The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  The books I loved best were in the second category – the ones that started in this world and took you to another. Earthsea and Middle Earth were separate. You travelled in them in imagination as you read Le Guin and Tolkien, but they had no location in relation to this world. Their richness did not call to you at home in any way. It did not lie just beyond a threshold in this world that you might find if you were particularly lucky, or particularly blessed. I wanted there to be the chance to pass through a portal, and by doing so to pass from rusty reality with its scaffolding of facts and events into the freedom of story. I wanted there to be doors. If, in a story, you found the one panel in the fabric of the workaday world which was hinged, and it opened, and it turned out that behind the walls of the world flashed the gold and peacock blue of something else, and you were able to pass through, that would be a moment in which all the decisions that had been taken in this world, and all the choices that had been made, and all the facts that had been settled, would be up for grabs again: all possibilities would be renewed, for who knew what lay on the other side?

  And once opened, the door would never entirely shut behind you either. A kind of mixture would begin. A tincture of this world’s reality would enter the other world, as the ordinary children in the story – my representatives, my ambassadors – wore their shorts and sweaters amid cloth of gold, and said Crumbs! and Come off it! among people speaking the high language of fantasy; while this world would be subtly altered too, changed in status by the knowledge that it had an outside. E. Nesbit invented the mixing of the worlds in The Amulet, which I preferred, along with the rest of her magical series, to the purely realistic comedy of the Bastables’ adventures in The Treasure Seekers and its sequels. On a grey day in Kentish Town, Robert and Anthea and Jane and Hugh travel to blue sky through the arch of the charm. The latest master of worlds is Philip Pullman. Lyra Belacqua and her daemon walk through the aurora borealis in Northern Lights; in the next book of the Dark Materials trilogy, The Subtle Knife, a window in the air floats by a bypass in the Oxford suburbs; in The Amber Spyglass, the last instalment, access to the eternal sadness of the land of the dead is through a clapped-out, rubbish-strewn port town on the edge of a dark lake.

  As I read I passed to other worlds through every kind of door, and every kind of halfway space that could work metaphorically as a threshold too: the curtain of smoke hanging over burning stubble in an August cornfield, an abandoned church in a Manchester slum. After a while, I developed a taste for the transitions so subtle that the characters could not say at what instant the shift had happened. In Diana Wynne Jones’s Seven Days of Luke, the white Rolls-Royce belonging to ‘Mr Wedding’ – Woden – takes the eleven-year-old David to Valhalla for lunch, over a beautiful but very ordinary-seeming Rainbow Bridge that seems to be connected to the West Midlands road system. I liked the idea that the borders between the worlds could be vested in modern stuff: that the green and white signs on motorways counting down the miles to London could suddenly show the distance to Gramarye or Logres. But my deepest loyalty was unwavering. The books I loved best of all took me away through a wardrobe, and a shallow pool in the grass of a sleepy orchard, and a picture in a frame, and a door in a garden wall on a rainy day at boarding school, and always to Narnia. Other imaginary countries interested me, beguiled me, made rich suggestions to me. Narnia made me feel like I’d taken hold of a live wire. The book in my hand sent jolts and shimmers through my nerves. It affected me bodily. In Narnia, C. S. Lewis invented objects for my longing, gave forms to my longing, that I would never have thought of, and yet they seemed exactly right: he had anticipated what would delight me with an almost unearthly intimacy. Immediately I discovered them, they became the inevitable expressions of my longing. So from the moment I first encountered The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to when I was eleven or twelve, the seven Chronicles of Narnia represented essence-of-book to me. They were the Platonic Book of which other books were more or less imperfect shadows. For four or five years, I essentially read other books because I could not always be re-reading the Narnia books. I had a book-a-day habit to support, and there were only seven of them after all. But in other books, I was always seeking for partial or diluted reminders of Narnia, always hoping for a gleam of the sensation of Narnia. Once felt, never forgotten.

