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Introduction

The seven years beginning with 1950 and ending with 1956 saw the publication of seven children’s books by the Ulster Irish (but Oxford, then Cambridge) scholar, essayist, literary historian, Christian apologist, versifier and occasional poet, novelist, science-fiction and fantasy writer, philosopher (though old-fashioned), satirist and controversialist, Clive Staples Lewis, known to his early friends and relations as Jacks, and later to many as Jack, and to the world at large as C.S. Lewis.

I counted him as a friend by correspondence, in the last five years of his life, as I now count his younger stepson Douglas Gresham, and have counted his friends Ronald Tolkien, Lord David Cecil, Kenneth Hamilton Jenkin, Nevill Coghill, and two whom I have known also in person, Owen Barfield and Christopher Tolkien. I first read his seven children’s books, now known as the Chronicles of Narnia, as they came out—not because I was reading children’s books in general at that time, but because they were by C.S. Lewis—the same reason I read an old letter by him on The Kingis Quair published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1929, or the spoof law case he wrote up with Owen Barfield, Mark v. Tristram, later on. (I wish I still had the copy Owen gave me.) I read them for the mind of the maker (or, as Professor Tolkien might say, the sub-creator). I read them to be with C.S. Lewis.

He might tell us that is not the best—or even a very good—reason to be reading children’s books (after all, he wrote a book—or half a book—The Personal Heresy, partly against mixing what is in a book with what is or was in the author, or at least in the author’s life). But then, on the other hand, I can recall his lament that there was no weather—no atmosphere, almost no real flavor—in The Three Musketeers, and along that line, I think of the flavor of Narnia as coming from his mind and I think of that flavor, in a way, as a major part of Narnia’s success. I am not reading—and I have not ever read—the Narnia books as a guide to the mind of C.S. Lewis (though perhaps as a connection), but I am looking at the mind and thought (and experience) of C.S. Lewis, as I understand them (and therefore to some extent my own mind and thought and experience), as something of a guide to his Narnia. And here I should mention there is one book on Narnia (some of it in fact from Lewis) that has contributed greatly to my thought—Walter Hooper’s Past Watchful Dragons (Collier Books paperback 1979, reprinted from Imagination and the Spirit, ed. Charles Huttar, Grand Rapids, 1971).

In connection with my reason for reading the Narnia books (and in my defense), here is one thing Lewis said on the matter of writing for children. He told us, in effect, that if one is going to write a children’s story, it ought not to be written with a designed moral, because the only moral of any value comes not by specific design, but from the “whole cast of the author’s mind” (“On Three Ways of Writing for Children” given 1952, in On Stories, 1982, pp. 41–42), going on to say the story must come from what the author shares with the children in his (or her) audience, and its matter must be “part of the habitual furniture” of the author’s mind. And Lewis remarks that an author, to the child, is outside the difficult relations between child and parent or child and teacher, not even an uncle but “a freeman and an equal, like the postman, and the butcher, and the dog next door” (p. 43).

And not only to the child but to any who reads as a child—and of such is the Kingdom—to anyone reading or trying to read as a child. One thing I should make clear. A couple of years ago (or is it a decade ago?) I published a book on C.S. Lewis’s “Scientifiction” novels, and was (perhaps predictably) criticized for not spending time summarizing what other writers had to say about those novels—particularly what had been said by David Downing, who teaches a few blocks down the street from where I live, at Elizabethtown College. And it is likely some reviewer of this book will comment that I should have put more in from David Downing’s book on Narnia (or from others of the half dozen books on Narnia out in the last few years, or from biographers of C.S. Lewis). But this book is what I have to say on Narnia and C.S. Lewis, from my coign of vantage (with Walter Hooper’s help back in 1971 and Lewis’s before), and that’s based on my experience and my reading and understanding of C.S. Lewis, and my appreciation for the sources and analogues of his Narnia—not anyone else’s experience or appreciation or reading or understanding (except Walter’s additional information from Lewis)—and unless, of course, their expression of their understanding convinces me that I have been wrong on points where we disagree: the one exception, the work of Michael Ward, will be noted much later on, though not at any great length.

For me, the first knowledge that C.S. Lewis was writing what turned out to be the Narnia series came in Chad Walsh’s little 1949 book, C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, in which he mentions that Lewis was writing a children’s book “after the manner of E. Nesbit.” By the time I got around to checking out E. Nesbit (which was actually quite a while later), The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe had already appeared, and I had been given a copy—and it was a long time before I made the acquaintance either of E. Nesbit’s (Edith Nesbit Bland’s) Bastables or of her Five Children (as in The Five Children and It). Yet that phrase “after the manner of E. Nesbit” echoes in my ears, made clearer a few years later when I read in A Preface to Paradise Lost the words Lewis used to describe Milton’s question in making his decision to write Paradise Lost: “to which of the great pre-existing forms of literary creation, so different in the expectations they excite and fulfill, so diverse in their powers,” is this designed to contribute?

Perhaps a children’s book “after the manner of E. Nesbit,” is not an ideal qualifier as one of the great pre-existing forms of literary creation, but it was a pre-existing form back in 1948–49, and it remains true that “the first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship, from a corkscrew to a cathedral, to know what it is” (C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, Oxford 1942, pp. 1–2). After all, Lewis had made a conscious decision to write a children’s story of a particular kind, with a particular genealogy—that was the first important thing I knew about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, even before the name of the book, even before the name of the world or the country, and it remains important. And by the way, on the matter of names, we should note that—in common parlance—the name of the world is Narnia and the name of the country is Narnia. (We get to the “origins” of Narnia, the name, later on in this Introduction, and in Chapter 3.) Archenland on the borders of Narnia (the country) is part of the world of Narnia, but not the country. If I were to be given permission to write Narnian books as a kind of sequel to Lewis’s, they would be the Chronicles of Archenland—but that is unlikely to happen. (And it would have to be Archenland largely apart from Lewis’s “Outline of Narnian History” in Past Watchful Dragons.)

