The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to … But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.

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

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

  A Bad Patch

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