Laura Miller (2 page)

Ever since I reread
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
for that assignment over a decade ago, the Chronicles of Narnia have presented me with a puzzle, one that would eventually prompt me to write this book. When I finally came back to Narnia, I found that, for me, it had not lost its power or beauty, or at least not entirely. Although I am a little bit abashed about this, I am not like Clive James; the radiant books of my youth still seem radiant to me. Yet there are aspects of Narnia I can no longer embrace with the childish credulity that Greene describes. Then again, I
am
like James in that I’m sometimes dismayed by the prejudices and narrow-mindedness of the Chronicles’ author, and in a way I am also like Greene, in that I reread these books partly to find what is already in my mind. Nevertheless, what I dislike about Narnia no longer eclipses what I love about it, and the contents of my own mind still have the capacity to surprise me when I study them carefully enough.

What I am not, however, is a Christian; for all the countless times I have reread Lewis’s books, they have never succeeded in converting me. This, to many casual observers, no doubt makes my continuing enjoyment of the Chronicles perplexing. Most of the critics and scholars who pay any kind of sustained attention to Lewis’s work are Christians themselves, and their faith is the motivation for that attention. To everyone else, Lewis is an apologist for the Christian faith, and that is the only kind of meaning that could ever be found in anything he wrote. The Chronicles are merely religious “allegory” (the term most often — and erroneously — used to describe them in the general-interest press) and about as interesting to the nonbeliever as a cruise ship sales brochure is to a man determined never to leave dry land.

Besides, the Chronicles are children’s fiction. They belong to a class of literature that, in the opinion of many, doesn’t merit serious critical consideration. I can see how James or Greene might agree with this point of view: the former finds that the ugly old lamp no longer produces a genie when rubbed and the latter realizes he has nothing left to wish for. Nevertheless, I go on thinking that there is something significant in the Chronicles of Narnia, something more or less apart from their thinly concealed theological messages. I’m unwilling to resign myself to accepting a fathomless gap in the early part of my life, between the reader I was as a child and the reader I am now.

Lewis himself liked to read children’s books occasionally, both the ones he’d loved as a child growing up in Ireland in the early twentieth century, and others that he discovered later; Kenneth Grahame’s
The Wind in the Willows
was a particular favorite. “A children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story,” he once remarked. Lewis was an Oxford don, a bachelor pushing fifty who had very little real-world experience with children, when he wrote
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
. Unlike his good friend J. R. R. Tolkien, who told an early version of
The Hobbit
to his children, Lewis had to rely on memories of his own childhood tastes while writing his books. Evidently, those memories lay close to hand; his facility at writing for children has ever since offered his biographers cause to describe him as a man who never entirely grew up.

Lewis always maintained that he chose to write a “fairy tale” because he had something to say which could only be expressed in this way. He didn’t offer much detail as to what that something was, but he did once write that he had fallen in love “with the form itself: its brevity; its severe restraints on description; its flexible traditionalism; its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections, and ‘gas.’” To my mind, these are all ways of describing one variety of good writing, whether for adults or children, and when the Chronicles are well written — which is often — the quality is not age-dependent. Lewis, however, would have found nothing remarkable in this fact, for he also insisted that “fairy tales” (a term he used to include writings that we’d call “fantasy” today) were not meant only for children. Although the Chronicles were patently intended for young readers, they partake of literary traditions that are as old as the act of storytelling itself.

There is yet another reason to devote the kind of attention to the Chronicles that critics ordinarily reserve for the works of writers like Flaubert or F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it may be the most persuasive of all. In
An Experiment in Criticism,
Lewis floats the idea that we can determine how good a book is by how it is read. This was an offbeat notion at a time when most critics judged a book by how it was written, and it would become an irrelevant one a few years later, when deciding how “good” a book was would seem immaterial to most academics. But Lewis — who was, above all else, a passionate, omnivorous, and generous reader — thought that this might be the best way to appreciate a book’s worth, especially since he regarded the literary mandarins of his day as slaves to pernicious intellectual fads.

A hater of progress, newfanglement, and vulgarity, Lewis was not a notably tolerant man, but reading brought out the populist in him. He worked out a set of criteria for identifying truly “literary” readers; their ranks include people who reread books, those who savor what they read for more than just the plot, and those for whom the first encounter with a favorite book is an “experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before.”

Nothing on this list dictates what
type
of book the literary reader ought to prefer; it is the quality of the attention brought to it that matters. There is an uncharacteristic radicalism to Lewis’s further suggestion that if we can find “even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale.”

He is, among other things, describing the way certain children read certain books, with a fervor that can inspire mystification and awe in their adult counterparts. Such experiences
can’t
be merely ephemeral, meaningless, but they often seem entirely inaccessible when we look back on them years later. This, at least, is what Clive James felt upon returning to Professor Challenger, and so he was forced to dismiss the whole situation as merely comical. Still, how could he have failed to be formed as a man and as a reader by Doyle’s adventure yarns? We would not expect any other overwhelming emotional experience from his childhood to have left him untouched. Today, James is a gifted, witty critic. Perhaps there is more to Professor Challenger than meets the eye.

The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. A first love teaches you how to be with another human being by choice, rather than out of the imperative of blood ties. If we are lucky, our first love shows us how to negotiate the paradox of entering into a union with someone who remains fundamentally unknowable. First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.