In Chapter 1, we will look at Lewis’s conscious decision to write a children’s story, beginning with what “a children’s story” meant to him, looking first at his childhood and childhood reading, and why he thought such a story might say best what was to be said! We will examine the children’s story (and at “boys’ books”) from 1898 to (say) 1950, and then we’ll look at another point, at Lewis’s boyishness. (In the early part of the period, we’ll look especially at G.A. Henty, Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling.) On this other point—Professor Claude Rawson has spoken of Lewis as the “schoolboy [Dr.] Johnson” and we will ask, in line with that, whether he wasn’t still in some sense that schoolboy even at the age of fifty when he began the Narnia books, trying (he said) to write “corking good yarns” (to use the slang of his youth) and all that. (And given his statement that the author of children’s books writes from what he shares with the child, Lewis’s schoolboy attitudes may be a kind of strength in his children’s books.)

But on this matter of a collection of books like the seven beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe “saying best what’s to be said,” we might look briefly here (more in Chapter 1) at what Lewis said about the reason(s) he wrote the Narnia books (in the New York Times Book Review in 1956, collected in On Stories, 1982, pp. 45–47): He is speaking of Tasso’s distinction between the poet as poet and the poet as citizen, and remarks that there are the Author’s reason for writing an imaginative work and the Man’s reason. The story material bubbles up in the Author’s mind—in Lewis’s case invariably beginning with pictures in his mind. But this gets one nowhere “unless it is accompanied by the longing for a Form” that completes the Author’s impulse. The Man must then ask “how the gratification of this impulse will fit in with all the other things he wants and ought to do or be.” He applies this then to his own “fairy tales,” where (a famous passage) he remarks: “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 . . . pushed itself in of its own accord . . . part of the bubbling.”

Then it becomes apparent that the Form will be that of the “fairytale” (though it is scarcely a traditional fairy tale), and then the Man becomes aware that this form will enable the Author to “cast all these things [the basic Christian truths presumably being among 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. That was the Man’s motive. But of course he could have done nothing if the Author had not been on the boil first.” It looks as though he was trying to do more than simply write corking good yarns, and that is where we go in Chapter 2, looking at his creation of Narnia (the country or world—less the name), and what went into it. And what went into it begins with his (and his brother Warnie’s) created world of Boxen (Animal-Land and India), and the Ulster world they were growing up in, in the very early years of the twentieth century.

India, in the Boxonian combined world, was the creature of Grandfather Hamilton’s sojourn there (his diary out, in the days before the Sepoy business, is in Volume I of the Lewis Papers, along with other diaries, including the Crimea) and perhaps still more of the Henty books whose mise-en-scène is India or thereabouts: With Clive in India, The Tiger of Mysore, At the Point of the Bayonet, On the Irrawaddy, To Herat and Cabul, Through the Sikh War, Rujub the Juggler, In Times of Peril, For Name and Fame, Through Three Campaigns. Animal-Land has perhaps more complicated origins: the timing is not certain, but there seems to have been a shift from contemporary (1906) to medieval (or “knights-in-armor”) Animal-Land about the time Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel was appearing in instalments in The Strand. India, of course (Warnie’s realm), might have very different knights and very different armor—but, like contemporary Animal-Land, it is fundamentally a political entity. If anyone doubts that Animal-Land is a creation out of Punch, by way of Edward Lear (or perhaps the other way around), then through Victorian illustration generally, let him (or her) look at the young C.S. Lewis’s illustrations of the early Boxonian play “The King’s Ring” (Boxen, p. 29) and of the later “Boxen, or Scenes from Boxonian City Life” (Boxen, esp. pp. 64–65, 69, 86).

These are, in short, pretty much the dressed animals of Punch or the Nonsense Writers like Lear and Carroll (and C.S. Lewis’s father was something like a character out of Punch), and even the human beings are comic creations (General Quicksteppe, for example). The dialogue has music-hall (comedy-routine) overtones—in fact, in “Boxen, or Scenes from Boxonian City Life,” Viscount Puddiphat is serenaded with “Oh Mister Puddiphat / Where did you get that ha-at?” followed by “Now down D street we will go / That’s the place for us, you know / Whoop! [Whoop! Whoopee!]” The only way in which this can be seen as a forerunner or antecessor (certainly not greatly an ancestor) of Narnia is in its illustrating the early furniture of Lewis’s mind. And particularly, it is interesting that at the age of nine he is systematizing the history of Animal-Land from 55 B.C. (sic!) to 1212—a more interesting date than 1215 to an eight-year-old, I suppose, the year 1215 being England’s Magna Carta to go with England’s Julius Caesar in 55 B.C.—and then 1377 (the latest date in the sketch), the death date of England’s Edward III. The only well-known English date missing (before the fifteenth century at least) is 1066.

