Laura Miller (24 page)

Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops.

Soon there were more wonderful things happening. Coming suddenly round a corner into a glade of silver birch trees Edmund saw the ground covered in all directions with little yellow flowers — celandines. The noise of water grew louder. Presently they actually crossed a stream. Beyond it they found snowdrops growing. . . .

Only five minutes later he noticed a dozen crocuses growing round the foot of an old tree — gold and purple and white. . . . Close behind the path they were following a bird suddenly chirped from the branch of the tree. It was answered by the chuckle of another bird a little further off. And then, as if that had been a signal, there was chattering and chirruping in every direction, and then a moment of full song, and within five minutes the whole wood was ringing with birds’ music, and wherever Edmund’s eyes turned he saw birds alighting on branches, or sailing overhead or chasing one another or having their little quarrels or tidying up their feathers with their beaks. . . .

There was no trace of the fog now. The sky became bluer and bluer, and now there were white clouds hurrying across it from time to time. In the wide glades there were primroses. A light breeze sprang up which scattered drops of moisture from the swaying branches and carried cool, delicious scents against the faces of the travelers. The trees began to come fully alive. The larches and birches were covered with green, the laburnums with gold. Soon the beech trees had put forth their delicate transparent leaves. As the travelers walked under them the light also became green. A bee buzzed across their path. “This is no thaw,” said the dwarf, suddenly stopping. “This is
Spring.
”

Anyone who has done much reading aloud to children knows that long passages of environmental description can be risky. Even adults reading novels meant for adults tend to skim over scene-setting paragraphs devoted to geology or weather patterns. (At least, I do. I’m not sure how closely I would have read the first three paragraphs of this chapter, for example.) The passage I’ve quoted is, in the book itself, interspersed with action and dialogue: the abandonment of the witch’s sledge, the binding of Edmund’s hands behind his back, cracks of the dwarf’s whip, the witch commanding the two of them to walk faster. Suspense over what will happen to the prodigal Pevensie does keep the story from bogging down in leaves and flowers, but Lewis’s landscape descriptions are never merely ornamental; they are a story in themselves. Edmund’s predicament seems to be getting more and more dire, but the counternarrative, reverberating in the forest around him, tells a different tale. The witch’s power is ebbing with the melting of the snow.

For Lewis, a prodigious and enthusiastic walker, landscape
was
feeling. One of his clearest memories from childhood was of looking out the nursery window at “the Green Hills,” Castelreagh Hills, a series of low, pasture-covered slopes to the southwest of Belfast. “They were not very far off,” he wrote in
Surprised by Joy,
“but they were, to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing —
Sehnsucht;
made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.” The blue flower is a key symbol in German Romanticism; it first appeared in a dream scene in an unfinished novel by the poet Novalis and it stands for unappeasable, mystic desire. Lewis christened this complicated emotion “Joy,” and his autobiography is less about the prosaic details of his material life than about his search for Joy and its meaning.

Joy, as Lewis defined it, was “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” He first felt it in full while standing by a flowering currant bush as a little boy. He was reminded of the beauty of his brother’s toy garden and flooded with a sensation he compared to the “enormous bliss” known to Adam and Eve in Milton’s Earthly Paradise. It was a great longing, but not for the toy garden, nor for his own past, “though that came into it.” Before he could ask himself what he wanted, “the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.”

The first time I read this passage, I thought, naturally, of my own childhood longing for Narnia;
Sehnsucht,
apparently, is a communicable disease. Either that, or — and perhaps this is more likely — Lewis managed to bottle a goodly portion of Joy-inducing material into the Chronicles, and whenever someone of the same yearning temperament uncorks them, a swoon is sure to result.

Narnia, like the unreachable Castlereagh Hills, is elusive even in the Chronicles themselves. One book,
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
never sets foot there. Two more,
The Horse and His Boy
and
The Silver Chair,
merely pass through.
The Magician’s Nephew
shows us Narnia’s creation, but doesn’t linger afterward. Of the three remaining Chronicles,
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
takes place in a Narnia that is cursed and frozen for most of the book; in
Prince Caspian
it is occupied by the disbelieving Telmarines, who have driven all the magical creatures into hiding; and, finally,
The Last Battle
gives us a corrupted Narnia slouching toward Armageddon.

The important thing to understand about Joy, Lewis insisted, is that “it is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’” In some ways, it resembles the lethal nostalgia A. E. Housman described in
A Shropshire Lad:

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

Perhaps Lewis had these verses in mind when, in a 1929 letter to Arthur Greeves, he described
A Shropshire Lad
as a “terrible little book . . . perfect and deadly, the beauty of the Gorgon.” But even then, Lewis would have made a distinction: Housman writes of “content” that’s been lost; Lewis’s Joy was the desire for something he had
never
had, and probably never could have had; it was also the desire for desire itself.

I can’t read the words “yon far country” without experiencing a Narnian twinge. Even now, when trying to picture the place, the image that usually comes to mind is a distant prospect, green hills amid small groves of trees, with tiny, tantalizing figures moving here and there, impossible to make out in any detail, and the sea glinting at the horizon. If there’s one thing you can be sure of about Narnia, it’s that wherever you are, it isn’t
here.
So perhaps it was quixotic to try to find the real places that inspired it. Nevertheless, Lewis’s landscape descriptions are anything but gauzy and fantastical; you can feel them with all of your senses. This is one aspect of the Chronicles that calls to me now just as powerfully as it did in my childhood, perhaps even a bit more so. Narnia was a breeze on my face, the “sweet, rustling, chattering noise” of a stream (in
The Silver Chair
), the smell of the sea. It had to have been at least partly based on the real world, on places that Lewis knew intimately. If I couldn’t get to Narnia, why not look for those?

