Laura Miller

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

  Conservatism can be principled. (Note: I’m speaking here of classical conservatism, the variety that Lewis adhered to, not of what Americans usually mean by the term. Confusingly, the American institution of free-market “conservatism” is often referred to as “neoliberalism” in Europe, and Lewis would have rejected its faith in unrestrained capitalism.) It seeks to preserve ways of life that people sometimes don’t value until they begin to slip away. Lewis and Tolkien mourned the loss of the Britain of their youth and generations past, a rural Britain of ancient social hierarchies, unspoiled by automobiles and factories. Theirs was a conservatism that led them to rail against a grab bag of phenomena ranging from coed schools to real-estate development. Though neither was politically active (and Lewis boasted of never reading the newspapers), some of their strongest political feelings align with what we would now call environmentalism.

  With its focus on halting all change, however, conservatism — especially the unconsidered brand of it that Lewis espoused — can be merely reflexive. It is always in danger of enshrining prejudice in the name of tradition, of treating garlic as an emblem of iniquity simply because your own family never cooked with it. Prejudice, alas, runs through the Chronicles, although not all of it is as blatant as Lewis’s descriptions of the odiferous, dark-skinned Calormenes. Some of what I call prejudice wouldn’t be so labeled by other Lewis admirers, even today. A member of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, a group that meets right around the corner from my apartment in Greenwich Village, recently explained to a New York Times reporter, “Lewis’s vision was not that we all are equal, but that we are all different in our natural attitudes and natural creativity. Narnia is not about a hierarchy of power, but each kind of creature joyfully living out their natural attitudes.” That’s an accurate enough characterization of Lewis’s thought (“I do not believe God created an egalitarian world,” he once wrote). It doesn’t, however, account for the fact that tyrants always talk of the need for their subjects to accept their proper (and often divinely ordained) station in life.

  We could deplore the Calormenes for many reasons — they keep slaves, their society is overly hierarchical, they have imperial designs on Narnia, they compel young women to marry men they don’t love, their government is despotic — and we would be right to do so. Recoiling from them because they eat garlic and onions, or because they have dark skin, might (if we’re brutally honest with ourselves) be our instinctive response, but it is, of course, fundamentally different and fundamentally wrong. This was a distinction Lewis often failed to make, either because he couldn’t see it or because he couldn’t be bothered to look. For him, the wickedness of the Calormenes was of a piece with their foreignness, which was integral to their wrongness; the dark skin and strange smells were all tangled up with the slaveholding and the tyranny and the devil worship, and just about as bad, too.

  Lewis’s critics have accused him of many prejudices, but the main ones are racism, misogyny, and elitism. Philip Pullman has complained that in the world of the Chronicles “boys are better than girls; light-colored people are better than dark-colored people; and so on.” Lewis’s champions frequently respond to the racism charges by pointing out that the Calormenes, in addition to being dark-skinned, have a genuinely wicked society and that some of the most evil figures in the Chronicles — the White Witch most notably — have pale skin. Furthermore, at least two of the Calormenes are sympathetic: Aravis and Emeth, the nobleman who is saved by Aslan at the end of The Last Battle. (This last and least convincing defense sounds suspiciously like “some of my best friends are …” and it doesn’t go very far in counteracting the penny-dreadful phobia evident in lines like “their white eyes flashing dreadfully in their brown faces.”)

  The impulse to hero-worship our favorite writers is a leftover of our starry-eyed adolescence, as much a part of that period as the urge to rebel against the authority figures closer at hand. We want the artists who have changed our lives to lead exemplary lives of their own. A college friend of mine was crushed when he learned of the messy and ignoble intimate relationships of his literary idol, George Orwell, who cheated on his first wife and later, when he was at death’s door, married a much younger woman. My friend, a romantic soul, expected Orwell to be, if not faultless, then at least a paragon commensurate with his expressed ideals. One of the things we look for in books, especially when we’re young, is guidance on how to live, and however much we might admire what a great man has to say on this count, his credo loses some luster if he turns out to be unable to abide by it himself.

