Finally, and probably related to these two earlier points, there are strong indications in his correspondence that Lewis believed his moment as an apologist had passed, and it was time to make room for younger voices. Two slightly different themes can be discerned: first, Lewis’s feeling that new issues had arisen, which he was not best placed to engage; and second, Lewis’s growing conviction that he had peaked in his abilities as an apologist. Declining Robert Walton’s invitation to take part in a BBC discussion on the evidence for religious faith, Lewis commented that “like the old fangless snake in The Jungle Book, I’ve largely lost my dialectical power.”554
There is no doubt that Anscombe helped Lewis to reach this conclusion. On 12 June 1950, Stella Aldwinckle wrote to Lewis in her capacity as secretary of the Socratic Club, reminding him that they needed to plan the programme for Michaelmas Term 1950. Lewis made a list of rising stars as possible speakers: Austin Farrer on the historical value of the New Testament; Basil Mitchell on faith and experience; and Elizabeth Anscombe on “Why I believe in God.” Lewis made it clear that Anscombe was his top pick: “Having obliterated me as an Apologist, ought she not to succeed me?”555
Lewis seems to have seen his move to Cambridge in January 1955 as marking a fresh start. It is striking how few of his writings of this later period of his life deal specifically with apologetic themes, if understood in terms of the explicit rational defence of the Christian faith. In a letter of September 1955, declining the invitation of the American evangelical leader Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003) to write some apologetic pieces, Lewis explained that while he had done what he could “in the way of frontal attacks,” he now felt “quite sure” those days were over. He now preferred more indirect approaches to apologetics, such as those which appealed to “fiction and symbol.”556
These remarks to Carl Henry—one of the most significant figures in the history of postwar American evangelicalism—are clearly relevant to the creation of Narnia. Many would see this comment about “fiction and symbol” as a reference to his Chronicles of Narnia, which can easily be categorised as works of narrative or imaginative apologetics, representing a move away from the more deductive or inductive argumentative approaches of his wartime broadcast talks. If Anscombe raised doubts in Lewis’s mind about his apologetic approach, these concerned its medium, rather than its content. Lewis might have lost his “dialectical power”; but what about its imaginative counterpart?
We can rightly see Narnia as the imaginative outworking of the core philosophical and theological ideas Lewis had been developing since the mid-1930s, expressed in a narrative rather than a rational manner. The Narnia novels express in the form of a story the same philosophical and theological arguments advanced in Miracles. Fiction becomes the means of allowing readers to see—more than that, to enjoy—the vision of reality Lewis had already set out in his more apologetic works.
We must now tell the story of how Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, and try to understand why they have captivated the imagination of a generation.
CHAPTER 11
Rearranging Reality: The Creation of Narnia
In 2008 the London publishers HarperCollins invited Diane Simpson, a professional graphologist, to examine some specimens of the handwriting of C. S. Lewis. Simpson had no idea whom she was investigating. She found the “small, neat script” suggestive of someone who was “guarded and careful,” with sharp critical faculties. Simpson also noticed something else. “I wonder whether he has a garden shed of sorts (or some other sort of world) in which to disappear when he chooses.”557 Simpson was absolutely right. Lewis did indeed have “some other sort of world” into which he would disappear—an imagined world we now know as Narnia.
Let us pause at this point. Narnia is an imaginative, not an imaginary, world. Lewis was quite clear that a distinction had to be drawn between these ideas. The “imaginary” is something that has been falsely imagined, having no counterpart in reality. Lewis regards such an invented reality as opening the way to delusion. The “imaginative” is something produced by the human mind as it tries to respond to something greater than itself, struggling to find images adequate to the reality. The more imaginative a mythology, the greater its ability to “communicate more Reality to us.”558 For Lewis, the imaginative is to be seen as a legitimate and positive use of the human imagination, challenging the limits of reason and opening the door to a deeper apprehension of reality.
So how did Lewis invent this imaginative world? And why? Was it a retreat into the security of his childhood at a time of personal and professional stress? Was Lewis like Peter Pan, an emotionally retarded boy who never really grew up, and Narnia his version of “Never Never Land”? There may be a grain of truth in these suggestions. As we have already seen, Lewis turned to writing when he was stressed, finding relief in the exercise. Yet there is clearly another factor in play here: Lewis’s growing realisation that children’s stories offered him a marvellous way of exploring philosophical and theological questions—such as the origins of evil, the nature of faith, and the human desire for God. A good story could weave these themes together, using the imagination as the gateway to serious thinking.