Chapter Seventeen

The Far Country

I
n the first chapter of
The Horse and His Boy,
set in Calormen, the foundling Shasta meets the warhorse Bree, who unbeknownst to the Calormen noble who owns him, is actually a talking Narnian beast. Bree persuades Shasta to escape with him by rhapsodizing about “Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests ringing with the hammers of Dwarfs.”

Adam Gopnik, in an essay about Lewis for
The New Yorker,
calls the landscape Bree celebrates “clearly a British composite.” Those might be taken as fighting words in some quarters, if it were more generally known that Lewis regarded Ireland as the inspiration for Narnia. He is so closely associated, though, with Oxford, where he lived for nearly fifty years, that most people assume that Narnia is essentially English. Perhaps Lewis would have quarreled with this notion (he would surely have identified “deep forests ringing with the hammers of Dwarfs” as a Germanic image), but even he admitted that, as much as he’d detested “this hot, ugly country” the first time he saw it as a schoolboy, by the early 1930s England had begun to feel like home. “I suppose I have been growing into the soil here,” he wrote to Arthur Greeves. Lewis called himself Irish when it suited him, but otherwise passed for English, and in some ways Narnia is the same; Irish on the inside, because Ireland was the longed-for countryside of his childhood (his “land of lost content”), but English, too, because for Lewis England was immediate — touchable, smellable, audible, visible.

Narnia lay all around Lewis. There is a germ of the thaw in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
in a passage from a letter he wrote to Arthur Greeves in 1945: “It is bitter cold this morning but lovely to see the green earth after all the snow and to hear the birds singing. I have just seen the first celandines.” He spotted them along Addison’s Walk, a footpath surrounding an island meadow on the grounds of Magdalen, named for the early eighteenth-century writer, editor, and politician who favored it when he was a fellow at the college. It was on Addison’s Walk, late one autumn night in 1931, that Lewis engaged in the hours-long conversation with Tolkien and another don, Hugo Dyson, which led to his conversion to Christianity. The Walk’s connection to Lewis’s religious life makes it a pilgrimage site for his Christian devotees, but its celandines and crocuses were what captivated me the first time I strolled there on a raw day in early spring.

Lewis’s own backyard was Narnia, too. He and Warnie decided to pitch in with Mrs. Moore to buy the Kilns even before they set foot in the house itself; for the brothers, the cottage’s main attraction was the nine acres of sylvan land that came with it, climbing up the northern side of Shotover Hill. A path from the back of that land leads to the southern slope of Shotover, where a former royal forest has been converted into a country park, including, to the east, the four-hundred-year-old oaks of Brasenose Wood.

Not long after moving in, Lewis recorded sightings of gregarious “bright-eyed robins,” squirrels, owls, and even a badger’s burrow (which thrilled him to the bone) on the grounds behind the Kilns; all these creatures would eventually find their way into the Chronicles as talking beasts. Lewis made a habit of walking in his “little wood” in all seasons, and observed it with a care that never seemed to diminish with familiarity. “We had about a week of snow with frost on top of it,” he wrote to Arthur, “and then the rime coming out of the air and making thick
woolly
formations on every branch. The little wood was indescribably beautiful. I used to go and crunch about on the crusted snow in it every evening — for the snow kept it light long after sunset. It was a labyrinth of white — the smallest twigs looking thick as seaweed and building up a kind of cathedral vault overhead.”

After books, the natural world is the most frequent subject of the letters Lewis wrote before he became a celebrated apologist. (Once famous, he often exhausted his epistolary energy in theological correspondence with his readers.) He prided himself on his appreciation of all kinds of weather, even those that other people found harsh or dull; he was a connoisseur of skies, classifying for Warnie’s benefit the three types of English overcast: “spring gray — long level clouds of white, silver, pearl, and dove-color . . . winter gray — ragged and pleated clouds of iron color [and] the hot summer gray or celestial damp blotting paper.” The 1930s and early ’40s were the golden age of Lewis’s informal nature writing, after the conversion that loosened him up imaginatively and before the Second World War and Mrs. Moore’s deterioration made any absences from home difficult. His letters from those years are full of long, vibrant descriptions of the epic walking tours he took in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and western England with his brother or friends. But he could also extract remarkable impressions from the humblest things lying close to home:

I suddenly paused, as we do for no reason known to consciousness, and gazed down into a little ditch beneath a grey hedge, where there was a pleasant mixture of ivies and low plants and mosses, and thought of herbalists and their art, and what a private, retired wisdom it would be to go groping along such hedges and the eaves of woods for some herb of virtuous powers, insignificant to the ordinary observer, but well known to the trained eye — and having at the same time a stronger sense of the mysteries of living stuff than usual, specially the mysteries twining at our feet, where homeliness and magic embrace one another.

All that from staring at a ditch! Herbalism notwithstanding, Lewis’s interests were never especially botanical (unlike, say, Tolkien, who used to exasperate the Lewis brothers by interrupting the “ruthless” pace of their country walks to stop and examine plants and trees). For Lewis, the ivies and mosses evoked a way of life — earthy and modest, yet not without enchantment; in other words, medieval — that he found appealing. Nature was a wellspring of moods and reflections, an extension and magnification of his own sensibility and sense of history, not a realm apart from the human or an object of science. He loved to exercise his literary skill in describing those clouded English skies and the subtle shadings of ambience they suggested, but he never cared much about the meteorological factors that distinguished the cumulus clouds from the stratus.