Laura Miller (7 page)

Jadis, the invader, tries to manipulate Digory’s fear not just of losing his mother, but of being culpable for that loss. “What would your mother think if she knew that you
could
have taken her pain away and given her back her life and saved your Father’s heart from being broken, and that you
wouldn’t?
” she taunts. She knows exactly which is the sorest spot to press because she has trespassed on territory where no one but Digory (besides Aslan) has the right to tread. Climbing the walls and eating the apples turns her skin “deadly white, white as salt,” an indication that she has lost whatever humanity had remained in her and has become something else, a voice in Digory’s head, his own worst impulses, the eternal Tempter. She is now allegorical. While the garden in
The Magician’s Nephew
bears a certain resemblance to the biblical Eden, it is even more evocative as an emblem of the self.

This moment, the moment of Digory’s choice, is the most emotionally naked depiction Lewis ever wrote of his feelings about Flora Lewis’s death. In
Surprised by Joy,
he describes the loss with a faded sorrow, as the moment when “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. . . . It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.” He also recalls trying to will himself into a belief that prayer could either cure or, finally, resurrect her.
Surprised by Joy,
a memoir intended to explain the circumstances of Lewis’s conversion, handles this early spiritual disappointment cursorily. Lewis claims, unconvincingly, that the futility of his boyhood prayers (and the unspoken likelihood that he blamed their failure on his own insufficient faith) had “no religious importance.” A few years later, however, the teenage Lewis would come to regard himself as an unbeliever.

Digory keeps his promise to Narnia’s god, and in the end is rewarded by Aslan with a second apple, which does cure his mother. Not only is the great catastrophe of Lewis’s early life averted in his fiction; so, too, is the foundering of his own faith. The fact that the image of a dying mother crops up in a book he wrote over forty years later suggests that, not surprisingly, Lewis never entirely recovered from this loss. Yet apart from the few pages that he devotes to his mother’s death in
Surprised by Joy,
it wasn’t a topic he mentioned much. He became notorious among his adult friends for his reluctance to enter into any conversation at all about his personal life, particularly his intimate relationships. In
Surprised by Joy,
Lewis recalls how he loathed the “fuss and flummery” of Flora’s funeral, which, he believed, instituted his lifelong “distaste for all that is public,” but “public” for him seemed to include even confidences shared with good friends. The best of friends, like Polly, knew not to intrude where they had not been invited.

Gardens make a particularly good image of the self for a writer, because while a garden can be cultivated and enjoyed privately, it can also yield fruit that can be shared with others. It can be watered with books and music and pictures. It can serve as a retreat from the world for an hour or two. It is also a place where you can spend days puttering away like my father, weeding flower beds, tying up vines, relaying little paths. Lewis’s own inner self — fed by Arthurian legends, Norse myths, Wagnerian opera, the Celtic folktales he heard from the family’s maid, the countryside around Belfast that he explored on foot and bicycle, the poetry he discovered on his own and through his family’s library — was like a walled garden, lavishly tended and well guarded. A handful of people (Warnie and Arthur Greeves, the boy across the street) were occasionally invited inside, but in every such place there is some fruit that must not be picked, and an inner garden that no one else can ever enter.

Chapter Four

Boxcar Children

I
t wouldn’t be truthful to say that the only books I liked as a child were fantasy stories, although those were my favorites, and I became adept at sniffing them out, often with as little as a title and cover art to go by. I did read books like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
Little House on the Prairie
and a Newbury Medal winner by Scott O’Dell called
Island of the Blue Dolphins,
about a Native American girl who is left behind on an island when her tribe is evacuated. The Wilder books were enjoyable if not riveting, but
Island of the Blue Dolphins
had real power. With its detailed descriptions of the girl learning how to make weapons to hunt with, to find fresh water, to dry meat, and to fend off the island’s wild dogs, it fascinated me. I persuaded a neighborhood friend to set up a “camp” in a corner of her backyard, where we crouched, pretending to be Indian hunters, draping slices of raw bacon over strings suspended between a couple of shrubs and calculating how much trouble we were likely to get into if we lit a fire to cook them over.

Both
Little House on the Prairie
and
Island of the Blue Dolphins
took what I considered to be a laudable interest in the nuts and bolts of survival in other times and places; I remember the maple-syrup-making scenes from the Wilder books more vividly than anything else. However,
Island of the Blue Dolphins
had one great advantage over
Little House on the Prairie:
no parents. A few years ago, while I was working on an essay about the boom in “problem novels” — fiction for young people centering on a trauma or an issue like drug addiction or rape — my editor reminisced about reading
Island of the Blue Dolphins
as a girl, too. “I can’t believe they give a book like that to children,” she remarked. “It’s about being abandoned by your family! What could be more disturbing?” I was startled; it had never occurred to me before that the novel described a terrifying scenario, although the girl’s situation was occasionally desperate. I didn’t see her as abandoned. To my child’s mind, she was liberated.

If you had asked me then what I liked so much about the Narnia books — or E. Nesbit’s
Five Children and It
or Edward Eager’s
Half Magic
series, among other favorites — I would eventually discover, I probably would have told you it was the magic. Reading them now, what I notice is the absence or irrelevance of parents. Mothers and fathers play, at best, a very minor supporting role in the Nesbit and Eager books. Sometimes beloved adults are sick or otherwise troubled and need to be rescued. Otherwise, if they’re around at all, they just get in the way.

The parents of the four Pevensie children, who have sent them off to stay in an old house in the country “because of the air-raids,” go nearly unmentioned in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
(Early in the story, Edmund accuses Susan of “trying to talk like Mother,” and he does not mean it appreciatively.) When the children arrive at Professor Kirk’s house, they never speak of the war that brought them there or of missing their parents; instead they go on excitedly about all the animals they hope to find in the countryside (“Badgers!” “Foxes!” “Rabbits!”). “This is going to be perfectly splendid,” Peter announces, without a hint of ambivalence. People who see the novel’s story as precipitated by trauma (the bombings, separation) are misreading it, as adults are prone to do.

