Digory keeps his promise to Narnia’s god, and in the end is rewarded by Aslan with a second apple, which does cure his mother. Not only is the great catastrophe of Lewis’s early life averted in his fiction; so, too, is the foundering of his own faith. The fact that the image of a dying mother crops up in a book he wrote over forty years later suggests that, not surprisingly, Lewis never entirely recovered from this loss. Yet apart from the few pages that he devotes to his mother’s death in Surprised by Joy, it wasn’t a topic he mentioned much. He became notorious among his adult friends for his reluctance to enter into any conversation at all about his personal life, particularly his intimate relationships. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis recalls how he loathed the “fuss and flummery” of Flora’s funeral, which, he believed, instituted his lifelong “distaste for all that is public,” but “public” for him seemed to include even confidences shared with good friends. The best of friends, like Polly, knew not to intrude where they had not been invited.
Gardens make a particularly good image of the self for a writer, because while a garden can be cultivated and enjoyed privately, it can also yield fruit that can be shared with others. It can be watered with books and music and pictures. It can serve as a retreat from the world for an hour or two. It is also a place where you can spend days puttering away like my father, weeding flower beds, tying up vines, relaying little paths. Lewis’s own inner self — fed by Arthurian legends, Norse myths, Wagnerian opera, the Celtic folktales he heard from the family’s maid, the countryside around Belfast that he explored on foot and bicycle, the poetry he discovered on his own and through his family’s library — was like a walled garden, lavishly tended and well guarded. A handful of people (Warnie and Arthur Greeves, the boy across the street) were occasionally invited inside, but in every such place there is some fruit that must not be picked, and an inner garden that no one else can ever enter.
Chapter Four
Boxcar Children
It wouldn’t be truthful to say that the only books I liked as a child were fantasy stories, although those were my favorites, and I became adept at sniffing them out, often with as little as a title and cover art to go by. I did read books like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie and a Newbury Medal winner by Scott O’Dell called Island of the Blue Dolphins, about a Native American girl who is left behind on an island when her tribe is evacuated. The Wilder books were enjoyable if not riveting, but Island of the Blue Dolphins had real power. With its detailed descriptions of the girl learning how to make weapons to hunt with, to find fresh water, to dry meat, and to fend off the island’s wild dogs, it fascinated me. I persuaded a neighborhood friend to set up a “camp” in a corner of her backyard, where we crouched, pretending to be Indian hunters, draping slices of raw bacon over strings suspended between a couple of shrubs and calculating how much trouble we were likely to get into if we lit a fire to cook them over.
Both Little House on the Prairie and Island of the Blue Dolphins took what I considered to be a laudable interest in the nuts and bolts of survival in other times and places; I remember the maple-syrup-making scenes from the Wilder books more vividly than anything else. However, Island of the Blue Dolphins had one great advantage over Little House on the Prairie: no parents. A few years ago, while I was working on an essay about the boom in “problem novels” — fiction for young people centering on a trauma or an issue like drug addiction or rape — my editor reminisced about reading Island of the Blue Dolphins as a girl, too. “I can’t believe they give a book like that to children,” she remarked. “It’s about being abandoned by your family! What could be more disturbing?” I was startled; it had never occurred to me before that the novel described a terrifying scenario, although the girl’s situation was occasionally desperate. I didn’t see her as abandoned. To my child’s mind, she was liberated.
If you had asked me then what I liked so much about the Narnia books — or E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It or Edward Eager’s Half Magic series, among other favorites — I would eventually discover, I probably would have told you it was the magic. Reading them now, what I notice is the absence or irrelevance of parents. Mothers and fathers play, at best, a very minor supporting role in the Nesbit and Eager books. Sometimes beloved adults are sick or otherwise troubled and need to be rescued. Otherwise, if they’re around at all, they just get in the way.
The parents of the four Pevensie children, who have sent them off to stay in an old house in the country “because of the air-raids,” go nearly unmentioned in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (Early in the story, Edmund accuses Susan of “trying to talk like Mother,” and he does not mean it appreciatively.) When the children arrive at Professor Kirk’s house, they never speak of the war that brought them there or of missing their parents; instead they go on excitedly about all the animals they hope to find in the countryside (“Badgers!” “Foxes!” “Rabbits!”). “This is going to be perfectly splendid,” Peter announces, without a hint of ambivalence. People who see the novel’s story as precipitated by trauma (the bombings, separation) are misreading it, as adults are prone to do.
It’s often been said of a certain kind of children’s book that the author has to get rid of one or both parents before anything interesting can happen. Nancy Drew has a father but no mother because no self-respecting mother would allow her teenage daughter to gallivant around in a blue roadster, chasing criminals. (A fond father can be gotten around, and apparently even coaxed into springing for the roadster.) Nancy’s mother is simply gone, and apparently unmourned, because Nancy exists in a fictional fantasy world where a missing mother is not missed.
While this isn’t very plausible, it is understandable. In the great enterprise of growing up, a child’s imagination practices the painless, surgical removal of an attachment that, however essential it may be at the moment, will sooner or later have to be left behind. The same child (myself, for example) who finds imagining her parents’ deaths heart-freezingly scary will also fantasize about the exciting escapade of being left entirely to her own devices. In her memoir, Welcome to Lizard Motel, the educator Barbara Feinberg describes leading a children’s creativity workshop whose participants liked pretending they were orphans, though not, one little girl clarified, “the sad part of orphans.”
Had anyone quizzed me further about the kinds of books I liked, I would have said that I wanted to read about adventures, and those didn’t happen when parents were around. The presence of Mother and Father guaranteed that children were stuck being children. Without their parents, Narnia’s young visitors finally get the chance to try out all the practical knowledge they’ve acquired over their years of reading what Lewis, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, refers to as “the right books.”