My point is that these stories seem to be constructed from the materials available to the pre-schoolboy C.S. Lewis at his parents’ house and in his parents’ lives at Little Lea, reflecting the interests of the house and those lives, and while the stories are illustrated, their sources seem to be literary rather than visionary. But then, perhaps the connection is closer than we might think, for if Narnia “all began with a picture,” we can reasonably ask, from what book or story did the picture come? And we will. We will also look then at the Ulster world the Lewis brothers grew up in. Here is where the music-hall sketches and the ships that are so important in Boxen come in: the Lewis brothers are living in the Belfast of Harland & Wolff and the Olympic and the Titanic. They are living in the politically charged atmosphere of Ireland in the years before the Curragh mutiny of 1914 and the Easter Rebellion of 1916. And they are living in the house of their father, a well-known solicitor, literary figure, and political speaker (on the Conservative and Unionist side). And their literary tastes (or at least their mental furniture) might be expected to reflect that of well-to-do political (Unionist) Belfast in the Titanic age. We know, for example, that Albert Lewis loved music-hall “variety” shows, and Gilbert and Sullivan, and the verses (sometimes poetry) of Henry Newbolt (“Captain, art tha’ sleepin’ there below?”)—and we know that someone in Lewis’s youth in Belfast, perhaps his father, read James Stephens, The Crock of Gold. On Gilbert and Sullivan, we know that Lewis’s 1945 verses “Awake! My Lute” pick up from the Lord Chancellor’s song in Iolanthe—“When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache / And repose is taboo’d by anxiety.” But the question here is, to what degree does all this have a place in the creation of Narnia?

It is likely not very much more than coincidental that in the Boxen stories, the province originally named Frog-land became Piscia, the first Roman place name in Lewis’s fiction, as Narnia is pretty much the last. Piscia is, I believe, a small town near Portovecchio on the south coast of Corsica—which has nothing much to do with Narnia (Nequinum) in Umbria. But its appearance in Boxen does suggest that at some time in the first decade of the twentieth century, Lewis was reading something with Latin (Roman) names—and if it was a text rather than simply a map, I believe it is very likely to have been The Lays of Ancient Rome, perhaps an edition (like the Harper 1894) with notes. That being said, I doubt if it is coincidental that a good bit of the sentiment of the Lays is in the Narnian stories—along with a love of ships and seafaring (though medievalized rather than contemporary, as happened in 1906 with Lewis’s childhood creation of Animal-Land). In what way does Tirian at the Stable differ from Horatius at the Bridge—“To every man upon this earth / Death cometh soon or late / And how can man die better / Than facing fearful odds / For the ashes of his fathers / And the temples of his gods?”?

I do not base any argument on the claim that the return of the Four Children in the Year of Narnia 2303 is akin to the coming of the Great Twin Brethren at The Battle of Lake Regillus—though it is akin. But Lake Regillus is simply Macaulay’s version of a story told of many divine returns by many hands (‘“The gods who live forever / Have fought for Rome to-day / These be the Great Twin Brethren / To whom the Dorians pray”), and Lewis’s turn on the story in Prince Caspian is like his turn in “Yellow-Hair” or “After Ten Years”—as we shall see. That is, in this case, he looks at the event from the generally unregarded point of view of the “divine” entities who are being summoned (or of the soldiers inside the Trojan Horse, to take another example).

In any case, whatever were the first stirrings of Narnia, part of what went into that world or country after it stirred was the books Lewis read in those long-gone days, written by E. Nesbit, or Andrew Lang, or even perhaps Thackeray, Kipling, Kenneth Grahame (and in Warnie’s case certainly, G.A. Henty). Then—as he said in 1956—he thought that new books after the manner of E. Nesbit (or Andrew Lang)—his own newly written books—could be used to “get past the watchful dragons” guarding modern children from the heritage of the past. Of course, we need to ask, in fact, “Were there watchful dragons?” And what, indeed, were they watching? The implication of Lewis’s remark in the New York Times Book Review is that they were watching for tell-tale signs of Christian belief. We shall see. In the meantime, the phrase gave Walter Hooper a title for his little book on Narnia, Past Watchful Dragons, based in part on that argument, which introduces some very interesting matter, as we shall also see.

Chapter 3 of this present book is entitled “The House in the Country and the First Larger Life,” referring both to the house in the country—Professor Kirke’s house—where Narnia lies (sometimes) behind the coats in the wardrobe in the spare room and to the house in the country (in the far north of Scotland) where Lewis’s mentor George MacDonald may be said to have begun his writing career and which appears in his novel Phantastes (and in at least six others of his novels). Here’s what Mr. Cupples in Alec Forbes says of the library and the house (quoted from M.R. Phillips, George MacDonald, Minneapolis: Bethany 1987, p. 117): “‘Efter I had ta’en my degree . . . I heard o’ a grit leebrary i’ the north . . . Dinna imaigin’ it was a public library. Na, na. It belonged to a grit an’ gran’ hoose—the Lord hae respec’ till’t!” [“After I had taken my degree, I heard of a great library in the north. Don’t imagine it was a public library. No, it belonged to a great and grand house, the Lord have respect to it!”] Greville MacDonald—George MacDonald’s son—suggested that the great and grand house with the great library where his father spent 1842–43 was the Castle of Thurso in the far north of Scotland, in Caithness. But whether there or at Dunbeath (also in the far north of Scotland, in Caithness), the important thing was the great and grand house and its great library and the “jump start” its books gave MacDonald in the realm of imagination—books by authors like Novalis, one of the founders of German Romanticism. Professor Kirke’s house in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is as much the great house in the north that led MacDonald to the realms of Faerie as it is anything like Little Lea. A great and grand house in the north would have empty rooms and long corridors (and tourists), much more than the book-crowded Little Lea.