The origins of the Narnia stories lay, Lewis tells us, in his imagination. It all began with an image of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels through a snowy wood. Lewis’s celebrated description of the creative process depicts it as unfolding from mental images, which were then consciously connected to form a consistent plot. There are obvious and important parallels with the origins of Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit. In a letter to W. H. Auden (1907–1973), Tolkien recalled being bored to death during the early 1930s marking school certificate exam papers (he needed the extra money), when for some inexplicable reason, an idea came into his head. “On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why.”559
Yet Lewis did not really see himself as “creating” Narnia. As he once commented, “creation” is “an entirely misleading term.” Lewis preferred to think of human thought as “God-kindled,”560 and the writing process as the rearrangement of elements that God has provided. The writer takes “things that lie to hand,” and puts them to new use. Like someone who plants a garden, the author is only one aspect of a “causal stream.”561 As we shall see, Lewis drew extensively on “elements” he found in literature. His skill lay not in inventing these elements, but in the manner he wove them together to create the literary landmark that we know as the Chronicles of Narnia.
11.1 Mr. Tumnus, a faun, carrying an umbrella and parcels through a snowy wood, accompanied by Lucy. This is one of the best-known images provided by Pauline Baynes for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The Origins of Narnia
“I’m going to write a children’s book!” Mrs. Moore and Maureen greeted Lewis’s unexpected announcement one morning over breakfast, probably around the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939,562 with good-natured derision.563 Not only did Lewis have no children of his own; he had virtually no contact with any children other than sporadic meetings with his godchildren. Their laughter soon died down, but Lewis’s idea did not fade away. Narnia was taking shape in his mind, as ideas and images going back to his childhood began to crystallise.
The composition of the series was generally fluid and easy. Despite Lewis’s mounting personal and professional problems, he was able to write five of the seven novels between the summer of 1948 and the spring of 1951. A fallow period then followed, before Lewis began writing The Last Battle in the autumn of 1952, finishing it the following spring. The final volume to be completed was The Magician’s Nephew, which Lewis clearly found more problematic than other works in the series. Although Lewis began drafting this work shortly after he finished the text of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he did not complete it until March 1954.
Some would see this ease of composition as a mark of Lewis’s creative genius. Others—most notably, J. R. R. Tolkien—rega
rded the speed with which they were written as an indication of their shallowness. They lacked a strong and consistent backstory, and were mythological cross-breeds, lacking a sense of coherence. Why, Tolkien wondered, introduce Father Christmas into the story? He didn’t really belong there. Harbouring darker thoughts, Tolkien also suspected that Lewis had borrowed some of his own ideas and had woven them into the Narnia Chronicles without due acknowledgement.
It is easy to understand Tolkien’s concerns. Yet it must be pointed out that recent Lewis scholarship has identified a deeper coherence to the Narnia stories, linked with Lewis’s subtle—indeed, one might say cryptic—use of medieval symbolism. We shall consider this point in the following chapter.
So where did the name Narnia come from? While studying classics under William Thompson Kirkpatrick at Great Bookham, between 1914 and 1917, Lewis acquired a copy of an atlas of the classical world, published in 1904. On one of its maps, Lewis underscored the name of an ancient Italian town because he liked the sound of its name.564 The town was Narnia—now the modern Italian town of Narni in Umbria, located roughly in the centre of Italy. (Lewis never visited it.) One of the most famous inhabitants of Narni was Lucia Brocadelli (1476–1544), a renowned visionary and mystic who became its patron saint. Yet no particular significance can be attached to these facts as they relate to real history of Narnia, or its cultural role in the late classical or early medieval periods—or even the importance of this Lucy to this Narnia. It seems Lewis simply liked the sound of the Latin name, and it became fixed in his memory—despite the fact that it designated a city, not a region or land.
The discovery of Narnia has become one of the best-known scenes in children’s literature. Four children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—are evacuated from London during the Second World War to escape the bombing of England’s capital city.565 Separated from their family, they are taken to an old house in the country, owned and occupied by a genial, well-meaning, yet slightly eccentric professor (whom many regard as a thinly disguised version of Lewis himself). Prevented from exploring the outside world by heavy rain, the children decide to explore the book-strewn corridors and rooms inside the house instead. (There is a clear parallel here with Lewis’s long-term fascination with the distinction between the “exterior world” and the “interior world.”) Finally, they stumble into a “room that was quite empty except for one big wardrobe.”566
Lucy, entering the wardrobe, finds herself in a cold, snowy land—a world in which it is “always winter and never Christmas.” In her encounters with its inhabitants—primarily with fauns and beavers—Lucy learns a story about Narnia: the true king of Narnia is a great lion named Aslan, who has been absent for many years but is now “on the move again.” Her brother Edmund hears a very different story from the White Witch, who presents herself as the true and lawful ruler of Narnia.
At one level, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is about the testing of these characters and their stories about Narnia. Who is to be trusted? Which story about Narnia is to be believed? To make the right judgements about what they should do, the children need to discover and trust the true master narrative of the mysterious world into which they have stumbled, and within which they seem destined to play a significant role.
11.2 The four children discover the mysterious wardrobe in an empty room in the Professor’s house. An illustration by Pauline Baynes from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The contrast with some earlier children’s stories is quite striking. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), for example, Dorothy is told which witches are wicked, and which are good. In Narnia, characters do not wear name tags declaring their moral character. The children (and readers) have to work these things out for themselves. The characters they encounter are complex and multifaceted. Their true moral character has to be discovered.
