by A. N. Wilson
One word, Ma’am … One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia … 24
If that is Lewis the wounded Christian, unable to think out his position but determined, in a moving and dogged way, to be loyal to it, then there are many other passages in the Narnia books where we meet Lewis the despondent conservative man living in the post-war Britain of austerity and Clement Attlee. Puzzle the Donkey, who is sent on errands to the market by the Ape in The Last Battle and is unable to find oranges or bananas to satisfy his taskmaster, is treading the same road that Lewis trod at the behest of Minto. The Ape’s interfering desire to dupe the populace owes something to the Labour Government’s treatment, as Lewis saw it, of the people of Britain, though it also draws upon a much deeper and more atavistic instinct in Lewis’s imagination. The Ape’s pretence that the people can only speak to Aslan through him reflects the Ulster author’s view of the papacy. ‘I’m a Man. If I look like an Ape, that’s because I’m so very old: hundreds and hundreds of years old. And it’s because I’m so old that I’m so wise. And it’s because I’m so wise that I’m the only one Aslan is ever going to speak to … He’ll tell me what to do and I’ll tell the rest of you … ’ The ‘progressive’ school in The Silver Chair- ‘Experiment House’ – is a similarly crude piece of satire. ‘It was Co-Educational, a school for both boys and girls, what used to be called a “mixed” school; some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it.’
The fact that Lewis threw into the mixture all the things which immediately concerned him certainly makes for a most imperfect ‘sub-creation’ by Tolkien’s strict standards; but it is symptomatic of the much more important fact that in the Narnia stories Lewis is deeply and unselfconsciously engaged in the stories he is creating. He has abandoned here a cerebral and superficial defence of religion of the kind attempted at the Socratic Club. He has launched back deep into the recesses of his own emotional history, his own most deeply felt psychological needs and vulnerabilities. It is this, surely, which gives the books their extraordinary power. They are written white-hot. The time when the comings and goings between our world and Narnia began is not as you might guess remote in history. It was when Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road; in other words, at the time when a certain Belfast solicitor called Albert Lewis was wooing a girl called Flora Hamilton. The penetration between the worlds began with his parents’ marriage, and this is made clear at the end of the series, even if one rejects any Freudian explanation for its beginning. That is to say, we hardly need to dwell on the psychological significance of the wardrobe in the first story; we do not need, though some will be tempted to do so, to see in this tale of a world which is reached through a dark hole surrounded by fur coats any unconscious image of the passage through which Lewis first entered the world from his mother’s body. We do not need to be ingenious because, by the end of The Last Battle, it is all spelt out for us. If The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a story which hangs on the gospel narrative of the Resurrection, then The Last Battle is the Apocalypse in which there is a final conflict with the forces of evil. The old heaven and the old earth pass away, Narnia is destroyed, and then remade for eternity. The children all come together because they and their parents have now entered Narnia for ever, not by the magic of stepping through a wardrobe, but through an actual railway accident, a real death. Only one of the children from the original quartet is excluded from heaven. This is Susan. She has committed the unforgivable sin of growing up.
‘Yes,’ said Eustace, ‘and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says, “What wonderful memories you have! Fancy you still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’”
‘Oh, Susan!’ said Jill, ‘She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.’25
For the magic of Narnia to work, you have to be devoid of any such desire; you have to be as Warnie was when he left the Army, wanting to re-create the world of the Little End Room and live in it for ever and ever. Lewis had tried to resist Warnie’s idea at the time, but his children’s writings show that he found it all but irresistible. For what the children discover when Aslan/Christ has made all things new is that the old things have not passed away at all. They find that not only has the old Narnia been preserved and refashioned, but that England has been too, and some people who are more important even than the many strange characters, fauns, centaurs, talking animals, whom they have met in their imaginative adventures.
‘Why!’ exclaimed Peter. ‘It’s England. And that’s the house itself – Professor Kirk’s old home in the country where all our adventures began!’
‘I thought that house had been destroyed,’ said Edmund.
‘So it was,’ said the Faun. ‘But you are now looking at the England within England, the real England just as this is the real Narnia. And in that inner England no good thing is destroyed.’
Suddenly they shifted their eyes to another spot, and then Peter and Edmund and Lucy gasped with amazement and shouted out and began waving: for they saw their own father and mother, waving back at them across the great, deep valley. It was like when you see people waving at you from the deck of a big ship when you are waiting on the quay to meet them.26
It was on the quayside that Lewis and Warnie parted from their father only two weeks after their mother had been taken from them. That terrible severance, which took them away from Ireland and childhood and all that had made them comfortable, is here longingly stitched up. The Last Battle is the story which Lewis, when he came to write his autobiography for grown-ups, was incapable of telling. It is an exploration on a level which George MacDonald would have understood of the unplumbed psychological depths where regret and longing and unhealed heartbreak find their consolation in old Christian story.
