Laura Miller (38 page)

Lewis read omnivorously and had ecumenical tastes, but fiction that conveyed this “something” had always been and always would be his favorite. A pulp novelist like H. Rider Haggard, he thought, exemplified the “mythopoetic” (mythmaking) art in isolation from all other literary gifts. A book didn’t always have to be
good
in any sense that matters to literary critics — in its prose, its construction of believable characters, its ideas, or its originality — to pack a mythopoetic wallop. Lewis knew that Haggard wasn’t a very good writer, but he also knew that he felt strangely swayed and captivated by books like
She
and
King Solomon’s Mines.
In Haggard, it was made apparent how the “daemon,” or mythopoetic genius, “triumphs over all obstacles and makes us tolerate all faults. It is quite unaffected by any foolish notions which the author himself, after the daemon has left him, may entertain about his own myths. He knows no more about them than any other man.”

To Lewis’s mind, no writer channeled this “daemon” better than his “master,” the Victorian novelist George MacDonald. Lewis had bought a copy of MacDonald’s
Phantastes
in a railway station bookstall when he was sixteen years old and far from home, boarding with his tutor in Surrey. Reading it, he was transported. The book somehow bridged a gulf within him, between his imagination, that “many-islanded sea of poetry and myth,” and the banal stuff of everyday life. He felt that MacDonald had shown him how Joy, an aura he once attached only to grand and distant things, to faraway mountains and Nordic heroes, might also be found in the nearby and the humble. “Up till now,” Lewis wrote in
Surprised by Joy,
“each visitation of Joy had left the common world momentarily a desert.” In
Phantastes,
he saw “the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged.” His imagination had been, “in a certain sense, baptized.”

Phantastes,
like
The Prelude,
would remain a touchstone book for Lewis, perhaps the single most powerful literary experience of his life — his Magician’s Book, you could say. Nevertheless, Lewis was a literary critic, and his critical judgment told him that MacDonald, like Haggard, was not a technically good writer. “If we define Literature as an art whose medium is words,” he wrote in the introduction to a 1946 collection of MacDonald’s writings, “then certainly MacDonald has no place in its first rank — perhaps not even in its second.”

It seems impossible to define literature as anything
but
an art whose medium is words. The term “literature,” from the French
littera,
for “letter,” seems to dictate that it can be nothing else.
Phantastes
itself was, of course, written in words, and not particularly felicitous ones. But there was something else in it, too, some other property that transcended words, a quality of story and image that Lewis would, years later, come to call by a name that Tolkien had invented, mythopoeia. As far as Lewis was concerned, MacDonald was “the greatest genius” at mythopoeia he had ever encountered.

Phantastes
is, like Charles Williams’s
The Place of the Lion,
a very strange book. A young man, Anodos — a name signifying “the way up” in Greek — describes the events following his twenty-first birthday, when he inherits an old desk with a secret compartment. A tiny, beautiful lady emerges from that compartment, and before vanishing, she zooms up to normal size, claims to be his great-grandmother, and promises him a trip to “Fairy Land.” He awakens the next morning to find a brook flowing through his bedroom and all the floral patterns on his carpet, furniture, and curtains turned to living plants and flowers. He then follows a footpath into a dense forest, where, during twenty-one days of wandering, he encounters flower fairies, evil and benevolent tree spirits, a fabulous book-filled castle whose inhabitants he can’t quite see, a statue of a woman that he brings to life, a penitent knight, a cottage whose several doors open onto entirely different regions of Fairy Land as well as into his own past, and more. In the course of this “faerie romance for men and women” (as MacDonald subtitled the book), the hero progresses from a selfish desire to be loved to a redeemed state of self-sacrificing altruism.

Like William Morris’s romances,
Phantastes,
first published in 1858, was innovative. Anodos, despite his allegorical name, is more or less a contemporary person, and no one else had yet hit upon the idea of setting a Victorian gentleman loose in the land customarily roamed by the Redcrosse Knight or Snow-White. (
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
hadn’t appeared yet; MacDonald, who later became a friend of Lewis Carroll’s and whose children read and loved an early draft of Alice’s story, played a significant role in getting
Alice
published.) In letters he wrote to Arthur Greeves upon first reading
Phantastes,
Lewis enthused about the book’s phantasmagorical and uncanny elements — the magnificent fairy palace and an eerie tale that Anodos recounts of a young man who falls in love with a lady imprisoned in a mirror. It was only later that Lewis decided that the story was not merely a parade of marvels, that the “quality which had enchanted me in [MacDonald’s] imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live.”

This statement bewilders me. I know that how Lewis felt about
Phantastes
resembles how I feel about the Chronicles. True, I admire Lewis’s prose as he could never admire MacDonald’s, but that’s not the fundamental source of his books’ appeal. It was exactly the mythopoeic quality in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
that caused me to hand it back to Mrs. Belden, effectively speechless. By all rights, the book that had had the same effect on Lewis ought to move me deeply, but it doesn’t. I have friends who feel differently, about MacDonald’s children’s fiction (
The Princess and the Goblin
and
At the Back of the North Wind,
for example), and I’ve come to appreciate the sweetness (it is never cloying) that pervades his books. Nevertheless,
Phantastes
seemed little more to me than an interesting, even trippy curiosity; the tremors that shot through Lewis when he first read it did not electrify me.

