Laura Miller

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

  It took me quite a while to recognize the trap in this. I didn’t have much use for clothes or parties myself until I reached my twenties, and I’m still no aficionado of gossip. But unlike Lucy, who apparently dies a virgin, I eventually faced the paradox that confronts most heterosexual women: revel in girly stuff and you’re viewed as shallow; reject it and you’re unattractively mannish. The best you can hope to be is “as good as a boy,” and the worst is a man-eater, a time-waster, a “hindrance” or perhaps, as Janie Moore would discover, the occasion for someone else’s martyrdom. The only way out is to remain a child forever, as Lucy does, but somehow even this is much easier for men — nostalgic bachelors like Warnie Lewis — to pull off. Besides, I wanted to grow up, didn’t I? As a child, I’d always believed that Lewis was on my side in that. As a young woman, I realized he’d disappointed me again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Blood Will Out

  The Natural History of Make-Believe by John Goldthwaite is a little-known “history of the world’s imaginative literature for children,” a passionate and partisan work, full of fiery tirades against several titles that are usually published with the words “The Beloved Classic” stamped on their covers. It was recommended to me by Philip Pullman, who said that he’d encountered one of the best articulations of his own criticisms of Lewis in the work of Goldthwaite, an American academic. Pullman thought I’d find The Natural History of Make-Believe particularly interesting because Goldthwaite is a Christian, and his animus toward Narnia can’t be summarily written off as anti-theist prejudice, the way Pullman’s often is.

  Perhaps the most unconventional argument that Goldthwaite mounts in The Natural History of Make-Believe concerns Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which he regards not as a charming flight of fancy but as a risible “bout of rancor.” Lewis Carroll’s novel, he maintains, is the toxic product of its author’s thwarted artistic and social ambitions. I’m not sure I can entirely agree with that, any more than I would argue that children’s fiction ought to be devoid of anger, but he has a point; a friend of mine stopped reading the book to his four-year-old daughter because she found the characters upsettingly “mean.”

  In Goldthwaite’s chapter on Middle-earth and Narnia, he raises some familiar objections to the Chronicles — Lewis’s evident fear of powerful, sexual women and the occasional sideswipes at such crackpot progressive notions as coed schooling. He also brings up a few others that I hadn’t considered before. Goldthwaite (who knows a thing or two about rancor) has a tendency to work up a full head of rhetorical steam and then let it run away with him for pages at a time. Still, he’s undeniably intelligent and he makes a troubling case against Lewis’s elitism.

  Goldthwaite particularly detests a passage from Prince Caspian in which Aslan leads a jubilant procession through a Narnia that he has just liberated from another occupation, this time by humans, the Telmarines. The lion’s party comes upon a school. Under Aslan’s influence, magical ivy grows over and then crushes the school’s walls and desks, freeing a classroom of miserable girls dressed in tight collars and “thick tickly stockings.” Most of the girls scatter in fear, but one, Gwendolen, hesitates and is invited by Aslan to join his companions. Gwendolen’s school is one in a series of dreary, workaday scenarios Aslan’s entourage upends along their way. The procession, which includes Bacchus and his Maenads, releases a river god from a bridge, a boy from a man beating him with a stick, and a tired girl teaching arithmetic to “a number of boys who looked very like pigs,” (and who will, à la Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, eventually turn into pigs).

  This scene, with its rambunctious celebrants, enchanted vines, frisking beasts, and general holiday air, has long been one of my favorites. Jonathan Franzen calls it “erotic,” and Lewis himself seemed a bit overwhelmed by the wantonness of all the dancing, drinking, and sticky-fingered grape eating. At one point, he has Susan whisper to Lucy, “I wouldn’t have felt safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we’d met them without Aslan.” This is the only point in the Chronicles where we can sense any concern in the author that his readers might get swept up in all the pagan delirium. For myself, I remember thinking that, contra Susan, Bacchus’s “wild girls” sounded like one of the few clubs I’d really like to join.