For the life of Faerie, or the life of the imagination, is the First Larger Life, and it is into this life that Lucy first steps through the wardrobe. And indeed, I see in Professor Kirke (and think of the ramifications of that name in Lewis’s mind, and the figure of Mother Kirk in The Pilgrim’s Regress!) a teacher not unlike George MacDonald, as he was in Lewis’s mind. For Professor Kirke is a Platonist and a rational man and a Romantic—and more than that, he is opening the children’s minds to that first larger life, as Phantastes, in 1914 or 1915, opened the mind of C.S. Lewis. And then, eventually, to the second larger life. The Wardrobe in the great and grand house of Digory Kirke (Father Kirk?) is a gate to the first larger life and eventually to both.

This chapter looks also at “the pictures it all began with” (in reference to Lewis’s Times Book Review essay “It All Began with a Picture”), then at the name of Narnia (which we first look at in this Introduction), then at The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with its beavers, fauns, Father Christmas, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve, witches, [Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh] and all. The key point here, I think, is that the pictures it all began with are literary pictures. Lewis had never seen in his quotidian life the Queen on the Sledge, or the Great Lion. Jadis, the White Witch, sometime Queen of Charn, the Queen on the Sledge, is out of E. Nesbit. The Great Lion bears the name Aslan (but shouldn’t it be Arslan?), and He is essentially a lion rampant (as he is indeed on Peter’s shield), an heraldic lion, a medieval lion, as Alp Arslan was a medieval warrior-king (though not on the Christian side). Now why did these particular pictures produce Narnia—the country and the world by whatever name we call it—we’re not asking about the name itself. The question, why the name Narnia?—that will be considered later in this Introduction and in Chapter 3.

But how did the world come out of the pictures? Certainly the pictures that started The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe must include the Lion and the Witch (as Lewis said they did), though not perhaps the Wardrobe, which was part of the furniture of Lewis’s mind and perhaps of his past when he began to write the Narnian books. There has been considerable argument as to which wardrobe was (or is) The Wardrobe? one at Wheaton College? one out in California? Let me recall here a remark made by Edmund Burke, back in the eighteenth century, and quoted by the twentieth-century scholar Russell Kirk: “in Burke’s rhetoric, the civilized being is distinguished from the savage by his possession of the moral imagination—by our ‘superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our estimation.’” I’m not suggesting that the wardrobe in Professor Kirk’s house is solely from Burke—we know there were wardrobes in the house at Little Lea, and presumably in the earlier house at Dundela Villas—but I believe nonetheless that it is the “wardrobe of moral imagination” from which the children take the coats that “cover . . . their shivering nature” as they enter Narnia (and the coats are left there in Narnia when they return).

Other pictures? Tolkien complained that Narnia was an untidy jumble, with Talking Beavers, Fauns, Father Christmas, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve, Witches and all—”L’Après-midi d’un faune, indeed!,” we can hear him remarking (and a very good remark it would be, I think, though the humor might be more Lewis’s than Tolkien’s). The “faun carrying the umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood” was, we know, one of the original pictures (“It All Began with a Picture” in The Radio Times 1960, reprinted in On Stories 1982, p. 53), “This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen [why?]. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it!’” This would give the beginning of the Narnian stories a date around 1938—which would tie in with Lewis’s remark to Chad Walsh in 1948 that, in effect, he was taking this book “After the manner of E. Nesbit” off the shelf. But it leaves unanswered the interesting question, where did this picture come from? When he was sixteen, C.S. Lewis was studying under his father’s tutor W.T. Kirkpatrick at Great Bookham in Surrey, and any teacher less likely to encourage or produce visions of fauns in the snow with an umbrella and parcels, can only be imagined with extreme difficulty—but perhaps it came from reading George MacDonald on the train.

Or perhaps it came from something as quotidian as a description of a man in a fawn-colored overcoat carrying an umbrella and parcels on the streets of London or Belfast or wherever. Or perhaps—I think I incline to this explanation, as agreeing with Lewis’s sense of humor)—young Lewis heard the music of L’Après-midi d’un Faune (Débussy’s tone-poem of 1894) and the picture came from that. After all, the humorist who described a Portuguese gourmet trying haggis as a “Vascular da Gama” certainly had a ready and witty way with words and their connections.

We go on from there to Chapter 4, on writing the Chronicles of Narnia and “realizing” the world of dragons—and specifically we look at “Cair Paravel and the Past in the Present” in Prince Caspian, at the character of Eustace Clarence Scrubb in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, at the question proposed in The Silver Chair, “What exactly is the real world?” and then at the cry “For Narnia and the North” and all it means and suggests in The Horse and His Boy. By “realizing” we mean here “making real”—which is what the authors of works of fiction generally do with their imagined worlds. The difficulty comes, in particular, when there are what we generally think of as unreal components in the imagined world—as, for example, dragons. Or castles like Cair Paravel (or should that be Caer Perlesvaus or something of that sort?).

On Cair Paravel and the past in the present, we can say this experience of the past in the present that is a hallmark of Edwardian (and late Victorian, and early Georgian) fiction—say from the mid-1880s to 1914—might reasonably be expected in the work of a children’s author who was a child at that time. What are the earmarks of this “Edwardian adventure story”? First, the story is framed in familiarity. In this, it is like a fairy-tale, but unlike the fairy-tale, its action is time-specific. Second, the characters are types, though they may rise to the dignity of archetypes (my example from Lewis’s youth would be Sherlock Holmes). Third, and connected with the second characteristic, it is the character of Nature (even a Nature containing dragons), not the characters of the actors, being “realized” (in the French sense of the word). Fourth, the adventurers are not solitary, but they are frequently (in fact, almost universally) a happy few. Fifth, the adventures are narrated (frequently in the first person), by the most ordinary of the happy few. Sixth, there is a recurring motif (perhaps the recurring motif) of the past alive in the present. And seventh, the world of the adventurers is essentially an aristocratic world.

