Jadis does try to tempt Digory to steal one of these magical, life-giving apples for his gravely ill mother, but unlike Satan she botches the job. This scene touches on the central tragedy of Lewis’s childhood, the death of his own mother from cancer when he was not much older than Digory. The witch invokes Digory’s grief and fear not because she sympathizes (having killed her own sister in an imperial power struggle, presumably she’s immune to such feelings), but because she knows that his love for his mother is his greatest weakness. Digory hesitates to follow her suggestion for a few reasons: because he instinctively trusts Aslan, because he does not want to break his promise, and because he believes that his mother herself wouldn’t approve of him stealing and then lying about it.
Jadis marshals persuasive counterarguments against all of these reservations, but what trips her up is her underestimation of Digory’s affection for Polly, of the power of friendship, a type of love Lewis considered underrated. Thinking that Digory is worried about getting caught, she tells him that he can easily cover his tracks by ditching Polly up in the mountains. In the pinch, Digory rebuffs her, not out of simple obedience to Aslan’s orders, but out of disgust at the “meanness” of the witch’s suggestion that he abandon his friend. Suddenly he perceives everything she’s said as “false and hollow.” The selfish, vainglorious evil she represents advocates more than just rebellion against God — she has subscribed to a radical disconnection from humanity. Symbolically, she has already demonstrated her disregard for natural feeling by violating the garden.
As a metaphor, the garden in The Magician’s Nephew has less in common with Eden than it does with the walled gardens that appear in the medieval courtly romances that Lewis wrote about in The Allegory of Love, his first great scholarly work, published in 1936. He came to Oxford from Belfast when he was in his late teens, and apart from a stint in the army during World War I, he never really left it. The Allegory of Love, an examination of the evolution of the form of allegory from the epics of late antiquity to the chivalric poems of the Middle Ages, made his academic reputation. It was in medieval literature, more than in scripture, that Lewis’s imagination lived and breathed. As arcane as its subject might seem to contemporary readers, for Lewis The Allegory of Love was an extension of his childhood enthusiasm for “knights in armor,” an enthusiasm that lasted all his life, beginning with the creaky historical novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and threading through the Arthurian works of Tennyson, Thomas Malory, William Morris, and Edmund Spenser.
Lewis adhered to a very particular, almost technical definition of allegory, so when critics later called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe allegorical (or, for that matter, suggested that The Lord of the Rings was an allegory for World War II), he took great pains to correct their error. He had a point — only someone who has a pretty feeble grasp of allegory would mistake The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for one. Some of the book’s elements are symbolic, but that is not the same thing. None of the characters in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are given labels like Despair or Prudence, nor can they be simply equated with such abstractions, like the figures in a strict allegory, such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
Still, the mistake is understandable. Why would most modern readers know anything much about allegory? Today the form is usually derided, rarely read, and never practiced, unless you count the allegories in political cartoons, where a gluttonous hog might appear with the letters “IRS” stamped on its side. The Pilgrim’s Progress is probably the only true allegory contemporary readers have ever heard of, let alone read. As a result, our ability to recognize allegories and to appreciate the best of them has withered away.
Nevertheless, Lewis was a medievalist at heart, and if none of the Narnia books are actual allegories, they are infused with a related affinity for emblems, pageants, and layered symbolism. This was the way his imagination worked, by constructing a series of meaning-drenched images. Lewis didn’t deny that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was allegory because he disliked the form (as Tolkien claimed to); to the contrary, he thought allegory was unjustly disdained. He believed modern readers required training to read it properly. If they could learn, at least temporarily, to think like the medievals, they would finally grasp allegory’s distinctive, if anti-quated beauty. Then it might give as much pleasure to the average educated reader as it had given to him.
One of the allegories Lewis most admired was The Romance of the Rose, a thirteenth-century French poem begun but not finished by Guillaume de Lorris and completed (to Lewis’s mind in an inferior fashion) by Jean de Meun. The story concerns a young courtier engaged in the delicate process of winning a lady’s love (symbolized by the rose of the title) in accordance with the elaborate protocols of chivalry. His opponents in this quest include figures named Shame and Fear; his chief ally is called Bialacoil, a term, Lewis explains, that is not quite the same as the chivalric principle of courtesy, but fairly similar.
