C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  28 The Pilgrim’s Regress, bk X, ch. 4, p. 229.

  29 W.H. Lewis, The Splendid Century (1953).

  30 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 71.

  31 The Great Divorce: A Dream (1946; Fount, 1997), ch. 3, p. 16.

  32 Ibid., p. 18.

  33 Ibid., ch. 9, p. 58.

  34 Ibid., ch. 5, pp. 31–2.

  35 Ibid., ch. 13, p. 102.

  36 The Spectator, No. 6135 (25 January 1946), p. 96.

  37 The Times Literary Supplement (2 February 1946), p. 58.

  38 Essays Presented to Charles Williams, p. vi.

  39 The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: Volume Two: 1937–1943: From Novelist to Playwright, ed. Barbara Reynolds (1997), p. 413.

  40 ‘C.S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, p. 264.

  41 CG, pp. 43–4.

  42 ‘An Anglican Portrait Gallery’, Church of England Newspaper (4 October 1946), p. 7.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947; Fount, 1998), ch. 1, p. 2.

  45 Ibid., ch. 2, p. 4.

  46 Ibid.

  47 Ibid., ch. 7, p. 49.

  48 Ibid., ch. 14, p. 137.

  49 The Spectator, vol. 178 (16 May 1947), p. 566.

  50 Theology, vol. L (October 1947), p. 397.

  51 This paper was published in Socratic Digest, No. 4 (1948) and reprinted in Anscombe’s Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. II, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (1981).

  52 Introduction to Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (1981), p. x.

  53 ‘The Day with a White Mark’, II, 2, in Collected Poems.

  54 ‘Memoir’, p. 37.

  55 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fol. 93.

  56 BF, p. 200.

  57 Ibid., p. 201.

  58 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. 220/3.

  59 TST, p. 510.

  60 Letters: C.S.Lewis – Don Giovanni Calabria, trans. and ed. Martin Moynihan (1988), pp. 27–9.

  61 Ibid., p. 31.

  62 TST, p. 492.

  63 BBC Written Archives.

  64 Letters, p. 422.

  65 Marion E. Wade Center, letter to Hugh Kilmer, 17 February 1961.

  66 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fol. 86.

  67 Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 164, fols 17–18.

  11

  THROUGH THE WARDROBE

  ‘I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last,’ said C.S. Lewis in his lecture ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’ at the Bournemouth Conference of the Library Association in 1952.1 And he pointed out at the same time that ‘where the children’s story is simply the right form for what the author has to say, then of course readers who want to hear that, will read the story, or re-read it, at any age. I never met The Wind in the Willows or the Bastable books till I was in my late twenties, and I do not think that I have enjoyed them any the less on that account.’2

  In fact, as we have seen, Lewis seems to have read relatively few children’s books as a child: after the usual nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and the earlier Beatrix Potter (the first, Peter Rabbit, appeared when he was four; the thirteenth, Samuel Whiskers, when he was ten), he seems to have moved on to adventure stories. The one notable exception was E. Nesbit, whose Psammead series and two Arden serials he read in the Strand Magazine where they appeared between 1902 and 1909, together with several of her short tales of magic. The absence of the Bastable books suggests that he did not purchase her works in volume form and knew only those in the Strand, except when he chanced on an odd short story in any other publication.

  Lewis’s love of E. Nesbit’s stories was lifelong. In his diary for 29 January 1923 he noted: ‘I dreamed that in a station waiting room I found a children’s story which I had never seen before, by E. Nesbit; and became so interested that I missed my train.’3 (Lewis never missed a train by his own fault: in later years it became a joke among his Oxford friends that he liked to be on the platform half an hour before the train went and they tried again and again to make him miss his train to Cambridge. They never succeeded. He, on the other hand, entered fully into the spirit of the game, and tried to make those who were seeing him off fail to leave the train before it started: he succeeded once, and his friend had to walk back to Oxford from Wolvercote.)

