Commentary: The Wardrobe Wars

posted 7/01/1998

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Wardrobe closed. Case dismissed.

Has my alma mater been impressed by this impeccable brand of literary fundamentalism? Apparently not. According to one Wheaton brochure, theirs is the "wardrobe from which Lewis drew inspiration for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Old claims never die. They just grow more specific with time.

I was back at Wheaton for a conference just a couple of years ago. During a period of announcements, a curator from the Wade Collection invited the conference participants to visit the collection and see the many books and papers that had belonged to Lewis and his associates. At the end of her announcement, she told us, "We also have the wardrobe that served as the original for the one in the Narnia Chronicles."

There it was, that definite article again. In a remarkable display of maturity I put up my hand and said, "Excuse me, but the wardrobe is at Westmont College in Santa Barbara."

The woman gave me a long, hard look of the "we are not amused" variety. That was all. I wasn't able to find her after the session was over to clear things up.

Not that we could have, really. Of course, if pressed, I suspect we would both admit the wardrobe we are really concerned with exists only within the covers of a book, and that not even this wardrobe is so important as the story of which it is a part, and that the story is not so important as the sense of infinite longing that it stirs within our souls, and that this longing is not so important as the One—more real than Aslan himself—to whom it directs us. But that would be asking too much of either the curator or myself. To worship at our respective wardrobes, whether they be in Jerusalem or Samaria, is indeed to live in the shadowlands. And that is where we like it.

Lewis himself would doubtless say that the physical wardrobes in our possession are but copies of a faint copy. He might even claim, to our horror, that no single wardrobe inspired the one found in his book. Then he might add under his breath, like the professor in The Last Battle who has passed on to the next life, "It's all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!"

The reason that the Westmont wardrobe remained at the Kilns long after the auction of other furniture was that it could not fit out the doorway of Joy Davidman's bedroom. The hallway had been made smaller in the forties—and remember, it is a large wardrobe. The new owner of the house apparently cared little for Lewis and was prepared to destroy the wardrobe to make room for an American-style built-in closet. Walter Hooper, who has long served as Lewis's literary executor, reportedly thought it a great pity that the last remaining piece of furniture from C. S. Lewis's house should in all likelihood end up as firewood. That is when a group of Westmont students and faculty bought the wardrobe for next to nothing, had it dismantled, shipped it in pieces to Santa Barbara, and reassembled it carefully near the fireplace in Reynolds Hall.

But I have a little fantasy, thanks perhaps to Walter Hooper, about our wardrobe's proper end. Late some rainy California winter evening, long after my colleagues have returned to their homes and the students have slogged back up the hill to the residence halls, I will let myself back into the building, lock the doors, raise an ax high over my head, and with dolorous strokes split the wardrobe into kindling. Then I will stack the broken wood high in the old fireplace and start myself a cheerful blaze. By the light of this fire I will settle into a wingback chair, open a tattered book that was the first book to open me, and read far into the night.

Paul Willis is a novelist and poet; he teaches literature at Westmont College.

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