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 Before he could ask himself what he wanted, “the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased.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:
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
In 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.