The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis

The Faerie King

I.
Alan Jacobs observes in his book that C.S. Lewis seems not to have been a particularly likeable or interesting man before his conversion to Christianity in 1929. Lewis himself would probably have agreed. Looking back at that time, he recalled examining himself with a practical purpose for the first time and being appalled by what he found: "a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds." He was probably judging himself by standards that would condemn most of us even more severely, but certainly his conversion appears to have infused and changed every part of his life and action.

Before, he seems not to have known where he was going. He had aspired to be a poet, and had published a couple of long verse narratives that few people have ever cared to read then or since; and he had been forced to recognize that his dearest hope was dead. He knew that he wanted to be an academic (it is unclear whether he ever considered looking for a job outside Oxford), but oddly he did not know what the subject of his life's work should be. He applied for posts in both philosophy and English literature; as it happened, after a couple of rejections he landed an English job at Magdalen College. Had a philosophy post come his way first, his career might have been unknowably different.

Almost from the moment of his conversion, Lewis acquired an extraordinary fluency. Books poured from him on a wide range of subjects: medieval and Renaissance literature, science fiction, children's books, and Christian writings. Even his explicitly Christian books are diverse in character, ranging from apologetics (Mere Christianity) to philosophical theology (The Problem of Pain, Miracles) and moral theology cast in fictional form (The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce). Once he became famous as a Christian thinker, in his forties, he received a flood of letters from admirers, some of them importunate and tediously persistent; and dutifully he spent a large part of his time replying to them in longhand, and often with a kindness and fullness that encouraged them to write back again and again. All this while holding down a full-time academic post, coping with odd domestic circumstances that drained time and spirit from him, and suffering frequent ill health. He must have been tough.

His conversion changed Lewis also as a writer, so one should not consider the Narnia stories in isolation from his other works. He put moral and religious teaching into his children's books, and he dressed moral theology for adults in a fictional guise. All his interests pervade all his best works, and so his reading in classical and Renaissance literature was not too grand to be offered to the young. Narnia is accordingly peopled with satyrs, dryads, and centaurs from Greek mythology, fauns from ancient Italy, talking animals from children's stories, dwarfs and giants from northern folk-tale. His friend Tolkien objected to the incoherence of this, but the answer is to be found in, say, Spenser's Faerie Queen, the poem that Lewis so vigorously defended, at a time when it was out of favor, in his first book, The Allegory of Love. What his diverse books have in common is that he wrote always as an advocate. He is chivalric in temperament, a champion, a knight constantly girding himself for another battle. Just occasionally the armored figure may seem more like Don Quixote than the Black Prince.

The Allegory of Love already shows Lewis's refusal to be constrained by conventional academic boundaries. It ranges between French and English poetry, between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between the exploration of individual poems and the defense of allegory as a form. And it is, characteristically, an evangelizing book, in a mostly (but not entirely) secular sense of that word. Lewis wants us to understand a genre, the allegorical love poetry of the Middle Ages, which, as he says, "is apt to repel the modern reader both by its form and its content," and more than that, he wants to persuade us to delight in it. In this, his first book, he has already found a distinctive tone of voice. The book is personal in a more direct sense, too: already in the first paragraph of his chapter on the Roman de la Rose we read, "for myself ... as I confessed ... As far as I myself is concerned ..." This is not egotism, it is the conviction that a writer should be intensely engaged with his subject. This scholarly book reads as an overflowing of the spirit, pouring forth under the pressure of a need to persuade.

Improbably, the same is true even of Lewis's only large tome, the one book that he wrote reluctantly, out of a sense of academic duty, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. It is interesting that Jacobs judges this to be the greatest of his works. The uninviting title -- and Lewis was generally good at titles -- is explained by the fact that the volume was one in a series, the Oxford History of English Literature (Oxford University Press has recently re-issued it as Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century). Is there another textbook so witty, gripping, and entertaining? It is most beautifully written -- how curious, but also significant, that Lewis's most eloquent prose, outside his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, should come in his academic works; but its power lies also in the fact that its author lives, intellectually and spiritually, within the century that he is interpreting. Lewis knows that the religious conflicts of the age were hugely important to its literature, and they remain hugely important to himself.

When Lewis notes that Catholics in this century condemned the Anglican church because it did not persecute, we may be sure that he has in mind the Catholics of his own time who condemned Anglicanism for lukewarmness. And he has a distinctive and controversial case to argue: that the Renaissance was regress as well as progress. His first chapter, "New Learning and New Ignorance," has seemed perverse to some, but in exposing the narrowness and the pedantry of some of the Renaissance humanists, and in championing the intellectual power of the best medieval minds, he was at least partly justified, and in some ways he was ahead of his time.

