Laura Miller (11 page)

Even today I find it hard to secure any perspective on her. “Lucy goes straight to your heart,” Neil Gaiman observes, and once she is ensconced there, it’s impossible to step far enough away from her to take her in. Upon first hearing the name of Aslan in the Beavers’ house, each of the four children has a distinct reaction. Edmund, naturally, feels horribly guilty, Peter feels brave, and Susan experiences an almost sensuous pleasure, “as if a delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by.” Lucy gets “the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.” Hers is a child’s excitement, “your” excitement, as the passage explicitly puts it. And the sensation Lewis describes, that flush of freedom on the first day of summer vacation: Is there any child who doesn’t know exactly how that feels? Or any adult who doesn’t try to recreate it during the pitifully brief holidays we get from our working lives?

As much as I wanted to be Lucy Pevensie, I also wanted to be her friend. I thought I’d do a much better job of it than Marjorie Preston, who makes a cameo appearance in
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Alone in the magician’s house, reading her way through his big book of spells, Lucy finds herself tempted to use a charm that will “maketh beautiful her that uttereth it beyond the lot of mortals.” (This is a particularly appealing prospect given that in this department she feels overshadowed by Susan.) Although the illustrations accompanying the spell suggest that its results will be destructive, and Lucy’s own better judgment warns her against it, the only thing that really stops her is the sudden apparition of Aslan’s disapproving face. Turning the page, Lucy comes upon a charm that allows you to know what your friends think of you, and she resolves that this magic, at least, she ought to be able to try. After she recites the spell, the pictures on the page begin to move, showing her Marjorie, a friend from last term at school, bad-mouthing Lucy to a more popular girl.

Lucy has been sent into the magician’s house to search his book for an anti-invisibility spell; after she recites it, Aslan appears. He reproaches Lucy for spying on Marjorie, and tells her that her friend didn’t really mean what she said: “She is weak, but she loves you.” In spite of this, they both agree that Lucy will never be able to forget what she heard the girl say, and something precious has been lost. “Have I spoiled everything?” Lucy asks Aslan. “Do you mean we would have gone on being friends if it hadn’t been for this — and been really great friends — all our lives perhaps — and now we never shall.”

I thought of this scene decades after I first read it, during a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s
Persona.
One of the film’s characters, a nurse who has befriended the actress she has been tending, surreptitiously reads one of the actress’s letters to her doctor. In the letter, she finds a patronizing description of herself. Enraged, the nurse confronts her charge, accusing the actress of an inability to love anyone, even her own son, and thus precipitates a wrenching dislocation, signaled by one of the great montages of experimental cinema. For Bergman, the reading of the letter (a variety of eavesdropping that also turns up in his film
Through a Glass Darkly
) flushes the truth about the actress’s inner life out into the open; it’s assumed — naively, really — that she wouldn’t misrepresent her feelings in a letter to her doctor. In
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
the result is a little more complicated.

Persona
is a film about permeable, fluid identities (at one point, images of the faces of the two women fuse), overflowing the barriers between individuals. Lewis’s vignette implies that true friendship depends on the maintenance of those boundaries. That Lewis would champion privacy is no surprise, but there’s more to the Marjorie Preston incident than a simple admonishment against eavesdropping. Aslan’s remarks about Marjorie’s love for Lucy serve as a reminder that people employ personas in all sorts of situations; we shouldn’t necessarily assume that what our friends say when we’re not around is more truthful than what they say to our faces. This is a particularly valuable bit of wisdom for schoolgirls (though how Lewis could have known this, I can’t imagine), who are all too prone to the conviction that they’ve merged with their best friends — and therefore all too susceptible to feeling betrayed when this belief turns out to be an illusion.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
includes another passage about friendship, one of my favorites in all of the Chronicles. It comes late in the journey, as the ship sails through waters of preternatural clarity near the edge of the world. Lucy has been leaning over the side, puzzled by “a little black object, about the size of a shoe” racing along after the ship, getting bigger or smaller in the wink of an eye; this she soon realizes is the shadow the ship casts on the bottom of the sea. Then she watches as the
Dawn Treader
and its shadow pass over a city of merpeople and a hunting party led by a warlike king who shakes his spear at them. As the ship glides past the outskirts of this submarine nation, Lucy spots one last sea person, “a quiet, lonely-looking girl with a sort of crook in her hand,” who seems to be a “fish-herdess.”

The girl looked up and stared straight into Lucy’s face. Neither could speak to the other and in a moment the Sea Girl dropped astern. But Lucy will never forget her face. It did not look frightened or angry like those of the other Sea People. Lucy had liked that girl and she felt certain the girl had liked her. In that one moment they had somehow become friends. There does not seem to be much chance of their meeting again in that world or any other. But if ever they do they will rush together with their hands held out.

Here is the bookend to the sad story of Lucy Pevensie and Marjorie Preston, one friendship lost to the desire for too much knowledge contrasted with another friendship cemented in the absence of any knowledge at all. Lucy’s encounter with the sea girl is romantic, an emotional flourish set off by passages of radiant description, but that doesn’t make it untrue. If we believe in love at first sight, and friendship is a form of love, why shouldn’t we be able to recognize a friend at first sight, too? Aren’t some of the most enduring childhood bonds formed in just a few moments on a sidewalk or a playground? Needless to say, at eight I was convinced that I, too, would have befriended that sea girl in a single glance.

