Narnia and Beyond: A Guide to the Fiction of C.S. Lewis

FOREWORD

At last! A book about C.  S. Lewis that doesn’t sound like a term paper, a book that is a joy to read, a book written with Lewis’ own passionate power with words, mercurial magic. At last a book that shows us things we didn’t see or appreciate in Lewis before, instead of trotting out a recital of the obvious things we did see (unless we were morons).

At last a book that looks along Lewis rather than merely at him; a book that looks at something far more important than Lewis: his world, which is also our world because it is the real world.

So far the plethora of Lewisiana has illustrated two maxims: that inflation cheapens value and that the more interesting the author, the duller the books about him. To see the first maxim, all you need do is live in America. During inflation, the value of gold soars. We are living through a Lewis inflation, and here is some gold.

For the second maxim, first read Homer, Plato, Saint Augustine, or Kierkegaard, then read any commentary you can find about them. Better yet, first read the most exciting book in the world (the Bible of course), and then read a few dozen of the thousands of astonishingly dull books about it.

Lewis is a magnificent writer, strong and soaring. But with only a few exceptions, books about him have been leaden-footed and platitudinous. Here is the most notable exception so far.

What makes it exceptional is that it accomplishes the two things a good book should aim at, according to the sane, sunny common sense of pre-modern, pre-publish-or-perish literary criticism: to please and instruct. That is to say, it offers the human spirit its two most essential foods: joy and truth. Lewis does this; that’s why he moves us so, and why most books about him don’t. Throw them away and read Lewis again. Why eat hamburger when you can eat steak? Why read by reflected moonlight when you can read by direct sunlight? Why look at a photograph when you can look at the real thing?

Why read this book then? Doesn’t any book about Lewis merely shed snow on his bell? The shape may be faithful to the bell, but the snow blurs it a bit; and the sound may be the bell’s sound, but the snow muffles it a bit. Why not blow away this new snow and hear the naked bell ring out again?

Because this book is not just more snow on the bell. It is an echo chamber, a corridor through which those reverberating bell tones can reach into silent, empty rooms and tombs. It is a witness preaching the ancient and universal Gospel of a glory-filled universe to mousy Modern Man, opening a window onto a world that is not modernity’s dungeon but the Great Dance; not Playboy’s playpen, but Providence’s play, the Cosmic Drama; not the formulas of flatness but the fountain, the hierarchy, the Great Chain of being, packed with peril and drenched in joy: this world is like Aslan—it’s not tame, but it’s good.

Tom Howard takes the delightful trouble to make this worldview, which is implicit in all Lewis’ fiction, explicit in this book. Because he believes, together with the democracy of the dead, together with all premodern, presecular civilizations, that it is the true world; that nothing is more important than living in the true world; and that one of the most effective ways to waken us out of our little dram world into the enormous, terrifying and wonderful real world is through the imagination of a master storyteller. And who can do this better than the author of Chance or the Dance?

I would no more put snow on Howard’s bell than he on Lewis’. My prophetic burden is: look with Tom Howard (not at him), and Lewis tells you to look with the world, along the world (not at it). If you do, you will see the ancient stars shining through the modern smog. We are lost in a haunted wood; why should we always be staring at the ground? Lift up your eyes, O Jerusalem, and see the weight of glory.

What an unfashionable task for a book today. Hopelessly naive, of course. Simple-mindedness, wish-fulfillments, desperate dreams. Science has conclusively demonstrated that. . . .  modern scholarship is unanimous that. . . .  the consensus of the most enlightened opinion assures us that. . . . 

Oh, shut up, Screwtape! Go on, reader, I dare you. Take another look.

—Peter J.  Kreeft

PREFACE

C.   S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia began appearing in the United States in the early 1950s. They made a stir then; but presently the stir became an insistent sound, which itself became eventually a roar, so to speak. By the time of this writing, two, or perhaps three, generations of children have been regaled by these fairy tales (as Lewis called them). And indeed they are fairy tales, in the best tradition of that genre. Everything is here: spells; talking animals; fauns; centaurs; unicorns (or at least a unicorn); witches; dryads; heroes; and, best of all, a lion who turns out to be the Son of the Emperor Beyond the Sea.