It might also be argued that there are fewer shades of grey in the actions of the characters than we are accustomed to seeing in our present-day world (on all this, see Jared Lobdell, The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy, 2005, p. 167). While there are two time-schemes in the books, they are time-specific, and if the English world is not aristocratic, the Narnian world certainly is. The stories have an omniscient (or almost-omniscient) narrator, which is characteristic of the fairy-tale mode rather than the Edwardian-adventure mode, but they are Edwardian for all that.

Coming to the fifth of our children in Narnia, Eustace, in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” it is noteworthy that Eustace Clarence Scrubb is a humorous name, like Otho or Lotho Sackville-Baggins—or (but this was a real man, in our world and the world of Lewis’s childhood), Archibald Willingham de Graffenreid Clarendon Butt. In fact, it combines, like the full name of Major Butt (who went down on the Titanic), or like Otho or Lotho, Medieval or Norman names with an absurdly English last name. The humor is not far removed from the humor of juxtaposition in the old music-hall song, “I’m ’Enery the Eighth, I Am!”

Eustace and Clarence are noble names from Medieval England and Scrubb is the resounding anti-climax. But Eustace’s coadjutor in The Silver Chair, Jill Pole, should be recognized as having a royal name. When the Welsh claimant to the Lancastrian line, Henry Tudor (nephew of the half-blood to Henry VI Plantagenet), took England by conquest in 1485, there remained (besides his wife, Elizabeth of York), several other Yorkist claimants to the late rights of Edmund Mortimer from Lionel Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence. One of these was Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury, daughter of the Duke of Clarence, who married Sir Richard Pole. She was put to death by Henry VIII, possibly because her claim was better than his, certainly because her children’s claims would be better than his children’s. I doubt if Lewis was unaware that Pole was a royal name. (Jill is, I suppose, from the child evacuee Jill Flewett, who became a friend for the rest of Lewis’s life.) I suspect the “Eustace Clarence Scrubb” name lay dormant in Lewis’s mind a very long time—we shall say more about the name itself in Chapter 4.

But what is real? Not a child named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, to be sure, though possibly a child named Jill Pole. Not a marsh-wiggle named Puddleglum—though certainly Fred Paxford, Lewis’s gardener, who was a model for some of Puddleglum’s characteristics. Of course, the real philosophical question in The Silver Chair is whether the “Overworld” is real—but then, we already know it is, even though Rilian, in captivity, has been brought by the Green Witch to believe the “Underworld” is all. But this is Lewis seeking to get past the watchful dragons, not to realize (“make real”) the world of the dragons, the world of imagination. This is Lewis the apologist, the controversialist, not so much the artist. The artist made Puddleglum on Paxford’s model—that is a work of imagination, with overtones from Punch. The gnomes of Bism (if not the name of Bism) are a work of imagination (even if their origins lie in part in Punch caricatures of workers in Lewis’s youth). We will look a bit more at the philosophical point later on, in Chapter 4: here we are merely noting some other matters along the way.

Here, for starters on the matter of Narnia and the North (and what the North meant to Lewis), is Lewis’s description of the three great imaginative experiences of his earlier youth: “The third glimpse [of ‘enormous bliss’] came through poetry. I had become fond of Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf; fond of it in a casual shallow way for its story and its vigorous rhythms. But then, and quite different from such pleasures, and like a voice from far more distant regions, there came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of Tegner’s Drapa and read ‘I heard a voice that cried / Balder the beautiful / Is dead, is dead.’ I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote), and then, as in the other examples, found myself already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it” (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, New York, 1954, paperback ed., p. 17). Remember, we are not looking here at the North in the Narnian world, but at what “The North” meant to Lewis, in this world, in his world.

And then, some few years after the experience with Balder, but still in his youth (pp. 72–73), there came another such experience. “A moment later, as the poet says, ‘The sky had turned round.’ What I had read was the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. What I had seen was one of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to that volume. I had never heard of Wagner, nor of Siegfried. I thought the Twilight of the Gods meant the twilight in which the gods lived. How did I know, at once and beyond question, that this was no Celtic, or silvan, or terrestrial twilight? But so it was. Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me: a vision of huge clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity . . . and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long long ago (it hardly seems longer now) in Tegner’s Drapa, that Siegfried (whatever it might be) belonged to the same world as Balder and the sunward-sailing cranes. And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself.”

In Chapter 5, “First Things, Last Things: The Second Larger Life,” we conclude our separate looks at the separate volumes of the Chronicles of Narnia, beginning with the way in which the first and last volumes (by Narnian chronology) show the consciousness that “In my ending is my beginning.” Here we consider Digory and Polly in The Magician’s Nephew as they might have been friends of Jacks (they were certainly his older contemporaries)—that is, beginning the whole story in the familiar times of his youth before going off to adventures not really within his timeline at all, inside the stable (but what stable? and where?) in The Last Battle, before going “Higher up and further in” in the Delectable Mountains, in a time-line that includes Christ and Christian, but not the quotidian days of Clive Staples Lewis. This is the beginning of the Second Larger Life. (For those of my readers unfamiliar with the prayer on the anniversary of one departed in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer it reads this way: “Almighty God, we remember this day before thee thy faithful servant [N.], and we pray thee that, having opened to him the gates of larger life, thou wilt receive him more and more into thy joyful service; that he may win, with thee and thy servants everywhere, the eternal victory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.)

