Nothing on this list dictates what type of book the literary reader ought to prefer; it is the quality of the attention brought to it that matters. There is an uncharacteristic radicalism to Lewis’s further suggestion that if we can find “even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale.”
He is, among other things, describing the way certain children read certain books, with a fervor that can inspire mystification and awe in their adult counterparts. Such experiences can’t be merely ephemeral, meaningless, but they often seem entirely inaccessible when we look back on them years later. This, at least, is what Clive James felt upon returning to Professor Challenger, and so he was forced to dismiss the whole situation as merely comical. Still, how could he have failed to be formed as a man and as a reader by Doyle’s adventure yarns? We would not expect any other overwhelming emotional experience from his childhood to have left him untouched. Today, James is a gifted, witty critic. Perhaps there is more to Professor Challenger than meets the eye.
The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. A first love teaches you how to be with another human being by choice, rather than out of the imperative of blood ties. If we are lucky, our first love shows us how to negotiate the paradox of entering into a union with someone who remains fundamentally unknowable. First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.
The meeting of author and reader has a similar soul-shaping potential. The author who can make a world for a reader — make him believe that the people, places, and events he describes are, if anything, truer than his real, immediate surroundings — that author is someone with a mighty power indeed. Who can forget the first time they experienced this sensation? Who can doubt that every literary encounter they have afterward must somehow be colored by it? If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children’s books suddenly turn up very high on the list.
I’ve titled this book after a passage in my current favorite among the Chronicles of Narnia, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It’s the part where Lucy, who has reluctantly agreed to enter the house of an invisible magician, slips into his study in order to read a spell out of his great book. She finds a couple of charms that intrigue and tempt her, and then she arrives at something special, a spell that is “like a story” but that disappears as she reads it, and soon vanishes even from her memory.
Perhaps Lewis is alluding here to the fleeting enchantment of childhood reading. But that’s not all this passage is about. He also had the idea that certain stories run deep in human nature, deeper than the individual books that tell them, deeper even than words themselves. He tried to tap into that kind of story in his fiction, and he achieved this in his children’s books better than anywhere else. The peculiarly heady effect of the Chronicles on young readers is testimony to his success. Francis Spufford, author of the memoir The Child That Books Built, writes of feeling that Lewis “had anticipated what would delight me with an almost unearthly intimacy,” in stories that became “the inevitable expressions of my longing.” The Chronicles have bewitched millions of children of vastly different backgrounds in just this way since they were first published in the 1950s.
Lucy can’t remember any more from the story than “a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill,” but that doesn’t mean she isn’t able to recognize it when she meets it again, even when it appears in a different form. “Ever since that day,” the narrator continues, “what Lucy means by a good story is a story that reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician’s Book.” I’ve read a lot of great literature since the day my second-grade teacher handed me a clothbound copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I’ve read both towering masterpieces and less exalted novels that, when it comes to felicity of craftsmanship, thoroughly trounce any of Lewis’s fiction. But none of these is my Magician’s Book, the story to which all other stories must be compared. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, my introduction to Narnia, is that book for me, not merely because of its form or style or historical significance, but because of how it made me feel, which is at heart the fundamental question with any work of fiction. In the right light, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will always be the best book I’ve ever read.
Why is this so? Many of the answers lie with its author, a man whom the critic William Empson (ideologically unsympathetic to Lewis in almost every way) characterized as “the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read.” Much of this reading, and many of Lewis’s own life experiences, make themselves felt in the Chronicles, as we would expect of any writer striving to bring his full talent to the task. He did not think any less of the work because it was intended for children, or any less of his readers because they were young. Lewis was cognizant of reading, the moment when the words of the writer mingle with the mind of the reader, as a kind of duet, with the reader bringing as much, in her own way, to the union as the writer. Here, from An Experiment in Criticism, is a remarkable description of the act of reading:
[If the] dance is devised by a master, the rests and movements, the quickenings and slowings, the easier and the more arduous passages, will come exactly as we need them; we shall be deliciously surprised by the satisfaction of wants we were not aware of till they were satisfied. We shall end up just tired enough and not too tired, and “on the right note.” It would have been unbearable if it had ended a moment sooner — or later — or in any different way. Looking back on the whole performance, we shall feel that we have been led through a pattern or arrangement of activities which our nature cried out for… . The relaxation, the slight (agreeable) weariness, the banishment of all our fidgets, at the close of a great work all proclaim that it has done us good.
