@ink-splotch, I’m thoroughly impressed by this well-written short essay, because “The Problem of Susan” is another reason among several that turned me right off the Narnia books.
“Susan Pevensie“ was where Lewis aimed his bullet-with-a-name-on-it, but even at the age of twelve I had an uneasy feeling that the rest of the belt of ammo was for less direct delivery ”to whom it may concern”. Being “talked at” (the oblique version of being “talked to” or worse, “talked down to”) is a good old Northern Irish custom, one I’d already experienced often enough to recognise it in print as clearly as hearing it aloud.
Accurate interpretation or not, it felt like it was meant not just for the unnamed girls who were grown-up enough to get interested in wearing lipstick and nylons, but the unnamed boys who were grown-up enough to get interested in the girls who were doing that.
Like, for instance, me. I was grown-up enough to get interested when I was about twelve-into-thirteen, but not grown-up enough for several years more to do anything but daydream. You can call it letching if you like, but what I remember of those daydreams was that they were fairly innocent.
You have to remember that this was Northern Ireland in 1969-70, where The Troubles were just starting and the Swinging Sixties never happened. The joke “We are now landing at Aldergrove Airport, where the local time and year are both 19:55“ was too realistic to be funny.
I was growing up in that environment, and now I was being informed by one of the most highly thought-of locally born writers that appreciating more grown-up things was abandoning some sort of primal innocence. It was Wrong, I was Wrong, and I wouldn’t be allowed Nice Things even if all my other relatives got to have them. The feeling was a bit like going downstairs in the dark and finding you’ve miscounted. It’s a nasty jolt.
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” [C. S. Lewis]
I read fairy-tales when I was ten (earlier, too) and had already learned to call them “folklore.” I still read them now, and I still call them “folklore.” I was a bright but rather po-faced kid, and family photos where I’m smiling are unusual. Maybe I was trying to be grown-up and serious and sensible (my family wouldn’t believe that for a minute) or maybe I’d seen enough other photos to know what “grinning like an idiot” looked like, and wanted none of it.
However, condemning those who leap at all the new pleasures of becoming an adult - dressing up in clothes you get to pick yourself, going out to more than just parentally-supervised birthday parties, indulgence in things officially-unavailable-to-youngsters during that brief bright period before the appearance of other adult things like work and taxes, overdraft, rent or mortgage - is to manage the curious simultaneous feat of being annoyingly childish (Ew, cooties!) and tiresomely adult (Are you never going to grow up?)
C.S. Lewis was born in 1898, and died unreasonably young at only 64; he could have lived into the world of the 1990s, and what would he have made of that? Northern Ireland in his youth must have been even more stiflingly provincial than it was in mine. He had a long career as an academic at both Oxford and Cambridge (insert reference to ivy-covered cloisters or even ivory tower whether required or not) and as a writer.
That doesn’t mean he spent his entire life wrapped in scholarly cotton-wool, unaware of what “The Real World” was doing – he served in and survived the First World War, and had a complex relationship with the mother of an Army friend who didn’t survive, but he was a man of his time, place and mindset.
After nine novels of my own and a bunch more as collaborations, I’m in a good position to say that fictional characters do not constantly speak with their author’s voice. But sometimes, even if only by accident, they do, and letting that voice get into print can be as revealing as saying something aloud without considering the consequences.
On the last page of Chapter XII,”Through the Stable Door”, three of the Good People (Eustace, Jill and Polly) line up to take their shot at Susan, and then her own brother shrugs off the subject of his sister (!) with brutal brevity:
“Well, let’s not talk about that now,” said Peter. “Look! Here are lovely fruit-trees. Let us taste them.”
So they don’t “talk about that” now, and after a paragraph-long commercial for the fruit they’re eating, they don’t “talk about that” then either, because Peter’s dismissal of the matter is the last we ever hear about Susan in the Chronicles of Narnia.
It’s also where things get awkward for me. The usual interpretation (as in J.K. Rowling’s quote at the very top) is that Susan was “no longer a friend of Narnia” because she was “interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations.”
Translation from children’s-book speak: Susan is old enough to have discovered looking good, going to parties and probably meeting boys (hang on, didn’t she go through something similar in A Horse and His Boy, to the extent that there were princes from all over the place vying for her hand?) Lewis’s more direct accusation is that she lost her faith, dismissed “all those funny games we used to play as children,” became frivolous, an airhead, a flapper, a bobby-soxer, a ditz.
And then Lewis hits her with the rail crash that wipes out…
For me it was (and is) not what’s said but what’s left out. Diane’s 1972 Bodley Head hardcover of The Last Battle continues for another four chapters and forty-five pages, but in all those words Lewis doesn’t suggest, doesn’t even hint at, the possibility that Susan (and those like her) may be forgiven and redeemed.
Forgiveness and redemption are two core tenets of the faith he wrote so much about, yet for some reason he withheld both of them from a character in a children’s story who had been suddenly, massively bereaved.
Young readers of The Last Battle won’t be reading all the “what he really meant was…“ explanations that are in print and on the Net. They aren’t a part of the book. All they know is that the Good People have given reasons three times (sound familiar?) why Susan won’t get to Narnia and be reunited with the rest of her family.
When the truth is revealed…
"There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are - as you used to call it in the Shadowlands - dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
…there’s no grief for a teenage girl left alone to identify the mangled corpses of her entire family, and certainly no expression of hope that with repentance and a change of heart - or even just an iota of supposedly-infinite divine mercy - she will find her way back.
Lewis may indeed have afterthought he’d dropped the narrative ball on this one, though he didn’t have enough balls to request that Bodley Head let him add a couple of enhancements to a revised edition of the book (which they’d have done without a second thought for such a popular and famous author). Certainly one reply to a concerned young fan is quoted in Letters to Children, 22 Jan 1957 (p.67 of Diane’s Collins 1985 edition). I’d be very surprised if the fan-letter prompting his response was the only one he received on the subject.
Whatever concern was in the fan’s own letter isn’t quoted, but “books” not “book” makes me wonder if Martin, the boy who wrote the letter, had gone through the entire Narnia Chronicles looking for a clue that Susan might somehow share the happy ending…
“Dear Martin - The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end — in her own way. I think that whatever she had seen in Narnia she could (if she were the sort that wanted to) persuade herself, as she grew up, that it was ‘all nonsense.’”
Like the post-”Harry Potter” series revelation of Dumbledore’s sexuality, Lewis’s “plenty of time to mend” (!) hint of potential salvation isn’t in Officially Published Material, and wasn’t added during any reprints or new editions. So Susan’s chance of redemption is non-canonical and not part of the Official Story. Lewis’s afterthoughts and apologia outside that environment, though voiced by the author, do not change what is said in-story.
So far as its narrative tells us when The Last Battle is closed and back on the bookshelf, Susan “no longer a friend of Narnia” has been cast into Outer Darkness, she’s meat for Screwtape, and there was no hint in-story of any reprieve, no Comfortable Words from any character, not from Aslan, not from the Good People, not even from Lewis as narrator, to suggest her situation can or ever will change.
As a boy who once went fairly willingly to morning and afternoon Sunday School, but was still more of an age to read Narnia books than any heavyweight theological stuff, that troubled me.
50 years later, it still does.