  Goldthwaite sees something else again in Aslan’s march. The narrator dismisses the rest of the students from Gwendolen’s demolished school, the ones who run away from Aslan, as “mostly dumpy, prim little girls with fat legs.” The line infuriates Goldthwaite to the degree that he calls it “the vilest passage ever to poison a children’s book.” Imagine, he suggests, a vulnerable child somewhere, reading this description and recognizing that her own chubby legs must forever relegate her to the ranks of the unchosen; such a slur, Goldthwaite maintains, constitutes nothing less than “sadism.” Fat-legged girls are “Lewis’s Jews”: “The word evil springs to mind,” he fulminates, “and, if not evil, then certainly the word shame.”

  Goldthwaite’s outrage may be over the top, but it’s not unfounded. Classic fairy tales, like the ones collected in Andrew Lang’s nineteenth-century color books (The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, and so on), commonly make their virtuous characters beautiful and their wicked characters ugly. But Lewis, a twentieth-century author attempting to model Christian values, ought to have known better. He wasn’t writing a traditional fairy tale; those stories feature brutalities that he would never have dreamed of including in Narnia: torture, people thrown into ovens alive, dismemberment, cannibalism, and so on. Besides, Lewis condemned petty vanity and prided himself on not caring much about appearances; his clothes were notoriously shabby and even his house was run-down. To make the primitive error of linking someone’s unattractive looks with spiritual unworthiness (or vice versa) is exactly the sort of thing a “silly, conceited,” and superficial young woman like the grown-up Susan Pevensie would do.

  Goldthwaite views the crack about fat legs as one among many instances of in-group snottiness in the Chronicles. Caspian rejects a potential bride because she “squints and has freckles.” Eustace Scrubb, at the beginning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is derided not just for reading the wrong kinds of books, but also for having parents who “were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underwear.” Such remarks, writes Goldthwaite, work like “keep-out signs on the clubhouse door.” (He also reads a great deal into the name Gwendolen, with its posh intimations of the most popular girl at boarding school.) And true enough, a whiff of clubbiness does waft through the Chronicles — an unthinking complacency about the superiority of “our kind” (that is, Lewis’s kind) of people which goes beyond even the knee-jerk attitudes about race. Nowhere does this seem more apparent to me than in The Horse and His Boy, my least favorite among the books (after The Last Battle, of course).

  The Horse and His Boy has several villains, but in a way its least appealing character is Corin, a boy made more disagreeable by being offered to readers as one of the good guys. Corin is the twin brother of the book’s hero, Shasta; both are born princes of Archenland, Narnia’s close ally and neighbor. They were separated in infancy when Shasta was kidnapped, lost in a battle, and then raised by a Calormene fisherman as his son. Even a casual observer can tell Shasta doesn’t belong in his adoptive father’s smelly seaside cottage; a Calormene visitor describes the boy as “fair and white like the accursed but beautiful barbarians who inhabit the remote North.” (That the Calormenes invariably find the light-skinned Narnians beautiful is yet another of this book’s unsavory motifs.) Furthermore, Shasta harbors an instinctive fascination with the north, a yearning that Bree, the talking horse who escapes with him, believes comes from “the blood that’s in you. I’m sure you’re true northern stock.” Much later, when Shasta finds his way to Archenland, a northern lord remarks, “The boy has a true horseman’s seat, Sire. I’ll warrant there’s noble blood in him.”

  Blood will out, and some blood is finer than others: these are persisten
t ideas in The Horse and His Boy. Shasta is modest, loyal, and likeable, and despite being raised amid Calormene “slaves and tyrants,” he behaves much like the Pevensies and the other children from our world who get to Narnia. He has been reared by the wily and avaricious Arsheesh, yet he has very Pevensian scruples, objecting to a plan that involves “a certain amount of what Shasta called stealing and Bree called ‘raiding.’” He even talks like a British schoolboy: “Oh bother breakfast,” he says after waking up saddle-sore on the first morning of his flight north. “Bother everything.” Shasta sometimes expects other people to act with a Calormene ruthlessness (“He had, you see, no idea how noble and free-born people behave”), but his own natural responses always resemble those of the fair-playing, unpretentious Narnian lords he first sees whistling through the streets of Tashbaan.

