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The Creator of the Narnia Chronicles:
"He has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has
put eternity into man's mind."
Ecclesiastes 3:11
C. S. Lewis is becoming increasingly well known as the author of an
overwhelmingly varied range of books other than the Narnia tales. He is a well
respected authority on Medieval and Renaissance literature and Milton; he has
written key theological works such as Miracles and The Problem of Pain; and his
book, Mere Christianity, was instrumental in the conversion of people as diverse
as Watergate felon Charles Colson and black radical Eldridge Cleaver. The
Screwtape Letters is a unique classic whose main character is a devil advising
his nephew on how to corrupt a human soul. The slim volume The Abolition of Man
may well be one of the great philosophical books of our time; and the science
fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength)
are to be found in every bookstore.
Lewis is now read three times as much as he was in his lifetime, and book sales
have increased six fold since his death. In 1978, for example, two million of
his books were sold in the U.S. and England-over one million of the Narnia
Chronicles alone-and the trend is increasing. When asked what quality about
Lewis impressed them most, members of the New York C. S. Lewis Society gave a
wide range of responses, mentioning such qualities as "joy," "truth,"
"imagination," "wholeness," "belief," "holiness," "light" and "beauty." But why
would a bachelor Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge
University write seven children's stories when he was in his fifties? While it
is always difficult to point categorically to elements of an author's life as
influences in his writings, we will look at some of the most important events in
Lewis's life which helped to mold so creative an imagination and which led to
the writing of the Narnian Chronicles. If you are interested in learning more,
Lewis's life is described at length by Walter Hooper and Roger Green in C. S.
Lewis: A Biography, and by Lewis himself in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy.
Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898 in Belfast. He died on
November 22, 1963-the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. When his mother
died before he was ten, Lewis was very angry at God for not miraculously healing
her, like a Magician. Perhaps some of his deep distress at his mother's long
illness is reflected in Digory's sorrow over his dying mother and her joyous
recovery through the life-giving apple from Aslan. When Lewis was five, his
family moved to a huge house whose atmosphere had a profound influence on him
and his older brother, Warren. Lewis said: "I am a product of long corridors,
empty sunlit rooms, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise
of wind under the tiles." Because of the typical cold wetness of the climate of
Great Britain, the boys were often driven to entertain themselves indoors. In
The Magician's Nephew, Digory and Polly explore the attic above their houses
just as Lewis did: "Their adventures began chiefly because it was one of the
wettest and coldest summers there had been for years. That drove them to do
indoor things: you might say, indoor exploration." Such a setting became the
matrix for Lewis's fertile imagination to grow in.
Fascinated by Beatrix Potter's books and by animal cartoons, plus the quantities
of books stacked in every available nook in the house, Lewis began writing his
own stories before he was six and up until the time he was 12. He attributes his
turn to writing to the fact that he had only one joint in his thumb and thus was
clumsy at everything else. So, he tells us in his autobiography, he "staked out
a claim to one of the attics" and decorated it with his own pictures or those
from magazines. Polly Plummer "had used the bit of the tunnel just beside the
cistern as a smuggler's cave. She had brought up bits of old packing cases and
the seats of broken kitchen chairs, and things of that sort, and spread them
across from rafter to rafter so as to make a bit of floor. Here she kept a cash
box containing various treasures, and a story she was writing." Polly's creator,
C. S. Lewis, wrote his first stories in this kind of hideaway, too: "Here my
first stories were written, and illustrated, with enormous satisfaction. They
were an attempt to combine my two chief literary pleasures' dressed animals' and
'knights-in-armour.' As a result, I wrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who
rode out in complete mail to kill not giants but cats." His stories were about a
medieval country called Animal-Land, inhabited by an array of characters such as
Bublish I; a frog, Lord John Big; a horse, Samuel Macgoullah; and an owl,
Viscount Puddiphat. The first book, called The King's Ring, centered around the
theft of some crown jewels in the reign of Benjamin I. Another book, The Locked
Door, was written when he was 12, yet shows a style and vocabulary mature for
such a young boy.
There is some evidence that Lewis's brother Warren was also writing his own
stories, set in modern India with trains and steamships, and Lewis may have
decided to combine the two worlds and their inhabitants. At any rate, he created
a mythical land called Boxen. He thus became interested in the setting of
Animal-Land and systematically recorded its 700 year history, then its
geography, complete with maps, steamship routes and elaborate illustrations of
boats.
Although we can see how this might have been the embryo of what later would grow
into Narnia, Lewis emphasized that none of the Narnian stories or characters
were drawn from these childhood tales: "Animal-Land had nothing whatever in
common with Narnia except the anthropomorphic beasts. Animal-Land, by its whole
quality, excluded the least hint of wonder .... My invented world was (for me)
of interest, bustle, humour, and character; but there was no poetry, even no
romance in it. It was almost astonishingly prosaic." The stories dealt mainly
with politics rather than with the more imaginative events and the sense of
joy-the "kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious" that pervade
Narnia.
A second element runs as a thread throughout all of Lewis' life-the search for
joy. It began as a series of "aesthetic" experiences scattered through his
younger years. Once, Warren made a miniature garden in the lid of a biscuit tin
with moss, twigs, and flowers. "That was the first beauty I ever knew .... It
made me aware of nature . . . as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant."