The Chronicles of Narnia illuminate how human beings understand themselves, face up to their weaknesses, and try to become the people they are meant to be. They are about a quest for meaning and virtue, not simply the quest for explanation and understanding. That is perhaps one reason why the Chronicles of Narnia have proved to have such a powerful appeal: they speak of choices to be made, of right and wrong, and of challenges that must be faced. Yet this vision of goodness and greatness is not set forth as a logical or reasoned argument, but is affirmed and explored through the telling of a story—a story that captures the imagination.
Through the influence of Charles Williams in the early 1940s, Lewis discovered the power of the imagination to make readers long for moral goodness. It was Williams, he declared, who taught him that “when the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted.”567 The key to moral improvement is thus the captivation of the imagination through powerful stories telling of “brave knights and heroic courage.”568 Such stories inspire and ennoble, making us yearn to do the same in our own worlds.
The Threshold: A Key Narnian Theme
A central theme in the Chronicles of Narnia is that of a door into another world—a threshold that can be crossed, allowing us to enter a wonderful new realm and explore it. There are obvious religious overtones to the idea, which Lewis discussed in earlier works, such as the 1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory.” For Lewis, human experience suggests that there is another and more wonderful world, in which our true destiny lies—but that we are at present on the “wrong side” of the door that leads into this world.
The idea of a threshold to strange worlds is a familiar theme in children’s literature, past and present. Today’s readers are likely to think of J. K. Rowling’s “Platform 9¾” at King’s Cross Station in London. Readers of an earlier age—including Lewis himself—would think of the children’s stories of E. Nesbit (1858–1924), now remembered for her classic Edwardian novels The Railway Children (1906) and The Enchanted Castle (1907).
Lewis had read several of Nesbit’s works with great appreciation as a child, and recalled particularly being entranced by Nesbit’s trilogy Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906). Lewis singled out the last of these as being of especial importance to him, and notes that he could still “reread it with delight.”569 All three stories centre on a family group of five children who have to leave home for various reasons, and discover exciting new things in the company of strange and wonderful people and creatures. It is through being distanced from their familiar context that the children encounter new and mysterious worlds and ideas—a theme that recurs in the Narnia novels.
One of Nesbit’s central themes is that there is a link or bridge between two worlds, which the wise are able to find and traverse. Like George MacDonald (1824–1905) before her, Nesbit wrote about a mysterious threshold between the ordinary and the magical, between the everyday world and an enchanted realm. As she explained this idea in The Enchanted Castle:
There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs for ever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets, and the like, almost anything may happen.570
Lewis’s debt to Nesbit goes beyond the idea of a general threshold to strange worlds. In her collection of stories The Magic World (1912), we find a series of plotlines which bear an uncanny resemblance to those found in Narnia. In “The Aunt and Amabel,” we read of Amabel, a young girl who unintentionally wrecks her aunt’s flowerbed, and is sent upstairs to a bedroom as punishment. There she finds a bed, a large wardrobe, and a railway timetable. The wardrobe turns out to contain a secret railway station, which can transport her to other worlds.571
The theme of crossing thresholds plays an important imaginative role in the Narnia series. It allows the reader to enter a strange world, which is explored through the actions and adventures of the chief characters. This process is signi
ficantly helped through the illustrations of Pauline Baynes (1922–2008), who had earlier provided the artwork for Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham (1949). Baynes produced a series of line illustrations that seemed to Tolkien to capture the essence of his text perfectly. He wrote with delight to his publishers, declaring that they were even better than he had dared to hope. “They are more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme.” For Tolkien, the illustrations were so good that his friends considered that they reduced his text “to a commentary on the drawings.”572 So began a long and mutually respectful relationship between author and illustrator. There is little wonder that Tolkien should recommend her to Lewis when his publisher insisted on illustrations for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
In the end, Baynes’s relationship with Lewis turned out to be rather formal and distant. They appear to have met only twice. One of these two meetings was a highly perfunctory and brief discussion at London’s Waterloo Station, during which Lewis frequently consulted his watch, anxious not to miss his train. (Her diary entry for that day was rumoured to read: “Met C. S. Lewis. Came home. Made rock cakes.”) It was not an easy relationship, particularly when Baynes learned that Lewis, having been very positive about her illustrations to her face, was somewhat more critical of her artistic gifts behind her back—especially her ability to draw lions.
Lewis seems to have made a significant misjudgement here, failing to realise how Baynes’s illustrations would help his readers visualise Narnia, and especially the noble and magisterial Aslan. Wouldn’t Lewis’s childhood experience of coming to love Wagner through Arthur Rackham’s illustrations (pages 28–29) have made him alert to the importance of illustrations in helping captivate the imagination? Yet apparently without realising it, Lewis had found the perfect visualisation of his imaginative world—perhaps most evocatively depicted in the drawing of a little girl walking arm in arm with a faun beneath an umbrella in a snowy wood.
C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 28
