“This is War. This is what Homer wrote about,” was what Lewis himself thought one afternoon in November 1917 at the beginning of his only encounter with real, life-and-death adventure in France. A bullet had just whined past him, and even then, his mind turned toward books. Afterward, he would write even less about the war than he did about his mother’s death. In Surprised by Joy, he explains that the period is “too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else. It is even in a way unimportant.” This remark comes just after a sentence that describes, with excruciating vividness, the horrors of the trenches: “the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E. [human excrement], the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet.”
Passing references made in the years that followed suggest that the war stuck with Lewis more than he let on. He was lucky enough to sustain a minor wound fairly early in his stint (the shrapnel remained in his shoulder for the rest of his days), and that probably saved his life. The following year, he makes reference, in a letter to his father, of suffering from “nightmares — or rather the same nightmare over and over again. Nearly every one has it.” In 1925, again writing to his father, he recounts a walk with Warnie, during which they overheard a battery practicing nearby, the first gunfire he’d heard since returning from France. His own response startled him: “It seemed much louder and more sinister and generally unpleasant than I had expected.” Later still, he would gratefully note “the stamp of the war” on Hugo Dyson, a new friend, and in one of his few surviving letters to Tolkien, he praises The Lord of the Rings for capturing “so much of our joint life, so much of the war,” which otherwise seemed to be slipping out of immediate memory.
The lives Lewis and Tolkien led might appear sheltered at first glance, but in this respect they endured more than almost anyone in my own circle ever will; middle-class American intellectuals in recent years have seldom gone to war. Tolkien, in a preface to The Lord of the Rings, wrote that by 1918, when he turned twenty-six, all but one of his closest friends had been killed. The formative trials of his youth, and Lewis’s, the almost incommunicable agonies of the trenches, have become increasingly alien to their readers, who are gradually losing even the ability to understand that they don’t understand them. All the same, although I was only a little girl who knew nothing of real violence, I recognized the ring of truth in Peter’s battle with the wolf in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:
All this happened too quickly for Peter to think at all — he had just time to duck down and plunge his sword, as hard as he could, between the brute’s forelegs into its heart. Then came a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare. He was tugging and pulling and the Wolf seemed to be neither alive nor dead, and its bared teeth knocked against his forehead, and everything was blood and heat and hair. A moment later he found that the monster lay dead and he had drawn his sword out of it and was straightening his back and rubbing the sweat off his face and out of his eyes. He felt tired all over.
Aslan knights Peter after this messy victory (admonishing him, “Never forget to wipe your sword” — more practical advice!) and gives him the nickname Wolf’s-Bane. Peter has not only rescued Susan from the wolf; he has entered a heroic narrative and acquired a title. Lewis dreaded war (especially as his brother became a career officer in the Royal Army Service Corps and was recalled to active duty during World War II), but the literature he studied showed it to be a continuing fact of human existence. He firmly believed that sometimes war was necessary. Religion explains why — sometimes we must be willing to sacrifice ourselves for a greater good — but stories show us how. Stories are what make heroes. You can only become a hero by participating in a story, and stories bestow meaning on what might otherwise look like raw suffering and waste.
This, of course, is not always a virtue. You can get people to do a lot of difficult, unpleasant, and dangerous things by convincing them that someday a golden story will be spun out of the straw of their mortal lives. Many of these things are not worth doing, and not all Christians agree with Lewis’s views on war. But war is not the only enterprise that requires courage, energy, and will. Another is the perilous adventure of growing up.
Chapter Five
Something Wicked This Way Comes
At age seven, I believed that I knew sermonizing when I saw it, and I loathed no book more on this count than Elsie Dinsmore. Martha Finley’s 1867 novel had been pressed on me by my grandmother, who, incredibly, claimed to have enjoyed it in her youth. The title character is a weepy Goody Two-shoes, mistreated by her stepmother yet responding with an unflagging, inhuman sweetness and docility that the reader is obviously meant to admire and emulate. Later in the narrative, Elsie even manages to get into a ludicrous doctrinal dispute with her adored father, who orders her to read a secular book aloud to him on his sickbed; it is Sunday and Elsie believes that Sabbath reading should be reserved for the Bible or some other appropriately pious literature.
Despite hating it so thoroughly, I read Elsie Dinsmore all the way through. Part of my reason for persisting with the book was to marvel at the sort of hogwash adults expected me to swallow, and to congratulate myself on knowing better. This was my first taste of the righteous indignation of the abused reader, that strangely pleasurable outrage we experience when we recognize that an author has broken an important trust. As every critic knows, readers relish a negative review, and not simply out of spite. Seeing an author punished by critics for trampling on the compact between reader and writer attests to the fact that the compact was there in the first place. You can’t recognize blasphemy until you hold something sacred. Elsie Dinsmore could only be so very bad because The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was so very good.
It was precisely the propaganda aspect of Elsie Dinsmore that offended me, the subservience of the story and characters, of the entire book, to the task of instructing me morally. I recognized that the Chronicles also sometimes spoke to me about virtue — in fact, I regarded those parts of the books as among their most thrilling and important moments. The difference was, as I saw it, fundamental. The morality of Elsie Dinsmore was the morality of childhood, where the choice was between obedience and naughtiness. The morality of Narnia was grown-up, a matter of good and evil.
Adult readers, who detect the Christian symbolism of the Chronicles so readily, often can’t see the distinction. In her book Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter, Alison Lurie complains, “In Narnia, final happiness is the result not of individual initiative and enterprise, but of submission to the wisdom and will of superior beings.” Edmund’s treachery in betraying the Narnians and his own siblings to the White Witch might seem heinous, but “misbehavior can be forgiven if it is sincerely repented, and Edmund eventually becomes one of the Kings of Narnia.” This is really an objection to Christian faith itself, to its emphasis on obedience to the will of God and its promise of redemption to those who repent of their defiance. But it never occurred to me to look for Christianity in Narnia, and so, in the temptation of Edmund Pevensie, I saw another kind of drama entirely.