As soon as they’ve eaten, Mr. Tumnus begins to tell Lucy stories:
He had wonderful tales to tell of life in the forest. He told about the midnight dances and how the Nymphs who lived in the wells and the Dryads who lived in the trees came out to dance with the Fauns; about long hunting parties after the milk white stag who could give you wishes if you caught him; about feasting and treasure-seeking with the wild Red Dwarfs in deep mines and caverns far beneath the forest floor; and then about summer when the woods were green and old Silenus on his fat donkey would come to visit them, and sometimes Bacchus himself, and then the streams would run with wine instead of water and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.
People from our world visit Narnia only when something’s gone wrong and needs to be fixed: the White Witch has to be overthrown, the Telmarines ejected, the lost prince retrieved from the northern wastes. Rereading the Chronicles as an adult, I realized that my notion of everyday Narnian life as a merry round of festivals and games comes almost entirely from fireside tales like Tumnus’s. Even when you’re in Narnia, the place can be elusive, constructed out of stories about times that are not quite this one. The titles of Tumnus’s books — The Life and Letters of Silenus, Nymphs and Their Ways, and especially Men, Monks and Gamekeepers: A Study in Popular Legend — peg him as a scholar of sorts, but it is his storytelling that makes him the most likely avatar for Lewis in all of the Chronicles.
Hospitality codes, as anyone as conversant with ancient literature as Lewis would have known, are among humanity’s oldest and most sacrosanct taboos. There’s no possibility that Mr. Tumnus, having invited Lucy into his home and buttered toast with her, could ever have carried out his initial plan to hand her over to the White Witch. But above and beyond that consideration, he does not do it because they have become friends — that theme again. Lewis considered it lamentable that friendship, in the contemporary view, had been almost entirely overshadowed by filial and romantic love: “Very few modern people,” he wrote in The Four Loves, “think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all.”
Perhaps there’s no better illustration of this than the 2005 film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Although a large budget and new special effects technologies have finally made it possible to visually approximate Lewis’s Narnia, the emotional mechanics of the book had to be fundamentally changed for modern audiences. It’s easy to picture the filmmakers puzzling over the adaptation, realizing that, despite Lewis’s reputation as a Christian proselytizer, his values don’t necessarily mesh well with the American-style piety of Walden Media, the company that produced the film.
Above all, assertions about the preeminence of family feeling had to be inserted. The book dispenses with the “air-raids” in a sentence or two, while the movie lingers over scenes of the Blitz and the siblings’ tearful good-byes with the hitherto faceless Mrs. Pevensie. The movie children talk mournfully about being separated from their parents, and Edmund’s nasty behavior is made to seem a symptom of his distress at his father’s absence. (He almost gets himself killed when he leaves the air-raid shelter to retrieve a photo of Mr. Pevensie in his soldier’s uniform.) Instead of lecturing Peter and Susan about Plato when they come to him with their worries about Lucy, Professor Kirk scolds (nonsensically), “You’re a family. You might just start acting like one.” By my count, the film uses the word “family” in this charged, almost fetishistic fashion over a half-dozen times. In the book, it appears just once, and then only in reference to the lineage of the giant Rumblebuffin, who, Mr. Tumnus informs Lucy, comes from “an old family. With traditions you know.”
I noticed this shift in emphasis most in the scene where Lucy leads her brothers and sisters to Tumnus’s cave, eager to introduce them to her new friend, only to find his house ransacked and a notice announcing that the faun has been arrested by the White Witch. In Lewis’s book, this discovery precipitates a discussion. Susan immediately suggests that they flee back through the wardrobe, and Lucy cries, “Don’t you see? We can’t just go home, not after this. It is all on my account that the poor Faun has gotten into this trouble. He hid me from the Witch and showed me the way back… . We simply must try to rescue him.” After a debate (with Edmund grumbling), the children agree, and even Susan, the most domesticated of the bunch, admits, “I don’t want to go a step further and I wish we’d never come. But I think we must try to do something for Mr. Whatever-his-name-is — I mean the Faun.” This conversation never happens in the film.
