Laura Miller (20 page)

More than the other Chronicles,
The Horse and His Boy
is preoccupied with social status and inclusion, and the novel’s ambivalence is Lewis’s own. In a lecture he delivered in 1944, he said, “I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.” Wanting to belong to this “inner ring” can be corrupting — it compromises the spineless protagonist of Lewis’s adult science-fiction novel
That Hideous Strength,
for example — although Lewis hastened to clarify that inner rings aren’t pernicious per se. You can see why he might stress that last point, why he would warn against the
craving
to be admitted to the in crowd without necessarily condemning in crowds themselves; Lewis belonged to several official and unofficial cliques, from the faculty of Oxford to the Inklings. Yet he also knew how it felt to be shut out.

Lewis’s first taste of the bitterness of exclusion came at age fifteen, when he was sent to Malvern College in Worcestershire. Warnie had spent a couple of years at the school before Jack arrived, and had succeeded socially, if not academically; he loved the place. Jack, however, was bad at sports and had no patience for the exacting rituals of British boarding school life.
Surprised by Joy
includes an entire chapter, entitled “Bloodery,” devoted to detailing the social structure he found at Malvern, a rigorous hierarchy in which younger boys were obliged to drop everything at a moment’s notice to shine shoes and perform other chores for the older students. At the pinnacle of this order stood the “bloods,” the “adored athletes and prefects” who functioned as the school’s aristocracy.

Every society of children has its pecking order, but at British boarding schools the exalted status of the most popular boys was both highly formalized and endorsed by adult authority. Alumni of this system could be extravagantly sentimental about it and were its fiercest proponents. (Warnie argued with Jack that the practice of “fagging”— forcing younger boys to work as the personal servants of the older ones — provided a necessary lesson in humility.) In Lewis’s father’s generation, many middle- and upper-class men were convinced that boarding school had prepared them to be exemplary Englishmen and champions of the empire. The Duke of Wellington supposedly asserted that the battle of Waterloo was “won on the playing fields of Eton”— although historians have since pointed out that there were no organized sports at the school during his time there and that the great Wellington, like Lewis, was no athlete.

Lewis’s own feelings about the institution were mixed. When
Surprised by Joy
was first published in 1956, it shocked some readers with its matter-of-fact discussion of “tarts” — smaller boys who served as “catamites” to the bloods at Malvern. But some of Lewis’s more conservative readers found it nearly as provocative that he dared to question the public school power structure — an “oligarchy,” he called it — in general. Still, as much as Lewis hated being forced to play games that bored him and to abandon his studies to dance attendance on some pubescent lout, he could not bring himself to denounce traditional boarding schools entirely.

At Malvern, Lewis encountered an inner ring at its most impenetrable and abusive. On one occasion, an older boy tricked him into “skipping clubs” — that is, into not showing up for the obligatory sporting events that formed the center of student life. For this offense, he was ordered to report to a blood he calls Porridge for a flogging. The messenger who delivered the summons told Lewis, “Who are you? Nobody. Who is Porridge? THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.” It’s not hard to see how this sort of thing might have inspired scenes of Calormene muckety-mucks in litters, barreling through the streets of Tashbaan, knocking the peasantry into the dust. So, too, does the haughty Rabadash feel perfectly free to kick the backside of his father’s groveling vizier whenever the spirit moves him.

None of this is surprising in the Calormenes, who are, of course, the bad guys. Yet what is Corin if not an idealized version of the British public school blood, a natural athlete who blithely shanghais Shasta into a battle he’s utterly unequipped to fight? Like the bookish Lewis, who was compelled to run ineffectually around a cricket field, Shasta soon loses his sword and falls off his horse — sending him into combat is “mere murder,” says the wise old hermit observing the scene — and he barely emerges with his life. While Lewis was at Malvern, he wrote a play based on Norse myth, a tragedy he called
Loki Bound,
in which the title character lashes out at the injustice of the gods. The gods’ enforcer is Thor, god of thunder, whose “brutal orthodoxy” demands that power be respected simply because it is powerful. “Thor was, in fact, the symbol of the Bloods,” Lewis writes in
Surprised by Joy,
and so it’s indicative that when Corin grows up to become a famous boxer who pummels a renegade Narnian bear back into line, he earns the nickname Corin Thunder-Fist.

