Laura Miller (6 page)

Like many great readers, Lewis regarded his time alone as his real life. By the age of nine — the same age at which I was thinking that my hunger for Narnia might kill me — he, too, was “living almost entirely in my imagination; or at least . . . the imaginative experience of those years now seems to me more important than anything else.” Like Lewis’s, my material life often seemed to be nothing more than the drab and shadowy interludes between the hours when I could read and retreat to an interior realm furnished with the fabulous treasure I had scavenged from hundreds of books. I sometimes wonder if this kind of inward-turning, inward-dwelling, probably unhealthy temperament is acquired or inherited. Did tumbling into Lewis’s own imagined world at such an impressionable age imprint me with some of his traits? Or did I perhaps get my dreaming ways from my father, who liked nothing better than to escape the rumpus of family life and work alone in his garden?

Gardens speak to people of this solitary temperament. Even those of us who don’t tend the real ones find the idea of gardens, especially walled ones, evocative. In
Surprised by Joy,
Lewis recalls his first experience of true “beauty,” which appeared in the unlikely form of the lid of a cookie tin that his brother had filled with bits of moss and twigs to create a miniature garden. “What the real garden had failed to do,” Lewis writes, “the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature — not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant.” Gardens are man-made concentrations of the natural world, places where nature is trained to seem more itself than it is when left to its own devices. In a way, the artificiality of gardens is like the artificiality of stories, which take the components of life and arrange them into forms that intensify and order them, saturating them with meaning.

In
The Magician’s Nephew,
the Chronicles’ Creation story, Aslan sends the boy Digory on a quest to a walled garden in the mountains far to the west of the newly made land of Narnia. Digory has been given the task of bringing back a single apple from a tree that grows there, and although Aslan hasn’t told him not to taste the apples himself, an inscription on the gate admonishes all visitors to “Take of my fruit for others” only. There are, of course, the obviously biblical connotations to this walled garden at the beginning of the world, with its semiforbidden fruit. But Digory is no Adam; he has committed his transgression
before
he arrives at the garden’s gate. He has already unwittingly introduced an evil into Narnia — the sorceress Jadis, who will one day become the White Witch in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Aslan sets him the task of fetching the apple as a form of expiation.

Digory’s friend Polly has come along for most of the journey, and the two children travel on the back of Fledge, a talking winged horse. Polly and Fledge are stalwart companions, but at the entrance to the garden they instinctively hang back. “You never saw a place which was so obviously private,” the narrator explains. “You could see at a glance that it belonged to someone else.” It’s all right for Digory to go inside, but not the others. Like all of the most magical places in the Narnia books, the garden is very quiet; even the fountain at its center makes “only the faintest sound.” Jadis, however, has snuck in before Digory, and he spots her there, gorging herself on plundered apples. (I never forgot the “horrid stain” their juice leaves around her mouth, and sometimes I wonder if that’s why my most vivid recollection of Madame Bovary is of her mouth stained by the poison she swallows at the end of the novel.)

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.

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.