  Even more unrealistic, we also like to believe that our literary sages and mentors had the ability to see through the errors and prejudices of their day and to prefigure the wisdom of our own. T. S. Eliot, for example, was a great poet, but also an anti-Semite. This was not particularly unusual for someone of his background, but it was not universal, either. Tolkien admired Jews, and when, in 1938, his German publisher wrote to ask about his ethnicity, he testily replied, “If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” Tolkien’s contemporary fans are fortunate in this; those who adulate Eliot have on occasion felt obliged to write long and urgent essays for intellectual journals attempting to explain away such slurs as “the jew squats on the window sill” (from “Gerontion”) as “parody.”

  Imagine, then, how much more defensive a writer’s acolytes must be when the very foundations of their lives depend, to a certain extent, on his work. This is the case with almost everyone who writes about Lewis today. While Lewis’s literary criticism has drifted into obscurity (as A. N. Wilson has pointed out, criticism is a literary genre especially prone to obsolescence), his Christian apologetics remain nearly as popular as the Chronicles. Most of the biographers and scholars who currently study him first became interested in his religious works. Through his writing, Lewis has served as an avuncular theological mentor, a kindly guide who eases the anxious into the fold and continues to provide them with justifications for their beliefs. (This, incidentally, is precisely the job of the apologetic as a rhetorical form, according to the Oxford American Dictionary; it is “a reasoned argument or writing in justification of something.”)

  Among these converts is the geneticist Francis S. Collins, who in his book The Language of God, describes his own transformation from “obnoxious atheist” to evangelical Christian, precipitated by reading Lewis’s Mere Christianity. “Within the first three pages,” Collins told an interviewer, “I realized that my arguments against faith were those of a schoolboy.” Of course, Collins would not have been reading Mere Christianity to begin with if he had not been uneasy in his atheism and searching for some alternative. (He was given the book by a Methodist minister who recognized him as ripe for the plucking.) But Collins, like Lewis, portrays himself as a reluctant convert, and not surprisingly he invests great authority in the writer who persuaded him to cross the line.

  For many of the people who study Lewis’s writings, finding moral fault with any of his versions of Christianity, including the Chronicles, amounts to discovering termites in the joists supporting their own faith; it’s not a possibility they’re prepared to seriously contemplate. They may know better than to speak of Lewis’s theological writings as a form of scripture — that would be blasphemous — but veneration is also part of their temperament; it is, after all, one reason why they are religious. For them, Lewis has become the rough equivalent of the eleventh-century French rabbi Shlomo ben Itzhak (or Rashi), whose commentary on the Torah acquired so much authority that it was included in the first printed version of the Hebrew Bible.

  This, not surprisingly, makes Lewis scholars pretty skittish about examining the rare occasions when he seems to address race. The fact that the worst of Lewis’s stereotypes turn up in the Chronicles — mere children’s fiction — makes the subject easier to shrug off as inconsequential. David Downing, once again among the braver souls
who attempt a defense, picks his battles with exquisite care in Into the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles. He begins by dismissing charges (made by the British academic Andrew Blake) that the Chronicles contribute to the “demonization of Islam.” Islam, Downing observes, is a monotheistic religion while the Calormenes have more than one god. Downing then goes on to explain that Lewis modeled the Calormenes on characters from the Arabian Nights and therefore “every objectionable trait” they exhibit originates in “source materials” that “arose among Middle Easterners themselves.” The section of Into the Wardrobe that presents these evasive and absurdly technical vindications is entitled “Are the Chronicles Politically Incorrect?” rather than “Are the Chronicles Racist?” implying that such questions amount to no more than left-wing pettifoggery.