Corin is Thor redeemed, a blood with the thuggishness scrubbed out. Is such a thing really possible, or is the honorable, decent British public school blood a wishful fiction, the sort of fantasy promulgated by books like
Tom Brown’s School Days,
the “school stories” that Lewis once accused of being far more deceptive than fairy tales? His own boyhood misery would not lead to, say, the insurrection of George Orwell, who, in a famous autobiographical essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” described his stint at a preparatory school (a training academy for boys seeking admission to public schools like Eton) as a sojourn in “a world of force and fraud and secrecy.” These schools, Orwell wrote, were infused with “contempt for ‘braininess,’ and worship of games, contempt for foreigners and the working class, an almost neurotic dread of poverty and, above all, the assumption not only that money and privilege are the things that matter, but that it is better to inherit them than to have to work for them. . . . Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right.”

This early encounter with the cruelties of Britain’s class system helped make Orwell a leftist. Lewis, whose sentimental conservativism was really a flight from serious political thought, clung instinctively to the old ways in spite of all he had endured and resented under their dominion. Although he hated Malvern, in later years he would fret about excessive taxation, worrying that it might prevent middle-class Britons from sending their boys to similar schools. In the Chronicles, this makes for a contradictory attitude toward “school,” which Lewis usually depicts as a character-warping oppression. In
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
Peter and Lucy attribute Edmund’s nastiness to “that horrid school, which was where he had begun to go wrong,” and one of the many good works the Pevensies perform after they become kings and queens of Narnia is to make sure “young dwarfs and young satyrs” aren’t sent to school. Human beings aren’t so lucky; the downside to the discovery of Shasta’s true identity as a prince of Archenland, he explains to Aravis, is that now “education and all sort of horrible things are going to happen to me.”

This is a strange attitude in a man so devoted to books and learning. Lewis, it seems, had ruled out the possibility that school could ever be enjoyable, or even agreeable. His mistrust of anything labeled “progress” set him against the notion that schools could be improved or reformed; do-gooders would only make them worse. In
The Silver Chair,
Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole attend a coeducational academy called Experiment House, derided by the narrator as “what used to be called a ‘mixed’ school; some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it.” (Nowhere does Lewis sound more like the crusty, reactionary old colonel in an Agatha Christie country-house whodunit than he does in that aside.) At Experiment House, the smaller children are tormented by a gang of fellow students known only as “Them.”

We are informed that “horrid things” in the line of cliques and bullying are allowed to flourish at Experiment House, abuses that “at an ordinary school would have been found out and stopped in half a term.” It’s hard to imagine what could be worse than the goings-on permitted at an “ordinary” school like Malvern — de facto slavery in the form of the fag system, catamites, sanctioned beatings. But whatever the horrid things perpetrated at Experiment House, the school’s authorities merely indulge the culprits, drawing them out in long chats and treating them as “interesting psychological cases.” Further signs of the school’s deficiency include the fact that Bibles are “not encouraged” and the “Head” (headmaster, or principal) is a woman.

The swamp of misguided progressivism that is Experiment House can only be drained with the help of Aslan, who at the end of
The Silver Chair
sends Jill, Eustace, and (briefly) Caspian back into our world with orders to thrash some of the worst bullies. Jill beats them with a switch, and Caspian and Eustace with the sides of their swords, raising a ruckus and driving the Head to hysterics. (Later, we’re informed with uncharacteristically leaden wit that this individual will rise to a station more commensurate with her incompetence: a seat in Parliament.) The scene appalls Goldthwaite. All Christians, he maintains, are bound to honor the ideal of pacifism, even if they can’t always strictly abide by it. “I cannot imagine,” he writes, “a betrayal of one’s faith more complete than this last picture of Christ at the playground, putting weapons into the hands of children.”

