THE NARNIAN The Life and Imagination of C. S. LEWIS ALAN JACOBS To my godchildren: Emma Kienitz Sniegowski Daniel Martin Woodiwiss Mary Howard Lin Edgar “Child,” said the Lion, “I am telling you your story, not hers. No-one is told any story but their own.” Contents PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The story that follows is almost a biography in the… vii INTRODUCTION In March 1949 C. S. Lewis invited a friend named Roger Lancelyn… xi ONE “HAPPY, BUT FOR SO HAPPY ILL SECURED…” When Clive Staples Lewis was four years old, in 1902… 1 TWO “COARSE, BRAINLESS ENGLISH SCHOOLBOYS…” In The Silver Chair we meet Jill Pole and become… 19 THREE “RED BEEF AND STRONG BEER” In all the misery of life at Malvern, Jack had… 44 FOUR “I NEVER SANK SO LOW AS TO PRAY” The Oxford to which Jack came in March 1917 was… 65 FIVE “A REAL HOME SOMEWHERE ELSE” Thanks primarily to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, we have a… 85 SIX “I GAVE IN” In April 1935 Lewis—we had best call him Lewis… 111 SEVEN “DEFINITELY BELIEVING IN CHRIST” In the greatest of George MacDonald’s books, the children’s story… 136 EIGHT “DO YOU THINK I AM TRYING TO WEAVE A SPELL?” The plain fact is,” wrote one of Lewis’s friends, “he… 163 NINE “WHAT I OWE TO THEM ALL IS INCALCULABLE” when the lectures and tutorials were finished for the day,… 194 TEN “NOBODY COULD PUT LEWIS DOWN” If the arrival of Charles Williams in Oxford marked a… 220 ELEVEN “WE SOON LEARN TO LOVE WHAT WE KNOW WE MUST LOSE” Aslan pulled those stories in after him, and did so… 248 TWELVE “JOY IS THE SERIOUS BUSINESS OF HEAVEN” On July 14, 1960, two guests visited Lewis at the… 280 AFTERWORD THE FUTURE OF NARNIA The only surviving letter from Jack Lewis to Joy Davidman,… 305 PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT AUTHOR’S NOTES ABBREVIATIONS NOTES INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR CREDITS COVER COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER Preface and Acknowledgments T he story that follows is almost a biography in the usual sense of the word. It is not quite so strictly chronological as biographies usually are, and it omits certain details that a responsible biog- rapher would be obliged to include. For instance, C. S. Lewis spent many summers earning extra money by serving as an “outside exam- iner” for British schools and universities. Though this activity took up many months of his life, it is mentioned only once, briefly, in these pages. Likewise, though Lewis took many driving or walking tours in England, Wales, and Ireland during his vacations, these too I leave unchronicled. From other biographers one can learn when he visited Cambridge to meet with other examiners and discover what sites he and his brother visited when they took a holiday in Wales. I have neglected these matters because my chief task here is to write the life of a mind, the story of an imagination. The seed of this book is a question: what sort of person wrote the Chronicles of Narnia? Who was this man who made—and, in a sense, himself dwelled in—Narnia? What knowledge, what experience, what history made a boy from Ul- ster who grew up to profess English literature at Oxford turn, when he was nearly fifty, to the writing of stories for children—and stories for children that would become among the most popular and beloved ever written? The tale turns out to be a curious and (I think) fascinating one: in some ways revelatory of the main currents of intellectual life in twen- tieth century Europe, in other ways unique to one man’s strange expe- rience. But in any case this story traces the routes of Lewis’s imagination far more closely than it traces the routes of his holiday itineraries. viii Preface and Acknowledgments Those byways of imagination are worth tracing because in his life- time Lewis was a famous and influential man, as a scholar, as a writer of fiction, and above all as a controversialist on behalf of the Christian faith. Since his death his fame as a writer of children’s books has prob- ably put his other achievements in the shade—at least if one goes by sales figures—but he remains for many Christians a figure of unique au- thority. Long ago the writers of books and articles concerning “What C. S. Lewis Thought About X” ran out of subjects and began to write books and articles concerning “What C. S. Lewis Would Have Thought About X if He Had Lived Long Enough to See It.” For someone who cares about the quality of Christian reflection on contemporary culture, this tendency is rather discouraging, but it indicates that Lewis has— because (as we shall see) he earned—a reputation for thinking clearly and writing forcefully about a wide range of subjects of concern to Christians, and indeed to many other people as well. And as discour- aged as I can become by overreliance on Lewis, that doesn’t prevent me from returning to his books again and again for pleasure and instruc- tion alike; I rarely come away from such a reencounter disappointed. Of course, many people despise Lewis, a fact not unrelated to his great stature among Christians. I even know a man who says that he lost his faith largely because of Lewis’s Mere Christianity: he figured that, since all his devout friends told him that it was the last word on what Christian belief is all about, then if he loathed the book he was honor-bound to loathe Christianity as well. And public attacks on Lewis continue to this day; indeed, they have intensified in recent years, as first a play and now a film based on the first Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, have appeared, thus bringing Lewis back to the attention of anyone who might happen to have forgotten him. But of course no one bothers to attack a trivial figure; the violence of the protests (some of which we consider later in this book) testifies to the power—and there- fore, from a certain perspective, the danger—of Lewis’s writings. The En- glish satirical novelist Kingsley Amis had something like this in mind when he said that Lewis was “big enough to be worth laughing at.” That phrase is often quoted, but rarely does one hear that Amis also said that Lewis was someone “whom I respect highly”—indeed, when Amis began his career as a teacher at University College of Swansea in Wales, his lec- tures on Renaissance literature were given straight from the notes he had taken while listening to Lewis’s Oxford lectures. But if Christians, and some opponents of Christianity, think first of Lewis’s religious writings, millions of readers know him only as the