  Corin, by contrast, is an unadulterated upper-class alpha boy: cocky, insensitive to others, easily riled, and always up for a fight. In Tashbaan, Shasta is mistaken for Corin in the street and winds up spending an afternoon in the Narnians’ quarters while the truant Corin is off getting into a brawl with the locals. Later, in Archenland, Corin disobeys orders by sneaking the two of them into the novel’s climactic battle at the gates of Anvard, even though Shasta has no experience with a sword or any other kind of fighting. Corin consistently plays a pint-sized Hotspur to Shasta’s prepubescent Hal; perhaps Lewis meant him to be a character like the heroes of the school stories he read as a boy, someone he thought his child readers would admire. And perhaps that’s why, for me, Corin contributes to the impression that this novel celebrates what Goldthwaite calls “an elitist clique for Top Boys and Girls.”

  It is Corin who explains to Shasta that Lucy is “as good as a man, or at any rate as good as a boy.” For Corin, merit in battle is all that really counts. He is the first to publicly mock Rabadash once the Calormene prince has been mortifyingly defeated and captured in the battle of Anvard. (A hole in Rabadash’s hauberk gets caught on a hook as he is leaping down from a mounting block, and he’s left hanging from the castle’s wall like “a piece of washing.”) Corin’s father, King Lune, does reproach his son for the taunt, but that is merely Lewis’s way of having his cake and eating it, too, of permitting himself to humiliate Rabadash while pretending that his characters are too good to kick a man when he’s down. There’s more than a touch of the bully in Corin, yet the narrator clearly expects us to like him, to shake our heads fondly at his excesses just as the adults around him do, with the conviction that at heart he is all right, and he is all right because he is one of us.

  More than the other Chronicles, The Horse and His Boy is preoccupied with social status and inclusion, and the novel’s ambivalence is Lewis’s own. In a lecture he delivered in 1944, he said, “I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.” Wanting to belong to this “inner ring” can be corrupting — it compromises the spineless protagonist of Lewis’s adult science-fiction novel That Hideous Strength, for example — although Lewis hastened to clarify that inner rings aren’t pernicious per se. You can see why he might stress that last point, why he would warn against the craving to be admitted to the in crowd without necessarily condemning in crowds themselves; Lewis belonged to several official and unofficial cliques, from the faculty of Oxford to the Inklings. Yet he also knew how it felt to be shut out.

  Lewis’s first taste of the bitterness of exclusion came at age fifteen, when he was sent to Malvern College in Worcestershire. Warnie had spent a couple of years at the school before Jack arrived, and had succeeded socially, if not academically; he loved the place. Jack, however, was bad at sports and had no patience for the exacting rituals of British boarding school life. Surprised by Joy includes an entire chapter, entitled “Bloodery,” devoted to detailing the social structure he found at Malvern, a rigorous hierarchy in which younger boys were obliged to drop everything at a moment’s notice to shine shoes and perform other chores for the older students. At the pinnacle of this order stood the “bloods,” the “adored athletes and prefects” who functioned as the school’s aristocracy.

  Every society of children has its pecking order, but at British boarding schools the exalted status of the most popular boys was both highly formalized and endorsed by adult authority. Alumni of this system could be extravagantly sentimental about it and were its fiercest proponents. (Warnie argued with Jack that the practice of “fagging”— forcing younger boys to work as the personal servants of the older ones — provided a necessary lesson in humility.) In Lewis’s father’s generation, many middle- and upper-class men were convinced that boarding school had prepared them to be exemplary Englishmen and champions of the empire. The Duke of Wellington supposedly asserted that the battle of Waterloo was “won on the playing fields of Eton”— although historians have since pointed out that there were no organized sports at the school during his time there and that the great Wellington, like Lewis, was no athlete.

  Lewis’s own feelings about the institution were mixed. When Surprised by Joy was first published in 1956, it shocked some readers with its matter-of-fact discussion of “tarts” — smaller boys who served as “catamites” to the bloods at Malvern. But some of Lewis’s more conservative readers found it nearly as provocative that he dared to question the public school power structure — an “oligarchy,” he called it — in general. Still, as much as Lewis hated being forced to play games that bored him and to abandon his studies to dance attendance on some pubescent lout, he could not bring himself to denounce traditional boarding schools entirely.

