The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (61 page)

How did Lewis respond to these calamities? With anxiety, as one might expect, but also with forbearance and humor. As he told Dorothy L. Sayers just before Warnie’s July collapse, those who believe in easy cures often turn dour, while those who recognize ills as deep-rooted maintain a brighter disposition, “wh. is not really a paradox. If one is hurrying a hurt man into an ambulance with the knowledge that he can be saved if you get him to hospital in time, of course one doesn’t joke. But if one is alleviating (year in, year out) the sufferings of an invalid who will never be quite well till the Resurrection, then for his sake as well as one’s own cheerfulness, even gaiety, must be encouraged … the importance of
not
being earnest.”

In addition to this fortunate outlook, Lewis possessed, like his brother, his own private means of escape: he could quit at once the Kilns, the Acland, and the shackles of his complex relationships by picking up his pen. Absorbed in narrative rapture, he would travel effortlessly to Mars, Venus, or whatever otherworldly realm beckoned, there to pursue, in a virgin landscape untouched by personal sorrows, the same theological and social themes that occupied him in the real world of tutorials, Inklings gatherings, and Bodleian research. He found the making of fiction so involving that for him it bypassed the ordinary analytical faculties, at least in its first stages: “a man writing a story is too excited about the story itself to sit back and notice how he is doing it,” he said.

Nonetheless, Lewis bristled at accusations that his writing was no more than escapism. He told the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke that he had shed all worries about the issue after a friend (surely Tolkien) had pointed out that the only people who condemn escape are jailers. But unlike Tolkien, Lewis emphasized the didactic power of fantasy, and in turning from apologetics to fairy stories and children’s literature (the genres are distinct yet overlapping), he was conscious of advancing, rather than shirking, his cause. The Anscombe debate was of minor importance in this awareness. Lewis knew there were better ways than heated debate to communicate the truths of the faith; he would title a later essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said.” Writing in September 1947 to Mrs. E. L. Baxter, an Episcopalian in Kentucky who along with her husband had been sending care packages of tea and food, Lewis remarked, “Don’t the ordinary fairy tales really already contain much of the Spirit, in solution? Does not Cinderella give us
exaltavit humiles
, and is not Redemption figured in
The Sleeping Beauty
?” It was only as a grown-up that he came fully to appreciate children’s fantasy;
The Chronicles of Narnia
—his seven-part otherworld fantasy with gospel overtones—was almost the inevitable next move. Indeed, there is evidence, in the form of a fragment discovered by Walter Hooper among Lewis’s posthumous papers, that he may have taken a stab at something like a Narnia tale as early as World War II, while young evacuees packed the Kilns and he was immersed in his BBC talks and other explicitly apologetic projects. The fragment, which does date from the war years, contains what appears to be a raw version of the first paragraph of
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
:

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 … 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.

Apparently Lewis set the manuscript aside. In September 1947, responding to Mrs. Baxter’s suggestion that he should write his own children’s stories, he said, “I have tried one myself but it was, by the unanimous verdict of my friends, so bad that I destroyed it.” Curiously enough, there is no record of any of Lewis’s friends reading such a story. In any event, within a year of his exchange with Mrs. Baxter, he had plunged into the tale that would become
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: A Story for Children.

Through the Wardrobe

Lewis set his new fiction—the adventures of four young siblings (Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy, in descending order of age) evacuated to a country house during the London Blitz, who pass through a bedroom wardrobe into a magical land—in a precinct of Fa
ë
rie that he called Narnia. He took the name, as he told Walter Hooper, from an Umbrian town (“Narni”) on an atlas of ancient Italy. The idea of the tale first came as an image, appearing unheralded in his mind: “a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood.” The picture had arisen when he was sixteen, and he had nurtured it for more than thirty years. He never could determine its origin or antecedents; he believed that such ignorance was commonplace among artists: “I don’t know where the pictures came from. And I don’t believe anyone knows exactly how he ‘makes things up.’ Making up is a very mysterious thing.”

In the summer of 1948, Lewis told the American poet and literary scholar Chad Walsh (author, in 1949, of
C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics
) that he was in the midst of writing the memoir that would become
Surprised by Joy—
he had gotten as far as the end of World War I—and was planning to finish a book he had begun “in the tradition of E. Nesbit.” This conjunction is worth noting: if
Surprised by Joy
was a way for Lewis to confess and come to terms with the spiritual crises of his youth, Narnia was a way to reclaim the best parts of his youth in the light of the spiritual convictions of his Christian maturity, freed from the burdens of the past; Narnia and
Surprised by Joy
are two sides of the same conversion story. Almost a year after Walsh’s visit, Lewis read two chapters of the completed manuscript of his first children’s fantasy to his former tutee Roger Lancelyn Green, whose earlier story, “The Wood That Time Forgot” about three children magically transported into a preternatural forest, had been an encouragement and a minor influence. In his diary, Green declared the chapters “very good indeed, though a trifle self-conscious.” Dr. Havard’s daughter, Mary Clare, announced her approval, as a representative child reader.