In Lewis’s book, what draws the Pevensie siblings further into Narnia is a sense of obligation having everything to do with honor and friendship (and perhaps even that most neglected of Christian virtues, charity), but little to do with “family values.” The difference between movie and book becomes even more marked later in the story, when the film tries to portray the children’s involvement in the revolt against the White Witch as largely motivated by their desire to rescue Edmund and get back “home.” In the book, it never seems to occur to the Pevensies not to do all they can to help Narnia and the Narnians, even if that means fighting in a war. They are in no particularly hurry to get back to England or their parents.
It’s not that Lewis didn’t cherish family; he would spend much of his adult life living with his brother, after all. However, the Chronicles show his recognition that children hear a powerful call from the outside world, where their destiny ultimately lies. Relationships with friends and the ethics of those relationships are one of childhood’s great preoccupations. It was in friendships with Arthur Greeves, Tolkien, and other men that Lewis finally found the kind of community that suited him best. He had a great talent for friendship. In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, that talent would make him the gravitational center of the Inklings, a group of like-minded men, including Tolkien, who met regularly to talk about literature and to read their own writings aloud.
Although the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, one of the Inklings’ regular hangouts, has become a pilgrimage site for their fans, most of the group’s weekly readings (including the first readings of The Lord of the Rings) were held in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College. The rooms, supplied as part of his fellowship at Magdalen, were shabbily but comfortably furnished, and warmed by a coal fireplace. Bookshelves stood against the walls, and on a long, battered table, the Lewis brothers served tea, beer (when they could get it), and delicacies sent by Lewis’s readers via the transatlantic post. The snug picture of these friends gathered by the fire, sharing stories that would later captivate readers all over the world, is a key element in the ongoing popular fascination with the Inklings. Humphrey Carpenter, in his eponymous history of the group, devotes an entire chapter to imagining a typical Thursday evening in Lewis’s rooms, complete with the lighting of pipes and the chiming of Magdalen’s clock tower.
One thing that makes this image so charming to so many readers is its resemblance to that scene by the fire in Mr. Tumnus’s nice little cave. The fans would surely be disappointed, then, to learn that none of the Narnia stories were ever read aloud to the Inklings, mostly because Tolkien disliked them. Lewis showed the manuscripts of the books to Roger Lancelyn Green, an expert on children’s fiction who would later become one of his biographers, but others among his friends were astonished to learn of the Chronicles’ existence. Dom Bede Griffiths, a former pupil at Magdalen who became a Catholic monk and one of Lewis’s regular correspondents, told Wilson that he discovered the books only after Lewis’s death and marveled to find in them “a power of imaginative invention and insight of which I had no conception before.” Griffiths’s Lewis had always presented himself as “a plain, honest man with no nonsense about him.” So perhaps Tolkien’s disapproval is not entirely to blame for the fact that, with respect to the Inklings, Narnia remained Lewis’s private concern.
Once again, his life was divided. It could recover its unity only between the covers of a book. The part of Lewis that produced the Chronicles of
Narnia was not especially welcome among the Inklings, and while this strikes me as a little sad, it is also not surprising. The Inklings smoked, drank beer, argued philosophy, and subjected one another’s work to ungentle criticism. (“Not another fucking elf!” Hugo Dyson famously moaned at the start of one of Tolkien’s readings.) There was no place for the likes of Lucy, really, in the bluff, masculine social world Lewis had created for himself. She was, however, more than welcome in Mr. Tumnus’s sitting room, and perhaps that’s why the picture of them whiling away an afternoon over sardines and sugared cakes feels so extraordinarily gratifying, less like a first meeting than a longed-for reunion. In Narnia, if nowhere else, the little girl and the learned bachelor can sit down together at last.
