The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (62 page)

To the Professor—named Kirke, a thoroughly converted version of the ultrarational Kirkpatrick and something of a Gandalf figure (odd-looking, slightly alarming, in possession of a secret knowledge)—impeccable logic is the natural companion to Platonic metaphysics and, though this is unstated, to Christian faith. A well-formed mind, the Professor suggests, would find it eminently reasonable that there should be entrances to Fa
ë
rie in the spare room of a great country house; to paraphrase Dryden, great reason is to great imagination near allied.

And great imagination is to moral vision near allied—this was the lesson of
Out of the Silent Planet.
Lucy, as her name suggests, is lucid; her vision is wide-angle, her dreams rational, her communication with other talking species (beginning with the faun, Tumnus) immediate and unimpeded. Peter is sympathetic to Lucy’s lucidity yet burdened by his responsibility for making the wise decisions, while Susan is kindly and affectionate but in too great a hurry to grow up, to talk and eventually to look just like Mother. Edmund is a grouch; when we find him, in the first pages of
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
, reacting with exasperation to Susan’s affectation, scoffing at Lucy’s childish fears, and grumbling that the rain will spoil their fun, we are already witnessing the seeds of his downfall. Unwilling to admit that he is exhausted and scared, Edmund can see only what his own desires and resentments enable him to see; after a seemingly motiveless betrayal of Lucy, he lays himself open to manipulation by the White Witch, fails to see the essential goodness of the Badger family, and recoils in horror at the name of Aslan—all marks of the corruption of his affections and will. He is Mark Studdock with a sweet tooth; and Susan is Jane Studdock in training heels. Both embody faults Lewis detected in himself, confessed in
Surprised by Joy
, and hoped to absolve by the means of grace his Christian faith afforded.

By December 1949,
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
was ready to be published. Lewis thought he might like to do the illustrations himself, but made the wiser decision to employ Pauline Baynes, the illustrator for Tolkien’s
Farmer Giles of Ham
. Unfortunately, Lewis never quite grasped the nature of her genius; though politely encouraging (for he found her a gentle creature, easily demoralized by criticism), he complained to friends that her human faces were vacant and her animals anatomically incorrect. He had pictured a realistic lion; what Baynes produced instead was a heraldic lion, along with a splendid array of medievalesque miniatures whose delicate drollery invites rather than imposes belief.

Throughout the Narnian books, the Lion is a living portrait of holiness, akin to the theophanies and angelophanies of biblical literature, at once terrifying and desirable beyond all desires; Lewis was indebted to Rudolf Otto’s
The Idea of the Holy
for this conception of a
mysterium tremendum et fascinans
. More concretely, Aslan is an icon of Christ, “son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea,” who gives his life to pay a sinner’s debt, and in so doing confounds the enemy, releases the “deeper magic from before the dawn of time,” and breaks the rule of sin and death. When pressed to identify himself directly, the Lion echoes the great “I AM” three times, suggesting the three Persons of the Trinity: “‘Myself,’ said the voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again ‘Myself,’ loud and clear and gay: and then the third time ‘Myself,’ whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it.” In a messianic breakfast near the world’s end, the Lion becomes the Lamb, echoing the Book of Revelation and the Gospel according to St. John. All this, Lewis said, was not allegory but imaginative “supposal”: “Suppose there were a Narnian world and it, like ours, needed redemption. What kind of incarnation and Passion might Christ be supposed to undergo there?”