Dance is the metaphor he chooses and, as Yeats observed, it is impossible to distinguish the dancer from the dance. Accordingly, if I want to write about the meanings of Narnia, then one aspect of the story must be personal; Lewis’s children’s fiction played an important role in my early life, so much so that I could never be the least bit objective about it. Some of what I have to say can only be demonstrated by my own experiences. Therefore, to quote Lewis again, “I must here be autobiographical for the sake of being evidential.” Literary value is personal, after all, because somebody — a person — needs to experience it as a reader for it to exist at all.
But my history with Narnia is not idiosyncratic, and so I’ve also occasionally included interviews I conducted with writers and people who responded to my first essay about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published on Salon.com. Conversations with other readers have always been essential to the growth of my own literary understanding, and I suspect this is true for most other critics as well. But for some reason convention has dictated that we seldom mention these exchanges when writing about books. I’ve tried to correct that omission here.
In the concluding volume of the Chronicles, The Last Battle, Lewis wrote of a place that “was far larger than it seemed from the outside.” Although this book will wend its way through the life and thoughts of Lewis and his friends (especially his close friend and colleague J. R. R. Tolkien), my own life and thoughts, the memories and feelings of other readers, the history and literature of Britain and of Ireland and the mythical taproots of humanity, all of this, in the end, is contained in seven children’s novels. These books are far larger than they seem from the outside, and The Magician’s Book is an attempt to explore some of their interior terrain. There is one major thematic province, however, that I will do no more than fly over: Lewis’s Christianity. Many, many other writers have dealt exhausti
vely with this aspect of Lewis’s work, to the point of obscuring other elements in the Chronicles, the ones that appeal to me. Lewis’s theological writings don’t interest me much, and while religion is an unavoidable subject when considering Narnia, my goal has been to illuminate its other, unsung dimensions, especially the deep roots of the Chronicles in the universal experiences of childhood and in English literature.
I am no longer young, and I can’t read the Chronicles the way I once did, with the same absolute belief. Some of what I find there still moves me profoundly, but other bits now grate and disturb. I began The Magician’s Book hoping to explain not only why but how it is still possible for me to love these books, despite the biases and small-mindedness they sometimes display, despite often feeling that I wouldn’t have much liked the man who wrote them, despite the proselytizing that most adults assume is their only real content.
I don’t believe that my appreciation amounts to mere nostalgia or a yearning for my own lost innocence. At the very least, that would be a betrayal of the child I once was. She would have had no patience with such mopey sentimentality; one of the reasons she prized the Chronicles was her belief (correct, I still think) that they educated her on the nature of evil as well as good, and that she was the better for it. I like to think that in the end, I’ve kept faith with her.
A Note on the Order of the Chronicles of Narnia
The Chronicles of Narnia have been numbered by their publishers in two different orders. The first, and the order in which I originally read them, is the order of their publication: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Silver Chair; The Horse and His Boy; The Magician’s Nephew; and The Last Battle. In recent years, citing a letter C. S. Lewis wrote to a child in 1957, Lewis’s estate (which is managed by his stepson, Douglas Gresham) has specified that the books be numbered according to the chronological sequence of the fictional events they describe: The Magician’s Nephew; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Silver Chair; The Last Battle. Feelings run high on this matter. Lewis expressed the intention of one day going back to the Chronicles to correct various problems, and perhaps he would have revised them to make the current order more consistent with the content of the books themselves. However, he never got around to this, and as is, some lines in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe don’t make much sense if you presume that its readers are already familiar with The Magician’s Nephew.
Most of the people I’ve talked with about Narnia are old enough to have read the books in the original order and, like me, they can’t imagine discovering them in any other sequence, for reasons of art as well as logic. I remain unconvinced that Lewis himself had any definite opinions on the proper order in which to read the Chronicles (he was probably just being kind to his young correspondent), and even if he did, I would still recommend that they be read in the original configuration. Accordingly, throughout this book, I will discuss all seven books as if the original ordering still prevailed.
Part One
Songs of Innocence
Chapter One
The Light in the Forest
Long before I learned of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, before it was even written, a twelve-year-old girl named Wilanne Belden walked two miles once a week to the library in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, to check out the maximum quantity of five books. It was the Depression, and buying any book was a luxury. The deal Wilanne’s parents struck with her was that if she checked out the same title from the library three times, and read it from cover to cover each time, she could have a copy of her own.
This arrangement worked well enough until Wilanne discovered what would become her favorite book, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (then in its first edition, before even Tolkien himself knew the significance of Bilbo Baggins’s magic ring). The Hobbit is long for a children’s book, and by the time she had read it three times, it had gone out of stock in bookstores. Buying a copy was no longer an option. So Wilanne decided to make her own, checking the book out of the library over and over again, typing up a couple dozen pages at a time using two fingers on the family’s manual typewriter. She got as far as page 107 before the book returned to the stores.
