Laura Miller

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

  Lewis, it must be said, never took the time to understand the modernist writers properly; he didn’t think that he needed to. He was sure that Eliot’s “poems of disintegration” were morally dangerous: “I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading The Waste Land,” he declared, “but that most men are by it infected with chaos.” As Wordsworth had in his own time, Lewis believed that the literary establishment (for that is what he considered the modernists to be) had instituted and then slavishly followed an assortment of highfalutin fashions that cut them off from “the sympathies of men.”

  Lyrical Ballads returned to songs and legends rooted in English folk culture for inspiration, rejecting the mannered, elaborate classical allusions that reigned in the poetry of the previous generation. Lewis and Tolkien weren’t as convinced as Wordsworth and Coleridge were that they had “the sympathies of men” on their side, but they knew that the stories they preferred — whether fairy tales, heroic sagas, or pulp adventure yarns — were the sort of thing people had been writing and enjoying for millennia. The modernists, by contrast, prided themselves on being original, on discarding obsolete literary forms and subject matter that imposed a false coherence on the tumult of twentieth-century life. Indeed, modernism defined itself in part by its rejection of the nineteenth-century cult of Romanticism, whose focus on the transcendent self embodied in the artist Eliot dismissed as sentimental and solipsistic. Romantic individualism, Eliot wrote, could lead its disciples “only back upon themselves.”

  Lewis believed that the modernists were both snobs and parvenus. While he certainly championed “the masters” against the assaults of such upstarts, he was not a social critic in the contemporary vein of Alan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind. Lewis would never have defined himself as a defender of high culture against the crass rabble, the kind of conservative who trumpets “Great Books” and the work it takes to read them. Instead, he saw himself as an antimandarin, a defender of old-fashioned readerly pleasures. He had, after all, read most of the English-language classics, even the ones that make today’s undergraduates groan and reach for the Cliffs Notes, purely for the fun of it.

  Modernist novelists who wanted to abandon conventional story- telling as an oppressive, arbitrary, and outdated convention, were, in Lewis’s eyes, the real enemies of both the literary classics and the common folk. They were the same sort of people who sneered at him for liking The Wind in the Willows and H. G. Wells. Reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, he admired her “astonishing power of rendering the feel both of landscapes and moods, rising sometimes to real loveliness” but complained of “a total absence of any matter on which to use the power.” He thought he detected in the modernist project a debilitating fear of vulgarity. “The reason why they don’t like either the narrative elements or low comedy,” he wrote to Dorothy Sayers, “is that these have obvious immediate entertainment value. These prigs, starting from the true proposition that great art is more than entertainment, reach the glaring non sequitur, ‘entertainment has no place in great art.’”

  But while Lewis took it upon himself to defend Shelley from the critical disapproval of Eliot and his coterie, there was one aspect of Romanticism for which he had no use: its revolutionary fervor. Shelley was a notorious atheist, Coleridge a would-be socialist, and even Wordsworth had been exhilarated by the French Revolution before it went off the rails. At no point in his life would Lewis ever have written, as Wordsworth once did, “I disapprove of monarchical and aristocratical governments, however modified. Hereditary distinctions and privileged orders of every species I think must necessarily counteract the progress of human improvement.” Lewis and Tolkien didn’t believe in progress or “human improvement.” Man had fallen and only God could fix that.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Marvelous Journeys

  Tolkien’s intellectual battles were more esoteric than his friend’s — he had, for example, a serious quarrel with anyone who regarded Anglo-Saxon poetry as no more than a means to study the Old English language, rather than as literature in its own right. But where he and Lewis coincided most happily was in their affinity for the venerable literary form known as the romance. (This was, of course, before the term “romance” was adopted as a label for the genre of pulp fiction devoted to fantasies of courtship.) Much that frustrates and baffles certain readers about their work has to do with confusion over what the two men intended to write. Their books may look like novels, but in essence they are romances.

