The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  Suppose you answer. The sexy airs of summer blow on your bare skin as you take the first steps off damp sand into the creaming wash of the waves as they slide up the beach. The water is cold and fresh on your shins like a promise. It drags at them too, once you have strode out to where the surf is two feet deep, three feet deep. The next wave coming in presents a smooth unbroken face like green glass, with a mobile glitter of sunlight on it, and floating cells of white foam; gratefully, arms out, you launch yourself into it and pass with a sweet, piercing shock from one medium into another. Green world, blue world, rush of bubbles across your vision, sinuous flows of water around your chest. Your head breaks through into sunlight in the rocking valley between two crests, and you strike out strongly towards the open sea. Beyond the breakwater you can no longer touch bottom, but you are not afraid, for in this sea the harder you swim the stronger you grow, and the farther out you go the better it gets. More and more completely you feel the liquid embrace of the water, and yet appetite is not quenched here by being satisfied; from happiness to happiness, from joy to joy, it grows and goes on growing. You never knew it was possible to feel like this. You never felt more like yourself, so richly aware of your senses and yet so unclouded by the confusions of them, so unclogged, so awake. You are washed clean. No secrets are hidden any more, all desires are known. Now desire lives in you on effortlessly perfect terms with thought, and love, and justice. The best moment you ever lived before is multiplied tenfold, a hundredfold, and thousandfold. Welcome to ecstasy. ‘He’s a hedonist at heart,’ says Screwtape to Wormwood, disgustedly giving the devil’s-eye-view of God in The Screwtape Letters (1942). ‘All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only … like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure.’

  Lewis was always evoking ecstasy. His metaphors kept opening little, momentary windows on paradisiacal sensation as he imagined it. In fact, if Lewis’s writings were your only guide to Christianity, you might think, from the extraordinary energy he poured into his metaphors of heaven, that you were required to believe all sorts of things as tenets of the religion that he had only made up as he went along, and filled with his formidable longing. The comparison of the soul in the body to a rider on a horse, for instance, suggested to him in Miracles (1947) that ‘some day we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world-shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King’s stables.’ Winged horses do not feature in theology, usually. But though his miniatures of heaven were so story-like in their movement, and their invention – and though Lewis’s conversion to Christianity had been finally accomplished when his friend Tolkien had pointed out that the Gospels made a story-like sense – it was very important to Lewis to believe that his religion had none of the uncertainties of story. He had written his trilogy of theological science fiction novels, Out of the Silent Planet, Voyage to Venus and That Hideous Strength, before he came to the Narnia books in the late forties. But in his books of apologetics – defending and popularising Christianity to a public made eager for religion again by the moral crisis of the Second World War – he thought that he was building an edifice that rested on proof. He thought he had a watertight (so to speak) guarantee of the existence of the richer state of being beyond the boundary.

  After Miracles was published in 1947, Lewis took part in a head-to-head debate over its central argument with the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, at a meeting of an Oxford society called the Socratic Club. This, as Lewis’s biographer A. N. Wilson describes it, was home ground for Lewis: a forum in which he regularly administered a logical trouncing to a visiting atheist, to the applause of Oxford’s evangelical students. Unfortunately for him, Anscombe was not a naive non-believer, but an extremely sophisticated twenty-eight-year-old graduate student of Wittgenstein’s who also happened to be a committed Roman Catholic, and she trounced him. Opinions vary about how traumatic Lewis found his defeat on emotional grounds. Anscombe herself doesn’t remember him being particularly upset, while some of his friends talked at the time of him being brought ‘to the foot of the cross’ by the experience. A. N. Wilson suggests, interestingly, that having the intellectual carapace of his belief stripped away in public by a powerful woman made him feel like a child caught out in a game of make-believe. It may have revived the original anger and fear his mother’s death had caused in him. But the content of the debate is not in doubt. It was an argument about reason.

  Lewis argued that the existence of reason in the world could not be explained as the result of natural processes. If someone with alcoholic poisoning claims that the house is full of snakes, we don’t believe them, he pointed out. We identify their reasoning as defective and invalid because it emerges from the physical state of their body. Reason exists in its valid, undebased form only when we can say it is not influenced by non-rational forces, like having a high proportion of vodka in your bloodstream. Reason with a physical cause is not reason at all. Therefore true reason does not emerge from our bodies, but is a gift from beyond the frontier. Therefore there is a world beyond Nature to give such gifts. QED.

