In sixth grade, when I first studied Animal Farm, I felt that I had embarked upon a journey of great consequence, and I was right. I was making a momentous transition, and I’m surprised to find that few writers have ever attempted to describe it. Even Surprised by Joy, the memoir of a consummate reader, doesn’t. What Lewis does write about is a period, during the dark ages of boyhood, when he briefly gave up reading fairy tales and switched to school stories and fat bestsellers in the sword-and-sandals vein — Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur — “mainly rubbish,” as he characterizes them. This change, he felt, marked “a great decline in my imaginative life.”
It didn’t last, fortunately, and he would return to the old, resplendent inner life when he rediscovered Norse mythology in his early teens. Literature, it seems, was about the only aspect of his life that Lewis didn’t second-guess during his adolescence. But then, reading English poetry and prose was for him an almost entirely independent, extracurricular activity, and as a result, his teachers rarely set him to analyzing the kind of books he liked to read for pleasure. Reading remained part of his untouchable private world. “Never in my life had I read a work of fiction, poetry, or criticism in my own language except because, after trying the first few pages, I liked the taste of it,” he wrote of the years before he was sent to Malvern College in Worcestershire at the age of fifteen.
At Malvern, the last of the series of boarding schools he attended in England, Lewis was, by his own report, transformed into a “prig.” The term as he used it has a meaning more akin to “intellectual snob” than it does today, when it’s often regarded as a synonym for “prude.” But used either way, it indicates a disdain for other people’s pleasures. Lewis learned that he was not the only person who harbored a secret ardor for poetry, but with that knowledge came what he described as “a kind of Fall. The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost.” His once-pure love for certain books and authors became a justification for looking down on the philistines who didn’t share it.
For my part, I never really much liked Animal Farm, but that seemed beside the point. Here, for once, my experience of religion and my reading life converged. The Church had instructed me that the holiest activities were necessarily the dreariest ones, and now school was teaching me that the delight I took in a story was not the only — not even the best — criterion for judging how good it was. If anything, the more I enjoyed a story, the less likely it was to be serious, worthwhile literature.
Still, learning has a pleasure all its own; for some people, taking a car apart can be as much fun as driving it. I found that I wanted to figure out how books worked, almost as much as I wanted to feel them work on me. I also wanted, very much, to grow up, and studying books like Animal Farm was the sort of thing grown-ups did. And I was learning. Through Orwell’s novel, I gained a perspective on political power and how easily it can be misused. I also could see the way that good writing draws a collection of vague impressions into a coherent pattern until you both recognize your own experience and see it clearly for the first time. And beyond all this, I had come to recognize stories as made things, rather than as given phenomena of the universe, like the wind, a tree, or my brothers and sisters. If Animal Farm had a purpose, it could only be because somebody had created it to achieve that purpose — a writer, the author, George Orwell.
To me, the reality of authorship — the origin of every story in the imagination of a flawed human being — was both liberating and dispossessing. The presents you find under the tree on Christmas morning aren’t any less desirable because they’ve been left there by your parents instead of by a jolly fat man in a red suit who came down the chimney, but some of the thrill has gone out of receiving them all the same. Still, discovering that there is no Santa Claus has its compensations. You have been trusted with secret information that younger, greener children aren’t allowed. And you recognize that more of the world is under merely human governance than you had once thought; it’s a relief to know that a supernaturally industrious stranger at the North Pole isn’t really documenting how well you behave over the course of the year.
Adults remember learning the truth about Santa Claus as a miniature tragedy. Some of us cried. In the years since, most of us have forgotten that we were also gratified to be recognized as grown-up enough to know the truth. (I recall being impressed with how skillfully my parents had created the illusion, and I tried carefully to maintain it for my brothers and sisters — which was, strangely enough, almost as much fun as actually believing in it.) Likewise, when we mourn the way we used to read as children, that effortless absorption and unquestioning faith, we would do well to remind ourselves of the dangers of putting ourselves at the mercy of a book. For every Animal Farm, propaganda you probably agree with, there is a Turner Diaries, propaganda I hope you don’t. If we sometimes place a petty, priggish value on reading critically, we nevertheless learn to do it for excellent reasons.
Graham Greene, in his essay “The Lost Childhood,” suggested that reading loses its first, mighty power when books stop telling us what we don’t already know about our lives. Once, each volume was a “crystal in which the child dreamed that he saw life moving,” but eventually what we read only confirms or contradicts what we already believe: “As in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back.” But Greene was a Catholic who was unfortunate enough not to lapse and this made him morose. Think of it another way: We start out with a simple, even religious, relationship to the written word; its authority is unquestioned. We end up with something more complicated, but also something more our own. And then the time comes to decide a few things for ourselves.
Chapter Eleven
Garlic and Onions
In The Horse and His Boy, the foundling Shasta joins a runaway princess named Aravis and two talking horses in a desperate escape from Calormen, Narnia’s large, powerful neighbor to the south. We’ve met Calormenes before, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where they appear at the slave market in the Lone Islands. They have “dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-colored turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people.” In The Horse and His Boy, the fugitives’ route takes them through Calormen’s capital city, Tashbaan, and as they make their way along the streets, they’re bombarded with smells. The stench comes from “unwashed people, unwashed dogs, scent, garlic, onions and the piles of refuse which lay everywhere.” Although the Calormene capital looks magnificent from a distance, up close it stinks.