Words and Worlds

by Alison Lurie

  Weber sees parallels between the original Story of Babar and the fiction of writers like Stendhal and Balzac. When Babar arrives in Paris as an adolescent, he is befriended by the very rich Old Lady. According to Weber, she is “a maternal figure, whose role is to provide the younger generation with worldly amenities.” But she is also something more. In a way, her presence in the Babar books likens them to every French tale in which a young man from the country has a liaison with an older, more worldly woman. Babar is a kept man, the Old Lady his contented provider.

  Nicholas Fox Weber also speculates on the differences between the Babar books of father and son. Although Laurent “has upheld the tradition of Babar through its characters and settings and maintained its essential personality,” he feels that his is “a new, lighter, brighter universe,” “highly charged, fluid, and animated,” in which “painterly qualities have become more important than narrative ones.” He remarks perceptively that in Jean de Brunhoff’s world the danger level is high. This is true: Babar’s mother is shot by a hunter, the previous king of the elephants dies by eating a poisonous mushroom, and soldiers are wounded in battle. In Babar the King (1933), the Old Lady is bitten by a snake and Cornelius is injured in a fire that destroys his house. That night Babar has his famous dream, in which Misfortune appears in the shape of “a frightful old woman surrounded by flabby ugly beasts”—Fear, Despair, Indolence, Sickness, Anger, Stupidity, Ignorance, Cowardice, Laziness, and Discouragement (a kind of long-nosed white pig). It takes twelve winged elephant angels to put them to flight. In Laurent’s books, by contrast “the worst sort of occurrence consists of a character getting temporarily lost or slightly injured… . Above all, life is a series of joys.”

  Though the Babar books have been read and loved by children everywhere for over seventy years, they have also recently met with severe criticism. For example, they have been called anti-feminist. This attack, however, focuses on the early stories, written at a time when it was generally believed that women were essentially wives and mothers, whose careers should be limited to nursing, teaching, and the arts. Celeste dances in a circus, but only under duress, and once she has children, she stays home and takes care of them. The Old Lady serves as a nurse and a teacher, and at one point is said to be writing her memoirs. Later on, however, the female characters, particularly Isabelle, are much more active.

  Herbert Kohl, the author of Shall We Burn Babar?, condemns the books, though reluctantly, as elitist. As a child he found them charming and wonderful; now, however, he thinks that they glorify capitalism and the ruling class:

  The Old Lady has money, lots of it. The source of her wealth is unclear… . It is clear that in the book the use of money and the earning of it are two totally different matters, and that it is perfectly normal and in fact delightful that some people have wealth they do not have to work for.

  Kohl deplores Babar’s “malleability and the good humor with which he jumps into becoming a well-dressed rich person-like elephant.” He also complains that when Babar is chosen king because “he has learned so much living among men … all we are shown of his learning is that he knows how to choose clothes, order a meal at a restaurant, and add 2 + 2.” Though his own early exposure to The Story of Babar apparently did not turn Kohl himself into an elitist, he believes that “[u]ncritical reading of the book is so potentially damaging that it should be withheld from children when possible.”

  The charge of colonialism is made most strongly by Ariel Dorfman. According to him, Babar is the primitive African who becomes a European and returns to “build a utopia with the willing aid of his native brothers.” But his effort “is none other than the fulfillment of the dominant countries’ colonial dream.” In this dream, “the new ruler must come from the outside, a native instructed in the ways of men.” The Babar books, Dorfman believes, teach the false moral that if backward countries imitate more advanced countries and import technological know-how, they will improve their lot. What is left out of the story is the “plundering, racism, undevelopment, and misery” that colonial policy often brings. This is of course true in a sense, but it is a charge that can be leveled at many utopian visions, and at almost all children’s picture books, which normally portray a better world than the one we live in.

  The accusation of racism in Babar rests largely on two books published before 1950. Today, the drawings of what the texts refer to as “cannibals” (The Travels of Babar) and “savages” (Babar’s Picnic, 1949) seem shocking. When these books first appeared, however, much of both adult and children’s culture was naïvely racist. White performers blacked their faces to resemble caricatures of African Americans, and a recurrent cartoon situation of the 1930s and ’40s featured a pair of missionaries in a cook pot; Doctor Doolittle and Little Black Sambo were popular and much-admired children’s books, and thousands of English and American children owned Golliwog or Mammy dolls.

  Jean de Brunhoff had drawn caricatured Africans in The Travels of Babar, and they must have seemed a reasonable subject for his son Laurent, who was only twenty-three at the time Babar’s Picnic was written. Soon, however, as people all over the world became aware of the hateful and harmful stereotyping of not only African but Asian and Native American people, Laurent was one of the first children’s book artists to make amends and include realistic drawings of black people in his public scenes. In Babar Comes to America (1965) there are African Americans on the street in Chicago, New York, and Detroit: they are shown building automobiles, fishing from a pier along with whites, and at a Hollywood party. While in New York, Babar goes to hear “Theodorus Priest” (Thelonious Monk) and his jazz quartet, which includes two white and two black players.