Lucy’s connection with the sea girl is a matter of faith — the earthly, humanist kind — and faith is precisely what she lacks when she listens in on Marjorie’s conversation. What motivates her to recite the spell is not curiosity about Marjorie, but the egotism of insecurity. Lucy eavesdrops on her friend for the same reason that the nurse reads the actress’s letter in
Persona:
because she’s seeking her own reflection. She’s dying to know what other people think of her and hoping that what they say will be flattering. (A lot of snooping comes down to not much more than that.)
Persona
is an indictment of the actress’s narcissism, but I’ve always been a little disappointed that the nurse doesn’t come in for the same degree of stern scrutiny.

If Lucy was anything like me (and I was sure she was), then she wanted to know everything about that lonely-looking sea girl: where she lived, what her parents were like, how she kept her fish herd in tow, and what she wanted to be when she grew up. This is an entirely different sort of curiosity from the kind that craves assurances of other people’s good opinion. Lucy’s faith in her friendship with the sea girl is a leap of the imagination, a belief that however different they might seem, she and the sea girl must have something important to share.

It is also a reader’s faith, and it is omnivorous. As Lewis wrote in
An Experiment in Criticism:

The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality . . . in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

The characters in books can never really be our friends because as much as we might learn about them, they can never know anything about us. Still, they exercise our capacity for empathy, extending it beyond the boundaries of race, gender, species, even virtue. Readers will sometimes blame a morally objectionable main character for a novel’s failure to engage them; really, the fault lies with the author’s inability to make us stop quibbling about such things. If characters had to be admirable or even likeable to captivate us, then Humbert Humbert and Scarlett O’Hara would not be people you recognize without my having to explain which novels they come from.

Lewis, for example, makes us feel sorry for Eustace Scrubb, who is just about the most insufferable boy in the world before his transformation on Dragon Island in
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Even the slave traders on the island of Doorn are reduced to offering him as a free gift with purchase, and still they get no takers. Eustace’s penchant for the wrong kind of books is once again part of his problem. His habit of reading practical nonfiction renders him blind to his companions and even to his surroundings. One of the funniest bits in the Chronicles is Eustace’s preconversion shipboard diary, a crafty litany of excuses, rationalizations, self-justifications, and outright whining that makes it abundantly clear just how miserable it is not only to be around him, but to
be
him. Eustace simply can’t see the
Dawn Treader
as Lucy does — “a beauty of her kind, a ‘lady’ as sailors say, her lines perfect, her colors pure and every spar and rope and pin lovingly made.” In his eyes, the ship is “a rotten little tub,” bereft of both wireless and stateroom.

Nevertheless, Eustace’s diary does succeed at slipping us into this unfortunate boy’s head. Somewhere along the way, as Eustace sneaks off to avoid doing his share of the work on Dragon Island, then finds himself hideously transformed, he snags our sympathy. Rendered enormous, scaly, and fire-breathing, he enjoys a few moments of reveling in his terrible new power before realizing that he’d much rather “get back among humans and talk and laugh and share things.” His reform begins only when he resembles on the outside the monster that he’s long been on the inside, and realizes what an “unmitigated nuisance” he’s been to the others from the start.

Fixing Eustace requires divine intervention, so severe is his inability to put himself in anyone else’s place. My condition was not so remedial; after all, like Lucy, I had read the right books and instantly appreciated the
Dawn Treader
for the marvel she was. Simply reading about Lucy — her compassion, modesty, and generosity — probably improved me, a child not richly endowed with any of those qualities. It wasn’t that I wanted to be good for the sake of being good, or even to please Aslan; it was that I could see how Lucy’s way of being good was the opposite of Eustace’s awfulness. It made her happier, and drew her closer to other people. I hoped that I was already a lot like Lucy, but I was inclined to try to be more so mostly because I loved her. Like the sea girl, she inhabited another, unreachable world, but we would have been the best of friends if we ever met, I was sure of it.

Part Two

Trouble in Paradise

Chapter Eight

Forests and Trees

M
rs. Belden may not have been able to get much out of me about my revelatory first encounter with
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
but she learned enough to assure her that I’d missed the book’s religious symbolism. Adults marvel that this subtext, so glaringly obvious to us, is invisible to children. Children, after all, are usually adept at discovering most of the things we try to hide from them: profanity, sharp objects, Christmas presents, preferences for one child over another.

But children are literalists: they lack not only the cognitive skills but also the sheer bulk of information it takes to formulate abstractions and recognize general patterns. They think in specifics, of the concrete, tactile reality they encounter every day. As Philip Pullman, the author of His Dark Materials, an epic and intellectually demanding fantasy trilogy for children, is wont to say, “Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.” Sometimes they do not see the forest because they’re still getting acquainted with the trees. Once, when my three-year-old friend Corinne and I were reading a book about the ocean, we came upon a painting of a blue whale.

“This is very high up,” she informed me, pointing at the whale.

“It is?” I replied.

“It’s very, very high,” she explained patiently. “Sadie really likes it.”

Sadie is her babysitter, and like many people caring for little children in Manhattan, she has only a few places to take Corinne and her brother on rainy days. One of those places is the American Museum of Natural History on West 79th Street, and in the vast Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, where toddlers are allowed to run around loose, there is a life-size model of a blue whale hanging from the ceiling. When I looked at the picture in the book, I thought “blue whale,” summoning up a generalization, a typical blue whale distilled from everything I know about the creatures, including the fact that they live in the ocean, which is “down.” When Corinne looked at the picture she had one memory to call upon, the only representation of a blue whale that she had ever seen before. She thought not of blue whales in general, but of one whale in particular. And that whale is very high up.