But that, as John Donne might say, rather leaves us hanging. After we have looked at “chronicles” one by one, ending with the first and last (the book-end “chronicles” we might say), we will, in Chapter 6, (“Child! I Tell No-One Any Story but His Own”), consider some questions of style and content—including the style of the content and the content of the style. When Aslan tells Lucy that she really does not need to know the stories of others (and tells Shasta and Aravis)—and that she will not be told what would have been (ever!)—no stories of If!—he is asserting, for the author’s purposes in this creation, that the content of what is being told is universal, which is probably why it is told in the narrator’s voice of C.S. Lewis.

This sixth chapter looks at certain questions and connections—1. real children and unreal estates? 2. avuncular stories or parental stories? 3. Narnia and the “Greatest Story Ever Told”—and then 4. a discussion of what has come after. This bears the title, “Pevensies, Peregrinations, and Potter.” The Pevensies, of course, are Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. (I connect their name with the Sussex location that plays so great a role in Kipling’s children’s books.) I do not think of them as real children in unreal estates, as I do of E. Nesbit’s five children, or Kipling’s Dan and Una. Eustace and Jill are neither more nor less real than the Pevensies, to my mind—but Digory and Polly seem to come out of C.S. Lewis’s childhood, when he said determinedly to his parents, “I’se Jacks!” Jadis comes out of a book (by E. Nesbit, as it happens)—whether Digory and Polly come from one too (or several) we cannot say, but they are (to me) a little more flesh and blood than the others. The wonderful illustrations of Pauline Baynes have almost guaranteed that the four Pevensies would need the medium of film to take full form.

Peregrinations (a word connected with “pilgrimages”) refers—in this context—both to Peregrine (Pippin) Took (Tûk), the Hobbit of that ilk, in The Lord of the Rings and to the Narnian stories as pilgrimages. Potter is, of course, Harry Potter in the J.K. Rowling heptology of that name. No doubt the Narnia books had some influence on Rowling, but what we will be looking at in Chapter 6 is the children’s milieu (for want of a better word) in both sets of books, and their place in the Arcady of childhood. Here we may briefly suggest the relation of some of the classic children’s books to the idea of Arcady.

First, G.A. Henty (1832–1902) is Arcadian—though his is a slightly different vision of Arcady from Grahame and Kipling—his novels are certainly not part of the same stream as The Wind in the Willows. Nor are they part of quite the same stream as Kipling’s, though they are much closer to being school stories (they are essentially about schoolboys), as indeed are the Narnian stories. The schoolboy excursions in defiance of authority in Kipling’s Stalky & Co (1899) are Arcadian, and I believe they suggest that the book is pastoral, that there is an amorality to pastoral (to which the English, at least, have found it necessary to add some kind of moral judgment), and that this exemplifies the natural linking of youth and pastoral—and thus Arcady (or Arcady and thus pastoral). And then there is the matter of the houses—the great grand houses—in the country.

There are dwelling-places in Arcady in Henty’s boys’ books (and his occasional girls’ book), and, for that matter, with Bevis. Inns are dwelling-places in the Arcady of the open road. For, after all, there are wolves in the pastoral (else why do we need the pastor?) just as there are dangers in the Wild Wood, dangers from which, in The Wind in the Willows, Ratty and Moley are rescued by Badger’s House. This too is surely a dwelling-place in Arcady. But it is also in the Wild Wood, and beyond that is the Wide World, of which it is forbidden to speak. Now for Lewis, as it is for Lewis’s friend Tolkien, it may be that recapturing the past (even the Arcadian past) is a kind of advance. Come to think of it, that is a theme in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, as it is in E. Nesbit’s The House of Arden. And in all these, irony aside, Kenneth Grahame’s vision of children as Arcadians among the Olympian adults holds true.

Whatever the age of the children, Arcadia is beset with perils, so an agreeable dwelling-place is all to the good—but note, there is a link between child and countryside, as well as between schooldays and golden days: the link is the link of Arcady. There is also a strong sense of the past somehow immanent in the present, not always a golden past but at least a past streaked with gold. And also we remember, that in the ninth chapter of The Wind in the Willows, “Wayfarers All,” the Rat is entranced by the call of the Sea Rat, and is only kept from leaving all his world behind, by the forcible action of the Mole. He is not to be a wayfarer: home is sweet, dulce domum, and the call of the Wide World is a siren call.

There’s a pattern beginning to take shape. Even if we go wide in this world, wonders to hear, we will come back—the pattern is “there and back again.” (Yes, I know, that’s the pattern of The Hobbit—and The Lord of the Rings—but so it is of the first six Narnia books.) And this leads us to Chapter 7, on what has come after—not only the competition (so to speak) in the form of Harry Potter at Hogwarts and elsewhere, but the glorification of the Narnia books over the past half-century as being (at least almost) C.S. Lewis’s greatest achievement.

Several of them have been made into movies, and doubtless the others will follow (or are already following)—and while I would have said once that no one is likely to make any films of Lewis’s other books, barring Screwtape and The Great Divorce, I think it possible that the Ransom stories will be made into films, with the (true but exaggerated) claim that Elwin Ransom is really based on Professor Tolkien. Nevertheless, it has been Narnia that has led that way, Narnia whose achievement has continued C.S. Lewis’s name as a house-hold word for more than half a century. No matter that his finest sustained work is English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. You can’t make a movie out of that, and Oxford even changed the book’s name some years after Lewis’s death.

