Being rather more in touch with contemporary children, Green was able to suggest a number of small alterations and improvements, ranging from the deletion of ‘Crikey!’ as a common exclamation among the young (‘the word “Crikey!” fell from more than one pair of lips’, as Oswald Bastable says in The Treasure Seekers) to the omission of bird’s-nesting from among the Pevensie children’s occupations, Lewis being unaware of the revolution against ‘egg-collectors’ achieved by Arthur Ransome.
In spite of Aslan’s pull, Lewis found it very hard to write a second Narnian story. He began by trying to discover what had gone before the meeting of the Pevensies with the White Witch, and how the lamp-post came to be standing on the edge of Narnia. From the literary point of view it stood ‘hard by the Sea of Dreams’ in Kipling’s poem in The Brushwood Boy:
Over the edge of the purple down,
Where the single lamplight gleams;16
but the creator was interested only in discovering how it found its way into Narnia.
So he began a story of the boy Digory who could understand what the trees and animals said, until he cut off a branch from the oak tree to help Polly, the girl next door, in the building of a raft; and of the visit of his godmother Mrs Lefay, who is obviously endowed with magic arts and has a rabbit in her bag called Coiny … but there the story stuck. Lewis was not sure what came next, and was dissatisfied with the turn it was taking. In June 1949 he read it to Green, who liked the beginning, but felt that Mrs Lefay was becoming perilously near the kind of burlesque fairy-tale character in stories such as The Rose and the Ring and some of E. Nesbit’s short ‘Unlikely Tales’ which Lewis liked least. Lewis agreed, and the story was set aside (by an irony of fate it is one of the very few manuscript fragments of a Narnian story to survive) – the more readily because he had thought of a splendid beginning for an adventure that was to be a sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There were many stories, both traditional and invented, Lewis pointed out, in which people are summoned by magic across time or space – but they are always told from the side of the magician, or the possessor of the charm which does the summoning: what would it be like to be on the other end – to be pulled suddenly by magic into another land or another age – or both? And so the story of Prince Caspian was begun: Drawn into Narnia was its original title, which was changed on the advice of the publisher who thought it would be difficult to say, but relinquished with regret, the second choice (also vetoed by the publisher) being A Horn in Narnia (since it was Queen Susan’s magic horn which drew the children back to the rescue of Prince Caspian).
The manuscript of the new story was finished by December 1949; Green had read it and suggested corrections and returned it with his report by 31 December when Lewis had a lunch party in ‘The Wilde Room’ at Magdalen to meet Pauline Baynes,* who was to illustrate the first story: the choice was due to the excellent illustrations which she had just produced for Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham (1949).
Before the end of February 1950 A Horn in Narnia was in typescript and the manuscript of The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ ready for Green to read. The former was taken to be read to Professor F.H. Lawson’s children, with enthusiastic results; the latter needed hardly any revision and was written obviously in the white heat of inspiration with hardly a correction in the hand that Green was learning to know so well, and which would bring a thrill of memory and regret whenever he saw it in the years to come.
At the end of March illustrations for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe were coming in and being discussed, and Lewis asked Green to write a blurb for the jacket. This he did ‘with much difficulty’ on 2 April, and Lewis wrote a couple of days later: ‘Thanks very much for the blurb: I shall send it to Bles to-day – It seems excellent to me, but like you I don’t really understand Blurbology.’ And it was not, finally, used.
Proofs of The Lion were being handed round at the ‘Bird and Baby’ on 22 June, and on 26 July Green ‘spent most of the day reading Lewis’s new story Narnia and the North,* which is very enthralling – almost the best of the four’. And next day he ‘dined in Magdalen S.C.R. with Lewis, and then a wonderful evening talking until after 1 a.m. Began by discussing To Narnia and the North, made several suggestions etc. Some talk of The Golden Cat,† which Lewis liked; much literary talk, also of life after death, war, killing, the ethics of such things: we got on to life after death by way of Kipling’s “On the Gate” and a Wells story of a similar kind.’
The almost weekly meetings with Lewis in 1950 ceased when Green left Oxford at the end of August to live in Cheshire. But he went with a standing invitation to stay with Lewis each term, and was paying his first visit to the guest room at Magdalen on 13 November when he ‘started reading Lewis’s newest story in MS’. He read more of the story the next day, and after dinner in Hall, ‘back to his rooms where we sat talking until about 12.30: usual sort of subjects – children’s books, romances of other worlds; I discoursed upon Edgar Rice Burroughs; we planned a story of a trip to Mercury – but couldn’t get very far with it.’
