C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  In 1947, for example, he published in Punch, anonymously, a poem called ‘The Late Passenger’. It is one of his finest, written in a sub-Chestertonian manner. Not only does it have an ingenious and pleasing metre, but the point of the poem is buried in its myth. It is a good example of what he wrote to a fellow-poet, Kathleen Raine: ‘What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something but reality is about which truth is) and therefore every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.’17 The Late Passenger is an animal who canters up and is too late to get into Noah’s Ark. Ham, the idle son of Noah, cannot be bothered to unlock the door of the Ark to let in this creature; in any case, the Ark is already full. But Noah, seeing it turn away in flight, addresses it:

  Oh noble and unmated beast, my sons were all unkind:

  In such a night what stable and what manger will you find?

  Oh golden hoofs, oh cataracts of mane, oh nostrils wide

  With indignation! Oh neck wave-arched, the lovely pride!

  Oh long shall be the furrows ploughed across the hearts of men

  Before it comes to stable and to manger once again.

  The creature, of course, is the Unicorn, a mythological beast always associated in medieval bestiaries and heraldry with Christ Himself. His rejection from the Ark is ‘myth’ on just the level Lewis expounded to Kathleen Raine, a story to set forth the reality that Christ came to His own, and His own received Him not. Surprisingly, Roger Lancelyn Green, a rich man who had cultivated Lewis ever since he had heard his lectures before the war and was now by way of being a friend, wrote to congratulate Lewis on having written a comic poem. Presumably the confusion arose in Green’s mind because the poem appeared in Punch, a supposedly comic paper (then under the editorship of Malcolm Muggeridge). Lewis was obliged to write back and correct him.

  Green’s chief area of literary interest was children’s literature, and he was himself the author of several charming stories for children. In the biography of Lewis that he later wrote with Walter Hooper, he has left a slightly confused account of the chronology of the Narnia stories, and it may well be the case that no one knows exactly when they were written.18 The first of them, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was begun at the end of 1939 but not resumed and finished until 1948 or 1949. We know it was complete then, in more or less the form we have it today, because he read it to Green in March 1949. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was finished by February 1950; The Horse and His Boy seems to have been written by the middle of 1950. Lewis once told Jill Freud that he had written all the children’s stories in the space of a single year. This must have been an exaggeration, but it was not necessarily much of one. By March 1953, Lewis had told his publisher that he had finished the seventh story in the series, The Last Battle. The books were published at more or less annual intervals throughout the 1950s, and they remain hugely popular with the reading public today. Now a whole generation has grown up of people who read the Narnia stories in childhood, and have passed on the secret to their own children in turn. Whatever Lewis’s future reputation as a theologian or literary critic, he is certain of a place among the classic authors of children’s books, together with his own favourites, E. Nesbit, Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame.

