Laura Miller (8 page)

I, for one, didn’t experience the Chronicles as a retreat into an orderly playpen populated by sweet-talking animals and a kind, cuddly godhead. I was, of course, being sheltered by the traditional conventions of children’s stories, in which the good are rewarded, the evil defeated, and the ending is at least partially happy. But getting to that happy ending was no picnic; along with the child heroes, I vicariously slogged through trackless forests and snowy wastes, took up arms against monsters, and wrangled with menacing adults. I was stirred by how much was expected of the Pevensies. I wanted to be challenged in the same way. I wanted to be asked to give my all for a cause I could be sure was worthy. (And even at that tender age, I had an inkling that finding such a cause would be the hardest part of the quest.)

Not all of these sentiments are entirely admirable, but they do represent a mezzanine between the dependency of childhood and the autonomy of adulthood. They’re an imaginative projection, not (quite) a real wish, and Lewis takes some care to remind his readers of the distinction. As Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum enjoy a brief, easy stretch on the moors at the beginning of
The Silver Chair,
Jill announces that she might just enjoy adventures after all, to which Puddleglum responds, “We haven’t had any yet.” Later on, Jill will get the opportunity to observe that “when, in books, people live on what they shoot, it never tells you what a long, smelly, messy job it is plucking and cleaning dead birds, and how cold it makes your fingers.” The sort of experience that makes for a good story is seldom a comfy one.

“Adventure,” then, is what might otherwise be called a hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis’s child characters have learned from reading “the right books.” This is surely the oldest of the many tasks that stories are called upon to perform. The honor that propels the warriors of
The Iliad
is bestowed in the form of stories, accounts of bravery first passed on by fellow soldiers and later recited by poets long after the hero himself is dead. When Shakespeare’s Henry V rallies his men before the Battle of Agincourt, he tells them that their courage on Saint Crispin’s Day will soon be legendary, offering them a kind of immortality:

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered.

“This is War. This is what Homer wrote about,” was what Lewis himself thought one afternoon in November 1917 at the beginning of his only encounter with real, life-and-death adventure in France. A bullet had just whined past him, and even then, his mind turned toward books. Afterward, he would write even less about the war than he did about his mother’s death. In
Surprised by Joy,
he explains that the period is “too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else. It is even in a way unimportant.” This remark comes just after a sentence that describes, with excruciating vividness, the horrors of the trenches: “the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E. [human excrement], the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet.”

Passing references made in the years that followed suggest that the war stuck with Lewis more than he let on. He was lucky enough to sustain a minor wound fairly early in his stint (the shrapnel remained in his shoulder for the rest of his days), and that probably saved his life. The following year, he makes reference, in a letter to his father, of suffering from “nightmares — or rather the same nightmare over and over again. Nearly every one has it.” In 1925, again writing to his father, he recounts a walk with Warnie, during which they overheard a battery practicing nearby, the first gunfire he’d heard since returning from France. His own response startled him: “It seemed much louder and more sinister and generally unpleasant than I had expected.” Later still, he would gratefully note “the stamp of the war” on Hugo Dyson, a new friend, and in one of his few surviving letters to Tolkien, he praises
The Lord of the Rings
for capturing “so much of our joint life, so much of the war,” which otherwise seemed to be slipping out of immediate memory.

The lives Lewis and Tolkien led might appear sheltered at first glance, but in this respect they endured more than almost anyone in my own circle ever will; middle-class American intellectuals in recent years have seldom gone to war. Tolkien, in a preface to
The Lord of the Rings,
wrote that by 1918, when he turned twenty-six, all but one of his closest friends had been killed. The formative trials of his youth, and Lewis’s, the almost incommunicable agonies of the trenches, have become increasingly alien to their readers, who are gradually losing even the ability to understand that they don’t understand them. All the same, although I was only a little girl who knew nothing of real violence, I recognized the ring of truth in Peter’s battle with the wolf in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

All this happened too quickly for Peter to think at all — he had just time to duck down and plunge his sword, as hard as he could, between the brute’s forelegs into its heart. Then came a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare. He was tugging and pulling and the Wolf seemed to be neither alive nor dead, and its bared teeth knocked against his forehead, and everything was blood and heat and hair. A moment later he found that the monster lay dead and he had drawn his sword out of it and was straightening his back and rubbing the sweat off his face and out of his eyes. He felt tired all over.