  When critics complain, as Edmund Wilson did, about the morally simplistic characterization in The Lord of the Rings, or its focus on mere adventure, or the pervasive unreality of its heroic deeds and magical beings, they are pointing out that Tolkien’s book is not a very good novel, and there is truth to that. The Lord of the Rings has no character to equal Jane Eyre or Raskolnikov, none of the sophisticated moral humanism of Huckleberry Finn — and certainly nothing approaching the stylistic bravado of Lolita. But if The Lord of the Rings doesn’t excel in any of these novelistic arenas, that’s largely because it isn’t trying to. “My work is not a ‘novel,’” Tolkien wrote testily to one would-be student of his book, “but an ‘heroic romance,’ a much older and quite different variety of literature.” As for Lewis, although he called the Chronicles “fairy tales” rather than romances, he saw the genres as deeply related, at times indistinguishable.

  One “modern” author whom both Lewis and Tolkien held in esteem was William Morris. This Victorian dynamo was the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, a political activist, historical preservationist, member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, fine-press publisher, translator, travel writer, poet, painter, designer, architect, and, in his final years, the author of eight “prose romances,” works of fiction that made him the “great author” of C. S. Lewis’s youth and first gave Tolkien the idea to write romances of his own. Morris is now best known for his textile and wallpaper designs, rich, intricate botanicals inspired by medieval tapestries, many of which you can still buy today. His role as pioneer of the socialist movement in Britain makes him interesting to political historians. The prose romances are probably the most dimly remembered of all his accomplishments; they have often been regarded as a kind of holiday he took from more significant pursuits. Nevertheless, it may well be through Morris’s tales of questing knights and valiant Germanic heroes that he has had, indirectly, the greatest influence of all.

  Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites celebrated the art and literature of the Middle Ages at a time when conventional wisdom held up the Renaissance as the pinnacle of European culture and Raphael as the quintessential Renaissance master. The centuries between the Fall of Rome and the rediscovery of classical antiquity were at that time (as they occasionally still are now) dismissed as the “Dark Ages.” This was sheer bias, in Morris’s opinion, rooted in the eighteenth century’s overvaluation of the disciplined, balanced formality of classical art. Historians were wrong, he wrote, when they portrayed the medieval period as “lawless and chaotic; its ethics a mere conscious hypocrisy, its art gloomy and barbarous fanaticism only, its literature the formless jargon of savages.”

  Like many of the Romantics, Morris saw vigor and truth in the eccentricities of individual expression, which, he argued, had been allowed freer rein in the Middle Ages than in the Renaissance. You could see this in the very objects that filled the medieval world: the chairs and wall hangings, the pitchers and illuminated books, each with its own handmade beauty. The Renaissance cathedral is an orderly, Palladian symphony of columns and arches, speaking persuasively of reason. The walls of a Gothic church, by contrast, teem with carvings of saints, allegorical figures, gargoyles, and other grotesqueries climbing improbably upward until they vanish into the shadowy mysteries of pointed vaults. Where the quintessential Renaissance structure — St. Peter’s Basilica or the Campidoglio in Rome — presents a refined, controlled ideal, orchestrated by a single master, the medieval public building is the work of dozens of unnamed
craftsmen, each adding his own idiosyncratic touch.

  With the Renaissance came not only the institution of a uniform classical style of beauty but — and worse yet in Morris’s view — the dawn of capitalism. Compared to the industrial workers of his own century, Morris felt, even medieval serfs had more varied, less alienating work and more free time. But it was the artisans who most captivated his imagination. A medieval guild craftsman, he wrote, was “master of his time, his tools, and his material, was not bound to turn out his work shabbily, but could afford to amuse himself by giving it artistic finish; how different that is from [the] mechanical or trade finish some of us, at least, have learned.” A world furnished with a few cherished possessions made in the old, authentic ways was an infinitely healthier and more joyful place to live, he believed, than one cluttered with cheap, mass-produced junk built by bored, miserable workers.