He was staying again at the beginning of March 1951 when he ‘finished reading the new Narnian story, which is every bit as good as the rest’, and left notes for possible alterations. About one of these Lewis wrote to him on 6 March:
You are quite right about a wood fire. Wood keeps on glowing red again in the places you have already extinguished – phoenix-like. Even the large webbed feet of a Marsh-wiggle couldn’t do it. Yet it must be a flat hearth, I think. Does peat go out easily by treading? As an Irishman I ought to know, but don’t. I think it will have to be a coal fire in a flat hearth. After all, Underland might well use coal, whereas wood or charcoal would have to be imported.17
It was impossible to change it completely, but Lewis cut out the original description of a great log fire and simply let Puddleglum stamp ‘on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth’.18
Besides such alterations and corrections there was much discussion about the titles of the stories. (Green christened the whole series The Chronicles of Narnia, on the analogy of Andrew Lang’s Chronicles of Pantouflia, and the name stuck.) Thus Night under Narnia (Green’s title) when Lewis decided to publish it as the fourth book (though written fifth) provoked several suggestions. Lewis wrote to Green on 26 September 1952:
Bles, like you, thinks The Wild Waste Lands bad, but he says Night under Narnia is ‘gloomy’. George Sayer and my brother say Gnomes under Narnia would be equally gloomy, but News under Narnia would do. On the other hand my brother and the American writer Joy Davidman (who has been staying with us and is a great reader of fantasy and children’s books) both say that The Wild Waste Lands is a splendid title. What’s a chap to do?19
The final decision was, of course, The Silver Chair.
When Geoffrey Bles, the publisher, received the story originally called Narnia and the North, he again disliked that title, and Lewis wrote to him on 13 April 1953: ‘What are your reactions to any of the following? The Horse and the Boy (which might allure the “pony-book” public) – The Desert Road to Narnia – Cor of Archenland – The Horse Stole the Boy – Over the Border – The Horse Bree. Suggestions will be welcome.’20 To which Bles replied, ‘I like best The Horse and the Boy, but what about The Horse and his Boy, which is a little startling and conveys the idea of your other title The Horse Stole the Boy?’ – and his suggestion was followed.
Another question raised by Bles was that of the gender of some of the creatures in Narnia, which seemed to be getting muddled, and Lewis wrote on 20 March 1953: ‘My idea about He and It was that the semi-humanity would be kept before the imagination by an unobtrusive mixture of the two. Your reaction, however, shows that such a mixture could not be unobtrusive or else that I, at any rate, could not make it so. Of course I cherish a secret hope that you are merely playing the “normalizing scribe”, well known to textual critics.’21
There were also criticisms of illustrations: those for The Silve
r Chair Lewis considered ‘the best set Miss Baynes has done for us yet. There is, as always, exquisite delicacy: and I think the faces (human faces) are greatly improved.’ He found it hard to discard the few by which Bles wanted to cut the size of the book, but suggested one which was ‘ruined by the utterly un-numinous, foreshortened Aslan in the background’, another in which ‘the travellers ought to be carrying packs, not parcels in their hands like trippers’, and a Gnome who was ‘too like a brat out of Dickens’s London’, and asked for one alteration: ‘could the shield be painted out in Chinese white and thus obliterated? Knights didn’t wear shields on the right arm.’
‘It is delightful to find (and not only for selfish reasons) that you do each book a little better than the last,’ wrote Lewis to Pauline Baynes on 21 January 1954 after seeing the illustrations for The Horse and his Boy.
Both the drawings of Lasaraleen in her litter were a rich feast of line and of fantastic-satiric imagination: my only regret was that we couldn’t have both. Shasta among the tombs (in the new technique which is lovely) was just what I wanted. The pictures of Rabadash hanging on the hook and just turning into an ass were the best comedy you’ve done yet. The Tisroc was superb: far beyond anything you were doing five years ago. I thought that your human faces – the boys, King Lune, etc. – were, this time, really good.22
Lewis had been very disappointed with the children in the illustrations to the earlier books, whom he considered ugly and unintelligent: ‘I know you made the children rather plain – in the interests of realism – but do you think you could possibly pretty them up now?’ he had written when the illustrations for Prince Caspian were commissioned.23 And he detested the modern trend in children’s book illustration for making the characters as vulgar and moronic as possible, whatever their cultural or hierarchic background: typically, he described the jacket picture to Green’s The Luck of Troy, supposedly depicting young Nicostratus, the son of Menelaus and Helen, as ‘a beatnik in running shorts’.
Meanwhile Lewis was turning back to the story he had always intended to write, about the beginnings of Narnia: why the lamp-post stood in ‘Lantern Waste’, and how the White Witch came to be such an evil power in the land. The ‘Lefay Fragment’ gave him little more than his two characters, who at first supplied the name for the book, Polly and Digory; and the idea that Digory should be the Professor Kirke of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as a boy, set the story back to the period of Lewis’s own childhood: the period of E. Nesbit and Conan Doyle.
A little under half of the book was written by the end of May 1951 when Green was staying again at Magdalen. Lewis read the first chapter aloud, pausing at ‘In those days Mr Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road’, with a diffident: ‘Is it all right to say that in a story?’ and then handed over the manuscript, which Green read eagerly into the small hours, after the usual evening of enthralling talk.
