Laura Miller

by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

  Still, being able to navigate traffic on your own doesn’t keep you from wanting to hold somebody’s hand every once in a while, if for different reasons. Holding hands feels nice, and this is one aspect of Aslan that has retained its charm for me. Unlike the God I was raised to worship, he is a god you can touch, and a god who asks to be touched physically in his darkest hour. “Lay your hands on my mane so that I can feel you are there and let us walk like that,” he says to Lucy and Susan as he goes to his execution at the stone table. After he has been killed, the weeping girls come to kiss “his cold face” and stroke “his beautiful fur,” in a far more raw and tangible evocation of grief than anything in the New Testament. Then, after Aslan has been resurrected, the girls climb onto his “warm, golden back,” bury their hands in his mane, and go for a breathless cross-country ride through a Narnia you can almost taste, thanks to one of Lewis’s most exhilarating descriptions:

  Have you ever had a gallop on a horse? Think of that; and then take away the heavy noise of the hoofs and the jingle of the bits and imagine instead the almost noiseless padding of the great paws. Then imagine instead of the black or gray or chestnut back of the horse the soft roughness of golden fur, and the mane flying back in the wind. And then imagine you are going about twice as fast as the fastest racehorse. But this is a mount that doesn’t need to be guided and never grows tired. He rushes on and on, never missing his footing, never hesitating, threading his way with perfect skill between tree trunks, jumping over bush and briar and the smaller streams, wading the larger, swimming the largest of all. And you are riding not on a road nor in the park nor even on the downs, but right across Narnia, in spring, down solemn avenues of beech and across sunny glades of oak, through wild orchards of snow-white cherry trees, past roaring waterfalls and mossy rocks and echoing caverns, up windy slopes alight with gorse bushes, and across the shoulders of heathery mountains and along giddy ridges and down, down, down again into wild valleys and out into acres of blue flowers.

  Traditional Christian iconography is filled with a mangled eroticism: the half-naked, suffering body of Christ hanging from the cross, the woman humbly drying his feet with her own hair, the graphic torments of martyrs displayed in centuries of religious art — all of it warped by a pervasive ambivalence about sexuality. (This ambivalence, incidentally, and whatever wishful thinkers might say to the contrary, is not limited to Judeo-Christian religions.) Nowhere among these images do you find the plain, untrammeled joy in being alive that Lewis captures in Lucy and Susan’s “romp” with Aslan. The scene is blissfully sensual. It ends with all three “rolled over together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and legs.” It would be hard to imagine the two girls sharing the same intimacy with a god in the form of a man — or, rather, it’s imaginable, but only with uncomfortable undertones.

  “Animal” is a word sometimes used as a synonym for “carnal,” and not in a good way, but Lucy and Susan’s desire to touch Aslan, and Aslan’s desire to be touched by them, is carnal without ambivalence because he is an actual animal. Like most adults of his time and place (or adults of most times and places, for that matter), Lewis had mixed feelings about sex, but in this scene, at least, he escapes into a pure delight in physicality that’s almost, but not quite, erotic. And although I myself am ambivalent about having to use the word “pure” to characterize that delight — or worse yet, the word “innocent,” which I’ve so far managed to avoid — there is no other adjective for it. Even if I would prefer not to think that sexuality contaminates experiences, I have to admit that ambivalence about sexuality does just that. Lucy and Susan’s romp with Aslan is as much pleasure as you can have in a body without sex — that is, without sex and the ambivalence that comes with it.

  It’s also transcendent. “Whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten, Lucy could never make up her mind,” Lewis writes. What Susan and Lucy are tumbling around with on Narnia’s springy turf is something titanic and formidable, not just their own carnality with all its dormant, unpredictable potential, but a divinity who has just unleashed snowbound Narnia into the rampant vitality of spring. Yet if you’re going to romp with a thunderstorm, what better form could it take than a gigantic kitten? Play and youth, too, are forces of nature.