Lewis had a taste for passionate paradox. He points out, for instance, that the early Puritans were censured by their opponents not for gloomy moralism but for an unseemly cheerfulness: washed in the blood of the Lamb, they had no further need for penitence, and it was Catholics such as Thomas More who demanded a darker sense of abiding guilt and purgatorial suffering to come. Compare Screwtape, the experienced devil in The Screwtape Letters, on Puritanism: "May I remark in passing that the value we have given to that word is one of the really solid triumphs of the last hundred years? By it we rescue annually thousands from temperance, chastity, and sobriety of life."

Jacobs offers his book as "almost a conventional biography in the usual sense of the word," and he provides a fluent and sensible re-telling of the main outlines of Lewis's life, with an emphasis on the interpretation of his fiction. It was a life that can sound limited in some of its outward aspects. Apparently an old-fashioned bachelor don until his late and all too short marriage, Lewis was rubicund and tweedy. He once said that he liked hardly any sound as much as healthy adult male laughter; he loved beer and conversation round a fire with like-minded friends. He left the British Isles only twice in his life, neither time at his own impulsion: first to France, to fight in the trenches in the World War I, and then forty years later to Greece, to please his dying wife.

But from another point of view his life was strange and eventful. This supremely English figure was in fact not English at all. Born in Belfast in 1898, he was by origin part of a minority three times over, an Irishman within the United Kingdom, a Protestant within Catholic Ireland, and an Anglican (Episcopalian) within predominantly Presbyterian Ulster. His background was respectably middle class: his mother was the daughter of an Episcopalian clergyman, his father a lawyer who worked for the police courts. As an Anglican, one might have expected him to have belonged to the Englishry in Ireland, Yeats's people, but at least in early adulthood he described himself as a Celt, and in that way distinct from the English.

Yet his Irish background does not seem to have been emotionally important to him; its importance was of another kind. In Surprised by Joy, his account of his early life and spiritual odyssey, Lewis describes how foreign England seemed to him when he first encountered it, so lush and thickly wooded. His feeling for England as both familiar and alien may have affected his literary imagination. Jacobs writes well about Lewis's passion for "faery." Faery both is and is not England -- it is an England transformed and irradiated by numinous myth. This is what Lewis found and loved in The Faerie Queen. Narnia in his otherworld is not in fact at all like England -- as the Shire is, by contrast, in Tolkien's Middle-Earth; but faery may at least have drawn him to the idea of a world that both is and is not ours.

He was robbed of his childhood twice over, by the death of his mother when he was nine years old, and by being sent away to England to a couple of boarding schools, which he loathed. These deprivations may have had something to do with his writing children's books in middle life. He was severely wounded in World WarI, and his life then took a curious turn. He seems to have fallen in love with Mrs. Jane Moore, a widow some two dozen years older than himself; she was the mother of a comrade killed in battle, and he appears also to have promised this friend that he would look after her. Lewis's passion for her seems to have faded fairly soon, but he came to regard her also as his own mother, and looked after her as such, although she became difficult, demanding, and eventually demented. He shared his house not only with her but also with his elder brother, an amiable cove, in some ways intelligent and perceptive, but indolent, childlike, and intermittently alcoholic. That he could write so much while existing in this domestic purgatory is remarkable.

The other strange episode in his life has been made famous by William Nicholson's play Shadowlands, which was later made into a film. Joy Gresham, née Davidman, an American Jewish divorcee and Christian convert, seems to have fallen in love with Lewis at a distance and came to England to meet him. They became friends, she was diagnosed with cancer, and Lewis, strangely unaware that he was falling in love with her, went through a civil marriage with her so that she could remain in the country. He then recognized his passion for her, but found that the Church of England would not marry him sacramentally because of her divorce. Eventually he found a clergyman who was not under the authority of the Bishop of Oxford and was prepared to conduct the ceremony.

A short period of intense physical and emotional happiness followed. Joy seemed to be cured, but the remission was short-lived; and her death in 1960 almost unhinged him with grief. It was characteristic of Lewis that his erotic fulfilment led him to write a book, The Four Loves, a blend of theology, literature, philosophy, imagination, and personal experience. It was originally commissioned as a series of radio talks by an Episcopalian foundation in Atlanta, Georgia, but they found the sections on eros too fruity for the American airwaves.

