Late in life, speaking on the subject of writing for children, Lewis remarked that asking yourself “What do modern children need?” can never produce a good story. “If we ask that question,” he went on, “we are assuming too superior an attitude. It would be better to ask ‘What moral do I need?’ for I think we can be sure that what does not concern us deeply will not deeply interest our readers, whatever their age. But it is better not to ask the question at all.” As the elements of the story emerge from the imagination, “the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life.”
The moral dilemmas that Edmund and the rest of Lewis’s child characters faced were his own. In his early thirties, he wrote to Arthur Greeves, admitting that his great weakness was pride and the rage that possessed him when his ego had been wounded. “The pleasure of anger,” he explained, “the gnawing attraction which makes one return again and again to its theme — lives, I believe, in the fact that one feels entirely righteous oneself only when one is angry.” It’s tempting, once you’re in control of a fictional universe of your very own, to “put absolutely all the right, with no snags or reservations, on the side of the hero (with whom you identify yourself) and all the wrong on the side of the villain. You thus revel in unearned self-righteousness, which would be vicious even if it were earned.” Instead, Lewis wrote a character like Edmund, who when caught playing a nasty trick, indignantly thinks to himself, “I’ll pay you all out for this, you pack of stuck-up, self-satisfied prigs.”
I didn’t for a moment feel lectured to or patronized by the Chronicles as a child. An adult reader, observing a dose of theology being dispensed, might well experience the irritation that most nonbelievers feel toward someone trying to convert them; it’s almost impossible to proselytize without condescension. However, what I saw in Edmund was not a representation of original sin but a boy whose one great, terrible mistake had been made up of many littler, unchecked moments of spite and ire that I could easily have indulged in myself. Because I wasn’t yet entirely willing to think of Edmund, and everything else in the Chronicles, as merely the invention of one man, I wouldn’t have asked myself if he was psychologically convincing; as far as I was concerned, he was real. I would not have believed in him so completely, however, if his creator hadn’t as well. His flaws were Lewis’s flaws; as a moral illustration, he’s a confession, not a lecture. We both hoped to be better than Edmund, and sometimes, no doubt, feared we were worse. In that, we were equals.
Chapter Six
Little House in the Big Woods
A decade before he started writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in earnest, Lewis jotted down the following paragraph on the back of another manuscript:
This book is about four children whose names were Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter. But it is mostly about Peter who was the youngest. They all had to go away from London suddenly because of the Air Raids, and because Father, who was in the army, had gone off to the war and Mother was doing some kind of war work. They were being sent to stay with a relation of Mother’s who was a very old Professor who lived by himself in the country.
By the time this passage blossomed into a real book, Mother and Father had been erased from the opener (the vagueness of “some kind of war work” suggests just how uninteresting Lewis found them both) and the main character among the children, the youngest, had become a girl. This looks like an odd choice for Lewis, an Oxford bachelor who could at least claim that he remembered what it was like to be a little boy, but who knew next to nothing about little girls. (A small group of refugee London children did come to stay at his Oxford cottage in 1939, but he doesn’t seem to have had much to do with them.) Lewis would later give the name Peter to the eldest child among the Pevensie siblings, suggesting that he still felt a connection to that early false start, but the Peter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a far more conventional figure than Lucy. And he is not the child the story is “mostly about.” Lucy is.
I identified with Lucy, of course, although, when called to, I could also identify with Edmund and Peter. One of the privileges of the girl reader is this flexibility in performing one of the elementary imaginative leaps of reading fiction. Boys, it is said, have difficulty with — or at least are resistant to — stories in which the protagonist is a girl. For the men I know who read the Chronicles when young, Peter and Edmund seem to loom larger in memory than they do for me, just as Aslan seems to be the brightest point for Christians. Nevertheless, it is Lucy who first gets into Narnia, and it is mostly through her eyes that we see the events of the first three books.
Lewis was a younger sibling himself, but only of two, and in spite of the three-year age difference between Warnie and himself, he was the leader of the pair; A. N. Wilson detects a “real forceful bossiness” in the letters Jack wrote to his brother, detailing plans for what the two of them would do during Warnie’s holidays from boarding school. That’s quite an accomplishment, pulling off a coup against the seniority system that usually prevails in sibling relationships. Perhaps some memory of this feat went into the character of Lucy, who, in the first two Chronicles, is often charged by Aslan with the task of persuading her skeptical brothers and sister to follow her lead. Lucy has a harder time of it than Lewis did, however, and in Prince Caspian she has to resort to threatening to strike off into the woods by herself if they won’t come with her. “I was closest to Lucy, because she was the youngest,” Jonathan Franzen told me. “I was the youngest kid. And nobody listened to her.”
Yet Lewis’s own biography can never entirely explain why he wound up switching to a girl protagonist after his initial stab at the story. The Chronicles may reflect some fragments of their author’s past, but they are substantially fashioned from bits and pieces of other books. The narrator’s voice, for example, owes much to the fiction of E. Nesbit, which Lewis loved as a boy. It is in books, as much as in Lewis’s own experiences, that the answer to the puzzle of Lucy lies. She is a believable little girl, as all the girl readers who have loved her can attest, but I suspect she began as a strategic solution to a literary problem. And that problem had its roots not in Lewis’s sympathy for little girls per se, but in the shortcomings and limitations of his ideas about boys.
Lewis preferred to conduct his intellectual and social life in a world of men, an old-fashioned but not uncommon attitude in a man of his background. Asked to write a short autobiographical paragraph for the American editions of his popular Christian works in 1944, one of the tidbits Lewis chose to offer was this: “There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter.” “Masculine” was a word he often used approvingly in his literary criticism; in The Allegory of Love, he praised a group of poets for their “clear and masculine thought.” Although he had female students and by all accounts treated them kindly, he didn’t take them as seriously as the male ones, or at least didn’t place them among the first ranks. When, in the late 1920s, he decided to take an English degree at Oxford (in addition to his degree in Greats — which corresponds with what we would call Classics), he wrote sniffily in his diary, “The atmosphere of the English school is very different from that of Greats. Women, Indians, and Americans predominate and — I can’t say how — one feels a certain amateurishness in the talk and look of the people.”