  *

  ‘Let us … suppose a violation of frontier,’ wrote C. S. Lewis, defending fantasy in 1949, the year he completed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was his first attempt to write for children. But though the form was new to him, by then he had been devoted for many years to the idea that it might be possible to cross the frontier of ordinary life.

  It was philosophy that taught him the nature of the frontier, and at first he had not believed there were doors. As an atheist student in Oxford after the First World War, he subscribed to the school of critical thought which had begun in the Enlightenment in the work of Hume and Kant. Traditionally, philosophy had tried to answer ultimate questions about freedom and truth, the nature of humanity and the nature of God. This, on the other hand, was a programme of stripping away the curlicues of metaphysics that previous philosophy’s search for answers had woven around human experience. Critical philosophy’s bite had recently been renewed in Oxford, and it was in the process of modulating into the logical positivism of Bertrand Russell and the young Wittgenstein. From one critical philosopher to another, emphasis and interpretation varied, but the map of the universe that they drew remained beautifully bare and plain. We have to see through philosophical eyes here. Although human life as directly experienced is at the centre of the map, it is thought of in the abstract, without any of the particular colouring we learn from our curiosity about individual lives and their differences. So forget anecdotes and incidents. Let logic take the place of biography. Make your mind into a sheet of white paper.

  Now imagine a circle. Inside the circle is the territory of sense-experience: everything we ever touch, see, taste, hear or smell, and know to be the case because we sense it. This includes not just the initial sensations but all the factual knowledge that develops from them, all the feelings and deductions that pertain to our existence as bodies in the world: everything. Outside the circle lies the domain of metaphysics, defined as the class of all concepts whose existence cannot be demonstrated logically from the data of our senses. Here be, not dragons, but such postulates as God, eternity, perfection, a meaning to events that we do not put there ourselves, ultimate purpose for human actions. Whether or not the ideas outside the circle are nonsense according to the ordinary understanding of the word – the philosophers disagreed – they are certainly non-sense judged by the criteria used inside the circle. Kant thought the object of philosophy was to remind us not to use the intellectual methods moulded by factual experience on the nebulous stuff beyond experience. We should not think about God as if God were a person in the world; we should not think about heaven as if it were another place of the sort we are already familiar with. The only function that Kant could see in philosophy for the space beyond the circle was that it might supply us with imaginary reference-points towards which we could gaze. Like a fixed star, the idea of perfection, for example, might be useful to navigate by even if it could never be reached. Otherwise, it was a vacuum out there. Wittgenstein went further in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921. For him, language ended at the boundary of the circle, and with it, existence in any sense that language was capable of describing. It was not even meaningful to talk about going ‘beyond’ the boundary. There was no outside. The line of the frontier was the curved edge of the universe. It had no other side. You could only talk about human existence happening against a background of profound mystery.

  C. S. Lewis signed up to this map, but he did not like it. His imagination contradicted it; needed to contradict it, perhaps. Lewis the abrasive dialectician who, it was reported, ‘seems to think that Plato is always wrong’, had been a teenage officer on the Western Front. Before that, he was
a confident, absorbed child in Ulster, feeling no need for friends outside his family, impatiently instructing his big brother where to stand and what to be in their games. Suddenly, when he was nine, his mother died of cancer. His father, driven to distraction by grief, turned to his sons for emotional support; they shrank back, unable to bear what felt like an invitation to abandon all their defences. Since then, it had not seemed fundamentally safe to Lewis to look in the world for the sustenance that once, traumatically, had been snatched away when he was depending on it. After that food for the heart seemed to him to come from over the hills and far away, from a source that receded, if you went looking for it, like the end of the rainbow.