There is no reader more devoted than a bookish child who has found the story that suits her perfectly. Thirty years later, Wilanne would turn me into one of those children when she handed me a slim hardcover bound in gray fabric with the image of a little stag stamped on the front, and said, “I think you’ll like this one.” It was her copy; she’d had the book for a while, but I was the first of her second-grade students that she’d tried it on. “You were a child who needed to read C. S. Lewis,” she said firmly when, not long ago, I asked her why.
“How did you know? How can you tell something like that?”
“I can’t explain. It’s just one of those things that happens.”
Even today, this intuition strikes me as slightly supernatural, in the same way that Narnia seemed to emerge, by some miracle, out of my own unspoken self. “When you brought the book back,” Wilanne remembered as we sat in her cozy apartment, surrounded by books, knitting, and cats, “You told me, and this I have always remembered, that you didn’t know that there were other people who had the kind of imagination that you did.”
Wilanne and I were not, I think, unhappy children. I grew up in a comfortable American home, in a big, intact family, with a lawyer father and a homemaker mom, and she still remembers feeling fortunate that her father had a steady job when so many others didn’t. But we were neither of us, I suspect, entirely satisfied with that.
“You were automatically one of my kids,” Wilanne said when I asked her what she remembered about first meeting me forty years ago. By this, she means one of those children “interested in the imagination and in the relationship between the real and the unreal. They are entirely capable of telling the difference between truth and falsehood, but they prefer the falsehood occasionally.” Nothing exciting had ever happened to me, was how I saw it, and I was convinced that nothing exciting ever could, as long as I was stuck in a world of station wagons and jump rope, backyard swim classes and spelling tests. Then Mrs. Belden handed me a book.
I’ve read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so often since then that I no longer have a distinct recollection of the first time. What was it like to be genuinely surprised when Lucy Pevensie’s fingertips brushed against branches instead of fur coats as she first walked through the wardrobe and into the snowy woods? That sensation is lost to me. What remains is a dim recollection of how life was shaped before I knew about Narnia, and a more distinct sense of what it was like afterward. I had found a new world, which at the same time felt like a place I’d always known existed. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to be wistful about the fact that I’d never read this perfect book for the first time again. All I wanted was more.
Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely? Once I began to confer with other people who had loved the Chronicles as children, I kept hearing stories, like my own, of countless, intoxicated rereadings. “I would read other books, of course,” wrote the novelist Neil Gaiman, “but in my heart I knew that I read them only because there wasn’t an infinite number of Narnia books.” Later, when I had the chance to talk with him about the Chronicles in person, he told me, “The weird thing about the Narnia books for me was that mostly they seemed true. There was a level on which I was absolutely willing at age six, age seven, to accept them as a profound and real truth. Unquestioned, there was definitely a Narnia. This stuff had happened. These were reports from a real place.”
Most of us persuaded our parents to buy us boxed sets of all seven Chronicles, but I also saved up my allowance and occasional small cash gifts from relatives to buy a hardcover copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, one of the few times
in my life I’ve ever succumbed to the collector’s impulse. If I hadn’t been able to obtain a copy of the book, I have no doubt that I, too, would have resorted to typing up one of my own. This was not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal. I was not yet capable of thinking about it in this way, but I’d been enthralled by the most elementary of readerly metaphors: A little girl opens the hinged door of some commonplace piece of household furniture and steps through it into another world. I opened the hinged cover of a book and did the same.
Why did I fall so hard and so completely, and why was a land of fauns and centaurs and talking animals so exactly what I wanted to read about? Not long ago, a friend told me about her nine-year-old daughter’s infatuation with Narnia. My friend had grown up loving historical novels about “prairie girls,” and while she didn’t disapprove of her daughter’s appetite for fantasy, it baffled her. “I just don’t get it,” she complained.
If you had asked me at the same age why I liked The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe better than, say, Little Women or any other story that was about lives more like my own, I wouldn’t have been able to answer; it seemed crazy to prefer anything else. The best analogy I can make is a corny one, to the film version of The Wizard of Oz and that famous moment when Dorothy ventures out of the drab, black-and-white farmhouse that’s carried her all the way from drab, black-and-white Kansas and into the Technicolor of Oz. Who in her right mind would poke her head out for just a sec, then slam the door shut, and shout, “Take me back to Kansas”?
Laura Miller Page 2