He was in Magdalen again at the end of October, and about three-quarters of the book was written. But on this occasion he took it upon himself to criticize not merely lines and incidents, but a whole section of the story. In the version that Green read on 31 October, and spent the evening of 2 November 1951 in discussing with Lewis, Digory paid several visits to the dying world of Charn. During these he stayed in a farm cottage with an old countryman called Piers and his wife, who spoke with a rather laboured ‘Loamshire’ accent and were a little too simple and honest and far too long-winded; but, most of all, seemed to Green quite out of harmony with the rest of the book. And when the end of Charn came, Piers and his wife became the Adam and Eve of the newly created Narnia and king and queen of the Talking Animals, so becoming the parents of the future race of Narnians.
Lewis was not at first convinced, and set the book aside to consider. In fact he had finished The Last Battle before lending the revised typescript to Green in February 1954. Green noted at the time: ‘It seems the best of the lot (but each does on reading) – and is certainly vastly improved by the omission of the long section about Piers the Plowman – which I take some credit for persuading Jack to cut out. It’s a single unity now, and irresistibly gripping and compelling …’ And Lewis wrote to him on 22 February: ‘I was relieved that Polly and Digory got your nihil obstat. I was afraid you might object to Uncle Andrew as a character more amusing to adults than to children. You can always feel a paternal interest in this tale, for it owes more than half its merit to your shrewdness in discerning, and honesty in pointing out, the fatal “sag” in the original draft.’24
The Magician’s Nephew, as the book was finally called, owes a great deal of its excellence to the completely natural conversation and behaviour of the children: here at least any feeling that Lewis is remembering his own childhood (or being reminded by his recollections of E. Nesbit’s characters) makes not for less but for more verisimilitude: for Polly and Digory are his contemporaries, and there is no danger of their talk being out of date. As Lewis said later in 1954 in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, ‘I may yet be useful as a specimen … Use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.’25
In spite of the excellence of The Magician’s Nephew, the critics were probably right in waiting to award The Last Battle the honour of the Carnegie Medal for the best children’s book of 1956. This, The Last Chronicle of Narnia as it was first called, did not follow the rest for more than a year after the first version of The Magician’s Nephew was finished and set aside for further consideration. Green was reading the first forty pages of it (more than half the book, in Lewis’s neat handwriting on very large folio sheets) early in February 1953, and on 11 March Lewis wrote to Geoffrey Bles, ‘You will hear with mixed feelings that I have just finished the seventh and really the last of the Narnian stories.’26 It was revised and ready to be typed by the end of May.
It has often been asked whether Lewis had planned the whole Narnian series from the beginning, or even wrote each book with the next in mind; and whether he set out from the start to ‘put across’ certain lessons in simple Christianity and then looked about for the most suitable form in which to clothe them. Lewis himself answered the last question in his article ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said’ in the New York Times Book Review on 18 November 1956: ‘This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.’27 And again of the first story, ‘suddenly Aslan came bounding in …’ In this essay Lewis made an important distinction:
There are usually two reasons for writing an imaginative work, which may be called the Author’s reason and the Man’s … In the Author’s mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariably begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form … On that side (as Author) I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seemed the ideal form for the stuff I had to say.
Then of course the Man in me began to have his turn. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.28
With regard to The Chronicles of Narnia as a whole, there was certainly no idea of more than one book to begin with – thoug
h naturally the possibility of a sequel was present in his mind when The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was drawing to a close. But it was only a hazy idea – and Green inadvertently held it up for a little while by asking how the lamp-post came to be in Narnia, which led Lewis off on the first abortive attempt which survives as the ‘Lefay Fragment’. Prince Caspian led on to The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’, and there the series stopped for the moment – though not the inspiration, for Lewis then paused to tell the purely Narnian tale of The Horse and his Boy, before returning to Eustace, who at the end of the Voyage had been promised a return to Narnia, which became The Silver Chair.
Already Lewis was departing slightly from statements made in the first chronicle: there the Pevensies were the only ‘Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve’ who had come into Narnia, but in Prince Caspian the Telmarines are descended from a boat-load of pirates from earth who got in by way of a magic cave in the South Seas. This incursion was, of course, centuries later than the Pevensies’ first visit, and so does not contradict completely; but the introduction of Frank the Cabby and his wife Helen from London, in place of Piers the Plowman and his wife from Charn, in The Magician’s Nephew, does go contrary to the original statement. Presumably the rather clumsy contrivance of Digory’s apprenticeship to the farmer and his wife in a world other than earth shows Lewis’s original attempt to conform to his first ideas of Narnia – and it obviously seemed worth assuming that readers would have forgotten a relatively unimportant point in the Lion in order to achieve so much better a plot in The Magician’s Nephew.
C. S. Lewis Page 41
