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

reference, in a letter to his father, of suffering from “nightmares — or rather the same nightmare over and over again. Nearly every one has it.” In 1925, again writing to his father, he recounts a walk with Warnie, during which they overheard a battery practicing nearby, the first gunfire he’d heard since returning from France. His own response startled him: “It seemed much louder and more sinister and generally unpleasant than I had expected.” Later still, he would gratefully note “the stamp of the war” on Hugo Dyson, a new friend, and in one of his few surviving letters to Tolkien, he praises
The Lord of the Rings
for capturing “so much of our joint life, so much of the war,” which otherwise seemed to be slipping out of immediate memory.
    The lives Lewis and Tolkien led might appear sheltered at first glance, but in this respect they endured more than almost anyone in my own circle ever will; middle-class American intellectuals in recent years have seldom gone to war. Tolkien, in a preface to
The Lord of the Rings,
wrote that by 1918, when he turned twenty-six, all but one of his closest friends had been killed. The formative trials of his youth, and Lewis’s, the almost incommunicable agonies of the trenches, have become increasingly alien to their readers, who are gradually losing even the ability to understand that they don’t understand them. All the same, although I was only a little girl who knew nothing of real violence, I recognized the ring of truth in Peter’s battle with the wolf in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:
    All this happened too quickly for Peter to think at all — he had just time to duck down and plunge his sword, as hard as he could, between the brute’s forelegs into its heart. Then came a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare. He was tugging and pulling and the Wolf seemed to be neither alive nor dead, and its bared teeth knocked against his forehead, and everything was blood and heat and hair. A moment later he found that the monster lay dead and he had drawn his sword out of it and was straightening his back and rubbing the sweat off his face and out of his eyes. He felt tired all over.
    Aslan knights Peter after this messy victory (admonishing him, “Never forget to wipe your sword” — more practical advice!) and gives him the nickname Wolf’s-Bane. Peter has not only rescued Susan from the wolf; he has entered a heroic narrative and acquired a title. Lewis dreaded war (especially as his brother became a career officer in the Royal Army Service Corps and was recalled to active duty during World War II), but the literature he studied showed it to be a continuing fact of human existence. He firmly believed that sometimes war was necessary. Religion explains why — sometimes we must be willing to sacrifice ourselves for a greater good — but stories show us
how.
Stories are what make heroes. You can only become a hero by participating in a story, and stories bestow meaning on what might otherwise look like raw suffering and waste.
    This, of course, is not always a virtue. You can get people to do a lot of difficult, unpleasant, and dangerous things by convincing them that someday a golden story will be spun out of the straw of their mortal lives. Many of these things are not worth doing, and not all Christians agree with Lewis’s views on war. But war is not the only enterprise that requires courage, energy, and will. Another is the perilous adventure of growing up.

Chapter Five
    Something Wicked This Way Comes
    A t age seven, I believed that I knew sermonizing when I saw it, and I loathed no book more on this count than
Elsie Dinsmore.
Martha Finley’s 1867 novel had been pressed on me by my grandmother, who, incredibly, claimed to have enjoyed it in her youth. The title character is a weepy Goody Two-shoes, mistreated by her stepmother yet responding with an unflagging, inhuman sweetness and docility that the reader is obviously meant to