  For a long time Laurent de Brunhoff has regretted his early drawings of African “savages”; he decided years ago that Babar’s Picnic will never be reprinted. Yet Random House, the original publisher of Jean de Brunhoff, continues to issue The Travels of Babar, with its stereotyped black “cannibals,” and some adult readers still complain of its bias: the description of the book on the current Amazon site calls it “as far from politically correct as you can get.”

  Fortunately, I am especially lucky to have met Laurent de Brunhoff myself, in Key West, Florida, where he and his wife, the literary critic and biographer Phyllis Rose, have a house. He is as charming and original as his books, a dedicated gardener, and remarkably fit. Though he was over seventy when he and his wife first came to dinner at our house, he climbed our giant gumbo limbo tree with skill and speed even before drinks were served. Not surprisingly, he also turned out to be an expert yoga practitioner, and the author of a successful guidebook, Yoga for Elephants, in which Babar demonstrates the classic poses.

  Saying No to Narnia

  In 2005, an “epic fantasy film” titled The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was released by Walt Disney Pictures in association with something called Walden Media. This organization, which is based in Los Angeles and appears to have no actual connection with Thoreau’s pond or book, was founded by the Denver multibillionaire Philip Anschutz, an evangelical Christian and supporter of George W. Bush. The stated goal of Walden Media is to produce “family-friendly” movies—including films based on all seven of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Their choice of this project is deeply appropriate, for the Narnia books have always been popular with conservative Christians, not only for their partly concealed religious message, but for their rather disturbing social and political implications.

  The Disney/Walden version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, like the original book, is a fantasy in which four English children find their way into a world ruled by an evil White Witch where it is always winter and never Christmas. With the help of some talking animals, especially a huge lion called Aslan, the Witch is eventually defeated, and spring returns to Narnia. The story can also be read as a Christian allegory in which the killing and resurrection of Aslan stands for the death and rebirth of Christ at Easter, compl
ete with his expiation of the sins of mankind (in this case, a sulky ten-year-old called Edmund who has betrayed his brother and sisters to the White Witch out of sibling rivalry and a greedy passion for a candy called Turkish Delight).

  The film is remarkably faithful to the original. Tilda Swinton, with a crown of ice and gray-blonde dreadlocks, is elegantly scary as the White Witch, and the computer-generated animals, including the traditionally domestic Beavers, who speak a kind of rural British dialect, are not too cute. The transition from the dark furry wardrobe to the bright snowy wood, which some psychologists have compared to a birth experience, is striking, and the landscape of Narnia is beautiful.

  The scenes of Aslan’s sacrificial death and resurrection, however, underline the religious allegory perhaps more heavily than Lewis would have liked. Aslan’s progress towards the Stone Table is a juvenile version of Mel Brooks’s Passion of the Christ, complete with ugly scorning and beating and spitting bystanders. Later, as Susan and Lucy watch by Aslan’s body, their postures imitate those of the mourning women in religious paintings, and when Aslan reappears, the golden light behind him is High Baroque.

  Disney publicists have shrewdly mounted two advertising campaigns for the film, one secular and one sacred. They did not want to scare any paying non-Christians away, but they knew that the Christian overtones of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe could make the film tremendously popular with the religious establishment, especially in America. The Chronicles of Narnia were already approved reading for church study groups: in the National Review, John J. Miller spoke of them as “the continuation of Sunday School by different means.” According to some Christian websites, all seven volumes of the series can be profitably read as religious fables. The Magician’s Nephew describes the creation of the world and the origin of evil, and contains a sacrament of marriage. Prince Caspian illustrates the corruption and restoration of true religion, and The Horse and His Boy tells the story of the conversion of a heathen. There is a spiritual voyage and a baptism in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and the Descent into Hell is featured in The Silver Chair. The final book of the series, The Last Battle, retells the coming of the Antichrist and the Last Judgment.

  Even before the film opened, the Disney organization was targeting evangelical Protestantism, and a company called “Motive Entertainment” was sponsoring meetings for church officials and supporters in a hundred and forty American churches, encouraging the use of The Chronicles of Narnia as an inspirational text, with sample sermons available for download on the Web.

  Conservative politicians also got into the act, though not without repercussions. When the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, chose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for a statewide reading program, the Palm Beach Post called the move “a cabal of Christian commerce,” and claimed that the state was “opening up the public schools to back door catechism lessons.” An organization called Americans United for Separation of Church and State then proposed to sue the State of Florida over the issue.

  C. S. Lewis, however, always claimed that The Chronicles of Narnia was not allegorical. “You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books ‘represents’ something in the world,” he wrote to a group of schoolchildren. “Things do that in The Pilgrim’s Progress but I’m not writing that way.” It is true that there is no consistent one-to-one parallel between characters and events in Narnia and their religious equivalent, as there is in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. But Lewis also often spoke of the Chronicles as a means of awakening religious impulses in children who might be turned off by the conventional teachings of Sunday school, as he had been.