  He was a romantic. While he did respond to the intellectual zeal with which critical philosophy took a hank of wire wool to the ground-in grease of previous philosophical systems and began to scrub, the kind of beauty he looked for was very different from the stark sort implied by the bare circle on the map, when the world’s outlines were reduced to the lines of geometry, without decoration, without thickening emotion. Wittgenstein designed a house in Vienna built in white concrete. He sat in a deckchair in an empty room, engaged in pure mentation. Lewis could not have abided this aesthetic starvation diet. He preferred (as he wrote later) ‘that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of “Kubla Khan”, the morning cobwebs in late summer …’ In the same piece of writing – the preface to the 1943 edition of his allegory The Pilgrim’s Regress – he analysed that ‘intense longing’, remembering how as a child he had felt it for distant hillsides, as an adolescent for an imaginary beloved or for the occult, as a scholar for intellectual mastery. ‘But every one of these impressions is wrong … Every one of these supposed objects for the Desire is inadequate to it.’ When he pressed these things for the sensation that they had seemed to hold out to him, it slipped away. ‘It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire … he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul is made to enjoy some object that is never fully given … in our present mode of subjective and spatiotemporal existence.’ If the map was right, though, there was no other mode of existence on offer. If the world ended in a one-sided wall, where was happiness to be found?

  Then in 1929 Lewis was converted to Christianity. For him, as it had been for the early Christians who broke the rules of Roman society, it was a deeply transgressive religion, in the literal sense of the word. It instructed you to trans-gress, that is, to ‘go across’, a whole set of lines that divided radically different states of being. When pagan Romans looked at Christians, they saw people who ignored some of the boundaries essential to civilised existence. Instead of segregating the dead in cemeteries beyond the city walls, for example, to keep the taint of mortality out of the world of the living, the Christians lived among the dead on shockingly intimate terms, by burying them in their churches, and founding whole shrines around the flesh or bones of particularly honoured corpses. They were following the example of the Jesus who had deliberately broken the laws of the Sabbath; who had violated ritual purity by sitting down to eat with prostitutes and with the agents of his country’s occupying power; who had, Christians believed, crossed from life into death and back into life again at his resurrection. As a Christian, you responded to this great intervention by God in the life of this world, by coming out of your old sinful existence in a nature corrupted by sin, and crossing through the waters of baptism, into a new and redeemed life with God. You might look the same, but you had declared that ultimately you depended on the love of God to nourish and sustain you, rather than on the food-and-sex-and-shelter-providing fertility of nature. Your connection beyond the world took priority. In the end you would leave this bodily life altogether, and travel into eternity on the far side of death. You would go to the source of all promises, where the living water flowed, and (according to the Book of Revelation) ‘there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.’

  Among the things this meant to Lewis, one was that the border around sense-experience was now permeable. He had found an infinitely large object for his longing, and the map was changed. Its topology was still the same. There was still a circle, and it still divided two domains, one inside, one outside. But the space beyond the circle, which had been bare and empty, which had signified the vacuum of metaphysics, now represented a fullness that could only be dreamed of, and yearned for, from within the boundary line. Beyond the circle, everything was richer, and more solid, and more real. ‘If we must have a mental picture to symbolise Spirit, we should represent it as something heavier than matter,’ he wrote. From being someone who thought that Plato was always wrong, with his view of this life as a mere play of shadows cast by true objects elsewhere, he had become someone who thought that Plato was almost always right. (‘It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!’ says Digory at the end of The Last Battle, the last of the Narnia stories.) If what we see in the distance here does not satisfy when we reach it, and take it into our hands, that’s because it is only an insubstantial ghost of the real thing, which we will find, in time, beyond the line.

  And this did not just apply to spiritual things, and to elusive sensations, but to the entire fabric of the physical world. A deeply carnal individual, Lewis always imagined heaven in carnal, you might say hyper-carnal, terms. It was not just the place where we will encounter immortal love, and see the true stars shine by comparison with which the stars of our familiar sky are dim, sad glowworms. It was also the home of the immortal sausage, more brown, more popping, more savoury in its skin than the shadow-sausages we know now; of immortal beer, and immortal tobacco, and all the other things Lewis enjoyed. It was the place where feeling would reach its fruition, its consummation. There, when you did the Keatsian thing, and burst joy’s grape against your palate fine, a hand grenade of true grapishness would go off in your mouth, and send its total message of cool pale green flesh, sweet and yet acidic, to overwhelm every nerve in your body.

