Laura Miller (25 page)

England is a good place for people of this inclination; few landscapes have been so continuously worked and shaped by human hands, and so it makes sense to see the natural world there as profoundly integrated with human affairs. Stories as well as trees are rooted in the earth of Britain, and every major landmark, it seems, is encrusted with tales and rumors. At Shotover Country Park, on the other side of the hill from the Kilns, I wandered over to a kiosk to pick up some photocopied leaflets from a box, expecting guides to the plants and animals around me. I wasn’t disappointed in that, but in addition to a map of the park and lists of notable trees, I also found a handout called “Myths and Legends on Shotover.”

The local tales attached to the hill feature an Oxford student who fended off a wild boar with a volume of Aristotle, a fugitive empress who disguised herself as a corpse, highway robbers, Robin Hood, and Oliver Cromwell. Few Britons would find the little leaflet in any way remarkable. But I stood puzzling over it, under a suitably damp blotting-paper sky, realizing that I’d just experienced one of those moments of unexpected cultural dissonance that pop up every so often between Americans and the British. There are many state parks where I grew up on the southwest coast of the United States, most of them much bigger than Shotover, and in none of them are visitors regaled with local “myths and legends.” The original inhabitants of western American parks, if any, were wiped out in the not so distant past, along with whatever stories they might have told about those places. No wonder England seemed almost as strange and magical to me as Narnia did when I was a child.

One of Shotover’s legends concerns a giant who lived in the forest and was said to be buried in the barrow that once stood on the top of the hill. (The barrow was destroyed by tank-testing operations during World War II.) When bored, the giant played marbles with the small boulders that can still be found scattered over a sandpit at the park’s center. Did Lewis know this story? It seems likely, given that he loved folktales, lived at the foot of Shotover for thirty years, and had regarded giants with a “queer fascination” since childhood.

It doesn’t seem too great a leap to conclude that the giants Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum encounter on the moors beyond the northern border of Narnia in
The Silver Chair
owe something to the Oxford giant. Lewis’s giants, idle and stupid, lean with their feet at the bottom of a river gorge, resting their elbows on the edge, “just as men might stand leaning on a wall — lazy men, on a fine morning after breakfast” (or men propped up against a bar in a pub presumably, though that wouldn’t have been a suitable comparison for a children’s book). The giants commence a game, throwing large stones at a nearby cairn. This makes a dangerous situation for the travelers; Puddleglum mutters that they would be a lot safer if the enormous dolts were actually trying to hit them.

Giant notwithstanding, Shotover Hill, full of picnicking families and strolling couples, is no vast and lonely moor like the one at Narnia’s northern frontier, and however pretty the celandines of Magdalen may be, they cannot persuade you that you are in a forest instead of the grounds of a stately institution. The little wood behind the Kilns (it has, with the addition of a parcel of land from a neighbor, been turned into the tiny C. S. Lewis Nature Reserve), is one of the few places I saw in Oxford that looks almost entirely Narnian. At its exact center, under a canopy of ash and lime trees, you can blot out the impression of the suburbs that lie all around and imagine you are in Narnia’s Lantern Waste, but take one step closer to the park’s edge, and that illusion will soon evaporate.

Much of Oxfordshire matches one storybook image of the English countryside: velvety green fields trimmed with a fat braid of hedgerow and the occasional puff of trees. The hills are low, easy, upholstered. Nothing could be gentler or more curvaceous. Near the Thames River footpath, the route Lewis and his friends would take from Oxford to a riverside pub called the Trout, cows and canal boats move drowsily. The land is flat and prosperous. Although I can see a certain resemblance to Tolkien’s Shire, this region is nothing like Narnia, since Narnia, as any reader of the Chronicles can attest, is
wild.

Everyone imagines that Narnia looks like England, but England lost its forests hundreds of years ago, and when Lucy, Peter, and Susan first arrive at Aslan’s How in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
they find themselves on a hill looking out over “a forest spreading as far as one could see in every direction.” This, I realized only after reading it for what must have been the thirtieth time, was a fact I had never entirely absorbed before. When I conjure up a mental picture of Narnia, I see something like a park, rolling turf broken by a few rocks and pleasantly scattered trees. Neither farmland nor woods, my Narnia falls somewhere in between — not cultivated, exactly, but not the forest primeval, either.

During my travels in England, the closest approximation to this mental image I found wasn’t in Oxford at all. It was a view of the park at Chatsworth, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire in the Peak District of Derbyshire, where I had stopped off to visit Susanna Clarke and her partner, Colin Greenland, on my way to Ireland. Susanna had also loved Narnia as a girl, and I wanted to talk with her about how it might have influenced her own work, particularly her witty, opulent fantasy novel,
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,
set in early nineteenth-century England.