–SIXTEEN–
THE SILVER CHAIR
1951–1954
Three weeks after the demise of Mrs Moore, Oxford found itself once again in the throes of an election for the Chair of Poetry, an event which takes place every five years. Lewis’s own candidate in 1938, the Reverend Adam Fox, had been a disgracefully tedious occupant of the post. In 1943, he had been succeeded by the Dean (later Warden) of Wadham College, Maurice Bowra. Bowra was a famously witty man, whose mots – ‘I am a man more dined against than dining,’ or, on becoming engaged to a rather ‘difficult’ woman, ‘Buggers can’t be choosers’ – were hawked around and repeated by his admirers and friends. Strangely enough, he was a crashing bore on the subject of literature. His books are flat as pancakes, and so were his lectures as Professor of Poetry. This time, in 1951, the old cry went up that the University deserved something a little more exciting. C. S. Lewis was persuaded to stand. He had two rivals, supported by those who echoed Lewis’s own view of 1938 that ‘we must have a practising poet’: they were Edmund Blunden and C. Day-Lewis.
Jack Lewis’s campaign manager was Dyson, who hobbled round the colleges canvassing for votes
. One don informed him that he would not be voting for Lewis on the grounds that he had written The Screwtape Letters. ‘If they offer you sherry, you’re done,’ was Dyson’s rule of thumb. ‘I had lots of sherry.’
C. Day-Lewis’s campaign manager was the diminutive French scholar Enid Starkie, a peculiar little Irish woman who wrote books about Flaubert and Baudelaire, and would often be seen weaving her way from Somerville College to her house in St Giles in bright variations of a matelot’s uniform. (‘All the colours of the Rimbaud,’ as Bowra inevitably remarked.) She was one of those self-created Oxford ‘characters’, with her strongly Irish-French accent, her hints at a raffish past and her acquaintance with modern French intellectuals. She once boasted to Gide that in order to pay for her years of study in Paris she had been reduced to selling her body, a transaction which makes one wish, if it ever took place, that the pen of Osbert Lancaster had depicted it. The Chair of Poetry was one of her obsessions. Indeed, when she stood for it herself, in a later contest, it could be said to have driven her rather mad. On this occasion, she backed C. Day-Lewis and she was an efficient operator. She persuaded Edmund Blunden to retire from the contest and stand again next time. C. S. Lewis’s opponents were thus united in a single band.
C. Day-Lewis, who had best exercised his talents in life as a publisher (at Chatto & Windus in London) and as the author of a fine series of detective stories under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, was put up as the ‘practising poet’. In reality, there was probably little to choose between C. Day-Lewis and C. S. Lewis as poets. Both were men who passionately wanted to be poets, and who wrote a few good poems, but who will never rank very high in any history of English poetry.
Warnie, and perhaps other members of Jack’s circle, saw it as a contest between the ‘atheist-communist bloc’ and the forces of sweetness and light. This was pretty largely nonsense. It could equally well have been seen as a contest between a man whom there was already every opportunity of hearing lecture in Oxford and an outsider – a man of letters from London, who might have things to say which Oxford had not heard. In the event it was an election which did not excite much interest among the thousands of people who, as MAs, were entitled to vote. Only 367 votes were cast: 173 of them were for C. S. Lewis, which left 194 for C. Day-Lewis, scraping home by 21 votes. Since the names on the voting slips were given merely as LEWIS C.D., and LEWIS C.S., it is even possible that some of the country clergy, after good luncheons at their old colleges, unintentionally allied themselves to the so-called atheist-communist bloc.
A dinner had been arranged that night at a large ugly hotel near the railway station to which the Lewis brothers were for some reason devoted: the Royal Oxford. Barfield, Havard, David Cecil, J. A. W. Bennett and Warnie were there. When the news came that Jack had been defeated, the supporters were more dashed than their candidate.
Warnie, who had been going through the names of those who ‘backed’ C. Day-Lewis, had begun the dangerous game of finding their surnames a little suspect (‘Pentacostal [sic] sweepings bearing all sorts of Slav and Balkan names’).1 Jack ‘took it astonishingly well’, almost certainly because he did not really care. The fact that his life was no longer circumscribed by depressing visits to Restholme, by the dread of domestic quarrels, by the sheer financial drain on his purse involved in nursing Minto, brought with it a deep inner peace.
The real strain of living with Minto had not been what Warnie or Lewis’s friends thought it was. Dyson quoted the line from Otbello – ‘O cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor(e),’ and Warnie considered this ‘poor Jack’s whole catastrophe epitomised in nine words’. Jack himself stopped speaking to Dyson for about a month when he heard this quip (and Dyson was never one to make a quip just the once). It was both deeply true and deeply untrue. The ‘cursed fate’ was that his relationship with Minto forced him into the position, from the very beginning, of living a lie. As an undergraduate he had had to conceal his actual living arrangements from his college, or he would certainly have been sent down from the University. He also felt he had to He to his father, and pretend that he was not living with Mrs Moore. It was during these years that the formula emerged of her being his ‘mother’ or ‘adopted mother’. But this in itself was artificial, because she was not his mother, and the relations he had with her were far more intense than those which most men have with their mothers. Whatever the relationship was, it was a closed book to Warnie.