  No, said Anscombe. He had misunderstood what it would mean for the natural world to furnish the causes for rational thought. If people discovered some version of the laws of cause and effect that was subtle enough and fine-grained enough to explain how each thought in someone’s mind caused its successor, it would still ‘not show that a man’s reasons were not his reasons; for a man who is explaining his reasons is not giving a causal account at all.’ That is, he would not be telling you how the belief x came about in his mind, but why he believes it. There are two different kinds of ‘cause’, corresponding to the ‘how’ and to the ‘why’ of any belief, and Lewis had lumped them together, making every this-worldly factor in our thinking seem as straightforwardly destructive of reason as a brain tumour. It is perfectly possible for ‘human thought to be the product of a chain of natural causes’, and yet not be invalidated by the standards of logic. Therefore the existence of reason does not in itself prove that anything besides Nature exists. QED.

  Elizabeth Anscombe believed, herself, that beyond the natural world lay the God who created it. But until a better argument than Lewis’s came along, there would be no guarantee. So far as proof was concerned, the humble silence still held good that Wittgenstein had advocated in the Tractatus. Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent. Lewis, on the other hand – who in his flustered reply to Anscombe described his idea of a cause as ‘magical’ – took a different turn after the shoot-out at the Socratic Club. With his intellectual justification gone, he asked story to hold the world beyond the circle steady. He took up a sketch he had begun in 1940 about a little girl meeting a faun in a snowy wood, and rapidly expanded it. Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must write children’s books.

  *

  Narnia, of course, was not supposed to be Heaven. It was more like an imaginary other island, farther out than ours perhaps, where longing could be briefly stabilised. What could only be longed for in this world would be possible in Narnia. Tolkien, Lewis’s friend, thought it was completely illegitimate, though as a child (as he wrote in On Fairy Tales) he himself had ‘desired dragons with a profound desire’. Narnia was not built from first principles, like Middle Earth. It lacked the disciplined consistency which a ‘subcreation’ needed to justify a green sun. Instead, it mixed together, with joyful promiscuity, everything, from a thousand sources, that had given Lewis delight.

  Even as a child I was perfectly aware that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe jumbled up stuff that I associated with different kinds of story. The witch was a fairy-tale villain like the Snow Queen, but when she dripped one drop of hissing liquor onto the snow, the sweet corrupting food that appeared was Turkish delight. There were talking squirrels in the wood, like Squirrel Nutkin, but also satyrs and dryads and centaurs, and when the witch’s spell of perpetual wi
nter began to crack, Father Christmas sledged through. The good beavers cooked a marmalade suet pudding for the children. Aslan was both a talking lion and something else at the same time: I already knew that the story of him being sacrificed and coming back to life was a kind of cousin of the story of Jesus. And now, re-reading the seven Narnia books as I write about them, I find borrowings everywhere, of specially loved names, ideas, situations, atmospheres. Narnia is patchwork. The Magician’s Nephew is set in E. Nesbit’s Victorian London, and turns a cab-horse into the Pegasus Lewis had tried to whistle up in theology. Prince Caspian is named after a sea in Central Asia, and his wicked stepmother Queen Prunaprismia is named after an elocution exercise (‘Prunes and prisms, prunes and prisms’). Reepicheep is a Dumas musketeer transformed into a mouse. The lost mariners in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader quote Dante. Part of the plot of The Silver Chair is stolen from an anti-fascist science fiction novel of the 1930s called Land Under England. The Horse and His Boy is a pony book crossed with The Arabian Nights.

  No wonder that Tolkien, with his carefully accumulated elvish etymologies, was scornful. And yet the Narnia books are unmistakably unified by Lewis’s common delight in all the heterogeneous stuff he knocked it up from, and by the poetic (as opposed to realistic) intelligence he applied, starting with such small details as the green silk ribbon around the box of Turkish delight – whose colour carries over, into an object like the work of a particularly decadent West End chocolatier, the fairy-tale sign for venom. Barring a few (a very few) tonal mistakes, all of Narnia is adapted in the same way to appeal directly to immediate, sensuous belief. The fabric may be thin, but it is always rich. Lewis beat out all his materials into one continuous, shivering silver leaf of story.

  The author’s voice in the Narnia books kindly explained things to the child reading. At the Calormene feast in The Horse and His Boy, for example, the characters eat ‘snipe stuffed with almonds and truffles, and a complicated dish made of chicken-livers and rice and raisins and nuts’ – very exotic for pre-Elizabeth David Britain – and they drink ‘a little flagon of the sort of wine that is called “white” though it is really yellow’. It was a gorgeously certain voice, which in itself lent a wonderful solidity to Narnia’s stars and sausages, so that they blazed in their spheres and swelled in their skins, but it never spoke from a position of adult detachment. There was never even the faintest flicker of a suggestion that Lewis was offering you something you could be expected to like, at your age, though he did not – the voice was as impassioned as you were. It breathed as hard as you did; it felt awe, surprise, fear, joy and worshipfulness as much as you did; it luxuriated as you did in the idea of lying on the air like a sofa while the clouds went by beneath like sheep grazing on a big blue field. When Lewis invited you to breakfast with centaurs, or to drink a cup of fresh diamond juice from the river of fire at the bottom of the world, or to sail across a sea of silver waterlilies, or to ride on Aslan’s back ‘up windy slopes alight with gorse bushes and across the shoulders of heathery mountains and along giddy ridges and down, down, down again into wild valleys and out into acres of blue flowers’ – you knew they were invitations he would have accepted willingly himself. He used the trick of uncondescending explanation, borrowed from E. Nesbit, only to involve you in perceptions you couldn’t have had on your own. Which made it doubly frustrating when the book was over, and you couldn’t invent any more of what you had taken part in.