II.
Why Lewis wrote the Narnia books at all is a puzzling question. The best writers for children have been, like Lewis, disproportionately childless (Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, Robert Louis Stevenson) or the parents of only children (Kenneth Grahame, A.A. Milne), and their books have often originated from stories invented to give pleasure to real children: Carroll, Grahame, and Milne again, as well as Kipling's Jungle Books, Just So Stories, and Puck of Pook's Hill. But Lewis hardly knew any children at the time and he does not appear to have liked them much. He seems to have been puzzled himself: he had simply felt, he said later, that a fairy tale for children was "exactly what I must write -- or burst."

The sort of story that he wanted to tell was more unusual at the time he was writing than it may seem now. The theme of the otherworld -- the tale of a child transported into another order of existence and usually returning home at the end -- was originally created for stories meant for quite small children. The current superstars of children's literature, J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, have taken this theme and used it in books intended for a somewhat older market. Adolescents today read a lot of fantasy, but at the time that Lewis was writing this was not so. Fantasy was for small children, and older children moved on to supposedly realistic stories of adventure -- the sort of story of which Treasure Island is the supreme example. The combination of otherworld fantasy with a kind of moral ambition that we meet in Pullman and in the later Harry Potter books originated with Lewis.

For each of us, the children's books that we have read fall into two classes: those that we discovered when we were children, and those that we have come across since. I did not myself discover the Narnia books in childhood, and so I cannot confidently say how I would have felt about them then. A liberal London vicar, Giles Fraser, has recently expressed his unease about the Narnia books, or at least his fear that they will mire adults in a childish version of Christianity, but he admits that he has to set his own feelings against the judgement of his nine-year-old daughter: "Daddy, it's brilliant." The seven books have between them sold more than eighty-five million copies; against that judgment there is, on one level, no appeal.

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was the first to be written. The tale follows the story pattern made famous by Carroll and much imitated since. Four English siblings, two boys and two girls, walk into a wardrobe or closet and find themselves in the land of Narnia, part of an otherworld, the way Alice passes through the looking-glass. Narnia, once a happy realm, has been frozen by the wicked White Witch, and has become a land where it is always winter but never Christmas. Aslan the lion comes from afar, bringing the spring with him, to do battle with the White Witch. But Edmund, one of the four children, has through his own wrongdoing fallen into the Witch's power, and he can only be rescued by Aslan's agreeing to die in his place. Aslan surrenders himself to the Witch and is bound, mocked, and killed; but he returns to life again and routs the forces of evil. And in this way Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection are re-enacted. Time in the otherworld is not our time, and the children grow up and become kings and queens in Narnia, while remaining the same age back on Earth.

Most of the subsequent books -- there are seven in all -- follow the same story pattern. The protagonists of The Horse and His Boy -- an escape narrative on the pattern of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped -- and Prince Caspian are natives of the otherworld, with the visitors from our own world playing at the most a subsidiary role, but the rest are based on the Through the Looking-Glass device, with several more children added to the original four. In the final volume, The Last Battle, Narnia comes to an end, and we see many of the characters from the earlier stories resurrected and moving through an earthly paradise toward heaven.

The Narnia books are good but not very good. The narratives are lively and reasonably inventive, but the stories lack the unique and original vision that makes a very few children's books great. And they lack vivid characters. The boys and the girls who take the leading roles are all pretty colorless: Edmund and Eustace are nasty little boys until they are redeemed by Aslan, but thereafter they are indistinguishable from the others. And none of the minor or quainter characters has the life that almost every figure in Lewis Carroll or Beatrix Potter has. Puddleglum in The Silver Chair is an inferior version of Milne's immortal Eeyore, and he is further weakened by Lewis's moralism: beneath his lugubrious exterior he is really the salt of the earth, and this seems soft-centered. Lewis's most imaginative creation is Aslan, the lion who represents Jesus, but he is more of a presence than a character.

I have asked friends who read the Narnia books as children how they felt about the allegory. Some of them have said that they felt cheated when they realized the truth: they had loved the stories, and then found that a grown-up was getting at them after all. But another friend remarked that it was plain to her from the start that the thing was allegorical (not, presumably, that she could have used that term). What might at least be evident to a reasonably alert and imaginative child is that there is something large and mysterious going on behind the narrative surface. Something a little similar happens in other children's books and children can enjoy it. I was certainly conscious as a boy of something excitingly "mystical" in the chapter on "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" in The Wind in the Willows and in the last chapter of The House at Pooh Corner. I now know that the former depicts a vision of the great god Pan and the latter is about the loss of childhood; and frankly these texts are less thrilling now that I possess their entire meaning. Eliot once said that great poetry could be appreciated before it is fully understood, but he might have added that some lesser literature is best appreciated before it is fully understood.