  When I read picture books to my toddler friends, Corinne and Desmond, they like to sidle up close to me. Their little fingers creep under my watchband and twine around my thumbs like the ivy that, under Aslan’s direction in Prince Caspian, pulls down all the man-made structures in Narnia. The twins can’t sit still; they have to fiddle with locks of my hair, climb onto my shoulders and into my lap. I usually wind up with a foot in my solar plexus and a head blocking my view of the book I’m supposed to be reading. They make me feel like a patient old dog, beset by puppies, my ears chewed on and paws squashed. I suppose they’ll only be able to get away with behaving like this for a few more years, when, inevitably, self-consciousness will set in. Except, of course, with animals, who have only ever had this way of showing their love.

  Chapter Three

  The Secret Garden

  Discovering Narnia felt like a breathtaking expansion of the boundaries of my world, yet it was also an intensely private event. “You were so excited you couldn’t talk about it,” Wilanne Belden recalled. “I tried, but you sort of clammed up. I knew how important it was to you, but I think you thought that if you talked about it, it would get away.”

  A friend of mine recalls having solemn discussions with his childhood cohorts about what they’d do if they ever got to Narnia or Middle-earth, but this youthful collegiality seems to be the exception. One woman, who had just described her grammar school to me as a place where “magical things happened” and “we were allowed to let our imaginations really run,” couldn’t say whether her classmates had also liked the Narnia books. As for myself, I didn’t know anyone else who’d read them, and to the best of my recollection I never urged them on my friends or siblings. There was Mrs. Belden, of course, but her role in initiating me had a priestly aspect — I expected to be led by her, not to befriend her — and I was a congregation of one. Even with the high priestess, I played it pretty close to my chest.

  Like a lot of children from large families, I was preoccupied with getting and maintaining some small, inviolable portion of privacy. The advantage of Narnia was that it was a whole world I could have all to myself. C. S. Lewis’s childhood had its fortified aspect, as well. Jack had a friend in Warnie, the brother to whom he remained close for the rest of his life, but from the start their bond was predicated on excluding adults. “We stood foursquare against the common enemy,” Lewis wrote in his memoir, Surprised by Joy. Their mother, Flora, died when Jack was nine; it was a loss he referred to sparingly afterward. Their father, Albert, had lost his own father a few weeks before that, and seems to have briefly fallen apart after the death of his wife. Lewis’s biographers (himself included) universally regard what happened next — the temperamental Albert’s efforts to seek comfort from his sons rather than to comfort them, and his occasional outbursts of what Jack called “unjust” behavior — as a mistake that resulted in a long estrangement.

  At least, that’s the theory, a theory that jibes with the commonplace, quasi-Freudian notion that a single traumatic event can cause lasting changes in the ecology of a relationship. It’s also one of those notions that treats life as more of a narrative than it actually is. In real life, a well-balanced relationship can regain its footing pretty well, even after a severe knock. It’s in the nature of human beings (especially young, adaptable ones) to get over things when given half a chance. I suspect that if the makings of real intimacy had ever existed between Albert and his sons, it probably would have revived in the years after Flora’s death, however badly he behaved just afterward. What really alienated the two brothers from their father was something less momentous — something with fewer of the dramatic qualities of a good excuse.

  The autobiographical writings of
both Jack and Warnie portray Albert as a well-intentioned but irritating man. Behind his back, the boys complained about him constantly and mocked his many foibles. They invented a nickname for him, the P’daytabird, and wrote each other letters grumbling about the “rows after tea and penitentiary strolls in the garden” that dominated their home life when he was around. When Jack was an undergraduate, he described Albert to a friend as “one for whom I have little affection and whose society has for many years given me much discomfort and no pleasure.” This, as Lewis seems acutely aware in Surprised by Joy, was unkind and looks especially bad in retrospect; Albert’s peculiarities were hardly the caliber of sin that merits rejection by one’s own children.