  At Malvern, Lewis encountered an inner ring at its most impenetrable and abusive. On one occasion, an older boy tricked him into “skipping clubs” — that is, into not showing up for the obligatory sporting events that formed the center of student life. For this offense, he was ordered to report to a blood he calls Porridge for a flogging. The messenger who delivered the summons told Lewis, “Who are you? Nobody. Who is Porridge? THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.” It’s not hard to see how this sort of thing might have inspired scenes of Calormene muckety-mucks in litters, barreling through the streets of Tashbaan, knocking the peasantry into the dust. So, too, does the haughty Rabadash feel perfectly free to kick the backside of his father’s groveling vizier whenever the spirit moves him.

  None of this is surprising in the Calormenes, who are, of course, the bad guys. Yet what is Corin if not an idealized version of the British public school blood, a natural athlete who blithely shanghais Shasta into a battle he’s utterly unequipped to fight? Like the bookish Lewis, who was compelled to run ineffectually around a cricket field, Shasta soon loses his sword and falls off his horse — sending him into combat is “mere murder,” says the wise old hermit observing the scene — and he barely emerges with his life. While Lewis was at Malvern, he wrote a play based on Norse myth, a tragedy he called Loki Bound, in which the title character lashes out at the injustice of the gods. The gods’ enforcer is Thor, god of thunder, whose “brutal orthodoxy” demands that power be respected simply because it is powerful. “Thor was, in fact, the symbol of the Bloods,” Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy, and so it’s indicative that when Corin grows up to become a famous boxer who pummels a renegade Narnian bear back into line, he earns the nickname Corin Thunder-Fist.

  Corin is Thor redeemed, a blood with the thuggishness scrubbed out. Is such a thing really possible, or is the honorable, decent British public school blood a wishful fiction, the sort of fantasy promulgated by books like Tom Brown’s School Days, the “school stories” that Lewis once accused of being far more deceptive than fairy tales? His own boyhood misery would not lead to, say, the insurrection of George Orwell, who, in a famous autobiographical essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” described his stint at a preparatory school (a training academy for boys seeking admission to public schools like
Eton) as a sojourn in “a world of force and fraud and secrecy.” These schools, Orwell wrote, were infused with “contempt for ‘braininess,’ and worship of games, contempt for foreigners and the working class, an almost neurotic dread of poverty and, above all, the assumption not only that money and privilege are the things that matter, but that it is better to inherit them than to have to work for them… . Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right.”

  This early encounter with the cruelties of Britain’s class system helped make Orwell a leftist. Lewis, whose sentimental conservativism was really a flight from serious political thought, clung instinctively to the old ways in spite of all he had endured and resented under their dominion. Although he hated Malvern, in later years he would fret about excessive taxation, worrying that it might prevent middle-class Britons from sending their boys to similar schools. In the Chronicles, this makes for a contradictory attitude toward “school,” which Lewis usually depicts as a character-warping oppression. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter and Lucy attribute Edmund’s nastiness to “that horrid school, which was where he had begun to go wrong,” and one of the many good works the Pevensies perform after they become kings and queens of Narnia is to make sure “young dwarfs and young satyrs” aren’t sent to school. Human beings aren’t so lucky; the downside to the discovery of Shasta’s true identity as a prince of Archenland, he explains to Aravis, is that now “education and all sort of horrible things are going to happen to me.”

  This is a strange attitude in a man so devoted to books and learning. Lewis, it seems, had ruled out the possibility that school could ever be enjoyable, or even agreeable. His mistrust of anything labeled “progress” set him against the notion that schools could be improved or reformed; do-gooders would only make them worse. In The Silver Chair, Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole attend a coeducational academy called Experiment House, derided by the narrator as “what used to be called a ‘mixed’ school; some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it.” (Nowhere does Lewis sound more like the crusty, reactionary old colonel in an Agatha Christie country-house whodunit than he does in that aside.) At Experiment House, the smaller children are tormented by a gang of fellow students known only as “Them.”