  Of course, such fierce delight would be too much for us in our present bodies. If we touched perfection now, it would hurt us. In The Great Divorce, Lewis imagined the sad shades in Hell being allowed to visit Heaven, and finding the grass underfoot as sharp as spikes of diamond – a speculation similar, really, to the old laddish gag that Superman and Lois Lane couldn’t have sex, because when he ejaculated inside her, his supersonic super sperm would blow a hole in her. But fortunately, when we are raised by God in our shining new bodies of new flesh, we shall be as strong as everything else in the true kingdom, and capacity shall at last be exactly equal to desire. Desire was the right word, in all its connotations, the sexual ones included. Lewis took a completely orthodox but rather marginal point of Christian doctrine, and made it central to his belief. It was axiomatic that no sinful act could bring the sinner any substantial reward. You might be tempted by the idea that the sin would bring you a full, overflowing, pleasure, but when you actually succumbed, you’d find out that all you got was a flat, empty sensation. The apples of Sodom taste of ashes. This happened because sins were parodies, or perversions, of the legitimate pleasures God had ordained for human beings. In that case, reasoned Lewis, if you resisted sins in this life, every pleasure they held out delusively to you now, would be supplied in reality and in overwhelming abundance in the greater life to come. Every pleasure, though we might no longer recognise them as sexual once they had shed their mortal connections with biology.

  Stars, sausages, diamonds. Lewis’s map could not remain the diagram it had been for the philosophers. It ceased to be minimalist and monochrome. It burst out, like the page of the magician’s book in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when Lucy says the spell ‘to make hidden things visible’, into ‘gold and blue and scarlet’. It came
to life. Fresh tendrils sprouted and curled around it luxuriantly, like the illuminated vines drawn in the margins of medieval manuscripts that gave ‘page’ its name, pagina meaning ‘vineyard’ in Latin. The abstract grew concrete. And what was the plain circle of our present life turning into, now that geometrical figure was becoming bright image? Several metaphors were available. They were the old, powerful ones people have used from time immemorial when we conceive of life surrounded by eternity, the Self surrounded by the Other, consciousness surrounded by the unconscious, in terms of one space within another. Lewis could have seen the circle as a clearing in the great forest that is always there in our imaginations, even if it’s missing in the British countryside. The boundary between the two states would have been the forest edge, where we pass from the open land into the green shade of the trees.

  But that would have made paradise a thicket; and though Lewis saw the greater reality of heaven as stronger and richer, and even heavier, than the fabric of this world, he did not imagine a medium that put up more resistance, that was thicker. On the contrary: he saw heaven as a place of delicious flow, where the stuff of existence would be more free and liquid, and all our delights would be dolphin-like. He always responded intensely to the water images in scripture. ‘As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.’ ‘O God … my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land.’ ‘I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.’ When he proposed a counterpart to Kant’s go-out-of-sense-experience-and-look-back-at-it manoeuvre, it came out distinctly aqueous, as an invitation to seek perspective by tasting ‘the pure water from beyond the world’. So, for the most part, when C. S. Lewis contemplated the blank circle of the philosophers, it became a splotch of greens and browns fading to the pale colours of sand at its rim, with the marine blues of endless sea around it. It became an island. Perhaps once it had been humanity’s jail cell, but Jesus had ‘forced open a door that [had] been locked since the death of the first man’, and now its boundaries were as wide open as a beach where the gulls are crying and the wind is stirring the dry grasses on the top of the dunes. It became an island; and the tide came stealing up creeks and inlets in a flood of silver to remind you, even if you were far inland, dry and stranded, that something else lay over the horizon, calling you.