This was the difficulty with mythopoeia as Lewis defined it, that is, by the profundity of a reader’s response: not everyone recognizes it in the same books. Lewis knew this all too well. He could hardly fail to notice how many of his peers turned up their noses at his favorites. “It is plain,” he wrote, “that . . . the same story may be a myth to one man and not another.” If so, then how can we be sure that it’s really a myth? He had a passing interest in anthropological and psychological theories about where the recurring motifs in the world’s religions and legends might have come from, and was intrigued enough by Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes to look into it. Ultimately, though, Lewis concluded that what Jung had to say was not so much a theory of myth as yet
another
myth. Jung’s description of the collective unconscious was magnificent, written in the quasi-mystical language of “good poetry,” but it wasn’t supported with sufficiently solid material evidence to merit the status of science. “Surely the analysis of water should not itself be wet?” Lewis quipped.

And, after all, Lewis didn’t need a theory of the collective unconscious — or of narrative “grammar” embedded in the neurological workings of the human brain. If he wanted to explain why we feel we recognize certain stories even when we’re encountering them for the first time, or why the same types of story seem to arise again and again in every culture, he had a perfectly adequate reason: they were facets of a truth that transcended the individual self. Myths were God’s way of calling us home.

But how can the skeptic understand such things? How to explain why certain stories exert a power that feels virtually biological over me, while leaving other readers cold? Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects. During the time I was working on this book, the information that I was writing about Narnia elicited very different responses in conversation. Some people would give me a look of politely blank puzzlement; if they’d read the Chronicles at all, they hadn’t especially liked them. Others would exclaim, “Oh, I loved those books!” and for a moment their gaze would drift off to some distant prospect, remembering. One woman, the proprietor of a bed and breakfast I stayed at in Ireland, came up to me holding seven frayed paperbacks, the old Puffin editions of the Chronicles published in Britain, pressed between her two flattened hands like sacred objects; she’d kept them safe for nearly forty years. I wasn’t sure she’d even let me touch them, and then hardly knew what to say about them when she did. These weren’t the editions I’d read, of course, but I’d seen similar ones before, so they weren’t a novelty to me. They were just paperback books, really. But I knew what they meant to her.

In his memoir of his own childhood reading,
The Child That Books Built,
Francis Spufford describes the effect that the Chronicles had on him when he first read them:

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.

Which is spookier: that Spufford has so perfectly articulated my own childhood feelings about Narnia, or that Lewis was able to achieve this “unearthly intimacy” with me, Spufford, my Irish hostess, and millions of other young readers? We have very little commentary directly from Lewis himself about what he thought he was doing when he first sat down to write
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Later in life, he could offer no more illumination than that he was in the grip of an old image (a faun walking through a snowy wood) cherished for decades, and that a “fairy tale” seemed the best form for what he wanted to say. But what exactly he meant by that image, or by any of the rest of it until, rather late in the process, he hit upon the idea of rewriting the Passion of Christ, he could never entirely explain. He wrote the Chronicles in a pell-mell rush, at a time in his life when he was distracted, emotionally taxed, and physically exhausted, in an effort that seems almost haphazard. But just as we sometimes dance best when we are not consciously thinking about the steps, it was in writing the Chronicles of Narnia that Lewis finally managed to do what he had admired for so long in others: create myths.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Further Up and Further In

O
f all Lewis’s inventions in the Chronicles, the one that comes closest to his conception of myth is the Wood Between the Worlds in
The Magician’s Nephew
. Digory’s scheming, vainglorious uncle Andrew tricks Polly into picking up a magic yellow ring that transports her out of our universe, and Digory has no choice but to follow her, carrying the green rings that can bring them both back. The rings are made from the contents of an otherworldly box of dust Uncle Andrew inherited from his godmother (“one of the last mortals in this country who had fairy blood in her”), but he has always been too much of a coward to try them out himself. Uncle Andrew has no appetite for adventure, although he was willing to undergo “disagreeable” experiences with “devilishly queer people” in order to obtain his expertise in magic. He regards sorcery not as romance but as a kind of technology. Like all bad magicians, he is “dreadfully practical” (never a term of praise coming from Lewis).

The yellow ring takes Digory to the Wood Between the Worlds. In this quiet forest, there are small pools beneath the trees every few yards as far as the eye can see. It is warm and bright, although leaves obscure the sky. Digory steps out of one of the pools and finds Polly safe, lying on the grass “just between sleeping and waking.” Eventually, they discover that each pool is a passage to a different world. If you jump into any one of them while wearing a green ring, you will find yourself in another universe; touching the yellow rings takes you back to the Wood.

Before they figure this out, however, the children almost get lost forever. The Wood isn’t a dangerous place, exactly. (Digory and Polly come across one of Uncle Andrew’s previous experimental subjects, a guinea pig, and decide to leave it there, since the magician will only do “something horrid” to it if they bring it back.) But, once in the Wood, people find it easy to forget who they are and where they came from. The narrator speculates that Digory, if asked, would have replied that he had always been there. At first, he and Polly just barely recognize each other and can’t recall why. They are like people trying to remember a dream that is slipping away, but in this case, the dream is real life. The guinea pig is the trigger that brings it all back, but even after they recover themselves, Polly argues against lingering in the Wood, “or we shall just lie down and drowse forever and ever.”

The Wood Between the Worlds owes a little to the “wood where things have no names” in Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking-Glass.
Wandering through that forest, Alice meets a fawn, and for a while they walk together, Alice with her arm around the fawn’s soft neck, until they reach an open field. Out of the wood, the fawn suddenly recalls that it is indeed a fawn, and runs away, leaving Alice on the verge of tears at losing “her dear little fellow-traveler,” but somewhat comforted at having regained her own name. This interlude, a sojourn through that preverbal land where child and beast are reunited, feels like an afterthought and takes less than a page. Perhaps for a writer as fond of wordplay as Carroll, the idea of a wood without words was uninteresting, merely empty.