It’s often been said of a certain kind of children’s book that the author has to get rid of one or both parents before anything interesting can happen. Nancy Drew has a father but no mother because no self-respecting mother would allow her teenage daughter to gallivant around in a blue roadster, chasing criminals. (A fond father can be gotten around, and apparently even coaxed into springing for the roadster.) Nancy’s mother is simply
gone,
and apparently unmourned, because Nancy exists in a fictional fantasy world where a missing mother is not missed.

While this isn’t very plausible, it is understandable. In the great enterprise of growing up, a child’s imagination practices the painless, surgical removal of an attachment that, however essential it may be at the moment, will sooner or later have to be left behind. The same child (myself, for example) who finds imagining her parents’ deaths heart-freezingly scary will also fantasize about the exciting escapade of being left entirely to her own devices. In her memoir,
Welcome to Lizard Motel,
the educator Barbara Feinberg describes leading a children’s creativity workshop whose participants liked pretending they were orphans, though not, one little girl clarified, “the sad part of orphans.”

Had anyone quizzed me further about the kinds of books I liked, I would have said that I wanted to read about adventures, and those didn’t happen when parents were around. The presence of Mother and Father guaranteed that children were stuck being children. Without their parents, Narnia’s young visitors finally get the chance to try out all the practical knowledge they’ve acquired over their years of reading what Lewis, in
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
refers to as “the right books.”

The Pevensies know all about jungle explorers and buccaneers and questing knights, and they can keep their heads in a crisis; they belong to a long tradition in British fiction of what the novelist and critic Colin Greenland calls “competent children.” I admired both their wherewithal and the delicacy of their scruples in a scene from
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
in which all four of the siblings have finally made it through the wardrobe and debate what to do next. They decide to put on the fur coats from the wardrobe before venturing on into the snowy woods, reasoning that because they’re not actually taking the coats
out
of the wardrobe, they won’t be stealing them.

The second Chronicle,
Prince Caspian,
of which a goodly portion is a wilderness adventure yarn, begins with the Pevensies magically yanked back into Narnia and stranded on a desert island. They are made castaways without the preliminary grief of a shipwreck, but as usual they’re not at a loss. I was especially impressed when Peter announced to his thirsty siblings, “If there are streams they’re bound to come down to the sea, and if we walk along the beach we’re bound to come to them.” I stowed that tip away for the future. As the oldest child in my own tribe of brothers and sisters, I thought this was exactly the sort of thing I ought to know in the event of an emergency — though how, exactly, we might be lucky enough to get shipwrecked together I didn’t consider. Likewise, Susan keeps the two younger children from abandoning their hot, heavy shoes after a wade in the surf because “we shall want them if we’re still here when night comes and it gets cold,” and Edmund suggests exploring the woods: “Hermits and Knights Errant and people like that always manage to live somehow if they’re in a forest. They find roots and berries and things.”

Later in
Prince Caspian,
under the influence of the Narnian air, the Pevensies will begin to recall all of the skills — archery, sword fighting, the composition of a formal challenge to single combat — they acquired in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
during their time as kings and queens. At first, however, their points of reference are strictly literary. From Defoe and Stevenson, possibly Walter Scott, and any number of less exalted authors, they have acquired this idea of adventure, and they don’t consider themselves to be excluded from it simply because they’re children. Play has girded them for action, and initially Narnia itself has to be distinguished from a game of make-believe. “We can pretend we are Arctic explorers,” suggests Lucy in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
as the siblings set off through the woods. “This is going to be exciting enough without pretending,” Peter points out. Narnia is a place so thrilling that you can finally stop imagining you’re somewhere better. It is the place where adventures are transformed from something you read about in books to something you actually get to do.

Still, the Pevensies never stop reading adventure stories in our world just because they have experienced real, live adventures in Narnia. Practically speaking, reading the wrong books would leave them unprepared, making them the kind of children who wouldn’t know that you should kick off your shoes if you happen to fall into deep water with your clothes on, as Lucy does at the beginning of
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
The Chronicles are full of such advice, some of it very useful, even if in the first book Lewis archly parodied the mother-hen tone of other children’s authors by repeatedly warning of the dangers of shutting oneself up in a wardrobe. In
The Silver Chair,
we learn that midday is a better time to sneak out of a house than the night (you look less suspicious if you get caught) and that a good way to keep your companions from realizing you’re afraid is to say nothing at all; otherwise, your quavering voice will probably give you away.

The Chronicles, then, become the same kind of adventurers’ handbooks that stand their own characters in good stead. I can remember thinking that I’d gotten plenty of invaluable information from them, although strictly speaking most of it was only helpful if you also happened to be a character in an adventure story. Eustace Scrubb, in the early chapters of
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
manages to get himself turned into a dragon largely because the books he has read have “a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.” Eustace’s prosaic taste in reading matter is of a piece with more serious personal failings, of course. His selfishness and sloth also lead him to the dragon’s lair, and only an ordeal will give him back his humanity.

For some adults, “Narnia” has become shorthand for an excessively, impossibly safe fantasyland. In the novel
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl, a character out of the young heroine’s past telephones from a posh sanitarium she describes as “a Narnia kind of place,” by which she means an artificially sustained shelter that bears no resemblance to the real world. But however cozy the land of Narnia might look from the vantage of adulthood, now that memory has mingled it with nostalgia for childhood itself, it is not especially secure. The place seems to be under perpetual threat, and the course of action required to save it is invariably difficult, physically as well as psychically.