Still, being able to navigate traffic on your own doesn’t keep you from wanting to hold somebody’s hand every once in a while, if for different reasons. Holding hands feels nice, and this is one aspect of Aslan that has retained its charm for me. Unlike the God I was raised to worship, he is a god you can touch, and a god who asks to be touched physically in his darkest hour. “Lay your hands on my mane so that I can feel you are there and let us walk like that,” he says to Lucy and Susan as he goes to his execution at the stone table. After he has been killed, the weeping girls come to kiss “his cold face” and stroke “his beautiful fur,” in a far more raw and tangible evocation of grief than anything in the New Testament. Then, after Aslan has been resurrected, the girls climb onto his “warm, golden back,” bury their hands in his mane, and go for a breathless cross-country ride through a Narnia you can almost taste, thanks to one of Lewis’s most exhilarating descriptions:
Have you ever had a gallop on a horse? Think of that; and then take away the heavy noise of the hoofs and the jingle of the bits and imagine instead the almost noiseless padding of the great paws. Then imagine instead of the black or gray or chestnut back of the horse the soft roughness of golden fur, and the mane flying back in the wind. And then imagine you are going about twice as fast as the fastest racehorse. But this is a mount that doesn’t need to be guided and never grows tired. He rushes on and on, never missing his footing, never hesitating, threading his way with perfect skill between tree trunks, jumping over bush and briar and the smaller streams, wading the larger, swimming the largest of all. And you are riding not on a road nor in the park nor even on the downs, but right across Narnia, in spring, down solemn avenues of beech and across sunny glades of oak, through wild orchards of snow-white cherry trees, past roaring waterfalls and mossy rocks and echoing caverns, up windy slopes alight with gorse bushes, and across the shoulders of heathery mountains and along giddy ridges and down, down, down again into wild valleys and out into acres of blue flowers.
Traditional Christian iconography is filled with a mangled eroticism: the half-naked, suffering body of Christ hanging from the cross, the woman humbly drying his feet with her own hair, the graphic torments of martyrs displayed in centuries of religious art — all of it warped by a pervasive ambivalence about sexuality. (This ambivalence, incidentally, and whatever wishful thinkers might say to the contrary, is not limited to Judeo-Christian religions.) Nowhere among these images do you find the plain, untrammeled joy in being alive that Lewis captures in Lucy and Susan’s “romp” with Aslan. The scene is blissfully sensual. It ends with all three “rolled over together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and legs.” It would be hard to imagine the two girls sharing the same intimacy with a god in the form of a man — or, rather, it’s imaginable, but only with uncomfortable undertones.
“Animal” is a word sometimes used as a synonym for “carnal,” and not in a good way, but Lucy and Susan’s desire to touch Aslan, and Aslan’s desire to be touched by them, is carnal without ambivalence because he is an actual animal. Like most adults of his time and place (or adults of most times and places, for that matter), Lewis had mixed feelings about sex, but in this scene, at least, he escapes into a pure delight in physicality that’s almost, but not quite, erotic. And although I myself am ambivalent about having to use the word “pure” to characterize that delight — or worse yet, the word “innocent,” which I’ve so far managed to avoid — there is no other adjective for it. Even if I would prefer not to think that sexuality contaminates experiences, I have to admit that ambivalence about sexuality does just that. Lucy and Susan’s romp with Aslan is as much pleasure as you can have in a body without sex — that is, without sex and the ambivalence that comes with it.
It’s also transcendent. “Whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten, Lucy could never make up her mind,” Lewis writes. What Susan and Lucy are tumbling around with on Narnia’s springy turf is something titanic and formidable, not just their own carnality with all its dormant, unpredictable potential, but a divinity who has just unleashed snowbound Narnia into the rampant vitality of spring. Yet if you’re going to romp with a thunderstorm, what better form could it take than a gigantic kitten? Play and youth, too, are forces of nature.
When I read picture books to my toddler friends, Corinne and Desmond, they like to sidle up close to me. Their little fingers creep under my watchband and twine around my thumbs like the ivy that, under Aslan’s direction in Prince Caspian, pulls down all the man-made structures in Narnia. The twins can’t sit still; they have to fiddle with locks of my hair, climb onto my shoulders and into my lap. I usually wind up with a foot in my solar plexus and a head blocking my view of the book I’m supposed to be reading. They make me feel like a patient old dog, beset by puppies, my ears chewed on and paws squashed. I suppose they’ll only be able to get away with behaving like this for a few more years, when, inevitably, self-consciousness will set in. Except, of course, with animals, who have only ever had this way of showing their love.
Chapter Three
The Secret Garden
Discovering Narnia felt like a breathtaking expansion of the boundaries of my world, yet it was also an intensely private event. “You were so excited you couldn’t talk about it,” Wilanne Belden recalled. “I tried, but you sort of clammed up. I knew how important it was to you, but I think you thought that if you talked about it, it would get away.”
A friend of mine recalls having solemn discussions with his childhood cohorts about what they’d do if they ever got to Narnia or Middle-earth, but this youthful collegiality seems to be the exception. One woman, who had just described her grammar school to me as a place where “magical things happened” and “we were allowed to let our imaginations really run,” couldn’t say whether her classmates had also liked the Narnia books. As for myself, I didn’t know anyone else who’d read them, and to the best of my recollection I never urged them on my friends or siblings. There was Mrs. Belden, of course, but her role in initiating me had a priestly aspect — I expected to be led by her, not to befriend her — and I was a congregation of one. Even with the high priestess, I played it pretty close to my chest.
Like a lot of children from large families, I was preoccupied with getting and maintaining some small, inviolable portion of privacy. The advantage of Narnia was that it was a whole world I could have all to myself. C. S. Lewis’s childhood had its fortified aspect, as well. Jack had a friend in Warnie, the brother to whom he remained close for the rest of his life, but from the start their bond was predicated on excluding adults. “We stood foursquare against the common enemy,” Lewis wrote in his memoir, Surprised by Joy. Their mother, Flora, died when Jack was nine; it was a loss he referred to sparingly afterward. Their father, Albert, had lost his own father a few weeks before that, and seems to have briefly fallen apart after the death of his wife. Lewis’s biographers (himself included) universally regard what happened next — the temperamental Albert’s efforts to seek comfort from his sons rather than to comfort them, and his occasional outbursts of what Jack called “unjust” behavior — as a mistake that resulted in a long estrangement.
At least, that’s the theory, a theory that jibes with the commonplace, quasi-Freudian notion that a single traumatic event can cause lasting changes in the ecology of a relationship. It’s also one of those notions that treats life as more of a narrative than it actually is. In real life, a well-balanced relationship can regain its footing pretty well, even after a severe knock. It’s in the nature of human beings (especially young, adaptable ones) to get over things when given half a chance. I suspect that if the makings of real intimacy had ever existed between Albert and his sons, it probably would have revived in the years after Flora’s death, however badly he behaved just afterward. What really alienated the two brothers from their father was something less momentous — something with fewer of the dramatic qualities of a good excuse.