Aslan knights Peter after this messy victory (admonishing him, “Never forget to wipe your sword” — more practical advice!) and gives him the nickname Wolf’s-Bane. Peter has not only rescued Susan from the wolf; he has entered a heroic narrative and acquired a title. Lewis dreaded war (especially as his brother became a career officer in the Royal Army Service Corps and was recalled to active duty during World War II), but the literature he studied showed it to be a continuing fact of human existence. He firmly believed that sometimes war was necessary. Religion explains why — sometimes we must be willing to sacrifice ourselves for a greater good — but stories show us
how.
Stories are what make heroes. You can only become a hero by participating in a story, and stories bestow meaning on what might otherwise look like raw suffering and waste.

This, of course, is not always a virtue. You can get people to do a lot of difficult, unpleasant, and dangerous things by convincing them that someday a golden story will be spun out of the straw of their mortal lives. Many of these things are not worth doing, and not all Christians agree with Lewis’s views on war. But war is not the only enterprise that requires courage, energy, and will. Another is the perilous adventure of growing up.

Chapter Five

Something Wicked This Way Comes

A
t age seven, I believed that I knew sermonizing when I saw it, and I loathed no book more on this count than
Elsie Dinsmore.
Martha Finley’s 1867 novel had been pressed on me by my grandmother, who, incredibly, claimed to have enjoyed it in her youth. The title character is a weepy Goody Two-shoes, mistreated by her stepmother yet responding with an unflagging, inhuman sweetness and docility that the reader is obviously meant to admire and emulate. Later in the narrative, Elsie even manages to get into a ludicrous doctrinal dispute with her adored father, who orders her to read a secular book aloud to him on his sickbed; it is Sunday and Elsie believes that Sabbath reading should be reserved for the Bible or some other appropriately pious literature.

Despite hating it so thoroughly, I read
Elsie Dinsmore
all the way through. Part of my reason for persisting with the book was to marvel at the sort of hogwash adults expected me to swallow, and to congratulate myself on knowing better. This was my first taste of the righteous indignation of the abused reader, that strangely pleasurable outrage we experience when we recognize that an author has broken an important trust. As every critic knows, readers relish a negative review, and not simply out of spite. Seeing an author punished by critics for trampling on the compact between reader and writer attests to the fact that the compact was there in the first place. You can’t recognize blasphemy until you hold something sacred.
Elsie Dinsmore
could only be so very bad because
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
was so very good.

It was precisely the propaganda aspect of
Elsie Dinsmore
that offended me, the subservience of the story and characters, of the entire book, to the task of instructing me morally. I recognized that the Chronicles also sometimes spoke to me about virtue — in fact, I regarded those parts of the books as among their most thrilling and important moments. The difference was, as I saw it, fundamental. The morality of Elsie Dinsmore was the morality of childhood, where the choice was between obedience and naughtiness. The morality of Narnia was grown-up, a matter of good and evil.

Adult readers, who detect the Christian symbolism of the Chronicles so readily, often can’t see the distinction. In her book
Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter,
Alison Lurie complains, “In Narnia, final happiness is the result not of individual initiative and enterprise, but of submission to the wisdom and will of superior beings.” Edmund’s treachery in betraying the Narnians and his own siblings to the White Witch might seem heinous, but “misbehavior can be forgiven if it is sincerely repented, and Edmund eventually becomes one of the Kings of Narnia.” This is really an objection to Christian faith itself, to its emphasis on obedience to the will of God and its promise of redemption to those who repent of their defiance. But it never occurred to me to look for Christianity in Narnia, and so, in the temptation of Edmund Pevensie, I saw another kind of drama entirely.