  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe grew out of Lewis’s experience of being stung back into childhood by his defeat at the hands of Elizabeth Anscombe at the Socratic Club. It tells the story of how four children, staying with an old professor in the heart of the country, find a wardrobe in a remote part of his house which leads to another world, a world called Narnia. To write an outline of the story, which turns out to be the redemption of Narnia by a great lion called Aslan, who gives himself up for the sins of the children and rises again from the dead, would be to present as an ‘idea’ – what Lewis himself would have called ‘a truth about something’ – a story which is felt, in reading, to be reality itself. This story is delightful, a wholly absorbing narrative in its own right. It is as though Lewis, in all his tiredness and despondency in the late 1940s, has managed to get through the wardrobe door himself; to leave behind the world of squabbles and grown-ups and to re-enter the world which with the deepest part of himself he never left, that of childhood reading. In a very few pages, there is a rich concentration of all that he has most intensely felt and enjoyed as a reader – the talking animals of his own early stories, the fauna of classical mythology, the cold Wagnerian gusts of Northernness brought by the witch, the drama of religious confrontation, when the children witness ‘deeper magic from before the dawn of time’. They are E. Nesbit children; they ‘jaw’ rather than talk; they say ‘by gum!’ and ‘Crikey!’ They seem no more to belong to the mid or late twentieth century than Lewis did himself. But generations of children can now testify to the irresistible readability of the Narnia stories. This must derive – at the risk of voicing once more the ‘personal heresy’ – from the fact that Lewis wrote them for the child who was within himself. It is not whimsical to say that Narnia is the inside of Lewis’s mind, peopled with a rich enjoyment of old books and old stories and the beauties of nature, but always threatened by a terrible sense of loss, of love’s frailty. Its method, of a heterodox absorption of so many different influences into one Christian allegory – MacDonald, Malory, Nesbit, Ovid, all have their deliberate echoes here – is one borrowed from Spenser; or perhaps it would be truer to say that it is at one with Lewis’s own reading of that poet. The unifying element in The Faerie Queene is the place – ‘Faerie Land itself provides the unity.’19 Narnia provides a precisely similar unity for all the disparate elements which Lewis chooses to pour into his allegory. Green remonstrated with Lewis about the inclusion of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but, guided by Spenser, Lewis rejected his advice. The appearance of a familiar figure like Father Christmas among so much that was new and strange is precisely the effect which Spenser achieved by juxtaposing old friends like St George with new monsters of his own invention.

  Indeed, whenever Lewis writes about Spenser, we find it difficult not to think that the words apply equally well to himself. ‘He is sure that popery is not “the pure springe of lyfe” but “nothing doubtes” the salvation of many Papists. He loves Ireland strongly, in his own way, pronouncing Ulster “a most bewtifull and sweete countrie as any is vnder heauen”.’ But we feel most of all that Lewis is, consciously or unconsciously, describing himself when he contrasts the Christian Platonism of the poet with the modern existentialists.

  The Existentialist feels Angst because he thinks that man’s nature (and therefore his relation to all things) has to be created or invented, without guidance, at each moment of decision. Spenser thought that man’s nature was given, discoverable, and discovered; he did not feel Angst. He was often sad: but not, at bottom worried … His tranquillity is a robust tranquillity that ‘tolerates the indignities of time’, refusing (if we may put the matter in his terms) to be deceived by them, recognising them as truths, indeed, but only the truths of ‘a foolish world’. He would not have called himself ‘the poet of our waking dreams’: rather ‘the poet of our waking’.20

  This is the figure who comes before us as the author of the Narnia stories. Not all his friends liked them. Tolkien hated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He regarded it as scrappily put together, and not in his sense a ‘sub-creation’; that is, a coherently made imaginative world. Moreover it was an allegory, a literary form which he never enjoyed. But presumably, since he was only human, he also felt an element of resentment at Lewis’s fluency, his ability to get a thing done, and his increasing attractiveness to publishers. Tolkien himself managed to finish The Lord of the Rings in 1949, after twelve difficult years’ work. It had first been submitted, together with The Silmarillion, to the publishers Collins, and whether or not it would be published still remained a matter of great uncertainty. He showed the completed typescript to Lewis, who, undeterred by Tolkien’s view that Narnia ‘just w
on’t do’, happily reabsorbed himself in his friend’s great work. When he had finished it, he was effusive in his genuinely felt praise.

  But as far as the Thursday evenings went, it was the end of the story. By October 1949, Warnie’s diary was recording ‘No one turned up after dinner.’ There was still a regular assembly of Lewis’s friends on Tuesdays at the Eagle and Child in St Giles’s, but the high old days of the Inklings were over.