  If, for inspiration, Morris looked even more intently to the past than the earlier Romantics had, he still shared their belief in the possibility of a redeemed future. His own infatuation with Norse legends and sagas (several of which he had translated) led him to visit Iceland; there he had seen people living in simple, wholesome (if sometimes harsh) circumstances and in communities without great disparities in wealth. This experience further fired his interest in socialism, and when not designing furniture or directing the publication of the Kelmscott Chaucer (one of the most beautiful books ever printed), Morris could be found on the streets of London attempting to rally the proletariat. His time-travel narrative, News from Nowhere, imagines a twenty-first-century England that has restored the virtues of the fourteenth century with a few key alterations. In fact, Morris’s utopian vision resembles the Shire — a cheerful, unassuming, agrarian society with few machines and a reverent respect for the natural world and its rhythms — but unlike Tolkien’s hobbits, the inhabitants of Morris’s future England have organized their economy along strictly communal lines.

  In Morris’s prose romances, the politics are much more subdued (though perhaps no more detached from reality). Lewis first came across a copy of Morris’s Well at the World’s End on a shelf at Arthur Greeves’s house when he was in his early teens. The book single-handedly revived his childhood penchant for “knights in armor,” and soon “the letters WILLIAM MORRIS were coming to have at least as potent a magic in them as WAGNER.” Tolkien wasn’t much older when he used a small cash prize he’d won in an academic competition to buy a copy of The House of the Wolfings. That book, the story of a tribe of pre-Roman Goths, gave him the idea of adapting a tale from the Kalevala “along the lines of Morris’s romances” (as he put it in a letter to his wife-to-be). His prime candidate for this adaptation was the Finnish legend of Kullervo, a hapless young man who winds up inadvertently committing incest and precipitating other catastrophes during an attempt to avenge the massacre of his family. (This idea, transplanted to Middle-earth, eventually became the story of Túrin Turambar, a cursed hero who endures a string of similar misfortunes, published posthumously in 2007 as The Children of Húrin.)

  My copy of Morris’s Well at the World’s End comes in a double volume, bound together with a similar work, The Wood Beyond the World, and published by Inkling Books, a one-man concern in Seattle. The collective title given to this volume by its conservative Catholic publisher, On the Lines of Morris’ Romances, is taken from Tolkien’s letter to his fiancée, and the subtitle is Two Books That Inspired J. R. R. Tolkien. If that’s not sufficient to get the point across, a back-cover blurb appeals directly to “Tolkien fans who long for more of the same delight that they get from The Lord of the Rings.” (In truth, the stately, rambling narratives of Morris’s romances are unlikely to beguile any but the most patient and scholarly aficionados of Middle-earth, and even then their interest will probably be more historical than anything else.) The introduction to The Wood Beyond the World takes pains to assure readers that this “uncomplicated romance” contains “no hidden messages about contemporary social issues,” presumably a reference to Morris’s politics. Lewis and Tolkien, too, were more than capable of reading selectively, extracting what they liked from the romances, while leaving Morris’s socialism on the plate.

  What they liked was something that had never quite been attempted before. The Well at the World’s End and The Wood Beyond the World, written in the 1890s, are entirely original stories, set in imaginary lands that resemble the mystical Britain of the Arthurian tradition combined with the timeless noplace where fairy tales transpire. Morris was the first writer to do this — devise a whole new world for his romances, rather than setting them in “Faerie Land” or a semi-mythologized version of a place that actually existed. From his example grew Tolkien’s concept of the secondary world and, eventually, Middle-earth itself. In a way, the socialist Morris was the grandfather of a vast and highly lucrative genre of popular fiction, even though what he’d set out to do was revive a beloved, forsaken form.

  The heroes in Morris’s romances, like the heroes in the medieval romances he emulated, are knights who set forth in search of adventure, passing through castles, towns, and isolated cottages, battling other knights, rescuing ladies, swearing loyalty to leaders and companions, and encountering supernatural wonders like giants or sorceresses. They become embroiled in complicated questions of honor and often struggle to figure out who among the strangers they meet can be trusted and who cannot. A beautiful maiden might turn out to be a foul crone or even a serpent in disguise; a magnificent palace might conceal an ugly secret. As is often the case in romances, the Morris hero pursues a quest; he searches for a kidnapped lady, or a magical object or place. In The Well at the World’s End, Ralph, the youngest son of the king of Upmeads, leaves home without a particular goal in mind, but soon decides to seek the eponymous well, whose waters will renew a drinker’s youth and fortitude.

  All of these elements are as familiar to us as cops and robbers, even if we’ve never heard of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The iconography of medieval romance is woven into our world and our language. The knight in shining armor, the damsel in distress — these are half-mocking labels we use to tease people for acting out roles from an idealistic, outdated notion of chivalry. The Holy Grail or the dragon that requires slaying are metaphors invoked in newspaper or magazine articles to indicate that a particular goal or challenge has some extraordinary significance. Four hundred years ago, Cervantes mercilessly parodied the clichés of the romance in Don Quixote, but his mockery didn’t slow it down; romance mutated and evolved, manifesting in dozens of new forms: the gothic tale, magic realism, the road novel. It lives on in comic books, science fiction, movies and television series, even video games. Once you learn how to recognize it, you see it everywhere, especially in narratives (whatever the medium) that speak to the young.

  Northrop Frye, one of the last great literary critics to flourish before the advent of structuralism, defined the classic romance as belonging to “the mythos of summer,” in which the essential element is “adventure.” This observation comes from Anatomy of Criticism, Frye’s attempt, in 1957, to devise a systematic, objective catalog of literary modes and forms. As a student at Oxford in the 1930s, Frye attended Lewis’s famous lectures on medieval literature, and I can’t help wondering if he recognized in himself the two qualities Lewis listed as the defining traits of the medieval thinker. The medieval scholar was “bookish,” Lewis wrote, and above all “an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted ‘a place for everything and everything in the right place.’”

  Frye took this mentality to its logical extreme by devising a codification for all books, slotting the vast, multifarious body of English literature into a gridlike system of classifications. He called his approach “archetypal criticism.” Although it has since fallen out of fashion and at times seems almost pathologically optimistic (Frye describes his project as based on “the assumption of total coherence”), the aerial view it offers of literature’s evolution shows
us connections not visible from any other angle.

  Since the romance’s essential element is adventure, Frye observed that it is “necessarily a sequential and processional form.” Travel is its central metaphor. A beginning that involves the hero “setting forth” is more crucial to making a story a romance than whether that hero is a young man in armor, or a young man at all. “Of all fictions,” Frye wrote, “the marvelous journey is the one formula that is never exhausted, and it is this fiction that is employed as a parable in the definitive encyclopedic poem of the mode,” which is Dante’s Divine Comedy.

  The Divine Comedy is a rare romance of middle age, beginning with its narrator midway through “the journey that is our life,” lost and desperately in need of someone to show him the path forward. Most romance, however, belongs to youth and speaks to the desire to get out in the world and prove oneself, which may be why the form proliferates most luxuriantly and in some of its purest strains in children’s fiction. I knew as a little girl that there were really two kinds of readers: those who liked Little Women and those who preferred The Phantom Tollbooth, but it wasn’t until I was much older and learned to think like a critic that I understood exactly where the difference lies: Little Women is a novel; The Phantom Tollbooth is a romance. Little House on the Prairie is a novel; The Wizard of Oz is a romance. Magic is, without a doubt, a fictional device you almost never see outside of romance, but not all romances are magical. Island of the Blue Dolphins has neither magic nor a traveling protagonist, but the main character’s journey from helpless child to self-sufficient adult, a destination reached via a series of often desperate but also exhilarating adventures, makes it a kind of romance, the romance of survival.

  Frye defined his literary modes (they are: myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic) according to the relationship between the main character and the reader. A hero who is superior “in kind” to the reader — in other words, a divine being — marks the story as a myth. A hero who is human, but possessed of superior rank and qualities, a king or other leader, is the sign of a high mimetic narrative, usually a tragedy or epic. The low mimetic hero, the figure at the center of most realistic novels and comedy, is the reader’s approximate equal. The ironic portrays characters we look down upon or pity. The classic hero of romance is human, like the high mimetic hero, but capable of “marvelous” actions. He inhabits “a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended,” and is assisted or hindered by “enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power.”