  In The Narnian, a biography of Lewis, Alan Jacobs makes the customary (and not negligible) argument that Lewis wrote “in a time less sensitive to cultural differences.” Like Downing, he insists that Lewis merely drew upon the “readymade source of ‘Oriental’ imagery,” generated by Christian Europe’s long rivalry with the Ottoman Empire. Jacobs feels sure that the continued popularity of the Chronicles proves that “readers … can tell the difference between, on the one hand, an intentionally hostile depiction of some alien culture and, on the other, the use of cultural difference as a mere plot device.” Jacobs’s confidence that the average reader would instinctively reject stories with truly racist elements is sadly misplaced; such scruples, if they exist, have done nothing to inhibit the popularity of Gone With the Wind. But beyond this, he also seems to be suggesting that because Lewis didn’t really know — or even want to know — anything about Turks or Arabs, he can’t be accused of deliberately maligning them. At worst, he just didn’t care whether he was doing them an injustice as long as it served his needs.

  The feebleness of this distinction — it’s better to insult someone out of ignorant expedience than out of straightforward antipathy — is pitiful. What is prejudice if not the presumption to judge people you know nothing about on the basis of “readymade” imagery? Perhaps if Lewis had lived in Istanbul or enjoyed a few close Turkish friends, he would not have made this mistake. He might have grown accustomed to the scent of garlic. His pronouncements on homosexuality were notably liberal-minded, for example, no doubt because Arthur Greeves, his best friend from boyhood, was homosexual. Lewis’s fault lies in never considering the possibility that he might be wrong about those dark-skinned strangers, the ones he never got to meet; he was ignorant of his own ignorance. His beloved imagination may have served him well on many other occasions, but when it came to people who looked or smelled different from himself, it stopped short.

  Chapter Twelve

  Girl Trouble

  Everybody’s favorite characters from the Chronicles are reunited at the end of the final book, The Last Battle — all but one. King Tirian, Narnia’s staunch defender against the Calormene menace, until the moment Aslan brings his world to an end, suddenly and inexplicably finds himself in a beautiful countryside, where he meets seven of the eight children who have visited Narnia from our world. Among them are Peter, Edmund, and Lucy (now young adults), but when Tirian asks after Susan, Peter tersely replies that she’s “no longer a friend of Narnia.” Jill explains that, back in our world, Susan would rather not hang around with the rest of them reminiscing about their Narnian adventures. Instead, she’s “interested in nothing nowadays but nylons and lipstick and invitations.” Polly, also among the redeemed, adds, “Her whole idea is to race to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”

  Susan’s fate — the rest of the visitants from our world have already died in a railway accident, although they don’t know it yet — has bothered many readers. It is one of the most debated aspects of the Chronicles. Presumably, Susan is the only Pevensie to escape the accident (the Pevensies’ parents are also killed), which prompted Neil Gaiman to write a short story imagining the rest of her life. In “The Problem of Susan,” she is presented as an elderly college professor, the author of a history of children’s literature, giving an interview to a young journalist. Susan recalls identifying the mangled bodies of her siblings at the railway station and barely scraping by financially after losing her whole family. She has lived a full life, illustrated by an obituary in the morning paper that reminds her of a man she kissed in a summer house long ago and another man who “took what was left of her virginity on a blanket on a Spanish beach.”

  Gaiman pointedly fills “The Problem of Susan” with everything Lewis left out of the Chronicles: adulthood, the uglier realities of violence and death, the brutal side of nature, and, especially, sexuality. Although none of these matters are natural topics for children’s books (especially in Lewis’s day), Gaiman feels that Lewis takes his aversion to maturity too far. He agrees with Philip Pullman that Susan’s “nylons and lipstick and invitations” are emblems of her sexuality, and he maintains that sexuality is really what keeps her out of Paradise. “It’s only reading it as an adult,” he told me, “that you start to wonder: Where are the nice women of childbearing age? …There was a level on which of course [Susan] doesn’t get to heaven because she’s just like the witches, and they wear dresses and they’re pretty.”