  Even if the fellowship had not been broken for various other reasons, it is doubtful whether Lewis would have had the time or the energy for his salon in 1949 and 1950. He was writing, and teaching a great deal, and the strains at home were building up to a crisis point. All his weekends were devoted to nursing and caring for Minto, who was declining with greater and greater speed into a malign senility. In the middle of June 1949, Lewis himself collapsed under the burden of it all. Havard moved him into the Acland nursing home. He had a high fever and swollen glands, and Havard believed his condition to be ‘serious … for a man of fifty’. Warnie, terrified by this development, went straight back to The Kilns ‘and let her ladyship have a blunt statement of facts: stressing the exhaustion motif and its causes. I ultimately frightened her into agreeing to grant J a month’s leave.’21 When Miss Griggs, the daily help, arrived, he records that she entered Minto’s room and ‘forestalled any possible Mintonic opening with the words, “No, I don’t want to hear anything about Bruce’s health, I want to hear about Dr. Lewis’s health.”’ Bruce was Minto’s fifteen-year-old dog, ailing in health and much preying on her poor tormented mind. Warnie’s next contribution to the family happiness was, while Jack was still languishing in the Acland, to go on one of his ‘benders’. He was himself taken by force to the Acland to join his brother, but was eventually transferred for a brief period to the mental hospital in Headington, the Warneford. ‘I am a man in chains,’ Jack wrote.

  The hellish responsibility of looking after an alcoholic brother and a furiously senile old woman were to remain with him for another ten months; but there were intervals of happiness. There were long periods when Warnie appeared to have got the drinking under control, though what made it all so frightening was the fact that it was precisely in moments of crisis, when Jack needed him most, that he was most likely to take once again to the bottle.

  Events gradually took their course and eased the burdens on Lewis’s shoulders. The unfortunate Bruce died on 17 January 1950. (‘Joyful news,’ Warnie recorded. ‘As Minto’s brain began to give way, his “little walks” became an obsession with her. I have known him taken out three times an hour.’22 In April, ‘Once again the axe has fallen.’ Minto fell out of bed, and the doctor ordered her to be transferred to an old people’s nursing home, Restholme, on the Woodstock Road, Oxford. The expense was crushing – well over £500 per annum – and Lewis began to wonder gloomily how he could possibly afford it if she were to live beyond his retirement. ‘I hardly know how I feel,’ he told Arthur Greeves, writing to his old friend to cancel his annual Irish holiday for lack of funds. ‘Relief, pity, hope, terror, and bewilderment have me in a whirl. I have the jitters!’

  Although it was a relief not to have to live with Minto in her present condition, it was also a wrench. Lewis’s excruciatingly painful visits to Restholme, which he kept up every day that she was there, were a preparation for the final parting – a parting which Warnie could view with the cheerful emotional greed of a schoolboy waiting for the end of term, but which excited in Jack very different emotions. For the approaching loss of his ‘adopted mother’ threatened to reawake the trauma of his life, the loss of his real mother.

  The New Year, 1951, brought with it a particularly virulent strain of influenza – ‘the old man’s friend’, as it used to be called. In this case, it was the old woman’s friend, since Janie Moore went down with it. She had long been addled in her wits, a figure of pathos to those who cared for her at Restholme. On 12 January, at five o’clock in the afternoon, she died. Lewis was with her. ‘And so ends the mysterious self imposed slavery in which J has lived for at least thirty years,’ Warnie wrote in his diary. ‘How it began I suppose I shall never know.’

  Warnie, who had come to hate and resent Mrs Moore, went down with a bout of influenza himself, and devoted an extended passage in his diary to a final vilification of Minto’s memory. He described her association with his brother as ‘the rape of J’s life … I wonder how much of his time she did waste? It was some years before her breakdown that I calculated that merely taking her dogs for unneeded “little walks” she had had five months of my life.’ But this was a very strange way of regarding things. When all allowance has been made for the fact that Mrs Moore was, by any standards, a ‘difficult’ woman, it is perverse to blame her for the fact that life itself is humdrum. Most time is taken up, on this side of the grave, in trivia – in walks, in domestic conversations, in chores. To describe this as waste might have been just if it had made it impossible for Lewis to write his books. But very plainly it had not. He wrote at least twenty-five books during the time of his association with Minto.