Now that she was dead, Jack was ready to start his life all over again. The children’s books written at this period were more than an imaginative return to his own childhood. They were a sort of sluicing of the system which, together with his regular confessions and communions, represented a conversion every bit as deep as the conversion to a belief in the supernatural and the divinity of Jesus Christ which occurred in 1929-1931. Then, it will be remembered, he had no real interest in the traditional teachings or concerns of Christianity. The teachings of St Paul, about the Cross, about grace, about the forgiveness of sins, meant nothing to him: he could ‘get nothing out of them’. The only doctrine of St Paul’s which seemed to have ‘stuck’ at this period was the rather esoteric one that a man and a woman, having once made love, whether or not they are married, have become one flesh, and are therefore bound to one another forever afterwards, through thick or thin. After he had ‘become a Christian’, the tension of his life with Minto therefore became all the more pronounced. He was having to live with her in a way which would conceal, even from Warnie, whatever had once been ‘sinful’ in the relationship. No wonder all his friends found that relationship totally baffling. No wonder, too, that he developed the habit of never discussing personal matters, never seeming, when in the company of male friends, even to have a personal life.
Shuffling off the guilt and relief which came at the time of his father’s death, Lewis had felt (in his mystical experience on the bus on Headington Hill) as though ‘some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armour, as if I were a lobster’2 were being removed from him. In his second, and more radical, phase of conversion, twenty and more years after the first, Lewis began to feel for the first time that he knew what was meant by the grace and forgiveness of God. In June 1951, he wrote to Sister Penelope at Wantage:
I specially need your prayers because I am (like the pilgrim in Bunyan) travelling across ‘a plain called Ease’. Everything without, and many things within, are marvellously well at present. Indeed (I do not know whether to be more ashamed or joyful in confessing it) I realise that until about a month ago I never really believed (tho’ I thought I did) in God’s forgiveness.3
It was in this frame of mind that he finished the Narnia stories, which probably contain his finest passages of religious writing. One of the great paradoxes inherent in the process I have been describing in this chapter is that his intimates were the last people to know what was going on, as it were, inside Lewis. The softening process did not change his lifelong habit of keeping ‘talk’ rigidly to a level in which anyone could join. There was never any intimate chat with Lewis. Christopher Tolkien has often remarked to me not only that Lewis repelled any attempt to gossip in his presence, but that he would display no interest whatsoever in a friend’s private life. Sessions at the pub would not begin with routine enquiries about one’s wife, health, family. For all Lewis knew by the end of the conversation, one could just have got divorced or been told that one had cancer. All that would have been discussed would have been the merits of Layamon as a poet, or the rights and wrongs of cannibalism. It was this inability to be personal – to be, in one sense, natural – which led so many of his friends to be surprised by sides of Lewis which emerged in his work: mention has already been made of Dom Bede Griffiths’ astonishment at the imaginative force and sheer emotion of the children’s stories; neither were apparent in the conversations he had, over many years, with Lewis himself.
As someone of so passionate a nature, and so good at articulating emotion on the page, it was natural that Lewis should
have built up a large correspondence. From the moment he came to prominence as a writer on religious subjects, Lewis had correspondents from both sides of the Atlantic, who wrote to him as to a spiritual director about their problems – their marriages, their difficulties in prayer, their sexual and emotional troubles, their struggles with drink. Since they seemed like souls crying out for comfort, he answered them. It could be said that a man who was better-adjusted, less buttoned-up with his friends, might have seen the dangers of such correspondences. They quickly develop into fantasies, in which an ‘intimacy’ of a completely false kind grows up between two people who do not actually know one another at all. One of his correspondents always signed herself ‘Jehovah’. But from the first, Lewis was addicted to the custom of answering all the letters which were sent to him, often rising a good while before daybreak to complete the task. This accounts for the huge number of his letters which survive, many of them in American libraries.
Even more astonishing than the fact that he was prepared to read the letters was his willingness on occasion to meet the people who wrote them. One can interpret this in any number of ways. On one level, it can be said that Lewis merely felt that he was doing his duty. He had written a book on a subject close to everyone’s heart, The Problem of Pain. So when a clergyman wrote to him to say that he was finding it impossible to reconcile a belief in God’s omnipotence with a belief in his love, Lewis consented to spend an afternoon talking to this man about the problem. He was patient, friendly, helpful. The priest, who had expected the author of The Problem of Pain to look pale and ethereal, was astonished by the red-faced pork butcher in shabby tweeds whom he actually encountered. Since this was a case of a devoted parish priest in danger of losing his faith, one can see why Lewis consented to meet him. But what of the case of Kathryn Stillwell,* an admirer of Lewis’s from the United States who had made a fascinating connection with the master? Lewis’s mother was forty-six years old when she died on 23 August 1908. Exactly forty-six years later (and she does not explain in her account of the matter what was so magical about the number forty-six), a friend of hers borrowed one of Lewis’s books from a public library. ‘You could say that I was mentally “married” to Lewis that very day,’ she wrote. You could. But then again, you couldn’t. It is surely very interesting that when she wrote to Lewis from a London hotel, he should have invited her to tea with him at his beloved Royal Oxford Hotel. Finding herself sitting next to him on a sofa she was – not surprisingly after her mystical marriage in the public library – ‘giddy with awe’.4
