Walking to Martha’s Vineyard:Poems
by Franz Wright  Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003

Taking the Christianity out of Narnia may seem nearly blasphemous to Lewisites, but in reality it is, more than anything else, unnecessary. Granted, Lewis’s religious beliefs are more clearly on display than Tolkien’s are in The Lord of the Rings (which is actually rooted in a deeply Catholic view of the world, as Tolkien himself explained in his masterful essay “On Fairy-Stories,” which describes all such tales as re-capitulating the “eucatastrophe” of fall and redemption). But except for a few key moments, such as the death and rebirth of Aslan, the debate on the existence of a better world than the one before our eyes in The Silver Chair, and of course much of The Last Battle, the chronicles can easily be read as ethical, heroic, and magical, especially by readers not already steeped in a Christian tradition. It is ironic that this discussion is taking place even as Harry Potter is castigated by many Christians for promoting witchcraft. There is far more paganism in Lewis than in J.K. Rowling, despite the overarching Christian ethos that lies behind everything about Narnia.

The two matters that strike me as most incongruous about this situation are that anyone would think the story of Narnia can be picked up and carried on by some other writer, and that anyone could so misunderstand Lewis’s vision as to want to try. Like his colleague Tolkien, Lewis wrote his fiction out of a mind so steeped in literature, languages, history, mythology, and life experience, that no freelance word processor could possibly capture anything like the original in tone or richness of texture. (One of the eulogists at Lewis’s memorial described him as “the best-read man any of us is ever likely to meet,” a claim which probably becomes truer as the digital world grows older.) Aslan’s singing the creation of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew, for example, is not only the divine Word bringing all things into being, but a direct borrowing from Roman literature. Many readers know that Aslan is the Turkish word for lion (and what does that have to do with Christianity?), but only the insatiable Lewisite will know that Puddleglum the Marshwiggle in The Silver Chair gets his name from a passage in Gavin Douglas’s 1513 translation of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas descends to Avernus “through Stygian puddle glum.” Narnia is not the Hardy Boys or Goosebumps, an endless series of formulaic tales, but the product of “a mind awake,” as one of his friends described Lewis; a distinctively gifted writer whose voice and vision are quite literally inimitable.

More important, while writing these stories, Lewis had thought through the theological implications of other worlds for the believer in the Incarnation in several essays, including one called “Religion and Rocketry.” There he weighed the possibility of further creations in our universe, and concluded that these would pose a challenge to Christianity only if the ethical beings in those creations had indeed fallen (as they do not in his Perelandra or Out of the Silent Planet), and had not been redeemed , by whatever means redemption might take in their worlds. In other essays he even reasoned that there could be other creations outside this one, sharing nothing except their dependence on God, creations whose time would have no connection to ours, another essential idea for the Narnia series. Only one who had thought as deeply as Lewis about time and eternity, sin and redemption, incarnation and apocalypse, could have touched us as deeply as he did; who can imagine another such writer today?

Finally, anyone who did share Lewis’s erudition and world view would be fully aware that it is the nature of the Narnia books to be complete and whole, unsusceptible of continuation. Indeed he would have described the desire to extend the experience of the stories as quite probably sinful – a word his modern publishers would find either offensive or incomprehensible. After all, his hero Ransom (there’s Christianity for you) in Perelandra, “had always disliked the people who encored a favorite air in the opera – ‘That just spoils it’ had been his comment. But this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backward…was it possibly the root of all evil?” Now that we have powers to repeat and reshape experiences in exactly the way Lewis wryly described, it is all the more important that we preserve some sense of our own limitations before the movement of time -- videotape, instant replay, and MP3 notwithstanding. A rabbi friend has observed to me that the kosher dietary laws have their main value in reminding us that we are created beings who can never have everything we may desire. To remain satisfied with the books Lewis gave us would, in that sense, be an act of morality and humility. It would also help us understand the Christian view of time.

As many scholars and theologians have pointed out, it is the distinctive quality of Christianity to challenge both the cyclic view of time prevalent in many ancient cultures, and the evolutionary/entropic cosmologies of the modern world, providing in their stead an essentially linear view of the universe, from creation to parousia. As elsewhere, Lewis’s fictional account of the creation, fall, redemption, and ending of Narnia is bolstered by his theological reflections. In a number of essays, such as “The Funeral of a Great Myth” and “The World’s Last Night,” he reiterated his faith in one Story above all – that our world had a beginning and will have an end, and that those terminuses did and will happen according to a divine timetable, not a human one discernible by astrophysicists or numerologists.

Lewis told the Narnia story, then, from beginning to end, just as Milton did that of the Fall in Paradise Lost, and Bunyan of life’s journey in Pilgrim’s Progress. Narnia’s revels are indeed ended, and its characters have nowhere else to go except “higher up and farther in,” a story even Dante could not do justice in the Paradiso. Lewis himself closed the door on all sequels, perhaps foreseeing the folly that a new century might propose, in the closing words of The Last Battle: “the things that happened after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

Their book functions on many levels. On the one hand, they provide us with a picture of “monasticism with a human face,” describing their own journeys as individuals and as a community, and drawing on the wisdom of monastic thinking from earliest until recent times. But they also give guidance for all who seek spiritual meaning in their lives, whatever their chosen vocation. Only one group is warned off from the beginning: “If you are looking to reinforce the status quo of a satisfied life, then this book will surely disappoint you.”