Chapter Seven
Through the Looking-Glass
Not long ago, I read a picture book entitled Andy and the Lion to my three-year-old friend Desmond. The book, by James Daugherty, retells Aesop’s fable of Androcles, a runaway slave who removes a thorn from a wild lion’s paw; when Androcles is later captured and condemned to be thrown to the lions, the same beast saves him, and the emperor spares them both as exemplars of friendship. Daugherty recasts the tale as the story of a barefoot American farm boy who helps an escaped circus lion he meets on the way to school. When I got to the part where a whistling Andy nears a turn in the road and notices just the tip of the runaway lion’s tail peeping around the corner, Desmond scrambled anxiously to the other end of the sofa and hid behind a cushion. Next, we read Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express, and at the moment when Santa put his arm around the book’s narrator and called for a cheer from the crowd of onlooking children, Desmond sat up straight, radiating pride.
The twins are always reminding me that identification is a primal experience. (Corinne has been known to run right out of the room if a giant or a big bad wolf appears in a story.) What happens to the main character in any book might as well be happening to them, right now, and that makes stories volatile, potent objects that have to be handled carefully when small children are around. What’s primal, however, is also primitive. Many writers and critics get annoyed when readers talk about their need to identify with a novel’s characters; to them, this seems naive, a crude and reductive way to evaluate art. When a three-year-old identifies so automatically, can we really call it a literary experience?
It’s true that for some readers, identification can be a form of narcissism; they want only books in which the characters are slightly improved versions of themselves. They might read nothing but novels about single women looking for mates in the big city, or tales of angry, disaffected young men who refuse to kowtow to the Man. But there’s a difference between wanting all stories you read to be about you in the most literal sense, and reading with the hope that you can find a bit of yourself in all stories, however alien they may seem on the surface. When our capacity to identify withers, so does a portion of our humanity. What Androcles (or Andy) sees when he comes across the wounded lion is not a dangerous beast, but a fellow creature in pain. Knowing how the thorn must hurt, he pulls it out and bandages the paw. Identification, or sympathy, is the birth of friendship.
To me, Lucy Pevensie was both an alter ego and a clear glass. Through her I could see the action of the first three Chronicles undistorted; her response to everything felt as fresh and natural as a breeze, because it was so close to my own. She is that rare creation, a character who is good without being a prig or a bore. Her virtues are a kind of reflex or second nature, and her spirit — sincere, blithe, playful, trusty, warm — is so in tune with Narnia itself, that she is almost instantly at home there.
Even today I find it hard to secure any perspective on her. “Lucy goes straight to your heart,” Neil Gaiman observes, and once she is ensconced there, it’s impossible to step far enough away from her to take her in. Upon first hearing the name of Aslan in the Beavers’ house, each of the four children has a distinct reaction. Edmund, naturally, feels horribly guilty, Peter feels brave, and Susan experiences an almost sensuous pleasure, “as if a delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by.” Lucy gets “the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.” Hers is a child’s excitement, “your” excitement, as the passage explicitly puts it. And the sensation Lewis describes, that flush of freedom on the first day of summer vacation: Is there any child who doesn’t know exactly how that feels? Or any adult who doesn’t try to recreate it during the pitifully brief holidays we get from our working lives?
As much as I wanted to be Lucy Pevensie, I also wanted to be her friend. I thought I’d do a much better job of it than Marjorie Preston, who makes a cameo appearance in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Alone in the magician’s house, reading her way through his big book of spells, Lucy finds herself tempted to use a charm that will “maketh beautiful her that uttereth it beyond the lot of mortals.” (This is a particularly appealing prospect given that in this department she feels overshadowed by Susan.) Although the illustrations accompanying the spell suggest that its results will be destructive, and Lucy’s own better judgment warns her against it, the only thing that really stops her is the sudden apparition of Aslan’s disapproving face. Turning the page, Lucy comes upon a charm that allows you to know what your friends think of you, and she resolves that this magic, at least, she ought to be able to try. After she recites the spell, the pictures on the page begin to move, showing her Marjorie, a friend from last term at school, bad-mouthing Lucy to a more popular girl.