Tolkien’s assessment, by contrast, was apoplectic; he declared to Green, “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?” It was bad enough that Lewis had borrowed the N
ú
menor legend (Tolkien’s retelling of the Atlantis story) for incidental use in
That Hideous Strength
—changing the spelling to Numinor (suggestive of “numinous”)—before Tolkien had had a chance to publish the legend himself. But what really irked Tolkien about Narnia was that he saw Lewis as deploying, for a pious allegory, bits and pieces of classical and Tolkienesque mythology, instead of undertaking the long labor required to create a fully realized mythological world. Had Tolkien’s opinion prevailed, the series would have been stillborn. But it would be wrong to view Narnia as Middle-earth Lite or as a mere jumble of mythological motifs. It is a more fully and consciously
other
otherworld than Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and as such holds up a mirror to Lewis’s own broadly erudite mind and catholicity of taste. There was ample room in Lewis’s monotheistic world, if not for the old high gods, then for a host of lesser deities to play supporting parts. Bacchus, Silenus, fauns, satyrs, dryads, naiads, and centaurs roam freely in Narnia, detached from their Greek and Roman origins, their wildness (and, in the case of fauns or satyrs, their lechery) subdued. So do dwarfs, giants, and werewolves, of Germanic, Celtic, or uncertain provenance, as well as talking beasts and walking trees, earthmen, sea-people, and monopods, river gods and singing stars, and wholly fanciful beings like the Marsh-wiggle
.
These inconsistencies are not fatal; they remind us that the gradual Christianization of Europe was also a matter of assimilating and reframing local and classical myths. Lewis found a way to gather the “good dreams” (as he put it in
Mere Christianity
), the hints scattered throughout world mythology of divine and preternatural truth, and create for them an imaginal habitat—for what is Narnia if not the imagination made real?—in which they can convincingly coexist.

Jarring notes do intrude. Some of the humor is self-consciously patronizing and whimsical—a literary sin Tolkien would also commit in the first chapter of
The Lord of the Rings
—and would have been worse if Green had not persuaded Lewis to rein in colloquialisms like “Crikey!” The sudden appearance of Father Christmas, as the tide is turning in
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
, sends an all-too-obvious signal to seek out the Christian message. Green urged Lewis to drop Father Christmas. Tolkien was appalled. But on this matter, Lewis stuck to his guns; no other figure of legend would convey so fully to an English audience all that is truly festal in the celebration of Christ’s birth, overcoming the secular commercialization of Christmas on the one hand and the puritan prohibition of the holiday on the other, embodying the triumph of warmth and light over the long dark hours of a northern winter and of cheerful abundance amid the deprivation that lingered after the war.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
has as much to say about war and its aftermath—about collaborators, traitors, and heroes of resistance, about ordinary people caught up in a geopolitics they can’t fathom, about the harm even a vanquished enemy can cause, and about rationing and the fragile goodness of domestic life—as it does about the Christian mysteries. The four children who take refuge from the London Blitz in the country home of an eccentric professor are reluctant pilgrims, like Ransom, lifted out of a world at war into a realm where myths are real.

Just as H. G. Wells, in
First Men on the Moon
, provided a structure for Lewis to adapt to the more profound narrative that is
Out of the Silent Planet
, so did E. Nesbit (a friend of Wells, and like Wells a Fabian socialist) provide a structure for the first Narnia book. Though consciously modeling
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
on the Psammead and other Nesbit tales he had loved since childhood, Lewis had forgotten, until Green brought it to his attention, a minor Nesbit story that must have been an unconscious influence. In “The Aunt and Amabel,” a young girl, wrongly punished for some innocent mischief, discovers that the great wardrobe in a spare bedroom is actually a magical railway station called Bigwardrobeinspareroom where all times are Now; she boards a crystalline train bound for Whereyouwantogoto
—
a land of pure desire (everything is crystal, silver, or white) and instant gratification (with Whatyouwantoeat, Whatyouwantodrink, and Whatyouwantoread always on offer) whose citizens are the People Who Understand.

The parallels do not run deep, however; Nesbit’s story is a one-dimensional morality tale, with an ironic twist that could not be more different from the tone and purpose of
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
There is nothing in it like the numinous lion-god of Narnia. This majestic figure, as Lewis recalled, occurred to him long after the image of the faun with the umbrella—he had been dreaming of lions—but once present in the story as “Aslan” (Turkish for lion), quickly acquired a majesty and solar splendor suggestive of Christ, Lion of the tribe of Judah (Revelation 5:5). As Lewis said later, “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.”

Out of the Silent Planet
had been Lewis’s apprenticeship in the art of didactic fantasy, but in Narnia, addressing himself to children, he came of age. The new series gave Lewis the freedom to drop the science fiction framework entirely and transfer the great themes of his planetary romance and the central arguments of his Christian apologetics to a more purely fantastic otherworld whose laws could be completely of his own invention, with no worries about scientific plausibility. It would not be a work in code, but an integrated work of mythopoeic imagination, more like Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
than Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Lewis thought that the best way to appreciate Spenser would be to encounter him first “in a very large—and, preferably, illustrated—edition of
The Faerie Queene
, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen…” Reading
The Faerie Queene
thus, as a “mere wonder-tale,” would trigger a sense of having “met all these knights and ladies, all these monsters and enchanters, somewhere before”—and that would be literary magic enough for a child. Only later, as one grows up with
The Faerie Queene
in possession, would one discern layer upon layer of Spenser’s Christian and Platonic symbolism, without obscuring the initial, unanalyzed delight. Such a reading of
The Faerie Queene
is possible because it is allegory at its best, drawn from the reservoir of natural symbols rooted in the psyche and of scriptural symbols equally connatural to the Christian soul.

The same approach recommends itself for Narnia; for
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
is an allegory in the Spenserian sense alone, and as such repays both childish and adult investment. Lucy, the youngest of the children, represents the ideal of faithful reason, in just the way that real individuals often do embody a particular virtue and make it real for others. She is innocent and trusting, sensitive and inquisitive, but also essentially levelheaded. Her credentials as a witness, when her siblings doubt the reality of Narnia, pass the trilemma test Lewis had famously applied to Christ himself. Is Lucy a habitual liar? No. A lunatic? No. Then the conclusion is inescapable:

“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”