To me, the best children’s books gave their child characters (and by extension, myself) the chance to be taken seriously. In Narnia, the boundary between childhood and adulthood — a vast tundra of tedious years — could be elided. The Pevensies not only get to topple the White Witch, fight in battles, participate in an earthshaking mystical event, and be crowned kings and queens; they do it all without having to grow up. Yet they become more than children, too. Above all, their decisions have moral gravity. In contrast to how most children experience their role in an adult world, what the child characters in these stories do, for better or worse, really
matters,
and nowhere more so than in Edmund’s betrayal. His envy and vanity bring about a cataclysm, the death of God.

I remember feeling that the Chronicles were full of perilous decisions in which it was all too apparent how easily you could drift onto the wrong path. The White Witch entices Edmund with delicious hot drinks and enchanted Turkish delight, but primarily by flattering his laziness, his conceit, and his rivalrous sentiments toward his older brother, Peter — all very human weaknesses I recognized in myself. I wasn’t alone. One of the people who wrote to me after reading my essay about
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
was a musician, writer, and artist I knew slightly named Tiffany Lee Brown. When we met to talk about the books, she described how different Narnia felt from other children’s fantasies.

“The first novel I ever read was
The Magic of Oz
in the school library,” she told me. “I loved it, and believed every word of it. So I read all the Oz books. I moved on to the Narnia books after that, when I was about seven or eight.”

“And how did you think they compared to Oz?”

“Well, I didn’t spend too much time in Oz. It was kind of wacky and had a lot of things going on, but there was a certain weightiness to Narnia which really appealed to me.”

“What do you mean by ‘weightiness’?”

“The fact that people were really being tested. It wasn’t just ‘Are we coming to the end of the adventure? Will we get back to Kansas?’ but, ‘Will we get back to Kansas with our souls intact?’”

To the adult skeptic, the evident Christianity of the Chronicles makes their morality seem pat, the all-too-familiar stuff of tiresome, didactic tales like
Elsie Dinsmore.
“The world of Narnia is simple and eternal,” Alison Lurie writes, a place where good and evil are too “clearly distinguishable” compared to the “complex and ambiguous and fluid” world inhabited by Harry Potter. But that’s an illusion, fostered by an adult’s resistance to what appears to be religious proselytizing. True, Lewis does populate Narnia with semiallegorical figures who represent eternal aspects of human nature in addition to more realistic characters like the Pevensies. The White Witch is bad through and through, almost as uncomplicated as a fairy-tale villain. But she’s not the ground on which the story’s moral battle is fought. Edmund is.

For the novelist Jonathan Franzen, the plausibility of Edmund’s corruption is an example of the ethical gravity that gives the Chronicles much of their power. “What I so admire about them as an adult and I think may very well have been a big part of their appeal to me as a child,” he told me, “was how well Lewis understands how
real
evil is to children. How real a sense of guilt and having done something very, very bad is. And how vital to having a story with real meaning that possibility is. All of the books I liked best, that really made an impression on me from childhood, had main characters who were not all good, who were not victims of bad things but were actually agents in creating bad things.”

Victims, it’s true, have an appeal of their own. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
A Little Princess,
like
Elsie Dinsmore,
was one of those stories in which a child is bullied and deprived by nasty authority figures and her peers, only to achieve a satisfying triumph at the book’s end. Even with a heroine like Elsie, who bore little resemblance to an actual human being, this kind of narrative can be weirdly enthralling. Vindication, however diluted, is intoxicating to the powerless, and all children feel powerless much of the time. There’s something a little unwholesome about even a good children’s novel in this particular vein —
A Little Princess
being a fine example. Young as I was, I recognized that my fascination with the injustices suffered by Burnett’s heroine, a former rich girl reduced to working as a servant at her boarding school when her father dies, and my hot anticipation of the comeuppance I knew lay in store for her enemies, had an ugly side.