  Lewis’s most distinguished biographer, A. N. Wilson, regards the boys’ coolness toward their father as a personal failing, at least on Jack’s part. He characterizes the portrait of Albert in Surprised by Joy as “devastatingly cruel” and Jack’s resentment of his financial dependence on his father during his early Oxford years as amounting to a “venomous” hostility; Albert’s own diary confirms that he sometimes felt mistreated and disrespected by Jack. Yet in Jack and Warnie’s defense, consider how much easier it is to reconcile with a charming friend who has wronged you once (if seriously) than it is to get along with someone who aggravates you three times an hour every single hour you spend with him. People like this are not any more endurable because they’re technically harmless or mean well.

  Wilson argues, plausibly, that guilt over how he’d behaved toward Albert would haunt Jack for the rest of his life; “I treated my own father abominably,” Lewis once wrote to a friend after Albert’s death in 1929, “and no sin in my whole life now seems to be so serious.” No doubt Lewis learned to value patience and forbearance in his later years because he knew all too well how difficult it can be to summon both. In his adulthood, when he would be sorely tested in this department, Lewis’s Christianity gave him a moral framework in which to place all the small annoyances of difficult relationships. Indulging a querulous person’s unreasonable little demands and eccentricities could then be transfigured in Lewis’s mind into a cross to bear, a hair shirt, an opportunity to demonstrate that his faith had humbled him.

  I have more sympathy for the young Lewis (and his brother) than Lewis had for himself — more than Wilson has, too. In their memoirs, Warnie and Jack both try repeatedly to capture the particular manner that Albert had of vexing them; you can sense their frustration at not being able to get it right, at failing to convey just how bad things could be. Their grievances do sound minor, but they’re revealing all the same. In a memoir that was later condensed to serve as the introduction to a volume of his brother’s letters, Warnie explained why Jack avoided inviting Arthur Greeves, the boy who lived across the street and who would become a lifelong friend, into their family home:

  My father would certainly have welcomed his son’s friend very cordially, but not for a moment would it have occurred to him that the two boys might want to talk together, alone. No: he would have joined them, inescapably, for a good talk about books, doing nine-tenths of the talking himself, eulogizing his own favorites without regard to their interests. Two bored and frustrated youths would have been subjected to long readings from Macaulay’s essays, Burke’s speeches, and the like, and my father would have gone to bed satisfied that he had given them a literary evening far more interesting than they could have contrived for themselves.

  Albert Lewis was, furthermore, perpetually anxious and prone to hysteria, particularly about money. He did not hide this from his children. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes of how seriously he had once taken his father’s frequent, melodramatic talk of the poorhouse: “All security seemed to be taken from me; there was no solid ground beneath my feet.” Albert was exaggerating, but until Jack grew old enough to understand that these panicky warnings were mere “rhetoric,” he believed them, and was terrified that his family would soon be begging on the street.

  Albert, although essentially kindhearted, didn’t really listen to Jack or Warnie, usually got whatever they told him about themselves wrong, and then could never be persuaded that he had misunderstood them. (This imperviousness occasionally became a serious problem, as when he sent the boys to a small boarding school run by a sadistic headmaster who eventually had to be institutionalized.) When they were all at home, he insisted that his sons be, in Lewis’s words, “as closely bound to his presence as if the three of us had been chained together,” whereupon his own peculiar habits and endless, overwrought lectures monopolized everything they did or talked about. “The theory,” Lewis wrote, “was that we lived together more like three brothers than like a father and two sons.” The reality, of course, was that Albert failed to become a virtual brother and neglected to behave like the father he actually was. Small wonder, then, that Lewis also wrote, “I thought Monday morning, when he went back to his work, the brightest jewel of the week.”

  In modern parlance, we’d say Albert had boundary issues. His heart was in the right place, but he exposed his children to his raw grief, confusion, and fear when they were too young to be anything but frightened by it. He couldn’t grasp that they had thoughts or lives of their own, and so he never gathered that at times, he must necessarily be excluded from both, emotionally and physically. Even as an adult, Jack never entered his father’s house without first checking his pockets for anything he would prefer to keep private; Albert would go through them as casually as he’d enter his sons’ rooms without knocking. And thus, in Jack, “a habit of concealment” was formed. Unless you’ve had a parent of this sort, it’s hard to communicate how powerfully the sensation of perpetual intrusion shapes a child’s character or how fiercely an adolescent is likely to rebel against it.