By March 1951, Lewis had written
Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia—
the original title was
Drawn into Narnia—
a time-travel adventure in which the Pevensie children are magically summoned to the ruins of their former castle, more than a thousand years after their reign, to aid the young heir against his uncle, an evil usurper, during a dark period when the very existence of Aslan is doubted;
The Voyage of the
Dawn Treader, the most mythically rich of the tales, in which the younger Pevensies, Edmund and Lucy, joined by their priggish cousin Eustace, are drawn into Narnia by way of a ship at sea, and sail with Caspian, now king, on a mission to recover seven lords exiled by Caspian’s usurper;
The Horse and His Boy
, originally
To Narnia and the North
, the title echoing the cry of a Narnian prince and his horse fleeing in advance of an invasion by soldiers from the south in whose realm they had been forced to dwell; and
The Silver Chair
, originally
Night Under Narnia
, featuring Eustace and a school chum named Jill Pole, along with a sage and melancholy Marsh-wiggle, Puddleglum. By March 1953, Lewis had finished his Apocalypse,
The Last Battle: A Story for Children
, in which an Anti-christ ape persuades a befuddled donkey to dress up as Aslan and deceive the masses, and Eustace and Jill return in time to uncover the fraud and experience the world’s end. Last to be finished, and longest in the writing, was Lewis’s version of Genesis,
The Magician’s Nephew
, in which Aslan sings Narnia into existence, only to be challenged by Eustace’s uncle Andrew, a second-rate magician in thrall to the queen who would eventually conquer Narnia as the White Witch.

If, in Narnia, Lewis recast his great themes into a form suited to the nursery, he did little to dilute their potency or to dull the edge of his satire. Uncle Andrew is much like Weston in
Out of the Silent Planet
—a self-important Edwardian man of science thwarted in his attempt to corrupt a new world. Like Weston, he willfully makes himself incapable of understanding divine speech (“If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings”). The difference is that conversion remains possible for him; he is cured after a brief humiliation and a long sleep. Other conversion stories are more poignant; in
The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe
, the traitor Edmund is redeemed by the sacrificial death of Aslan, and in
The Voyage of the
Dawn Treader, the prig Eustace submits to a painful undragoning suggestive of purgatory. By the tender and terrible mercy of the Lion, both Edmund and Eustace emerge from their ordeals as saints, forever chastened and grateful; and if Uncle Andrew is not sanctified, he is at least softened by his upending.

In a 1956 essay for the Children’s Books section of
The New York Times Book Review
, Lewis explained that his aim in writing the Narnia books had been to recover an instinct for sacred things from the moralistic sentimentality by which it had been deadened:

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 … 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.

Stealing past the watchful dragons, Lewis was able to portray a Christian cosmos sung into being ex nihilo, marred in its beginning, redeemed by divine self-sacrifice, and finally dissolved, at the eschaton, into the real Narnia and the real England, into the story “which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” He was able to render this didacticism delightful by associating it with talking beasts, magical portals, healing elixirs, and courtly gentilesse. Stealing past the pedestrian Christians, he could satisfy the indelible human desire to speak with beings of a different kind, to know fauns, Arabian princesses, monopods, and a Marsh-wiggle, to discover one’s hidden royal identity, to visit the faraway realm seen from the nursery window, across the green Castlereagh Hills. Reepicheep the chivalrous mouse is no allegorical figure, yet in many ways the spiritual heart of the Narniad is his quest for the world’s end, his deepest longing since, as an infant mouse, he had heard the dryad’s song: “Where sky and water meet, / Where the waves grow sweet, / Doubt not, Reepicheep, / To find all you seek, / There is the utter East.”

Reviews in the popular and Christian press were straightforwardly appreciative. On the assumption that the books were written for boys and girls, criticism of the series was light. Most reviewers read the Christian symbolism accurately, without taking offense, while Christian educators were quick to appreciate the value of the tales for winning young hearts. Charles A. Brady, a professor at Canisius College and author of a historical novel about St. Thomas More, reviewed the series in the Jesuit magazine
America
, calling it the “greatest addition to the imperishable deposit of children’s literature since the Jungle Books” and noting the value to Catholic children in particular of an author who “evangelizes through the imagination.” Soon letters from adoring young readers began to pour in (to continue, long after Lewis’s death and even to the present day). But among the non-Christian literary and academic vanguard, Narnia only intensified resentment against its author; that admirers like Brady characterized Lewis as leader of an “Oxford Circle” of evangelizers scarcely helped the situation.