My approach in this book, as I have suggested, is individual and personal, and reflective—some critics may even say it is idiosyncratic. For example, to anticipate some of what I write in Chapter 3, the name Narnia, in combination with Lucy, suggested to me at my first reading, the name of the Blessed Lucia da Narni—presumably because I had seen that name very recently in a book assigned as summer reading for my class at the Episcopal boarding school I was then attending. It was. I think, Samuel Shellabarger’s Prince of Foxes [1947]).

I do not suppose many others first reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe around 1952–53 would have had that reaction, though of course I cannot be sure—but there was certainly a reference to “Saint” Lucia of Narni abroad in a popular book of that time, and it may have had an influence on Lewis, already writing a book “for” his godchild Lucy Barfield. (The whole matter of the ancient Umbrian Narnia and the present Narni is now well-known, of course, and I believe that the town of Narni has a website with references to C.S. Lewis, but I am speaking of what happened with me more than sixty years ago.)

Though “Narnia” appears in Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (a book very much part of Lewis’s mental furniture), it is in fact under the name “Nequinum” in that passage in Horatius at the Bridge that I once memorized (and I daresay the Lewis brothers, or at least their father, did too): “Aunus from green Tifernum / Lord of the Hill of Vines / And Seius whose eight hundred slaves / Sicken in Ilva’s mines / And Picus, long to Clusium / Vassal in peace and war, / Who led to fight his Umbrian powers / From that grey crag where girt with towers / The fortress of Nequinum lowers / O’er the pale waves of Nar.” The identity of Nequinum with Narnia is found (for example) in the notes to the Harper English Classics (W.J. Rolfe and J.C. Rolfe) 1894 edition of the Lays, p. 138, “Nequinum. The name applied before the Roman conquest [454 A.U.C.] to Narnia, one of the most important cities of Umbria, situated on the Nar, eight miles above its junction with the Tiber”—thus fifty-six miles from Rome.

Lucia (Brocadelli) da Narni (1476–1544), a Third-Order Dominican and recipient of seven divine visions, was a young lady of Umbria who married in 1494, was absolved from her vows, entered a convent at the age of twenty in 1496, under the protection of Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, at which time (or shortly thereafter, by 1500) she received the stigmata. She remained there at the Convent until her death, eventually as Prioress. I know of no similarity between the visions of Santa Lucia da Narni and the experiences of Lucy of Narnia (nor even if Lewis read her Visione), but I do not believe the similarity of names is accidental. (Walter Hooper, by the way, recalls a map Lewis once owned with the name of Narnia underlined.) The only part of the Umbrian Narnia (other than the name) that seems to have made its way into Lewis’s creation is the castle girt with towers (which in fact is Macaulay and not Umbrian) and perhaps the almost subterranean (certainly Arcadian rather than Olympian) classical world of fauns and satyrs and strange powers.

We know very little of the Umbrian Narnians, except that the Umbrian leader, Lar or Lars Porsena, under whom Picus of Nequinum (Narnia) fought, did in fact conquer Rome, the efforts of Horatius and Spurius Lartius and Herminius notwithstanding. But if we remember how Morgan le Fay set all Britain on fire with ladies that were enchantresses, we can see how the mysterious pre-Roman history of Rome—or possibly (but less likely) the intrigues of the Borgias with the countervailing piety of Lucia da Narni—could have helped set Lewis’s imagination on fire. He was, after all (as Ronald Tolkien once told me), a “voracious and retentive” reader prone to “echoic borrowing”—and the furniture of whose mind, by my understanding, was stored in many mansions.

In a way, this matter of the name of Narnia can serve as an introduction to the story I want to tell here of my experience of C.S. Lewis. When I was studying for my confirmation into the Episcopal Church my parents urged me to read some of his little books we had on the library table, The Case for Christianity, Beyond Personality, Christian Behavior, The Problem of Pain, Miracles. Besides these works of what I learned were called apologetics, there were also The Screwtape Letters (“You would enjoy that!”), The Great Divorce, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, The Abolition of Man, The Weight of Glory, the reprint of Pilgrim’s Regress.

Being twelve years old when I was confirmed, I read none of them, but the next year, being thirteen, curiosity got the best of me—though I turned almost automatically to the books my parents had not specifically recommended, beginning with Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, and then The Great Divorce—and only then the apologetics and The Screwtape Letters.

And once I began reading C.S. Lewis, I read him voraciously and retentively. And if he even so much as mentioned a book in one of his, I sought to read it. That was why, a few years later on, I asked my parents for the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings as a Christmas present—and why I read George MacDonald’s Curdie books, and Layamon, and Malory, and Brother Lawrence and Julien Benda and—once I came across his volume on English Literature in the Sixteenth Century in the Oxford History of English Literature (“OHEL”)—why I read the “Scottish Chaucerians” and indeed the Bannatyne Manuscript (four volumes from the Scottish Text Society), even translating “The Reed in the Loch Says” in my collegiate days for the Yale Literary Magazine. “Though raging storms make us to shake / And winds make waters overflow / We yield to them but do not break / And in the calm bent up we grow / So banished men, though princes rage, / And prisoners, be not despaired / Abide the calm while it assuage / For time such causes has repaired.”

And along the way, I read Chad Walsh’s C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, and then my parents began to give me the “children’s books” as birthday and Christmas presents, along with anything else Lewis published in those years. I had been raised on some of Lewis’s favorite books, The Wind in the Willows among them, and Andrew Lang’s Prince Prigio, besides the Henty books Warnie (W.H.) Lewis read, but not his brother. And, by the way, as soon as they began to come out, I bought or my parents bought me the W.H. Lewis books on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, and one of these days I’ll publish in that field also—I began some of the essays and studies long ago (“Letters from the Huguenot War of 1627–28” or “Charles de Batz-Castelmore”)—and I had his encouragement through Owen Barfield. Maybe I will finally get back to them when this is finished. It’s only been nearly fifty years. And since I own the letters, no one has gotten to them before me.