If you check the entry for The Romance of the Rose in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, you will be told that the lover’s personified enemies stand for the “personal and social restraints standing against his advances.” Lewis felt that this sort of all-too-common, slapdash interpretation of allegorical figures — describing them as merely “standing for” something else — missed the point. If, while reading The Romance of the Rose, we see Shame and Fear as no more than broad abstractions (much like the statue symbolizing Justice mounted over many a courtroom), we miss the richness of a medieval allegory, and its intimacy. What we must first remember, Lewis argued, is that the friendly and hostile figures the lover meets are contained within the lady he loves. “Her character,” he wrote, “is distributed among personifications.”
What made allegory powerful, and in Lewis’s eyes “realistic,” is that it was a sophisticated way of representing the inner lives of human beings at the time the great allegories like The Romance of the Rose were written. Though we now take for granted the notion of psychologically conflicted characters (who are “torn” or “divided” by forces contained within their own hearts and minds), the medievals didn’t have an artistic and conceptual toolbox quite like our own. Instead of imagining each person as possessing a complex interior mental space full of warring impulses, their picture of character was more external. So for them, the natural way to portray what we would regard as a debate within a person’s psyche would be to write a passage in which a figure labeled (for example) Reason stands in a garden quarreling with a figure called Passion. (One of the few pop culture remnants of this kind of representation are the little angel and devil who are sometimes drawn sitting on opposite shoulders of a cartoon character, each arguing for a different course of action. They are depicted outside of the character’s body, but they represent elements of his personality.)
The Romance of the Rose features a garden within a garden, where most of the action (such as it is) takes place; the inner garden is the mind and heart of the lady the lover woos. In a true allegory, where aspects of a woman’s personality are made to walk about and otherwise behave like independent people, the woman herself — the territory on which the conflict is being played out — becomes a physical space, a plot of land. The medieval self is, in this sense, geographical.
It’s helpful to keep this in mind when thinking about the difference between, say, a modern novel of psychological realism and some varieties of fantastic fiction, what Lewis called “fairy tales.” While some of the characters in the Chronicles — especially the children from our world — behave more or less like real contemporary people, others — the witches, giants, and many of the beasts, to name but a few — are at least partially a different kind of figure. They are liminal, that is, charged beings inhabiting the slippery territory between day thoughts and dreams, and in that sense they’re not really “people” at all, but forces within the human soul. The places where the action transpires are dirt and grass and stone, and at the same time the interior of the self.<
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Allegory often strikes modern readers as abstract, but Lewis argued on behalf of its distinctive sensuality. The lady in The Romance of the Rose guards the rose, her love, well; it is surrounded by a thorny hedge. The lover hero engages in a series of protracted negotiations with assorted parties, some well disposed to him, others not, in the hope of gaining access to the inner garden so that he can kiss the rose. Lewis argued that in a successful allegory, the emblems, symbols, and personifications are more than just crude substitutions for something else. Allegorical figures are not a puzzle to be decoded and then, once you have cracked it and figured out the “real” message, tossed in the wastebasket. Allegory is a form in which images behave like ideas, without losing their essential identity as images. When the lover in The Romance of the Rose stares into the garden’s clear, sparkling fountain, we are meant to understand that we are reading about the first time he gazes into his lady’s eyes. But Lewis reminds us that we should hold both pictures — fountain and eyes — in our heads at the same time; each one enriches the other, and the reader is ravished by two beauties at once.
To grasp a literary image fully and deeply and yet to understand that it has another, different, layer of meaning — or even more layers — operating within, beneath, and beside it is to read medievally. Lewis did not see allegory as equivalent to myth, but he believed that it fed from the deeper, more powerful imaginative stratum where myth lives, much as a tree draws nurturance from the soil. Lewis’s own fiction drew from both. He is a fundamentally imagistic writer and even as a child I felt almost physically intoxicated by the potency of the pictures he made with words. The garden in The Magician’s Nephew is one of those pictures. It is at once a real, leafy, shady garden, vividly present in Lewis’s description, and also an externalized image of the self, a place so “obviously private” that any decent person, any true friend like Polly, knows better than to enter it unbidden.
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
It 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.”
Laura Miller Page 5
