Can a book win over a soul who is fundamentally disinclined to believe? If any books could have persuaded me, it would have been these, yet I didn’t budge. Lewis makes a great deal, in Surprised by Joy, of having been “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” when, in his rooms at Magdalen in 1929, he realized that he really did believe in God, after all. He was, he insists, dragged through that portal “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting [my] eyes in every direction for a chance of escape.”
This strikes me as a case of protesting too much, for as A. N. Wilson has pointed out, myriad factors in Lewis’s life and environment had long been pushing him back to the Church. Lewis himself half admits as much when he writes, also in Surprised by Joy, that “everything and everyone had joined the other side.” His closest friends were all Christians; the writers he admired were Christians; the medievalism he found so appealing was saturated with the stuff.
Why the Chronicles didn’t “work” as intended on me is a tricky question. I was, of course, young and on the verge of the most rebellious and discontented stage of life, rather than just settling into a life well suited to me, as Lewis was when he converted. But there is, I believe, more to it than that. I lacked — and still lack — the disposition to believe. Like Lewis, I hankered after the ineffable and the sublime, but the story of Jesus had never spoken to that part of my imagination. Christianity was too monolithic, comprehensive, and established. Temperamentally, I preferred uncertainty, slippery boundaries, little neglected corners of the world where magic lurked unnoticed, and strangeness.
To me, the universe didn’t require much explaining. Although I wouldn’t read Keats until much later, I was already inclined toward what he called “Negative Capability … capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Unlike Lewis, I hadn’t lost my mother as a child, and I wasn’t left hungering for an enfolding, benevolent protector and redeemer. I didn’t know death and loss well enough to need the reassurance of an afterlife. For these and no doubt other reasons I was and am very different from Lewis; I’ve never found a good reason to believe, while he was a man who ran out of reasons not to.
If the Chronicles were not going to save Christianity for me, Lewis’s duplicity (as I saw it) was certainly capable of contaminating Narnia. He had hoped that his child readers, as they got older, would eventually come to see Narnia as filled with Christian meaning; perhaps he even hoped that Christianity might be enriched by Narnia’s magic (though he would never have permitted himself the vanity of suggesting as much). Possibly, if my early experiences of the religion had been better, I would have reacted to my discovery of the books’ “secret” significance with no more than a shrug. But for me, Christianity worked like a black hole, sucking all the beauty and wonder out of Narnia the moment the two came into imaginative contact. I was furious, but I was also bereft; I’d lost something infinitely precious to me.
Lewis was fond of repeating a conversation that he’d once had with Tolkien, on an occasion when they were grumbling about having their literary interests labeled as escapist. “What class of men,” Tolkien asked, “would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?” The response, also provided by Tolkien, was “jailers.” Tolkien, even more than Lewis, thought it was only natural to want to flee a world increasingly dominated by industry, science, capitalism, modernism, and secularism. Religion, for these men, meant hewing to the good old ways.
I, too, longed for escape, but as I saw it, Christianity was one of the jailers. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe seemed to promise another, better world, one that was wild, merry, enchanted, boundless. And when I could no longer kid myself that Narnia actually existed, it remained the province of my imagination where I felt the most free. What Lin Carter told me about Aslan and Jesus ruined even that.
I recently ordered a used copy of Imaginary Worlds online, and when the book arrived, I had to look twice at its publication date. There’s no possibility that I could have read the book before my thirteenth birthday. Had it really taken me so long to learn the truth? This got me wondering about the readers who’d responded to my Salon essay on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and about the writers I’d met over the years who’d mentioned the Chronicles as an early influence. When had they found out about the Christian symbolism in Narnia, and how did they react?
One correspondent I’d never forgotten was Pam Marks, who’d written to tell me how much she’d loved the Chronicles when she was growing up in one of the few Jewish families in a small English village in the 1950s. I decided to telephone her to ask how she’d responded to the Christian element in Narnia.
Pam’s family wasn’t religious, so for her being Jewish meant little more than occasionally feeling like an outsider. “In England,” she told me, “you had to sing Christian songs in schooclass="underline" ‘Away in the manger no crib for his bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head.’ I wasn’t too sure about that, so I asked my mother, and she said, ‘Well, when you come to that part, just don’t say the word “Jesus.”’”
As Pam saw it, her real problem was not Christians, but her father, “a harsh disciplinarian, very. He believed in obedience. He thought that I had way too much spirit and that he could beat it out of me.” When they were alone together, her mother would tell Pam that she thought the punishments were unjustified, but she never spoke up against them when her husband was around. For Pam, the moment in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Edmund betrays Lucy by telling Peter and Susan that he hasn’t been to Narnia after all was particularly piercing.
“I wanted a place where there was fairness and understanding,” she said. “There wasn’t that in my life. It’s not like I had an adult I could go to, getting through that childhood. When a child is mistreated and told that it’s because they’re bad, they’re left to either think that they’re bad or that their parents are extremely cruel and they’re victims. That becomes such a conflict that there becomes a great need to understand the nature of right and wrong, more so than with other children. And those books really talked about that.”
“When did you realize that there was a Christian subtext to the books?”
“When I read The Last Battle, once I understood that line about the stable that was bigger inside than outside. [Lucy makes a remark about a stable “that once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”] That line really upset me.”
“Did you go back and read the earlier books after that? And did the lightbulb light up then?”
“I’d already reread them many times, but yes, I did go back, and I saw it completely.”
“How did you feel about it?”
“I felt betrayed. But then, not too long after that, I decided, Well, I don’t really care what he was trying to do there, this is what I get out of it. Those books communicated really deep, why-we-are-here, life-and-death concepts to me. And I think I perceived even then that they were universal symbols. I had a feeling about the characters and about the writing. Even though I’d never read any of it before, it was as if I knew it. The rhythms of the language and the characters, it was as if I knew them all before I read them.”