Yet it will equally disappoint those seeking a “technique” (one of their least favorite words) for spiritual enlightenment, as well as those expecting an austere, other-worldly prescription. As their title suggests, the monks are convinced of Creation’s inherent goodness. They assert near their their conclusion, “don’t doubt for a second…that if we’re not happy in this world, which is where heaven begins, then hell begins here.”

If their viewpoint can be distilled, at least for the purposes of a review, into a set of guidelines, these would include the following:
          • Happiness comes from doing what is good and right because it is good and right.
          • Happiness requires the “habit of change,” and not simply a single dramatic conversion experience, which often makes people “resistant to change, precisely because they think they have already changed.”
          • None of us can achieve spiritual maturity as isolated beings, “feed[ing] on spirituality for ourselves exclusively, dining at a table set for one.”
          • Asceticism is best exemplified by the development of the ability to “willingly discipline ourselves by giving our full attention to whatever is at hand and responding as the situation warrants.”

But the richness of their advice can no more be captured in this short space than the practice they have developed through years of attention can be caught in a weekend retreat. This is a book to be read, re-read, and brought into daily life; readers who do so will be richly rewarded.

Elie’s joint biography is a striking accomplishment for many reasons. For one, it successfully interweaves the lives of its four subjects over nearly a century, from Day’s birth in 1898 to Percy’s death in 1990. Though chronological, his approach is often thematic, and he allows us to see how each reacted to external events, from the Depression to the election of John F. Kennedy.

More important, Elie depicts both the physical and the mental worlds through which each of his pilgrims passed. He captures life in Day’s Catholic Worker homes in New York, and on O’Connor’s Georgia farm, and follows an almost Ignatian method of placing us physically in their milieus. At the same time, he explores the moral and spiritual development of each, from favorite writers to personal encounters.

As soon becomes apparent, the links between the four are more than casual. From travels in South America (Merton and Day), to life in New York (all four), to debilitating illness (Percy and O’Connor), the four shared many life experiences, most notably religious conversion in the cases of all but O’Connor. In addition, although only two are famed for their fiction, all four wrote novels and non-fiction, and all were avid readers, often of the same writers, from Dostoyevsky to Kierkegaard. And each admired the others’ work, though more often from a distance than through direct personal connection.

Finally, Elie’s understands both the spiritual and the literary life, and his distinctions, between the rebel Merton, the reformer Day, the seeker Percy, and the prodigy O’Connor, are persuasive and illuminating, as are his exegeses of their writing, both as literature and as testimony. And although his quartet are, as he puts it, “firmly embedded in posterity now,” and the world “appears distinctly different than it did to their eyes,” their own words and lives, and his words about their lives, will continue to speak, as each book that lives must, to individual readers for whose pilgrimage they will become personal guides.

Walking to Martha’s Vineyard: Poems
by Franz Wright  Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003.
Review by Richard Barbieri, Ph.D.

No contemporary poet has more fully realized, in life or in verse, this dichotomy than Franz Wright. Son of the late poet James Wright, Franz began his writing career at fifteen, and was greeted by his father with the prophetic words “You’re a poet. Welcome to Hell.”  Franz Wright’s hell was 30 years of mental illness and consequent substance abuse, ended in large part through his conversion to Catholicism.

The poetry which has arisen from that journey bears mention in the same breath as that of Herbert and Hopkins. Taut and aphoristic – Wright’s enthusiasm for the connections being made today between Christians and Buddhists shows in his verse – his best poems reach into the divine silence in the simplest words: "Proof/of Your existence? There is nothing/but." His faith is of a piece with his writing, for he has found that “always, being/a maker/reminds:/you were made.”

Faith, however, is not a refuge from the largest questions of living and dying. In one poem Wright echoes Job’s lament, averring “If they had stabbed me to death on the day that I was born, it would have been an act of mercy,” but he can also thank God “ for letting me live a little as one of the sane.” Like Donne he affirms “if You can make a star from nothing You can raise me up.” But he can also ask starkly:
          "How does one go
           about dying?
           Who on earth
           is going to teach me--
           The world
           is filled with people
           who have never died."
Most movingly, Wright has compassion for others in the dark night, knowing that
           “there are human beings for whom the sun
            is never going to shine
            is never going to rise again, ever, not
            really—
            not the real sun.”
To these souls he can say, from the depths of his experience,
            “in deep sleep sometimes even we get well.
             So you can believe me, in the far deeper
             sleep (these new apple leaves, maybe) we are all going
             to be perfectly all right.”

If there are others like Wright out there -- and more to come from him -- we can be sure that religious poetry in the new millennium, as in the previous three, will be all right.