The meeting of author and reader has a similar soul-shaping potential. The author who can make a world for a reader — make him believe that the people, places, and events he describes are, if anything, truer than his real, immediate surroundings — that author is someone with a mighty power indeed. Who can forget the first time they experienced this sensation? Who can doubt that every literary encounter they have afterward must somehow be colored by it? If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children’s books suddenly turn up very high on the list.

I’ve titled this book after a passage in my current favorite among the Chronicles of Narnia,
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
. It’s the part where Lucy, who has reluctantly agreed to enter the house of an invisible magician, slips into his study in order to read a spell out of his great book. She finds a couple of charms that intrigue and tempt her, and then she arrives at something special, a spell that is “like a story” but that disappears as she reads it, and soon vanishes even from her memory.

Perhaps Lewis is alluding here to the fleeting enchantment of childhood reading. But that’s not all this passage is about. He also had the idea that certain stories run deep in human nature, deeper than the individual books that tell them, deeper even than words themselves. He tried to tap into that kind of story in his fiction, and he achieved this in his children’s books better than anywhere else. The peculiarly heady effect of the Chronicles on young readers is testimony to his success. Francis Spufford, author of the memoir
The Child That Books Built,
writes of feeling that Lewis “had anticipated what would delight me with an almost unearthly intimacy,” in stories that became “the inevitable expressions of my longing.” The Chronicles have bewitched millions of children of vastly different backgrounds in just this way since they were first published in the 1950s.

Lucy can’t remember any more from the story than “a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill,” but that doesn’t mean she isn’t able to recognize it when she meets it again, even when it appears in a different form. “Ever since that day,” the narrator continues, “what Lucy means by a good story is a story that reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician’s Book.” I’ve read a lot of great literature since the day my second-grade teacher handed me a clothbound copy of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
. I’ve read both towering masterpieces and less exalted novels that, when it comes to felicity of craftsmanship, thoroughly trounce any of Lewis’s fiction. But none of these is my Magician’s Book, the story to which all other stories must be compared.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
my introduction to Narnia, is that book for me, not merely because of its form or style or historical significance, but because of how it made me feel, which is at heart the fundamental question with any work of fiction. In the right light,
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
will always be the best book I’ve ever read.

Why is this so? Many of the answers lie with its author, a man whom the critic William Empson (ideologically unsympathetic to Lewis in almost every way) characterized as “the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read.” Much of this reading, and many of Lewis’s own life experiences, make themselves felt in the Chronicles, as we would expect of any writer striving to bring his full talent to the task. He did not think any less of the work because it was intended for children, or any less of his readers because they were young. Lewis was cognizant of reading, the moment when the words of the writer mingle with the mind of the reader, as a kind of duet, with the reader bringing as much, in her own way, to the union as the writer. Here, from
An Experiment in Criticism,
is a remarkable description of the act of reading:

[If the] dance is devised by a master, the rests and movements, the quickenings and slowings, the easier and the more arduous passages, will come exactly as we need them; we shall be deliciously surprised by the satisfaction of wants we were not aware of till they were satisfied. We shall end up just tired enough and not too tired, and “on the right note.” It would have been unbearable if it had ended a moment sooner — or later — or in any different way. Looking back on the whole performance, we shall feel that we have been led through a pattern or arrangement of activities which our nature cried out for. . . . The relaxation, the slight (agreeable) weariness, the banishment of all our fidgets, at the close of a great work all proclaim that it has done us good.

Dance is the metaphor he chooses and, as Yeats observed, it is impossible to distinguish the dancer from the dance. Accordingly, if I want to write about the meanings of Narnia, then one aspect of the story must be personal; Lewis’s children’s fiction played an important role in my early life, so much so that I could never be the least bit objective about it. Some of what I have to say can only be demonstrated by my own experiences. Therefore, to quote Lewis again, “I must here be autobiographical for the sake of being evidential.” Literary value
is
personal, after all, because somebody — a person — needs to experience it as a reader for it to exist at all.

But my history with Narnia is not idiosyncratic, and so I’ve also occasionally included interviews I conducted with writers and people who responded to my first essay about
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
published on Salon.com. Conversations with other readers have always been essential to the growth of my own literary understanding, and I suspect this is true for most other critics as well. But for some reason convention has dictated that we seldom mention these exchanges when writing about books. I’ve tried to correct that omission here.

In the concluding volume of the Chronicles,
The Last Battle,
Lewis wrote of a place that “was far larger than it seemed from the outside.” Although this book will wend its way through the life and thoughts of Lewis and his friends (especially his close friend and colleague J. R. R. Tolkien), my own life and thoughts, the memories and feelings of other readers, the history and literature of Britain and of Ireland and the mythical taproots of humanity, all of this, in the end, is contained in seven children’s novels. These books are far larger than they seem from the outside, and
The Magician’s Book
is an attempt to explore some of their interior terrain. There is one major thematic province, however, that I will do no more than fly over: Lewis’s Christianity. Many, many other writers have dealt exhaustively with this aspect of Lewis’s work, to the point of obscuring other elements in the Chronicles, the ones that appeal to me. Lewis’s theological writings don’t interest me much, and while religion is an unavoidable subject when considering Narnia, my goal has been to illuminate its other, unsung dimensions, especially the deep roots of the Chronicles in the universal experiences of childhood and in English literature.