ‘Now it’s at the worse.’ You keep the past connected to the present, and to the future, by keeping your promises. The horizon was a line of endless green.
I admired Mr Marx. But then, I expected to. He existed in a landscape that signified kept promises to me for almost three decades before I actually laid eyes on it. The books I read as a child that taught me about how people should treat each other were almost all set inside the circle drawn upon emptiness by a small community of one kind or another. Rather than being the circle of the solitary self and its experiences, beyond which lay the ineffable, or Narnia, or a philosophical empty set, this was the circle within which people were together, with loneliness all around. Though Narnia did not yet lose its power, when I was nine and ten I chose more and more stories that operated inside this circle: that took me to town. While in Narnia good and evil were distinct, as distinct as a lion is from a witch, in town they had to be worked out, in the actions of people who had to live tomorrow with what they and everybody else did today. It made vivid sense to me when I read about the society of the little town on the prairie being put together from its original elements – wood and paint, but also the rules of behaviour, which are the impalpable materials of the shared life. I too was assembling bits and pieces then, putting together society for the first time. Every kid is a pioneer.
The towns in stories weren’t always literal towns. The social islands of fiction take many forms. For Jane Austen, the grandmother of all novels of the shared life, it was the small world of the rural gentry, with its continual round of visits and meetings between the few families qualified to form polite society in a country district. In children’s books it can be a village, it can be a one-ended road in suburbia, it can be a city block with a store or a deli that everybody uses. The similarity to the settings of soap operas isn’t an accident. A soap is only a social island where the supply of events has metastasised. What matters is that the people should be willy-nilly interlocked with one another, so that the effects of what each does are felt as a pulse that propagates through the connections between them. Any sufficiently connected community of the right size will do. It has to be large enough for mutual knowledge to be incomplete, but small enough for the resulting secrets still to be powerful. Stories, soaps, and even the circles of friendship and family in our real lives, seem to settle for a clump of between ten and thirty significant players. Human beings seem to be able to hold the relationships of a group that size in our heads instinctually, perhaps because we once foraged across the savannah in troupes that big, and forever after have been most attuned to hierarchy and solidarity when they arise on the scale of that first, mobile township. Fewer than ten significant others in a life spells hermithood; many more than thirty implies they’re not that significant after all, and, when reading fiction, brings you inevitably to the point where you can’t remember who the person speaking is.
Children’s books can find a town in a boarding school, if the author doesn’t play school life entirely for laughs, as in Billy Bunter, or Molesworth, or the Jennings stories. From Angela Brazil and the Chalet School books, through to the unexpected rebirth of the genre at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series – where a new atmosphere, both magical and democratic, still does not displace such key features as the sneering rich boy, and the contest for the house cup – school stories explore what are essentially autonomous towns of children. As a perceptive critic of Harry Potter pointed out, what makes the school setting liberating is that school rules are always arbitrary rules, externally imposed. You can break them, when you get into scrapes, without feeling any guilt, or without it affecting the loyalty to the institutio
n that even unruly characters feel, right down from Angela Brazil to Joanne Rowling. Harry loves Hogwarts. The rules of conduct that really count are worked out by the children themselves, and exist inside the school rules like a live body inside a suit of armour. School stories are about children judging each other, deciding about each other, getting along with each other. The adults whose decisions would be emotionally decisive – parents – are deliberately absent.
In the same way, a town can sometimes be a single family, if the family is large enough, or the children alone enough, for the horizontal relationships between brothers and sisters to predominate over the vertical ones between each child and its father or mother. E. Nesbit’s non-magical stories – the Bastable series, The Railway Children – take care to remove one parent, into prison or death or a faraway country, and to interpose a surrogate, from a housekeeper to the Great Southern Railway Company, between the children and the remaining parent, to be an authority who can be upset without emotional repercussions. From these descend all the books about children who have the skill to have very autonomous adventures, like the Swallows and Amazons, or Elizabeth Enright’s confident Melendy family in 1940s New York, and all the books in which groups of children are cut off from their parents and have to live in a barn, or cope in the outback, or negotiate food and shelter in the London of the Blitz. With their emphasis on interchange and getting things done together, these are distinctly different from the stories about individual survival by children down history, whose settings sometimes overlap: Barbara Leonie Picard’s achingly unhappy One is One, for example, with its medieval orphan always left furthest from the fire, or Frances Hodgson Burnett’s magnificently lonely A Little Princess, which is a combination dead parents-cruel school story. When I read these I felt a frantic identification which diverged completely, as a sensation, from the steady feeling of my curiosity expanding criss-cross in all directions as it was fed on new people talking to each other.
The Child that Books Built Page 11