  Some people feel got at by the Narnia books. It isn’t just that the allegory of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe propagandises for Christianity, or that Lewis smuggles in his prejudices against the modern world in the guise of mocking at adult foolishness, so that children’s laughter is enlisted in causes they don’t necessarily understand. Or even that a streak of misogyny a hundred yards wide runs through the series. Every adult woman who is not a mother is an idiot, or a witch liable to turn into a giant snake; Susan is forbidden to return to Narnia because ‘she’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations’. It’s something more continuous, and perhaps more helpless on Lewis’s part. The seductive voice of the stories is also a bully, pushing you into feeling, overwhelming resistance with strong words. I was a very willing reader, but if someone had said this to me when I was eight or nine, I would instantly have known what they meant.

  It was never exactly comfortable reading the Narnia books. The intensity of the experience always came accompanied, for me, by the faint aura of embarrassment that tells you that you have been taken a little too far, or that at any moment you may be. Yet I welcomed the embarrassment as a necessary part of the intensity, and as a sign of how deeply the stories penetrated my imagination. It was strongest, of course, around the figure of Aslan, the great lion who is Narnia’s Christ, and consequently a fictive shadow in lion’s form of our world’s Christ, the Alpha and Omega of the real universe according to Lewis’s belief. ‘“Are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund. “I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name.”’ All-wise, all-good, Aslan constantly threatens to tear the fabric of Narnia when he appears. To borrow Lewis’s metaphor, he is heavier than an imaginary country. Reading the books again as an adult, I am impressed by Lewis’s tactical skill at managing (and rationing) Aslan’s appearances so that they do not breach the level on which the story is to be read. ‘People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. If the children had ever thought so, they were cured of it now. For when they tried to look at Aslan’s face they just caught a glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes; and then they found they couldn’t look at him, and went all trembly.’

  Aslan has two distinct speaking voices. To the boys in the stories, he is stern, man-to-man and noble in an archaic way. ‘Rise up, Sir Peter Wolf’s-Bane. And, whatever happens, never forget to wipe your sword.’ To the girls, he is tender and even playful. ‘Oh children, catch me if you can.’ ‘Speak on, dear heart.’ Of course, as a reader, you can be both the boys and the girls, whichever sex you are yourself, and so get Aslan both as ideal father and as something verging on ideal lover too. Of all the ten different children in the seven separate books, it is Lucy, the youngest girl, who is clearly Lewis’s own surrogate in the book – the person he would like to be in relation to Aslan, confiding, enchanted, wholly unafraid. ‘And he was solid and real and warm and he let her kiss him and bury herself in his shining mane.’ But Lewis keeps returning to the situation in which guilt has to be brought to Aslan, to be judged and purged. These moments – when Edmund has to face Aslan for his treachery, and Aravis for being cruel, and Jill for making Eustace fall off a cliff, and Eustace for generally being an obnoxious, self-centred, spiteful, greedy little so-and-so with vegetarian parents to boot – these moments were at the very heart of my embarrassment. The idea of being looked at by the lion and wholly known made me feel naked.

  And in the most alarming case of all, more than naked. When Eustace gets turned into a dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the only way he can shed the dragon’s hide which recurs again and again in fiction as an image for fearfully hardened emotions, is to submit himself to Aslan’s claws.

  The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know – if you’ve ever picked the scab of a sore place … And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on – and threw me into the water.

  It seemed that to meet Aslan was to consent to part of yourself maybe being discarded as a scab. I didn’t think I was like Eustace, but I couldn’t be sure. The books pressed a question, insistently: are you willing to be transformed? I was half-willing, unwilling, not sure if
I was willing or not; not able to look away. I’m sure reading the books now (and I was sure then, though I wouldn’t have put the thought into words) that there was nothing manipulative, or machiavellian about Lewis’s belief in Aslan’s claws. He didn’t urge anything on you that he didn’t think he needed himself. He truly thought he would not be chaste unless God ravished him. You could tell he was sure, that what a person needed was to be changed, turned inside out in a way you could never manage for yourself, because your fear would always prevent you from being drastic enough, cutting deep enough. Aslan the lion, God the surgeon, would show love ruthless enough to effect the cure.