Any child who has ever been bullied relishes scenarios in which schoolyard tyrants get their comeuppance; revenge is an ancient and satisfying narrative theme. It’s not, however, a particularly Christian one, and the beating delivered in the coda of
The Silver Chair
does seem gratuitous. It traffics in the sort of self-righteousness that Lewis usually makes a point of condemning elsewhere. Couldn’t Aslan have simply appeared before the bullies and terrified them into virtue with a single glance — he is God, after all — without asking our heroes to wallop a bunch of unarmed kids? Is hitting people really the best way to reform them? I suspect Lewis himself sensed how dicey the scene is; he becomes euphemistic when describing the thrashing itself, using the word “ply” instead of “beat” or “whip.” The whole episode has an air of bad faith and self-indulgence. Lewis gets the satisfaction of imagining his old enemies, the bloods, being scourged, but he excuses the tradition that gave them the power to persecute him in the first place. In this looking-glass world, progress and reform, not the hallowed institution of “bloodery,” have enabled sadists to run amok.

Throughout the Chronicles, Lewis will often play an imaginative sorting game, hoarding everything good and admirable on the side of what’s familiar while pushing all vices toward what’s not. The Calormenes, the foreigners to the south, are given all the shameful excesses of civilization, and the Narnians in the north get to keep all the justice and virtue. Both nations have hereditary monarchies, but Calormen is ruled by tyrants while Narnia’s kings are born noble and true. The hierarchy of Calormen is manifestly unfair, permitting spoiled aristocrats to push everyone else around, while the social ladder of Narnia consists of everybody knowing his place and feeling perfectly comfortable in it.

As the German psychologist Bruno Bettelheim pointed out in his most celebrated book,
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales,
such dichotomies are typical of traditional fairy tales. Bettelheim argued that the wicked stepmother figures in stories like
Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs
and
Cinderella
serve as stand-ins for troubling aspects of a child’s real mother. “Although Mother is most often the all-giving protector,” Bettelheim writes, “she can change into the cruel stepmother if she is so evil as to deny the child something he wants. Far from being a device used only in fairy tales, such a splitting up of one person into two to keep the good image uncontaminated occurs to many children as a solution to a relationship too difficult to manage or comprehend.”

When Lewis wrote “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said” in 1956, he surely didn’t have this particular use of enchantment in mind. He would have hated Bettelheim’s Freudian analysis of the tales he loved so much. Nevertheless, in light of
The Uses of Enchantment,
it’s hard to ignore how well Calormen serves, unconsciously at least, as a way to “manage” all sorts of difficult relationships and situations. The evils of the British class system could be displaced onto a nation of swarthy foreigners while the romance and poetry of its chivalric past could be kept by the Narnians.

Narnia is an idealized reimagining of a society toward which Lewis felt a deep aesthetic and spiritual affinity, the world of medieval Britain. But Narnia’s government is feudalism without serfs (Narnia has no discernible agriculture), a place where the epitome of civic virtue is to mind your own business unless Narnia itself is being threatened. By making the hereditary kings of Narnia human beings who rule over animals and semihuman creatures, Lewis could preserve a hierarchy that seems perfectly natural. A mole or a dwarf doesn’t mind being relegated at birth to a life of digging the way a human being would, because, of course, they “don’t look on it as work. They like digging.” When the citizens are different species, it’s easier to see caste as merely a matter of “each kind of creature joyfully living out their natural attitudes.” This left Lewis free to savor the romance of Arthurian-style aristocracy without countenancing the kind of underclass (the human kind) that makes any aristocracy viable. No wonder, then, that the half-bred dwarf Doctor Cornelius admonishes Caspian that Narnia “is not the land of men.”

All this makes it tempting to call Lewis misanthropic, but he liked people well enough — as long as he believed they were a lot like him. He and his circle saw themselves as surrounded by a hostile world intent on destroying everything they valued. Perhaps this kept Lewis from recognizing that even as he condemned the pursuit of the “inner ring,” he was often hard at work constructing such rings and determining who would or would not be let in. Membership was based on a presumed uniformity of taste as well as a generally conservative outlook. “Authors whom he did not admire,” write Walter Hooper and Roger Lancelyn Green in their biography of Lewis, “such as James and Lawrence, he would dismiss as ‘not for us’ in conversation with literary friends.” There’s not much air between “not for us” and “not our kind,” the watch phrase of the snob and the bigot.