Literary Wonderlands by Laura Miller

Author:Laura Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2016-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

Born to a middle-class Anglo-Irish family in Belfast, Clive Staples Lewis (known to his friends and family as Jack), described himself as “a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.” His mother died when he was nine and, although he remained close to his older brother Warren for the rest of his life, his relationship with his father was difficult. With Warren, he invented an imaginary realm the boys called Boxen, populated by animals who wore clothes and discussed politics, transport, and industry. Lewis himself dismissed it as “almost astonishingly prosaic.”

The works of Beatrix Potter and E. Nesbit made the most powerful impressions on him as a small boy, and the narration and sibling relationships of the Chronicles show how strongly Nesbit shaped his notion of what children’s fiction should be. The irony and relatively sophisticated social comedy that both Nesbit and Lewis employ (for example, in the diary of the awful Eustace Scrub in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952) derive from the nineteenth-century British novel—Austen and Trollope—the sort of books Lewis loved.

The critic William Empson called Lewis “the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read.” This was chiefly because he read for pleasure. Although he could be narrow-minded and intolerant, Lewis’s literary criticism (rather unjustly overshadowed by his popular theological writings) shows him to be a magnanimous and sympathetic reader, always willing to meet an author halfway and forever mounting defenses for Latin allegorists that no one else bothered even to know about, let alone read. (He drew the line, however, at modernism, an aesthetic movement that the conservative Lewis regarded with knee-jerk hostility.) When his oldest friend reproached him for writing letters entirely about books, Lewis replied, “I leave to others all the sordid and uninteresting worries about so-called practical life, and share with you those joys and experiences which make that life desirable… but seriously, what can you have been thinking about when you said “only” books, music, etc., just as if these weren’t the real things!”

The medieval literature Lewis loved and that underpinned his own work was essentially syncretic—a fusion of pagan, folkloric, and Christian elements. It’s a deliberately patchwork aesthetic that seeks to collect and harmonize rather than to unify and homogenize, on the principle that all the things of this world testify to the infinitely varied goodness of God. So, likewise, the talking animals, Northern European dwarves, classical fauns, and Arthurian knights of Narnia all happily coexist under the banner of the lion god, Aslan. The underlying thinking is platonic—or, rather, neoplatonic: All these seemingly incompatible elements are not lies that contradict the truth and each other, but rather the many shadows that human beings have invented to conjure the one great reality we can never encounter directly in this life.

The closest model for Narnia is the Faerie

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