  As he followed her coffin to the churchyard at Headington Quarry, Jack Lewis would have had very different memories from those of his brother: ‘Most infuriating to the onlooker was the fact that Minto never gave the faintest hint of gratitude; indeed regarded herself as Jack’s benefactor … ’ Jack would remember a time when he had wired home that he was on 48-hour leave before being sent to the Western Front. His father did not even come to say goodbye. It was Minto who gave him a home during those momentous two days. When he came back from France, wounded with shrapnel and confined to various hospitals for five months, it was Minto who had stayed with him while the P’daytabird mysteriously refused to stray from Belfast. Unlike Warnie, Jack would have remembered the early days with Minto – their struggles together in poor lodgings while he was a student; their shared grief and horror at her brother’s madness; the joy of holidays in Somerset or by the sea in Cornwall; her pride in his work and success; her warmth and her affectionate, generous nature which had been with him throughout his adult life. Though in the end she had become a monster to Warnie, Jack always remained completely true to his commitment to her – ‘I have definitely chosen and I don’t regret the choice.’ Some months later, ‘the Beast’ followed her to another world. Her husband, that is to say Courtenay Edward Moore, died somewhere in Ireland.

  If the Anscombe debate about Supernaturalism had stung Lewis into a quite different sort of writing, the decline of Minto had also helped to drive him back imaginatively into childhood worlds. There can be little doubt that the energy and passion of the Narnia stories spring from the intensely unhappy and physically depleted state through which he had been passing. With the cooling of male friendships, with the sense that his intellectual defence of himself as a Christian was, at best, flawed, and with the gradual removal of his mother-substitute, he needed more than ever the comradeship which he had only ever found with Warnie in the Little End Room. And Warnie, much of the time, was blind drunk. This is what necessitated the escape not merely to the Little End Room, but beyond the wardrobe into imagined lands.

  Tolkien’s aesthetic objection to the Narnia stories is a perfectly valid one if we attempt to judge Narnia by the standards of The Silmarillion. Lewis’s books for children show signs of extraordinary haste in composition; they are full of inconsistencies, and by his standards they are not even particularly well written. He frequently repeats epitliets, and if the series is read entire by an adult reader the tone of voice can become wearisome. But it is a mistake to judge the Narnia stories as if they were a sort of slapdash Lord of the Rings. They are a quite different sort of book, and their readability and fascination stem from wholly individual qualities. The fascination of Tolkien is that his was a finished and enclosed imagination. His world, with its creatures, gods, angels, languages, lost tales and civilizations, is as complete as the ‘real’ world; perhaps more so. There is never an intrusive moment in Tolkien of two world
s jarring together; no hint, for example, that the creation story in The Silmarillion might relate to anything we have read in the Bible, or that the legendary figures and dynasties might interconnect with other cycles, such as those of the Edda or Homer. Lewis’s Narnia books are quite different. Their whole theme is the interpenetration of worlds, and he poured into them a whole jumble of elements, drawn from his reading, and the world he was inhabiting when he wrote the books. The Magician’s Nephew consciously locks itself into the worlds of other books.

  This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. It is a very important story because it shows how all the comings and goings between our own world and the land of Narnia first began.

  In those days Mr Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road … 23

  The Bastables are the children in E. Nesbit’s books, such as The Story of the Treasure Seekers. Lewis was a devoted reader of Nesbit and borrowed elements of her stories for his Narnia plots. The Cabby and his wife who become the first King and Queen of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew are a direct copy of Nesbit’s idea in The Phoenix and the Carpet, where the cook is transported by magic to a desert island and made Queen of the Savages. At the same time, there are many elements in the hotch-potch which are seized from the immediate present. In The Silver Chair, Puddleglum, the heroically melancholy Marshwiggle, is a direct portrait, as Lewis acknowledged, of his gardener at The Kilns, Paxford. The moment when the Witch traps the children underground and tries to persuade them that there is no world above the ground as they supposed, is a nursery nightmare version of Lewis’s debate with Miss Anscombe. Characteristically, Lewis places the best speech of reply on the lips of Puddleglum himself: