In spite of anything that can be said against them, and considering The Chronicles of Narnia as dispassionately as possible, it seems safe to say that C.S. Lewis has earned by them a place among the greatest writers of children’s books and – surprising as it would have seemed to him – he will probably be remembered for them more than for anything else he wrote.
* * *
* Lucy Brocoelli (1476–1544) was born in Narnia and after three years of virginal wedlock, was allowed by her husband to become a Dominican nun at Viterbo, where she received the stigmata. In 1499 she became the first prioress at the convent in Ferrara. Lucy proved, however, an incapable superior and after being deposed, she was treated with un-Christian cruelty by her successor, and forgotten by all. She lived thirty-nine years without ever complaining. She was beatified by Pope Clement XI in 1710. Blessed Lucy of Narnia’s feast day is 14 November.
* Pauline Diana Baynes (1922– ) was educated at Farnham School of Art and the Slade. During the Second World War she went to Bath to draw charts for the Admiralty Hydrographic Department, after which she taught art at the Beaufort School in Camberley. Her first illustrations appeared in three books by Victoria Stevenson: Clover Magic (1944), The Magic Footstool (1946) and The Magic Broom (1950). Her long association with J.R.R. Tolkien began with her illustrations for Farmer Giles of Ham (1949). It was possibly as a result of the illustrations for Tolkien that Lewis asked her to illustrate The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When the Narnian series came to an end, Tolkien asked her to illustrate The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) and Smith of Wootton Major (1967). Since then Miss Baynes has illustrated a special edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1990) which contains her original illustrations as well as seventeen additional full-page illustrations in colour.
* The Horse and His Boy (1954).
† Green’s latest story, The Theft of the Golden Cat (1955).
* The ‘little biography’ published on the jackets of some of his books can be found in chapter 6.
NOTES
1 Of This and Other Worlds, p. 59.
2 Ibid.
3 LP VIII, p. 39.
4 That Hideous Strength, ch. 17, pt. 1, pp. 401–2..
5 ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’, Of This and Other Worlds, p. 60.
6 Ibid., p. 63.
7 ‘It All Began with a Picture …’, Of This and Other Worlds, p. 79.
8 Letters, p. 323.
9 Ibid., p. 326.
10 Bodleian Library, Ms. Eng. c. 6825, fol. 87.
11 Walsh, C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, p. 10.
12 Psalm 120:5.
13 Letters: C.S. Lewis – Don Giovanni Calabria, p. 51.
14 BF, p. 225.
15 ‘It All Began with a Picture …’, p. 79.
16 Rudyard Kipling, The Brushwood Boy (1908), ‘The City of Sleep’, 1–2.
17 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fols 24–5.
18 The Silver Chair (1953; HarperCollins Colour Edition, 1998), ch. 12, p. 167.
19 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fol. 36.
20 Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 772, fol. 25.
21 Ibid., fol. 23.
22 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/1, fols 155–6.
23 Letter from Pauline Baynes to Walter Hooper of 15 August 1967, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/1, fol. 163.
24 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fol. 52.
25 ‘De Descriptione Temporum’, Selected Literary Essays, p. 14.
26 Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 772, fol. 20.
27 Of This and Other Worlds, pp. 72–3.
28 Ibid., pp. 71–3.
29 AMR, pp. 232–3.
30 LP VIII, p. 164.
31 ‘In His Image’, C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, p. 242.
32 Perelandra, ch. 4, pp. 44–5.
33 Ibid., p. 42.
34 ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said’, Of This and Other Worlds, p. 73.
35 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 5374, fol. 110.
36 The Problem of Pain, ch. 8, p. 97.
37 C.S. Lewis: Letters to Children, ed. Lyle W. Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead (1985), p. 67.
38 The Allegory of Love, ch. 2.
39 The Last Battle (1956; HarperCollins Colour Edition, 1998), ch. 15, pp. 178–9.
40 The Magician’s Nephew (1955; HarperCollins Colour Edition, 1998), ch. 10, p. 129.
41 Roger Lancelyn Green, C.S. Lewis, A Bodley Head Monograph (1963), ch. 4, p. 51.
42 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fol. 31.
12
SURPRISED BY JOY
Lewis was already writing his autobiography, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, in March 1948, and presumably had the title and the theme of ‘Joy’ almost from the first, although the final typescript was not ready for the publisher until March 1955. This being so, it is a curious coincidence that Surprised by Joy was published on 19 September 1955 and that in 1956 he should have married a woman whose name was Joy. It was a coincidence not overlooked in Oxford at the time of his marriage where the smart thing to say was, ‘Do you know what’s happened to C.S. Lewis? He’s been surprised by Joy!’
Although she had written to him a number of ‘fan’ letters, the first of which he received on 10 January 1950, Lewis did not meet Joy Davidman until September 1952 – and marriage was far indeed from his thoughts during the period he was writing the Chronicles of Narnia.
While Lewis was dreaming of lions and Aslan came ‘bounding’ in with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he was all but overwhelmed by problems at home. Mrs Moore, now seventy-eight, had been semi-paralysed for some time. She was falling out of bed so often she had to be watched constantly. Warnie gave his brother some help, but most of the responsibility fell upon Jack who was trying to teach and look after Mrs Moore. On 10 June 1949 Warnie went to Malvern for the weekend. When he returned on Monday 13 June he was alarmed to find an ambulance at the door waiting to take Jack to the Acland Nursing Home. The next day he wrote in his diary:
J was light headed during the night, and obviously a very sick man when I went in to see him; he is having injections of penicillin every three hours. I could get little out of Humphrey except that it is ‘a serious illness for a man of fifty’ … Humphrey explained to me that J’s real complaint is exhaustion … he added that when he got him on his legs again, he would insist that he accepted no responsibility for J’s health unless he took a good holiday away from The Kilns.1
Jack wrote to Arthur Greeves on 21 June saying: ‘I have been ordered a real change. I’m coming home (Belfast) for a month … Can you find me a nice little hotel (or decent rooms) near your cottage? … I shall be free for once. The sooner you reply the happier I shall be. It seems too good to be true.’2 It was too good to be true. Warnie could not bear the thought of staying at home with Mrs Moore, and he was already drinking heavily. On 1 July Jack needed Dr Havard’s help in getting Warnie into the hospital. ‘Naturally,’ Jack wrote to Arthur on 2 July, ‘there is no question of a later Irish jaunt for me this year. A few odd days here and there in England is the best I can hope for.’3 As soon as Warnie was released from the hospital he went to Ireland, where he spent five weeks at the White Horse Hotel in Drogheda.
While he was away Jack continued looking after Mrs Moore and probably began writing Prince Caspian. He was also able to entertain one of those who had done most to help him during the lean years of the war. After its end Dr Warfield M. Firor had continued to inundate Lewis with scarce items – writing paper, cheese, chickens, sardines, lard, syrup, butter and, most noticeably, hams. Acknowledging one of the many hams Dr Firor sent, Lewis wrote on 2 March 1948: ‘The arrival of that magnificent ham leaves me just not knowing what to say. If it were known that it was in my house, it would draw every housebreaker in the neighbourhood more surely than would a collection of gold plate!’4 Lewis had urged ‘Firor-of-the-Hams’ to visit him whenever he might be in Oxford, an
d in July 1949 Dr Firor and Lewis were finally able to meet. On his return to the States, Dr Firor begged Lewis to join him for a rest in the Rocky Mountains where he had a cabin. Although he was unable to accept, it is the sort of American holiday Lewis would have enjoyed.
Lewis rarely experienced depression, but overwork and exhaustion were taking their toll, and this became evident in his correspondence. He admitted to Dr Firor on 15 October 1949 that the subject uppermost on his mind was ‘Old Age’: ‘These two feelings, the twitch of the tether and the loss of promise I have had for a long time. What has come lately is much harsher – the arctic wind of the future catching one, so to speak, at a corner. The particular corner was the sharp realization that I shall be compulsorily “retired” in 1959, and the infernal nuisance (to put it no higher) of patching up some new sort of life somewhere.’5 He nevertheless persevered with Prince Caspian, which was finished by Christmas.
Mrs Moore continued to decline, and after she fell out of bed several times in the early hours of 29 April 1950 Lewis got her into ‘Restholme’, a small nursing home run by Miss Dorothy Watson at 230 Woodstock Road. In his diary that evening Warnie said Mrs Moore wanted to know ‘how soon she will be able to escape from this hell on earth in which she is imprisoned’. ‘On the whole,’ he concluded, ‘the outlook is as black as it well can be.’6 ‘Her doctor thinks this arrangement may have to be permanent,’ Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves on 2 May 1950. ‘In one way it will be an enormous liberation for me. The other side of the picture is the crushing expense … The order of the day thus becomes for me stringent economy and such things as a holiday to Ireland are fantastically out of the question. So cancel all. I hardly know how I feel – relief, pity, hope, terror, & bewilderment have me in a whirl.’7 It was not in Lewis’s nature to abandon anyone, and he visited Mrs Moore every day until her death on 17 January 1951 at the age of seventy-nine.
Lewis was now freer than he had been since his undergraduate days. ‘I specially need your prayers,’ he wrote to Sister Penelope on 5 June 1951, ‘because I am (like the pilgrim in Bunyan) travelling across “a plain called Ease”. Everything without, and many things within, are marvellously well at present.’8 He was in the full flush of his creative powers; Narnia was nearing completion, the ‘O.H.E.L.’ volume would be off his hands in May 1952; he was enjoying summer holidays in Ireland with his brother, and his other friends saw more of him than at any other period.
In November 1951, for example, he paid his first visit to Roger Lancelyn Green in Cheshire on his way back to Oxford from a trip to Ireland, and together they planned a longer excursion the following year to visit some of the ruined castles of North Wales. The plan was for them to meet at Woodside (Birkenhead) and go by boat to Beaumaris in Anglesey for the night – and on 29 March 1952 Lewis wrote to Green in playful vein:
Hearken, Little Brother, to the wisdom of Babo. Neither you nor I will write to the Bulkeley Arms for rooms for us both, for the modern hotel keeper would then be very likely to put us both in one room without warning or remedy. But you will write for your room and I will write (today) for mine. And then, by the permission of Allah, he will think he had to do with a Mr Green of Bebington and a Mr Lewis of Oxford who have no connection.9
When they met on 9 September the weather was too bad for the sea trip, but they went by train to Bangor and on by bus to Beaumaris. Lewis insisted on keeping up the pretence that neither knew the other was to be there, and they arrived separately at the hotel, met by chance in the bar, and greeted each other with well-simulated surprise and delight.
A long time was spent in exploring the castle, which impressed Lewis greatly; and then they sat on the top of Rusticoker Tower and hatched the plot of a story in which they were the only survivors of a world-cataclysm but later found a party of children and with them founded a new civilization. The main incentive was to work out how much they could remember in the way of religion, literature, history and general knowledge to pass down to the new civilization of which the children would be the founders when they grew up and began to repeople the earth. Of course the book was never written: but they both got great enjoyment out of devising it (and continued planning it in Conwy Castle the next day on their way back to Bebington).
That evening Lewis was opening a pile of letters which had accumulated while he was in Ireland and had been sent in a parcel to await his arrival at Beaumaris. Among them was a curious large envelope with writing all over the back of it in red ink. Lewis held it up and said: ‘I’d better tell you about this so that you’ll be able to contradict any false rumours. This is from a mad woman who constantly writes, and tells people that we are engaged to be married. I now don’t even open the letters.’ In a striking example of the modern ‘stalking’ phenomenon, Miss Kitty Martin, an antique dealer in London, had for some years been treating Lewis’s books as ‘love letters’ to which she had the ‘key’. As soon as he realized what was going on, Lewis stopped writing to her. This did not make Miss Martin any less fervent, and it was not long before she was writing as many as three letters a day, with the occasional telephone call and cable thrown in. Lewis coped the best way he could, usually by taking the letters directly from the postman’s hand and throwing them in the fire.
By a curious chance the woman who did eventually marry Lewis turned up in Oxford the week after the Beaumaris visit.
Helen Joy Davidman,* of Jewish parents, was thirty-seven at the time, and already known as a poet of considerable merit; she and her husband William Gresham,† himself an author, had two sons, David aged eight and Douglas aged seven, at that time. Following the success of Gresham’s novel, Nightmare Alley (1946), which was made into a film in 1947, they moved to Staatsburg, New York. After their conversion to Christianity in 1948, which was due in part to Lewis’s books, they joined the local Presbyterian church and were baptized.
The interest in Lewis led Joy to read Chad Walsh’s C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, after which she began corresponding with both Walsh and Lewis. Writing about her correspondence with his brother, Warnie said in his diary on 5 November 1956: ‘Until 10 January 1950 neither of us had ever heard of her; then she appeared in the mail as just another American fan, Mrs W.L. Gresham from the neighbourhood of New York. With, however, the difference that she stood out from the ruck by her amusing and well-written letters, and soon J and she had become “pen-friends”.’10
The prosperity of the Gresham family did not last long. Bill’s writing was not going well and he became mentally unstable. Joy’s first cousin, Mrs Renée Pierce, the wife of Claud Pierce, who also had two children and was having trouble with her marriage, brought the children with her on a visit to Staatsburg. Joy was writing Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments (1953) at this time, and as her marriage was not turning out well she decided to get away from the problem and see whether some months of separation would help. She left David* and Douglas† with Bill and Renée and sailed for England in August 1952.
‘The adult convert to Christianity is of course a characteristic figure of our age,’ wrote Lewis in the foreword to her book on the Ten Commandments, Smoke on the Mountain:
Joy Davidman is one who comes to us from the second generation of unbelief; her parents, Jewish in blood, ‘rationalists’ by conviction. This makes her approach extremely interesting to the reclaimed apostates of my own generation; the daring paradoxes of our youth were the stale platitudes of hers. ‘Life is only an electrochemical reaction. The universe is only matter. Matter is only energy. I forget what I said energy was only’;11 thus she describes the philosophy with which she started life. How, from the very first, it failed to accommodate her actual experience, how, as a result of this discrepancy, she was for some years also ‘two people’, how Communism, too, broke up under the impact of realties more formidable even than itself, must be read in her own words … The essay describes exactly how ‘the universe’ – indeed, something much more important than it – broke in. For of course every sto
ry of conversion is a story of a blessed defeat.12
On her arrival in London, Joy stayed with a pen-friend, Phyllis Williams, and they invited Lewis to have lunch with them in the Eastgate Hotel in Oxford on 24 September. Lewis returned the compliment by asking the two women to lunch with him in Magdalen. At the second lunch Lewis gave Joy in his college, Warnie was present, and he wrote in his diary on 5 November 1956: ‘I was some little time in making up my mind about her; she proved … quite extraordinarily uninhibited. Our first meeting was at a lunch in Magdalen, where she turned to me in the presence of three or four men, and asked in the most natural tone in the world, “Is there anywhere in this monastic establishment where a lady can relieve herself?” But her visit was a great success, and a rapid friendship developed.’13
Undoubtedly Lewis found Joy a splendid companion from the first. The vivacity and depth of her mind, the quick and logical response to argument, and the considerable breadth of literary knowledge embracing many fields in which he was deeply interested made this inevitable. They struck fire from one another and their intellectual enjoyment of each other’s company was never in doubt.
Lewis enjoyed her company so much that he invited Joy to spend Christmas 1952 at The Kilns. By the time she left on 3 January 1953, she had been there for over a fortnight. She wrote to Chad Walsh about it on 25 January:
Quite an experience it was, Christmas with the Lewises! … Being on vacation, Jack was taking life easy – he was merely writing his book on prayer … correcting OHEL proofs, setting scholarship and fellowship exam papers, doing a college edition of Spenser for an American publisher,* and finishing the seventh Narnia book … also, of course, answering the endless letters … Also there was a lot of walking and talking … I’ve become a complete Anglomaniac anyway, can’t wait to transplant.14
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