It greatly frustrated Lewis that his collaborator was a “timid, shrinking” young woman who reacted to his critiques as if he’d pulled her hair or blackened her eye. He had plenty of reservations about her work. He believed, for instance, that Baynes had deliberately drawn the Pevensie children “rather plain — in the interests of realism,” for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and asked if she could “pretty them up” in the later books. It’s a baffling request, unless you happen upon an edition of one of E. Nesbit’s children’s books with the original illustrations and compare them to Baynes’s work. Lewis had grown up with H. R. Miller’s drawings of Nesbit’s child characters, conventionally attractive by Edwardian standards: thick-haired, pinafored girls with long-lashed eyes, and neatly combed boys in sailor shirts and short pants.
Lewis could be gracious to Baynes (when he won the Carnegie Medal for The Last Battle, he wrote to her, “Is it not rather ‘our’ Medal?”). Privately, however, he felt that her illustrations were often insufficiently accurate, complaining to his friend Dorothy Sayers about her “total ignorance of animal anatomy” and her lack of “interest in matter — how boats are rowed, or bows shot with, or feet planted, or fists clenched.” Most of his letters to Baynes have an air of barely concealed impatience; her sensitivity was an irksome restraint on his natural inclination to let others know, without reservation, exactly how they could improve their artistic efforts. His imperfectly pulled punches and backhanded compliments probably wounded her as much as a full-scale attack, or even more so, if she was insecure enough to start imagining what he’d refrained from saying. “You have learned something about animals in the last few months,” he wrote Baynes after seeing the illustrations for The Magician’s Nephew, the penultimate book in the series. “I mention the beasts first because they show the greatest advance.” It is the sort of remark guaranteed to make an uncertain artist wonder what he really thought of all those animals she’d drawn for the previous five volumes.
And how wrong Lewis was! True, a drawing of people in a rowboat really ought to have the rowers facing toward the stern, not the bow, but his insistence that Bree be drawn with the “big fetlocks” typical of a warhorse suggests that sometimes Baynes understood the tone of his tales better than he did. Her dainty, stylized lines match the lyricism of Lewis’s invention in a way that hearty naturalism and fidelity to animal anatomy never could. But then, Lewis’s own appreciation for the visual arts had never been well developed; a colleague who visited the Kilns recalled being dismayed by the absence of pictures or anything else created solely to please the eye. Otherwise, Lewis might have recognized that Baynes’s fanciful “Arabesque” style (as he dismissively called it) was ideally suited to depict a “wild” land — “not men’s country,” as Trufflehunter the badger puts it — that was, in truth, deeply infused with humanity and its dreams.
Narnia is wildness, not wilderness, a humanized vision of nature, drenched in imagination and stories, which is one of the reasons it seems so English. I found more evidence of this while retracing another of Lewis’s favorite Oxford walks, the climb over Hinksey Hill, which now lies on the far side of the thundering a34 bypass from the city center. Atop Hinksey in 1922, Lewis felt a brief stab of “the old joy” while (he wrote in his diary) sitting in “a patch of wood — all ferns and pines and the very driest sand” on the day before he took his final exam in Greats. Like a lot of the countryside where Lewis once roamed, Hinksey retains only a tiny portion of wood and farmland, hemmed in by new houses, highways, and a golf course that has claimed the summit of the hill. (It seemed that almost every time I tried to follow in Lewis’s footsteps, I found myself confronted with a golf course.) William Turner painted a bucolic view of Oxford from the top of Hinksey Hill in the early nineteenth century, and that probably gives a better sense of how it looked to Lewis in the 1920s than does visiting the place today.
Nevertheless, a tiny wedge of relatively unspoiled land on the hill has been set aside as a nature preserve, with a walk laid out for schoolchildren. At intervals along the path, placards have been set up next to representative trees, explaining that this is an elder, said to be the home of witches, or a hawthorn, said to be a harbinger of death. Farmers, visitors are informed, used to be afraid to invite bad luck by cutting down a holly and would leave the tree standing in the middle of their plowed fields. Another sign announces that this oak is a tree whose forebears brought “your” forebears to this island. Furthermore, a green man lives inside the oak, and every May he dances through the streets of Oxford. Most of the placards are illustrated with drawings of human figures personifying the various trees, a long-haired maiden for the birch and a crooked hag for the elder. The text on the signs is written in the first person, as if each tree were telling its own story.
The hippieish whimsy of the Hinksey Hill nature walk (the first placard promises an “enchanted forest” with “whispering trees”) must, I think, be due to the influence of Lewis and Tolkien. British folklore attaches great significance to trees, but (as Susanna Clarke assured me) rarely suggests that they contain anthropomorphic spirits or that a tree might also be a person. “Kat Godeu,” a poem from the fourteenth-century Welsh Book of Taliesin, describes a war fought by trees, but this seems to be a singular, magical event. The personified tree is a Greek idea, and in the Chronicles, the dryads and the hamadryads go by their classical names.
One of Lewis’s tree women looks after Jill in the castle of Cair Paravel at the beginning of The Silver Chair. She is “a delightful person … graceful as a willow, and her hair was willowy too, and there seemed to be moss in it.” (Jill doesn’t realize that her attendant is a tree nymph, but anyone who has read the other Chronicles will instantly recognize her as such.) Lucy, walking through the awakening woods in Prince Caspian, recalls the human forms of the silver birch — “it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl” — and the oak — “he would be a wizened, but hearty old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his face and hands, and hair growing out of the warts” — exactly like the drawings on the Hinksey Hill placards.
The images are so appealing, such a pleasing blend of the homely and the otherworldly, it’s no wonder people would like to think that their ancestors believed in them long ago. According to historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists, however, what we regard as age-old “traditional” lore is often a more recent invention. Take the Green Man, who supposedly lives in an oak and has come out to dance in the May Day parade since time immemorial. The authors of the Hinksey Hill placards make a common mistake in identifying the Green Man as an ancient legend; in fact, the name was invented in the 1930s by a folklorist interested in British church architecture. It refers to a type of architectural ornament often found in Romanesque and medieval churches, a carving of a male face surrounded by foliage and sometime sprouting leaves and vines from its mouth and ears. This Green Man (which may or may not have stood for a character from folklore) has sometimes been confused with a pantomime figure called Jack in the Green. Jack in the Green, a local man who covers himself with foliage until he looks like a walking shrub, does indeed march in May Day parades, but he has been doing so only since the eighteenth century and he has no known connection to the Green Man motif.