Mark Johnson, the producer of the new Narnia film, anxious to downplay the Christianity in Narnia, has said that when he first read Lewis, "it never occurred to me Aslan was anything more than a great lion." That was certainly imperceptive. It is just about possible to say that Aslan in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book of the series, is a type of Christ, who re-enacts the crucifixion and the resurrection, but in the sequels he is inescapably Christ himself. Nothing more than a great lion? Like the risen Jesus, he is fully physical but he comes and goes as he wills. He is the object of worship; he is numinous; he has miraculous and transforming powers. The young reader may be unaware of the Christian significances, but it is a dull child who does not sense that Aslan is supernatural.

To look for Lewis without Christianity is like looking for narcotic-free heroin: whether or not you are hooked on the drug, you would be missing the point. Apart from anything else, you would be making an aesthetic mistake. As a writer Lewis is best and most original when he is most Christian. Like it or not, this is where his imagination is most fully engaged. Aslan is the best thing in the Narnia books: the conception of Christ as a great cat, lovable and furry but also powerful, terrible, and strange, is indeed brilliant, and when Aslan appears, the stories acquire a new vividness.

Cynics have attributed the film-makers' busy denial of the Christianity in Narnia to a concern for the box office, but its causes are more probably cultural and psychological. According to Tilda Swinton, who plays the White Witch, the original book is more spiritual than religious, and anyway, "You can make a religious allegory out of anything if that's what you're interested in." Well, no, you can't; and if she ever turns to The Screwtape Letters or The Great Divorce, she will find that Lewis directs some of his most withering satire upon those who try to dissolve religion into a blur of vague spiritual uplift. Swinton again: "It's about finding self-sufficiency in difficult circumstances and finding the capacity to dig deep, survive, and prevail."

That is almost exactly wrong. Certainly the books advocate courage and virtue, but if there is one thing that they recurrently proclaim, it is human insufficiency. In each of the books the children cannot survive and prevail if they rely on themselves: they need the grace that comes from Aslan. The books also teach the disregard of self: it is by turning inward upon themselves that the children stumble and by forgetting themselves and caring for others that they are rescued.

This much may be conceded to the de-Christianizers: the stories can make sense as moral myths -- about courage, honor, unselfishness, insufficiency, and the relation of the divine to the created order -- without specifically Christian reference. Only once, I think, in The Last Battle, very near the end of the entire cycle, does Lewis make an explicitly Christian allusion. In this book there is a stable, insignificant to outward view, but which, once entered, opens out into the earthly paradise; and Lucy, the most "religious" of the children, observes, "In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world."

Lewis has come under ferocious attack from some who have no doubt about his Christian content. Jacobs quotes from a couple of his enemies. The first is the British critic and novelist Philip Hensher:

Let us drop C. S. Lewis and his ghastly, priggish, half-witted, money-making drivel about Narnia down the nearest deep hole ... They are revoltingly mean-minded books, written to corrupt the minds of the young with allegory, smugly denouncing anything that differs in the slightest respect from Lewis's creed of clean-living, muscular Christianity, pipe-smoking, misogyny, racism, and the most vulgar snobbery.

The other is Philip Pullman, who has repeatedly celebrated his loathing of Lewis (ungraciously, considering how much he owes to him). The message of Narnia, according to Pullman, is that "Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-colored people are better than dark-colored people; and so on." The books, on this account, are "nauseating drivel," and Pullman detests "the reactionary sneering, the misogyny, the racism."

This invective would not have surprised Lewis, who once observed that "few things in the ordinary peacetime life of a civilized country are more nearly fiendish than the rancour with which a whole unbelieving family will turn on the one member of it who has become a Christian." And indeed the rancor of some of Lewis's foes does seem to belong more to psychopathology than literary criticism. But is there anything in it? Not much, I think. Boys and girls are equally heroic and virtuous in the stories. The accusation of misogyny I do not understand. The charge of racism is based on the fact that the Calormenes, the people of the great pagan empire to the south of Narnia, are described as swarthy; but this, as Jacobs sensibly remarks, is owed to the fact that Lewis is creating an otherworld version of the East and the South in the European experience. He was drawing on the Arabian Nights and perhaps the Song of Roland; Tashbaan, the Calormene capital, is a kind of Baghdad or Babylon, and the quite complex depiction of its culture, luxurious, civilized, urbane, subtle, and cruel, is one of the best things in the Narnia series. The swarthiness of the Calormenes is merely one of the facts about them (no one complains about the paleness of the White Witch, the chief villain in the first of the books). Emeth, the chivalrous Calormene warrior, is as admirable as anyone in the series. Aravis, the heroine of The Horse and his Boy, is a Calormene; she becomes queen of a northern kingdom, and mother of its greatest king, who is therefore of mixed race, if you care about such things, which Lewis evidently did not.