  Clive Staples Lewis, who was born in 1898 and grew up in Northern Ireland, was raised as a low-church Anglican, with an emphasis on religious observance as a duty. But by the age of fourteen he had lost his faith in God—partly, perhaps, because his beloved mother had died of cancer when he was nine in spite of his fervent prayers for her recovery. His doubt and sense of abandonment were increased when two weeks later he and his older brother Warren were sent to an awful English boarding school that Lewis later called “Belsen” in his autobiography. The headmaster of this school had already been prosecuted for cruelty to his students when Lewis arrived in 1908, and a few years later he would be certified insane.

  Both boys wrote again and again to their father, begging to come home, and Lewis prayed constantly for relief from the constant savage beatings. But he did not escape “Belsen” until it was closed in 1910. As a result, he not only became estranged from God, but turned against his father, a pious, temperamental lawyer of whom he later wrote, “His emotions had always been uncontrolled. Under the pressure of anxiety his temper became incalculable; he spoke wildly and acted unjustly.” Lewis’s next English school was only marginally better: he was awkward at games, and was constantly bullied and teased. “Holidays are Heaven, school is, well, death,” he wrote.

  According to his most recent biographer, Alan Jacobs, Lewis was rescued from adolescent depression and despair by the discovery of myth, romance, and fairy tale, and by intense Wordsworthian experience of the natural world—all of which he called ‘Joy.’ At fifteen he read Frazer’s The Golden Bough and began to see Christianity as only another Near Eastern myth of a dying and reviving god. In December 1914 he was confirmed in a state of guilty disbelief.

  For the next seventeen years, most of which Lewis spent at Oxford—first as a student and then as a tutor at Magdalen College, he regarded himself as an agnostic. It was not until September 1931, during a late-night discussion with two other Oxford scholars, Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien, that he returned to Christianity. Lewis had been drawn to Tolkien, who was a practicing Catholic, because they both loved the myths and legends of Old English and Scandinavian folklore. That night, as they talked in Lewis’s college rooms or strolled round Addison’s Walk, Tolkien and Dyson persuaded Lewis that the Christian myth was not only equally beautiful and powerful, but also true. Lewis’s conversion was completed nine days later on a trip to the zoo, where he “made friends with a bear whom he nicknamed Bultitude.” As he reported later, “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”

  Though Lewis had a great deal to say about his spiritual history, he was secretive about his private life, a circumstance that has made things difficult for his biographers. The central mystery is his thirty-two-year relationship with Mrs. Janie Moore, the mother of an army friend. Before they went overseas in 1917, Lewis and Patrick Moore agreed that if one of them was killed, the other would look after their single parent. (Lewis’s father was a widower; Mrs. Moore was estranged from her husband, though never divorced.) Patrick did die in France; his mother moved to Oxford, and for over thirty years Lewis kept his word—and perhaps more than his word. Though he slept in his college rooms during the week, he spent most of his time at Mrs. Moore’s house, and went on extended holidays with her and her daughter, Maureen. Lewis always refused to discuss the relationship with his friends, and concealed it as much as possible from everyone else.

  Today Janie Moore remains an ambiguous figure. Some of Lewis’s friends spoke of her as self-centered and completely unintellectual; others reported her as charming. Both A. N. Wilson and Alan Jacobs believe that the relationship was sexual, and Wilson suggests that it had something of a sadomasochistic element. Mrs. Moore spoke of Lewis as being “as good as an extra maid,” and many observers were amazed at the way he waited on her. He also largely supported her and her daughter financially for many years.

  When they met, Janie Moore was “a pretty blonde Irishwoman” of forty-five and Lewis was eighteen; by the time he became a practicing Christian, she was fifty-nine and he was thirty-two. (It is possible that Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, with its commandment against adultery, ended an erotic connection that might by then have been a burden.) As she grew older and her health failed, Mrs. Moore became difficult and demanding.
Lewis remained devoted; even after she had more or less lost her mind, he visited her in the nursing home every day. Lewis’s brother Warren, a retired soldier who had shared Mrs. Moore’s house (which he helped to buy) for twenty years, spoke of her death in 1951 as the end of a “mysterious self imposed slavery.”

  The other romantic relationship in Lewis’s life is far better documented—perhaps over-documented. Lewis’s friendship with and marriage to his American fan Joy Davidman, and her subsequent death from cancer, has been the subject of many articles and books, a play, a film, and several television dramas. Most of them portray the relationship as a tragic but uplifting romance. For Lewis, Joy Davidman’s appearance in his life must have seemed extraordinary. Though he was a famous writer, he was also a heavy fifty-four-year-old man with a booming voice, shabbily dressed and awkward around women. (“I am tall, fat, bald, red-faced, double-chinned … and wear glasses… .” he had recently written to a class of fifth-graders in America who asked for a description of himself.) Joy was thirty-seven. She was small, dark, attractive, lively, tough, and outspoken, a nonpracticing Jew and former Communist from New York.

  Joy regarded C. S. Lewis as one of the greatest men of his time, whose works had inspired her conversion to Christianity. She began writing him fan mail in 1950, and in 1952 came to England in order to meet him. (The coincidence of her first name with Lewis’s private term for peak experiences of literature and nature appeared miraculous to both of them; certainly it was the hidden message in the title he later chose for his autobiography, Surprised by Joy.)