  Gaiman’s friend, Susanna Clarke, the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, thinks that both men interpret this passage too freely. “Lewis’s critics tend to reduce it all down to a question of sex,” she said when I had the chance to ask her about it during a visit to England. “I’ve seen convincing arguments that what Susan was guilty of in the end was not so much growing up as vanity. I think there are strong reasons to think that’s probably true.”

  “I see what you mean,” I replied, “but even so, I believe Lewis did think that women are more prone to that sort of trivial vanity than men are.” I told Susanna about a story Lewis wrote, “The Shoddy Lands,” in which a man’s friend becomes engaged and somehow the narrator finds himself briefly transported into the fiancée’s mind. Everything in the world becomes blurry and flimsy, except for the clothes and merchandise in shops, which is clearly all this silly woman really cares about.

  “I’m still not sure I agree with you,” she replied. “It really depends on whether you just look at the books themselves, or whether you look at his character and his other writings as well. I don’t see from the books, the Narnia books, that he thought trivial vanity was a female thing.”

  “What other examples are you thinking of?”

  “Well, you’ve got Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, who goes off and dresses himself up in his best clothes. And there’s also the horse Bree in The Horse and His Boy. [Lewis] makes it clear that Bree is vain and socially insecure and worried about what will happen to him in Narnia.”

  Lewis himself wrote to a child fan that Susan had “turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there’s plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end — in her own way.” Alan Jacobs, in The Narnian, defends Lewis against charges of sexism by arguing that Susan really misses out on paradise due to her “excessive regard for social acceptance.” Although Jacobs is willing to admit that Lewis “could say some extraordinarily silly things about women,” he believes that, for those who object to Susan’s fate, especially Philip Pullman, this is really a side issue. To atheists like Pullman, Jacobs claims, Lewis’s “greater crime” is his conviction that people can be eternally condemned at all; what they can’t stand is the fact that “God gives people the freedom to choose Hell rather than choose to dwell in Heaven.”

  I don’t doubt that Pullman objects to the idea of damnation, but in the case of Susan, what he’s protesting is the grounds for damnation, not damnation itself. Bree’s vanity is a minor flaw in an otherwise good character, and Uncle Andrew’s pride runs much deeper than just a preoccupation with appearances. Although Susan is not yet damned and still has the chance to “men
d,” the implication, in both Lewis’s novel and the letter to his child reader, is that if she keeps on as she has been, preoccupied with feminine nonsense, this alone will be enough to bring her to a bad end. And that prompts a question: Why does Lewis consider an interest in lipstick, nylons, and invitations such an especially pernicious form of silliness? What makes these amusements so much worse than pipes and beer and “bawdy” with your buddies at the pub? Why is feminine triviality so much worse than its masculine counterpart?

  Lipstick-obsessed flibbertigibbets like Susan or the fiancée from “The Shoddy Lands” were not the only sort of female Lewis found untrustworthy. In the Chronicles, two of the most memorable villains are women: the White Witch of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (later revealed in The Magician’s Nephew to be Jadis, the empress of the lost world of Charn) and the Lady of the Green Kirtle from The Silver Chair, who keeps Caspian’s son, Rilian, an unwitting prisoner in her underground kingdom. Both of these witches are very beautiful: the White Witch in the frosty tradition of the Snow Queen, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, or the Green Witch, in the merrier spirit of Celtic sorceresses. These two are after more than just party invitations; they want power. Vain, silly women may be annoying distractions for men who have better things to do; the witches are seducers.

  Although the tools the White Witch uses to corrupt Edmund are juvenile enough — enchanted candy and the prospect of lording it over his older brother — the scene in which she ensnares him swims with sensuality; there is the witch’s pale skin, her furlined sleigh, and the hot drink she conjures out of nothing (“sweet and foamy and creamy”). A friend of mine remembers being deeply unsettled by this episode as a boy; the witch, though frightening, was also alluring in some way he didn’t entirely understand. Soon the initially resistant Edmund becomes ridiculously pliable to her demands, red-faced and sticky and preoccupied with getting another taste of Turkish delight.