  Any habit of concealment inevitably leads to the division of one’s life and personality into compartments, and this, I believe, is a signal trait of the bookish child. “I am telling the story of two lives,” Lewis wrote of his early teens in Surprised by Joy, meaning that the outer story, set in the series of hateful boarding schools he attended after his mother’s death, must be contrasted with an inner story, contemporaneous with the first. In the inner story, Lewis reveled in “a period of ecstasy” fed by his discovery of classical and Norse mythology and his independent explorations of English literature and the Northern Irish countryside. At home, he soldiered through the weary hours with his father, and when Albert went to work, he would happily devise elaborate sagas set in the imaginary world he shared with Warnie. Best of all, on those rare, cherished occasions when he had the house to himself, he enjoyed the “complete satisfaction” of “a deeper solitude than I had ever known.”

  Like many great readers, Lewis regarded his time alone as his real life. By the age of nine — the same age at which I was thinking that my hunger for Narnia might kill me — he, too, was “living almost entirely in my imagination; or at least … the imaginative experience of those years now seems to me more important than anything else.” Like Lewis’s, my material life often seemed to be nothing more than the drab and shadowy interludes between the hours when I could read and retreat to an interior realm furnished with the fabulous treasure I had scavenged from hundreds of books. I sometimes wonder if this kind of inward-turning, inward-dwelling, probably unhealthy temperament is acquired or inherited. Did tumbling into Lewis’s own imagined world at such an impressionable age imprint me with some of his traits? Or did I perhaps get my dreaming ways from my father, who liked nothing better than to escape the rumpus of family life and work alone in his garden?

  Gardens speak to people of this solitary temperament. Even those of us who don’t tend the real ones find the idea of gardens, especially walled ones, evocative. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis recalls his first experience of true “beauty,” which appeared in the unlikely form of the lid of a cookie tin that his brother had filled with bits of moss and twigs to create a miniature garden. “What the real garden had failed to do,” Lewis writes, “the toy garden did. It m
ade me aware of nature — not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant.” Gardens are man-made concentrations of the natural world, places where nature is trained to seem more itself than it is when left to its own devices. In a way, the artificiality of gardens is like the artificiality of stories, which take the components of life and arrange them into forms that intensify and order them, saturating them with meaning.

  In The Magician’s Nephew, the Chronicles’ Creation story, Aslan sends the boy Digory on a quest to a walled garden in the mountains far to the west of the newly made land of Narnia. Digory has been given the task of bringing back a single apple from a tree that grows there, and although Aslan hasn’t told him not to taste the apples himself, an inscription on the gate admonishes all visitors to “Take of my fruit for others” only. There are, of course, the obviously biblical connotations to this walled garden at the beginning of the world, with its semiforbidden fruit. But Digory is no Adam; he has committed his transgression before he arrives at the garden’s gate. He has already unwittingly introduced an evil into Narnia — the sorceress Jadis, who will one day become the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Aslan sets him the task of fetching the apple as a form of expiation.

  Digory’s friend Polly has come along for most of the journey, and the two children travel on the back of Fledge, a talking winged horse. Polly and Fledge are stalwart companions, but at the entrance to the garden they instinctively hang back. “You never saw a place which was so obviously private,” the narrator explains. “You could see at a glance that it belonged to someone else.” It’s all right for Digory to go inside, but not the others. Like all of the most magical places in the Narnia books, the garden is very quiet; even the fountain at its center makes “only the faintest sound.” Jadis, however, has snuck in before Digory, and he spots her there, gorging herself on plundered apples. (I never forgot the “horrid stain” their juice leaves around her mouth, and sometimes I wonder if that’s why my most vivid recollection of Madame Bovary is of her mouth stained by the poison she swallows at the end of the novel.)