  Perhaps Mark’s experience in That Hideous Strength when he finds the run of the Strand Magazine in the hotel sitting-room echoes an earlier experience of Lewis’s:

  In one of these he found a children’s serial story which he had begun to read as a child, but abandoned because his tenth birthday came when he was half-way through it and he was ashamed to read it after that. Now, he chased it from volume to volume till he finished it. It was good. The grown-up stories to which, after his tenth birthday, he had turned instead of it, now seemed to him, except for Sherlock Holmes, to be rubbish.4

  For Lewis admitted in his lecture that ‘When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly.’5 And in the histories of Boxen which he and his brother created as boys, though the characters were ‘dressed animals’ they were treated as grown-up human beings and their interests, pursuits and dialogues were intended to be as ‘adult’ as possible, however dull and unromantic adult preoccupations appeared to be.

  Lewis himself was not able to recollect exactly why he began to write fantasy stories for young readers. ‘I am not quite sure’, he said in the lecture quoted above, ‘what made me, in a particular year of my life, feel that not only a fairy tale, but a fairy tale addressed to children, was exactly what I must write – or burst.’6 Nor was the urge very strong at first, for he seems to have begun his first children’s story early in the war, and then to have left it for nearly ten years.

  As with the Ransom stories, the Narnian tales ‘began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. The picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day when I was about forty, I said to myself: “Let’s try to make a story about it.” At first I had very little idea how the story would go …’7

  Unfortunately Lewis kept no early drafts of stories, once the final form was achieved, nor even the manuscripts of the finished books themselves, and we have only a few early Narnian fragments preserved by chance, mostly in notebooks kept since they also contained references for his more academic works. What we now know as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe seems to have been begun at the end of 1939. On 2 September Lewis wrote to his brother, who had been recalled to the Army shortly before the outbreak of war, about the children evacuated to The Kilns. ‘Our schoolgirls (i.e. evacuees) have arrived and all seem to me … to be very nice, unaffected creatures and all most flatteringly delighted with their surroundings. They’re fond of animals, which is a good thing’;8 and on 18 September he amplified. ‘I have said that the children are “nice”, and so they are. But modern children are poor creatures. They keep coming to Maureen and asking, “What shall we do now?” … Shades of our childhood!’9

  The evacuees gave Lewis a setting for the story, and he began on an odd sheet which has survived in the manuscript of ‘The Dark Tower’, and which has notes for Broadcast Talks on the other end of it:

  This book is about four children whose names were Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter. But it is most about Peter who was the youngest. They all had to go away from London suddenly because of Air Raids, and because Father, who was in the Army, had gone off to the War and Mother was doing some kind of war work. They were sent to stay with a kind of relation of Mother’s who was a very old Professor who lived all by himself in the country.

  It is uncertain whether Lewis wrote much – or indeed any – more of the story at this time. There is, however, a suggestion in one of his letters that Lewis might have completed it. If he did not compl
ete it, he at least wrote another story for children. In 1947 Mr and Mrs E.L. Baxter of Kentucky asked his advice about children’s stories with a moral dimension. In his reply of 10 September 1947 Lewis said: ‘Don’t the ordinary fairy stories really already contain most of the Spirit, in solution? … Is not Redemption figured in The Sleeping Beauty? … What about George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, Curdie and the Princess, The Wise Woman, and The Golden Key? … I have tried one myself but it was, by the unanimous verdict of my friends, so bad that I destroyed it.’10

  We must now return to Chad Walsh’s visit in August 1948. In the first chapter of C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics the author gives us a tantalizing glimpse of what Lewis was writing at that time. We learn that he had started his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and that he was also working on the monumental English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Then, unaware that he is reporting something of great moment, Walsh said Lewis ‘talks vaguely of completing a children’s book which he has begun “in the tradition of E. Nesbit”.’11 Was this The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

  If it was, Lewis was having a very difficult time making any progress. Domestic life at The Kilns was causing him anxiety and exhaustion. Mrs Moore’s goddaughter, Vera Henry, who ran a little holiday resort at Annagasan, a few miles from Drogheda, had arrived in Oxford to help look after Mrs Moore. Friction between the women developed into open quarrels, and Lewis was having to act as peacemaker. Meanwhile, Don Calabria pressed Lewis to continue his apostolate of writing. Lewis told him on 14 January 1949:

  As for my own work, I would not wish to deceive you with vain hope. I am now in my fiftieth year. I feel my zeal for writing, and whatever talent I originally possessed to be decreasing; nor (I believe) do I please my readers as I used to. I labour under many difficulties. My house is unquiet and devastated by women’s quarrels. I have to dwell in the tents of Kedar.12 My aged mother, worn out by long infirmity, is my daily care. Pray for me, Father, that I ever bear in mind that profoundly true maxim: ‘If you wish to bring others to peace, keep thyself in peace.’13

  There was worse to follow. In February 1949, while Lewis was trying to continue the story ‘in the tradition of E. Nesbit’, Warnie had another bout with alcohol and Jack had to get him into the Acland Nursing Home. On 4 March Warnie wrote in his diary, ‘I emerged from the Acland yesterday morning, where I had been as a finale to the wearisome cycle of insomnia – drugs – depression – spirits – illness. The saddest feature of the thing is that I can see that J. assumes it to be spirits – insomnia – drugs – depression – spirits – illness. But his kindness remains unabated, and what more can I want?’14

  It was almost certainly at about this time, when Lewis’s spirits were so low, that he began dreaming of lions. ‘At first,’ he said about the inspiration for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ‘I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, I don’t know where the Lion came from or why He came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after Him.’15

  Besides the Lion himself, Lewis may have also been stimulated, perhaps subconsciously, by reading the manuscript of a friend’s book of a similar kind, to continue with his own tale – and in doing so, seems to have drawn some ideas from what he had read. On 6 September 1945 Lewis attended the wedding of the eldest daughter of David Nichol Smith, at that time Merton Professor of English Literature. After the ceremony, at the reception in the Senior Common Room at Merton, Roger Lancelyn Green found him rather out of his element and only too delighted to withdraw into a window-alcove and talk about fiction and fairy tales. (Green had recently submitted a thesis on ‘Andrew Lang and the Fairy Tale’ for the degree of Bachelor of Letters – and Lewis was reported to have remarked at the English Faculty meeting at which it was discussed, ‘Much better let him write a fairy tale about B. Litts!’)

  During the conversation Green told Lewis about a fantasy he had just written called The Wood that Time Forgot; Lewis showed great interest in this, and asked to read it. Green lent him the typescript and Lewis wrote him two packed pages of criticism a couple of weeks later, and invited him to dinner later that term to discuss the book in particular and ‘imaginative fiction’ in general. Lewis kept the typescript until Green lunched with him again on 17 September the following year, when he returned it with much good advice and the assurance that it ought to be published. Green tried in vain to turn the story into ‘a fairy tale for grown-ups’, and finally revised the book, scrapped the last two chapters and wrote four new ones to give it a completely different ending – of which Lewis approved very highly. But the book remains unpublished to this day – and would pass no publisher’s reader, as it would appear to owe too much to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

  It is, in fact, the earlier part of Green’s tale which set Lewis to work again on his ‘children’s book in the tradition of E. Nesbit’. The story tells of three children and an undergraduate friend who find their way out of an ordinary Oxfordshire wood, along a stream which comes through a tunnel under an embankment, into a wood cut off by Time from the surrounding world. In it they find Elena, a girl who has become partly a succubus and whose age is also suspended by Time, who is eternally pursued by Agares, a kind of fallen angel or minor devil (out of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft [1584]) until she and Randal, the undergraduate, with the aid of the children, meet and finally by saving each other save themselves. (‘The later chapters are splendidly conceived,’ wrote Lewis after reading the revised book. ‘The idea – almost the epigram – that Elena can reach Heaven only by recovering earth, comes from a depth that does not make itself felt in anything else of yours that I have seen.’) But the important part of the story, there from the beginning, is the visit paid by the children to Agares in his house, where he seems to be just a kindly old man, and the sweet raspberry-cordial-like drink which tempts one of the children to side with the enemy. That, and the whole atmosphere of the wood, seem to have given Lewis at least the seeds of the Pevensie children’s incursion into the Narnian forest, the character of the White Witch, and her temptation of Edmund by means of the magic Turkish Delight.

