Laura Miller by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia Page B

in
The Romance of the Rose
stares into the garden’s clear, sparkling fountain, we are meant to understand that we are reading about the first time he gazes into his lady’s eyes. But Lewis reminds us that we should hold both pictures — fountain and eyes — in our heads at the same time; each one enriches the other, and the reader is ravished by two beauties at once.
    To grasp a literary image fully and deeply and yet to understand that it has another, different, layer of meaning — or even more layers — operating within, beneath, and beside it is to read medievally. Lewis did not see allegory as equivalent to myth, but he believed that it fed from the deeper, more powerful imaginative stratum where myth lives, much as a tree draws nurturance from the soil. Lewis’s own fiction drew from both. He is a fundamentally imagistic writer and even as a child I felt almost physically intoxicated by the potency of the pictures he made with words. The garden in
The Magician’s Nephew
is one of those pictures. It is at once a real, leafy, shady garden, vividly present in Lewis’s description, and also an externalized image of the self, a place so “obviously private” that any decent person, any true friend like Polly, knows better than to enter it unbidden.
    Jadis, the invader, tries to manipulate Digory’s fear not just of losing his mother, but of being culpable for that loss. “What would your mother think if she knew that you
could
have taken her pain away and given her back her life and saved your Father’s heart from being broken, and that you
wouldn’t?
” she taunts. She knows exactly which is the sorest spot to press because she has trespassed on territory where no one but Digory (besides Aslan) has the right to tread. Climbing the walls and eating the apples turns her skin “deadly white, white as salt,” an indication that she has lost whatever humanity had remained in her and has become something else, a voice in Digory’s head, his own worst impulses, the eternal Tempter. She is now allegorical. While the garden in
The Magician’s Nephew
bears a certain resemblance to the biblical Eden, it is even more evocative as an emblem of the self.
    This moment, the moment of Digory’s choice, is the most emotionally naked depiction Lewis ever wrote of his feelings about Flora Lewis’s death. In
Surprised by Joy,
he describes the loss with a faded sorrow, as the moment when “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. . . . It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.” He also recalls trying to will himself into a belief that prayer could either cure or, finally, resurrect her.
Surprised by Joy,
a memoir intended to explain the circumstances of Lewis’s conversion, handles this early spiritual disappointment cursorily. Lewis claims, unconvincingly, that the futility of his boyhood prayers (and the unspoken likelihood that he blamed their failure on his own insufficient faith) had “no religious importance.” A few years later, however, the teenage Lewis would come to regard himself as an unbeliever.
    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,