Lucy has been sent into the magician’s house to search his book for an anti-invisibility spell; after she recites it, Aslan appears. He reproaches Lucy for spying on Marjorie, and tells her that her friend didn’t really mean what she said: “She is weak, but she loves you.” In spite of this, they both agree that Lucy will never be able to forget what she heard the girl say, and something precious has been lost. “Have I spoiled everything?” Lucy asks Aslan. “Do you mean we would have gone on being friends if it hadn’t been for this — and been really great friends — all our lives perhaps — and now we never shall.”
I thought of this scene decades after I first read it, during a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. One of the film’s characters, a nurse who has befriended the actress she has been tending, surreptitiously reads one of the actress’s letters to her doctor. In the letter, she finds a patronizing description of herself. Enraged, the nurse confronts her charge, accusing the actress of an inability to love anyone, even her own son, and thus precipitates a wrenching dislocation, signaled by one of the great montages of experimental cinema. For Bergman, the reading of the letter (a variety of eavesdropping that also turns up in his film Through a Glass Darkly) flushes the truth about the actress’s inner life out into the open; it’s assumed — naively, really — that she wouldn’t misrepresent her feelings in a letter to her doctor. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the result is a little more complicated.
Persona is a film about permeable, fluid identities (at one point, images of the faces of the two women fuse), overflowing the barriers between individuals. Lewis’s vignette implies that true friendship depends on the maintenance of those boundaries. That Lewis would champion privacy is no surprise, but there’s more to the Marjorie Preston incident than a simple admonishment against eavesdropping. Aslan’s remarks about Marjorie’s love for Lucy serve as a reminder that people employ personas in all sorts of situations; we shouldn’t necessarily assume that what our friends say when we’re not around is more truthful than what they say to our faces. This is a particularly valuable bit of wisdom for schoolgirls (though how Lewis could have known this, I can’t imagine), who are all too prone to the conviction that they’ve merged with their best friends — and therefore all too susceptible to feeling betrayed when this belief turns out to be an illusion.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader includes another passage about friendship, one of my favorites in all of the Chroni
cles. It comes late in the journey, as the ship sails through waters of preternatural clarity near the edge of the world. Lucy has been leaning over the side, puzzled by “a little black object, about the size of a shoe” racing along after the ship, getting bigger or smaller in the wink of an eye; this she soon realizes is the shadow the ship casts on the bottom of the sea. Then she watches as the Dawn Treader and its shadow pass over a city of merpeople and a hunting party led by a warlike king who shakes his spear at them. As the ship glides past the outskirts of this submarine nation, Lucy spots one last sea person, “a quiet, lonely-looking girl with a sort of crook in her hand,” who seems to be a “fish-herdess.”
The girl looked up and stared straight into Lucy’s face. Neither could speak to the other and in a moment the Sea Girl dropped astern. But Lucy will never forget her face. It did not look frightened or angry like those of the other Sea People. Lucy had liked that girl and she felt certain the girl had liked her. In that one moment they had somehow become friends. There does not seem to be much chance of their meeting again in that world or any other. But if ever they do they will rush together with their hands held out.
Here is the bookend to the sad story of Lucy Pevensie and Marjorie Preston, one friendship lost to the desire for too much knowledge contrasted with another friendship cemented in the absence of any knowledge at all. Lucy’s encounter with the sea girl is romantic, an emotional flourish set off by passages of radiant description, but that doesn’t make it untrue. If we believe in love at first sight, and friendship is a form of love, why shouldn’t we be able to recognize a friend at first sight, too? Aren’t some of the most enduring childhood bonds formed in just a few moments on a sidewalk or a playground? Needless to say, at eight I was convinced that I, too, would have befriended that sea girl in a single glance.
Laura Miller Page 8