Lewis did not think that death was better than life. He thought that earthly life was good -- the Narnia books are full of food and drink and solid sensuous pleasures -- but that heavenly life would be much better still. At the end of the series, all but one of the children are killed in a train crash in England and go to heaven in the otherworld. It must be conceded that this is a wretchedly clumsy device. Lewis wanted to depict the end of time in his otherworld, and he wanted his children to be part of it, and he failed to find a satisfactory way of bringing this about. (In The Screwtape Letters the human "patient" is similarly killed by a bomb, but here Lewis was able to explore the counterbalance between human fear, pain and misery and the divine victory, as in a children's book he could not.) One child, Susan, is left alive on earth, and according to another of the children, Jill, she is "interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."

Lewis has been much censured for this -- by A.N. Wilson, in a hostile biography, and once more by Pullman, who explains that Susan has passed through puberty and her sexual maturation "is so dreadful and so redolent of sin" that Lewis has "to send her to Hell." This is simply a misreading. In the first place, as Jacobs rightly notes, Susan is not sent to hell; she is left on earth, her future development and destiny unknown. More significantly, her creator's complaint is that she has not matured enough:

"Grown-up, indeed," said the Lady Polly. "I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can."

Susan's fault, in other words, is not maturation but worldliness, conformity, and a kind of childishness.

In fact, Lewis might more justly be faulted for the opposite error: for making his children grow up before their time and become boringly sententious. While remaining children on earth they become adults, they marry, and they rule as kings and queens in Narnia. They lose their childish slang and begin to speak in a ceremonious and mildly archaic manner. (To discover the reason for this, we can turn again to Lewis's academic work, this time to A Preface to Paradise Lost, where he describes the courtly and elaborate address of Adam and Eve to each other as a mark of their unfallen state, lost after they succumb to sin.) It is never really explained why ordinary English children become rulers of the otherworld -- maybe it is an echo of Queen Alice at the end of Through the Looking-Glass -- and it is perhaps an unsatisfactory aspect of the Narnia books. But it should at least acquit Lewis of the charge of wanting to keep his children childish.

One cannot quite say that Lewis never talks down to his young readers, but such moments are not common. Essentially he respects them. He certainly thought that children's books could bear messages even for their elders. In one of his adult works he used the "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" in The Wind in the Willows to illustrate the nature of numinousness, and in his book on Milton he brought out the basic and universal simplicity of Adam and Eve's disobedience by comparing them to Peter Rabbit, who "came to grief because he would go into Mr McGregor's garden." Conversely, he was ready to offer to children what he had already offered to the grown-ups. The Great Divorce is about the denizens of hell going in a coach on a day-trip to heaven. Its theme is that the damned choose their own damnation: the trippers -- they include a liberal bishop who runs a theological society in hell -- are so self-absorbed that they refuse to see the heaven around them. That idea returns in The Last Battle, when the dwarfs, admitted to the earthly paradise, sit round in a circle looking inward and denying that there is anything to see, touch, or taste, trapped in their surly refusal to be taken in.

When the dust of battle clears, the curious and enduring fact about C.S. Lewis is that he is still there. One might expect the Narnia books to have come to seem too middle class, too English, too dated in their language and their values; but they still delight a vast number of young readers. The English literature profession complained in his lifetime that his books were not proper scholarship; but The Allegory of Love, A Preface to Paradise Lost, and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century must still be read by anyone with a serious interest in their subjects (the Milton book by anyone seriously interested in epic at all), and few academic books enjoy that long a life. There is at least a touch of genius in Lewis. It is to be found not in the Narnia books, decent though they are, but in The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and the best of his literary studies. At Wheaton College in Illinois, Alan Jacobs's institution, Lewis's pipes and beermugs may be reverentially inspected in a glass case; and on the big screen he has been impersonated by Anthony Hopkins; and in Monrovia, California he is sanctified in a stained-glass window. Such things do not happen to many professors of English.

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