Laura Miller (17 page)

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

E
verybody’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 “mend,” 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.

For her part, the less Freudian Green Witch, with her “voice sweeter than the sweetest bird’s song” and “the richest, most musical laugh you can imagine” bewitches Rilian into a perverted form of chivalric servitude. She erases all memory of his former life and grooms him to be the figurehead general of a slave army. Like the knights of the romances Lewis wrote about in
The Allegory of Love,
men who proved their virtue by fulfilling the directives of their ladies, Rilian pronounces himself “well content to live by her word.”