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
N ot 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
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
N ot 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
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