Driving back from the train station, Colin and Susanna suggested a stop at Chatsworth. We’d already begun talking eagerly about the Chronicles, and as we stood just behind the enormous seventeenth-century mansion and looked out over the grounds, I was startled to find that here, at last, the right balance between nature and culture had been struck. I asked Susanna if she agreed that Chatsworth’s park resembled Narnia.

“Yes, I think it does,” she replied. “In the same way that Narnia was an idealized view of the English countryside, this is, too. Of course, it’s man-made, you know.”

“What do you mean, man-made?”

“Well, for one thing, originally, you could see the village of Edensor from here.” She pointed to a notch between two slopes in the near distance. “One of the dukes had the entire village moved in the 1800s. To ‘improve the view.’ There was a famous eighteenth-century landscape architect called Capability Brown who had the river straightened and changed a lot of other things. Back then, they had an ideal landscape in mind. They got it from French landscape painters who were painting their idea of a
Greek
landscape, but of course they had that all wrong.”

“Actually, the word that springs to mind when I look at it is ‘Arcadia,’ and that was supposedly in ancient Greece, wasn’t it? But having been to Greece, I know now that it never could have been as lush as this. It’s much too dry there.”

“Right, it doesn’t look like this at all! With the eighteenth- century English ideal, what you want is a series of very gentle green hills with occasional stands of trees. Of course, Capability Brown would have rather that it be deer under the trees instead of those cows over there.”

“So, right now, we’re admiring a landscape that’s been overhauled to look like paintings from another country that were meant to depict still another country that doesn’t remotely resemble them. And what you and I are both reminded of by all this is a
fictional
country. But, tell me, do you remember that Lewis describes Narnia as almost entirely forested?”

“Does he? That’s not how I imagined it.”

“I didn’t either, but it’s true. Chatsworth might look like Narnia to us, but it doesn’t match the descriptions in the books, so add that to the general confusion.”

Eventually, Susanna and I determined that our picture of Narnia had come as much from Pauline Baynes, the illustrator of all seven Chronicles, as it had from Lewis. It is Baynes’s Narnia we saw in Chatsworth, the low hills carpeted with green grass and studded with oaks and pine, laid out under the hooves of Fledge, the winged horse on the cover of
The Magician’s Nephew.
Lewis’s landscape descriptions bewitched me as a child, but I grew up in a desert, and for images of much that he describes — snow, heather, even a genuine spring — I had to rely on Baynes. Her illustrations showed me how Narnia looked, and it looked like no place I’d ever been to myself.

As a child, it would never have occurred to me that the illustrations for any book could be at odds with the text. To me, the words and pictures were inextricable, each as true in its own way as the other, so I never noticed the discrepancies between Baynes’s Narnia and Lewis’s. In my mind, I suspect, the pictures almost always won out. (Susanna, however, maintains that from an early age she had serious reservations about Caspian’s “stupid-looking” haircut in
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:
proof, for her at least, that Baynes’s illustrations were not infallible.)

Baynes’s style, with its flattened perspective and fine decorative patterns of branches, vines, flowers, and leaves, is meant to recall medieval illuminated manuscripts and tapestries. Plants get as much of her attention as animals and people. In the little exterior spot illustrations in particular, she defines the edges of the drawing using lines (often tree trunks or vines) curving outward like parentheses, balanced by figures that stand in exaggerated contrapposto, so that everything in the picture appears to be dancing or swaying in place. The characters are almost always drawn in full figure, often from a distance and placed so as to set off the landscape, as when the Pevensies appear as little details in the corner of a drawing of the island at the beginning of
Prince Caspian.
Baynes’s illustrations are merry, delicate, fluid, and droll, but also, like Narnia itself, a little elusive. We seldom feel as if we’re inside them.

Before working on
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
Baynes had done the drawings for a short book of Tolkien’s called
Farmer Giles of Ham,
much to that author’s delight. Lewis, however, claimed that he’d first discovered her work not through his friend, but by walking into an Oxford bookstore and asking the clerk to recommend someone who could produce good pictures of children and animals. As it turned out, he was rarely satisfied with her renderings of either. Baynes had yet to turn thirty when she began illustrating the Chronicles, and although she always spoke respectfully of Lewis, she was more tactful than honest when she described him as offering “no remarks or criticism” except when prompted.

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.