A Bad Patch

“I don’t like to hear of that ‘bad patch’ at all, at all,” wrote Walter de la Mare to Barfield on June 14, 1950, “but if the desire you mention is at all persistent—though it is ten to one that you didn’t mean it literally—then I’m sure there is something
physically
wrong.” By now the friends had exchanged dozens of letters discussing, with humor and growing intimacy, fellow authors, mutual friends, Anthroposophy, and closely held hopes and dreams (thus de la Mare, on November 16, 1949: “Between you and me I have a particular and forlorn hope—just once before I depart hence—to see a dryad, a naiad, an oread, sylph or a Nereid—in this England of ours”). By 1950, de la Mare would address Barfield as “My dear Obee” and sign his letters “All blessings and my love.”

In his June 14 letter, however, warmth and high spirits give way to fear and foreboding. Barfield’s “bad patch,” his ominous but unspecified “desire,” and de la Mare’s anxiety about his friend’s mental and physical state, indicate that despite the success of
This Ever Diverse Pair
, Barfield remained in serious distress. The failure to find a home for “The Mother of Pegasus” had been just the latest in a series of stinging defeats. His poetry attracted few readers, and his primary literary outlets had dwindled to a few Steinerian house organs. He gave two talks on the BBC Third Programme, “Goethe and Evolution” on December 1, 1949, and “The Influence of Language on Thought: The Poetic Approach” on January 10, 1951, but these opened no new doors. Reconciled to the legal profession, he still despised its daily grind.

His friendships, too, were undergoing more painful changes. Lewis, to his eyes, had half-disappeared behind a mask, although his generosity remained undiminished. Daphne Harwood had fallen terribly ill; on June 5, 1950, a concerned Lewis wrote to Cecil Harwood that “you must be incurring a good many unusual expenses at present: and there may be other—alleviations—wh. you wd. like to incur for Daphne,” and invited him to plunge into the Agape Fund, adding in a second letter four days later, “Dip and spare not.” Daphne died of cancer on July 14, leaving behind her husband and five children. To cap this calamity afflicting one of his closest friends, Barfield faced an Anthroposophical Society fractured by ideological rifts and packed with members who found it hard to face the modern world with its rampant skepticism and materialism. “It is … within my knowledge,” he said in a lecture to the society, “that there are people within this Movement who feel that they have just about reached the end of their tether, who really do not know which way to turn; to whom life appears to be one long series of seemingly meaningless frustrations; people for whom … life really does, in one way or another, wear the mask of something like a living death.” He might have been talking about himself, although he later denied this.

Meanwhile, he was increasingly exposed to the intimate troubles of others. Thanks to his rising prominence in Steinerian circles and his reputation as a kindly man, he received a stream of letters begging advice on matters Anthroposophical and personal. Some of the latter concerned marital difficulties. In 1951 he responded to a letter from a distraught woman regarding a situation in which, as he put it, “an appreciable number of married women, among our members, are finding themselves as they grow older”—that of a straying husband. He advised his correspondent to “get some mutual friend or relative to see him on your behalf and tell him (if that is the fact) that you are still fond of him and wish to … re-establish the marriage in the ordinary human sense. I would not recommend your explicitly insisting on absolute fidelity as a condition, but it is obvious that the present liaison would have to cease … there would have to be a genuine resolution on his part to make a true household with you…” This counsel, seemingly that of a sagacious bystander far beyond the fray, reflects Barfield’s own agonies of heart; for his marriage with Maud was in perilous disarray.

By 1951, Barfield was in his early fifties, Maud in her midsixties. Their marriage had lasted thirty years, during which Maud’s animosity toward Steiner and his teachings had, if anything, intensified. In 1927, Lewis had recorded in his diary a conversation between Maud and Mrs. Moore: “Mrs. B has apparently been having a heart-to-heart with D. She ‘hates, hates, hates’ Barfield’s Anthroposophy, and says he ought to have told her before they were married: wh. sounds ominous.” Twenty-four years later, despite Barfield’s conversion to Anglicanism, Maud remained implacably opposed to her husband’s esoteric interests. The two maintained a peaceful veneer by avoiding all discussion of religion or metaphysics, and especially of Anthroposophy, but this scarcely constitutes a prescription for marital bliss. Frustrated in his art, unhappy in his career, uninspired in his marriage, Barfield longed desperately for … well, he hardly knew what.