I enjoyed the Narnia books, but they couldn’t be part of the furniture of my mind as the Ransom books were (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength), and I did not enjoy them the same way I had enjoyed The Wind in the Willows or Prince Prigio, which, of course, I had read at the appropriate age. To me The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a kind of helter-skelter grab-bag of a book, not unlike That Hideous Strength in that respect, though far less recondite—and I valued it for the aspects of roman (or fairy-tale) à clef and for the references as much as for the story. One thing: I certainly did not read the books as character studies. Perhaps because of my age, perhaps because I was reading the books as a kind of literary exercise, or simply to be in touch with the mind of the author, rather than simply as story-books, I did not think of the four Pevensies as real children.

On the rare occasions earlier in grade school when my friends got me to read the Hardy Boys books, I couldn’t think of the Hardy boys as real “teenagers” or “big kids” either. Every once in a while there was a real “kid” moment in Narnia—Edmund saying (in Prince Caspian, p. 99) that he should challenge Trumpkin because “it will be more of a sucks for him if I win!”—but they were few and far between. Certainly it was the stories and not the characters that were of interest, perhaps in line with Lewis’s saying that those who have strange adventures should not themselves be strange. In any case, these are children’s books and not “young adult” books, and I believe they are in many ways “improving” books like the Sunday School tracts of the nineteenth century—but with far greater imagination, accepting imagination and literary tradition as legitimate parts of the endeavor. At least, that is how I saw them, and still see them.

Before I finished the Narnia books—indeed before they were all published—I read Surprised by Joy and Lewis’s own favorite, Till We Have Faces, and one of mine, his inaugural address at Cambridge, De Descriptione Temporum, with its great peroration. And then I went to Yale, where I searched down index references to Lewis in the Times Literary Supplement, in Time & Tide, in the Review of English Studies, and so on, then read the pieces. I had already read (almost memorized) my favorite Lewis verses (“Awake! My Lute”), quoted in full in C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, the verses that begin “I stood in the gloom of a spacious room / Where I listened for hours on and off / To a terrible bore with a beard like a snore / And a heavy rectangular cough.” (Verses reminiscent of “When you’re lying awake / With a dismal headache / And repose is taboo’d by anxiety . . . ”) By the time The Last Battle came out, I was far more familiar with Lewis’s whole work than I had been when I first read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But I cannot say my view of Lewis had changed, and my view of Narnia remained that of a literary critic or historian, more than that of a child reading a set of children’s books.

In November 1958, when I was home on leave from college, my mother told me she had written to C.S. Lewis, telling him how much our family enjoyed his books, and that her son’s (my) twenty-first birthday was his sixtieth (November 29th, 1958), and “Happy Birthday!” She received a very gracious letter in reply, inviting me to visit him if ever I came to England, and from that began our correspondence. My last letter from him was dated October 22nd 1963, having as its principal topic the origins of the bubble-trees in Perelandra (from a childish mispronunciation of laboratory as bubble-tree, “and the delightful word seemed to suggest the thing”).

All my letters from Lewis (and some of those from Ronald and Christopher Tolkien, and my Lewis books, including Mark v. Tristram, and my first American edition of The Lord of the Rings) were stolen in a break-in when I was in Massachusetts in 1976–77. Three of the books, which had my name in them (Till We Have Faces, Studies in Words, Christian Reflections), were purchased by or given to Wheaton College and returned by them to me in 1985, when I was there for a Conference. Another, the Hooper-Green life of C.S. Lewis, found its way back to me through Taylor University in 2003, when I was there for a Conference. So I no longer have the letters, or my first American editions of all the Narnia books, or much else of the actual copies of the Lewis books I grew up on.

And perhaps in part for that reason, I have something more than I might otherwise have of the voice that speaks through his books. I think Lewis had something to do with my wanting to be a teacher; I know he had something to do with my being a Christian (but then, my being a Christian, and of his denomination, had something to do with my being—you might say—a “Lewisite”). What I tried (in my better times) to learn from C.S. Lewis, and hope I have learned from him, was what I recognized as a habit of thought, engaged but judicious, convinced but reasoning, knowing the value of tradition and the past but carrying out today’s daily tasks, with the strengths of a life of the mind such that (in Scipio’s sense) I would never be less alone than when alone, with other minds—like Lewis’s—and “all the company of Heaven” to be with me. (And, indeed, the Somnium Scipionis was another book I read because Lewis mentioned it.)

I finished writing a first draft of this book eight or nine years ago, but time went on—as it has a way of doing—until it was evident it would be necessary to bring the book up to date if it were to be published at all. So I began extensive revisions, finished some of them, cut some of them short, and finally assembled the book we have here. Along the way, the title changed, and some of the chapters and their titles changed, but the cast of my mind has not, nor has my understanding of the cast of Lewis’s—rebellious, ironic, witty—versifier, editorialist, and satirist. And makar (as we will shortly see).

But this book is not the one I finished first-draft back in 2006. One cannot think—even off and on—about a project for eight years without that project changing shape in one’s mind. Particularly I have thought more about Lewis and History—as part of thinking more about Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien (and Barfield), and the Figure of Arthur. Some of the results of that additional thought may be seen, especially, in Chapter 7.