  When Aslan ‘came bounding into the story’ pulling the other stories with him, there were further stirrings in the author’s subconscious. In a world of Talking Animals it was traditional that the Lion should represent the king of the beasts. Lewis did not have to go far to find the name ‘Aslan’ for it is the Turkish word for lion. When Walter Hooper asked where he found the word ‘Narnia’, Lewis showed him Murray’s Small Classical Atlas, ed. G.B. Grundy (1904), which he acquired when he was reading the classics with Mr Kirkpatrick at Great Bookham. On plate 8 of the Atlas is a map of ancient Italy. Lewis had underscored the name of a little town called Narnia, simply because he liked the sound of it. Narnia – or ‘Narni’ in Italian – is in Umbria, halfway between Rome and Assisi.

  Narnia, a small medieval town, is situated at the top of an olive-covered hill. It was already ancient when the Romans defeated it in 299 BC. Its thirteenth-century fortress dominates a deep, narrow gorge of the Nera river which runs below. One of its most important archaeological features is a Romanesque cathedral, which contains the relics of a number of Umbrian saints. It is possible that Lewis named one of his central characters ‘Lucy Pevensie’ after his goddaughter – Lucy Barfield – to whom The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is dedicated, or he may simply have liked the sound and meaning of the name. It is nevertheless a surprise to discover that the most popular of Narnia’s saints is Blessed Lucy of Narnia, whose uncorrupted body lies in a side-chapel of the cathedral.*

  On 10 March 1949 Green dined with Lewis in Magdalen and, as he recorded in his diary, thereafter there followed a ‘wonderful talk until midnight: he read me two chapters of a story for children he is writing – very good indeed, though a
trifle self-conscious’. Nevertheless it was a memorable occasion which the listener remembered vividly, and remembered too his awed conviction that he was listening to a book that could rank with the great ones of its kind.

  Lewis stopped reading with the remark that he had read the story to Tolkien, who had disliked it intensely: was it any good? Green assured him that it was more than good, and Lewis had the complete story ready to lend him (in the original manuscript) by the end of the month. (Tolkien met Green shortly after and remarked: ‘I hear you’ve been reading Jack’s children’s story. It really won’t do, you know! I mean to say: “Nymphs and their Ways, The Love-Life of a Faun”. Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about?’)

  But Lewis was finding his way into a completely new world, and one that only he could have created – and insisted on creating. There have been many stories from Alice onwards in which the nursery-rhyme or fairy-tale characters play a part; from Only Toys! and Winnie-the-Pooh in which the child’s most beloved secret companions come to life: but only Lewis could ransack all myth for his dramatis personae, taking what he needed wherever he found it throughout literature and making it his own.

  And he was convinced from the start about what he was doing, though not at first quite able to convince all his readers. Green remembers reacting against the appearance of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and urging Lewis to omit him somehow as breaking the magic for a moment: he still does not seem to fit quite comfortably into his place, but the rightness of introducing him seems more certain on each rereading.

  The ‘self-consciousness’ which Green noted was most apparent in the first two stories, and took the form of an occasional forced jocularity, and a more frequent attempt at children’s colloquialisms – which too often sounded like recollections of E. Nesbit – though they were as likely to be from Lewis’s own childhood. His knowledge of actual children was slight: his own two stepsons did not arrive on the scene until after the Narnian stories were completed. Doubtless Maureen, Mrs Moore’s daughter, whom he had the opportunity to observe from her childhood onwards, gave him some insight into the mind of a girl: and most of his girls seem more deeply studied than his boys. He had also a number of godchildren whom he met from time to time, and with whom he was sometimes able to get on very friendly terms; but children played a very small part in his life, and he saw them to a great extent ‘through the spectacles of books’.