Similarly, the low line of the Castlereagh Hills which he could see from his
nursery window-perhaps contoured like the mountains of Aslan's country taught
him longing, or Sehnsucht. One day he stood beside a flowering currant bush and
the same sensation came over him-"a desire; but desire for what? . . . in a
certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in
comparison."
Later in his life, an Arthur Rackham illustration from Siegfried and the
Twilight of the Gods and a line from this retelling of the Norse myth engulfed
Lewis in what he described as "Pure Northernness": "a vision of huge, clear
spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer,
remoteness, severity," and he felt a return of the sense of distant joy for
which he had long searched. The myth also contained elements he looked for in
religion, and he admitted that he loved the god Balder before he loved Christ.
Throughout all the Narnia tales we can sense the spell of Aslan's country or a
glimpse of something no one can quite put their finger on. But we should also
mention that Lewis's life had another side: "I am telling a story of two lives.
They have nothing to do with each other." On the one side was the inner, secret
world of imagination; on the other, that of the intellect "The two hemispheres
of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of
poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow 'rationalism.' Nearly all that
I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I
thought grim and meaningless." Part of this other half of Lewis's life can be
associated with his strict formal schooling in one boarding school after
another. Undertones of his feelings about school are certainly obvious in the
Narnia stories. At 11, he attended his first boarding school, dressed in the
stiff Eton collar which he came to hate. (Naturally, in Narnia and Aslan' s
country, not a bit of elastic, flannel, or starch is to be found!) Setting off
for school at the start of a new term he must have felt much like the four
Pevensie children awaiting the train at the station: "they were all rather
gloomy and no-one could think of anything to say." Lewis's somewhat irrational
schoolmaster, "Oldie," flogged the boys liberally and indiscriminately. At 12,
Lewis switched to Campbell College in Belfast where he was introduced to
literature by his teacher "Octie" and read fairy tales, especially enjoying
stories about the Dwarfs. Then, while attending prep school, he ceased to be a
Christian.
Up until this time, Lewis viewed God as more or less a "Magician" whom he wished
would go away, believing in the doctrines of Christianity simply because he
feared hell. At Malvern, though, the Matron introduced Lewis to the spirit world
of the occult, where he became further frustrated at trying hard to "feel"
something when he prayed.
And it was at Malvern College ("Wyvern"), which he attended at 15, where Lewis
probably learned the great distaste he thenceforth showed for the British school
system. Although he was an excellent student and his teacher, "Smewgy," further
nourished his love for literature, including Greek and Roman myth, he was lonely
and miserable at this school. A "tart" or "fagging" system required that all the
younger boys wait continually on the older boys and be ready to serve their
whims or succumb to pranks like being locked up in a dark, underground room. It
was all probably much like the misery Jill and Eustace experience at Experiment
House, where they are bullied or "attended to" by "mean," "conceited," "cruel,"
"sneaky" schoolmates with names like Cholmondely Major, Edith Winterblott,
"Spotty" Sorner, and the two "loathesome" Garrett twins. At that time, he felt
paradoxically that God did not exist and he was angry at him for not existing.
Next, his tutor, W. T. Kirkpatrick, after whom Kirke the professor in The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe is perhaps patterned, further influenced Lewis with
his atheistic, positivist logic. But it was with the help of "Kirke's" excellent
coaching that Lewis won a scholarship to Oxford. He later became a Fellow of
Magdalen College. Lewis's great love for learning and his endless reading -from
Homer and Plato to classical writers to fairy tales-despite the tendency of his
schooling to discourage his belief in God, is reflected in the Narnia tales.
Patched together out of his vast memory, they contain fragments reminiscent of
Malory and the Arthurian tradition; Norse, Celtic, Greek and Arabian myths; and
children's books such as those of Potter, Nesbit, and George MacDonald.
A combination of events led to Lewis's eventual conversion to Christianity, and
he has since become noted as one of its chief apologists. First, a number of his
closest friends, including Owen Barfield and Nevill Coghill, discussed, or more
properly, argued Christian beliefs with him and began to influence his thinking.
He was especially flabbergasted when an atheist friend admitted that the
historical evidence for Christianity was quite good. Also, all of the authors
Lewis especially liked, such as Spenser, Milton, G. K. Chesterton, and even
Norse myths, conveyed a certain "religious" quality that others lacked. In fact,
Lewis regarded most of his reading as a kind of "trap" for him. George
MacDonald's adult fantasy Phantastes presented him with the "bright shadow" he
later identified as "holiness." Later, MacDonald's children's books greatly
inspired Lewis's own writing.
Then, Lewis discovered a book by Samuel Alexander called Space, Time and Deity
in which he read that it was impossible to think about something and experience
it simultaneously. What this showed him was that everything he had been
searching for all his life and mistaking for joy were merely its by-products,
only pointers signaling with all fingers that they had their source elsewhere.
They were only "appearances of the Absolute," of God himself, in which we all
are rooted. So too, all the children discover in Aslan's country their real
home, the real Narnia and England of which all others had been only shoddy
reflections. Thus, in 1929, a man who had once stubbornly refused to give in,
knelt down and reluctantly admitted that God was God. Two years later, when he
set out on a trip to Whipsnade zoo, "I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the
Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." Aslan's s cure had begun!