There is an irony in all of this, however. The thing is, what we find extolled in the Chronicles are such odd qualities as purity, humility, fidelity, valor, courtesy, domesticity, simplicity, and holiness, forsooth. This is all very well, but the point is that virtually every one of these qualities has long since been buried and forgotten in the avalanche which has swept over Western civilization in the last fifty years. The boulders and rubble in this avalanche have such names as self-authentication, self-actualization, self-assertion, and self-promotion, and with all of this comes a certain harshness, callousness, cynicism, and a thing which calls itself liberation, which is as old as mankind itself, namely the indulgence in ribald forms of public sexual license which would make Babylon itself blush.

But this is to strike an unhappy note. The Chronicles are full of pure joy. Glorious, hilarious, rhapsodic joy. To be sure, there is sorrow, and terror and wistfulness and horrible evil. But Lewis is like Dante: he knew that Joy is a higher and deeper word than sorrow. He knew that Joy is the Last Word. The Chronicles of Narnia are a comedy in the old sense of that word. It does not mean lots of laughs. Rather, it refers to a tale that ends in marriage, whatever ordeals may have gone before. Readers already versed in the Chronicles may object here that there is no marriage in Narnia. No. Not as such, of course. But that great rush at the end, when Jewel the Unicorn leads them all in a great race farther up and farther in, is akin to the glorious consummation of all things which we find in Dante, and, before that, in Christian revelation itself. It is the in gathering of all of God’s people into his kingdom, the way a bride is brought into the household of her lord or, in this case, the way all of the good creatures in Narnia are swept up into Aslan’s country.

The interest in Narnia seems, suddenly, to have exploded in our decade. This may be due, in part, to the worldwide fascination with Tolkien’s saga. And it makes sense: Lewis and Tolkien wrote about, and loved, the same world, and they read their manuscripts to each other over the years when they were working on them. We can only hope that the lovely, and even salvific, effects of their tales may keep alive in those who love these stories, something of the sheer goodness that obtains in Middle Earth and in Narnia.

—Thomas Howard

November 2005

CHAPTER ONE

The Peal of a

Thousand Bells

In the early days of World War II, an odd book appeared in England and America. It seemed to be a collection of letters from an old devil to a younger one, telling him how to handle a man who had been assigned to him as his special demonic responsibility.

The book was odd for a number of reasons. For a start, one does not run across infernal letters every day. But then this was not a book on the occult, nor demonism, nor satanism, nor any other sort of arcana. Moreover, it was odd in that, in the darkest days that the West had known for many a century, it caught the attention of Christendom, not by commenting on the dread and apocalyptic political situation we found ourselves in just then, but rather on a much older, more widespread, and infinitely more alarming situation that the race has lived with for aeons. And again, it was odd in that, right in the middle of the twentieth century, after decades of assiduous effort on the part of the modern Church in the West to de-supernaturalize the ancient Faith under the gun of German romanticism, higher criticism, Darwinism, Freudianism, and so forth (this effort was called modernism)—just when this effort had swept all before it in Protestantism at least—there appeared this book which assumed, blithely and unapologetically, that the Devil is real, for heaven’s sake. Here was Christian theology, anxiously plucking at the coattails of the Western world, assuring everyone that we don’t for a moment insist that anyone believe in any nonsense about miracles and God-in-the-flesh, and parthenogenesis and so forth, much less Satan, and along comes a book, not by a white-sock stump-preacher from the boondocks, but by a vastly civilized and luminously intelligent don who obviously believed this awkward stuff.

The book, of course, was The Screwtape Letters, and the don was Clive Staples Lewis.

Who was he? Well, he was a Christian, for a start, of the Anglican variety. But no group in Christendom can claim him as its special spokesman. He was most emphatically a mere Christian, meaning by that, not a watered-down Christian, but a Christian who saw himself as standing in the mainstream of traditional orthodoxy, as that has been taught and held universally for two thousand years (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est—what has everywhere, always, and by everyone been believed: the old Vincentian Canon would apply to him quite well). He took the Bible seriously, but the evangelicals couldn’t claim him; and he was unselfconsciously a sacramentalist, but the Anglo-Catholics couldn’t claim him. He was Anglican, but Methodists and Roman Catholics and Baptists read him and applauded. He saw as his particular apostolate the task of speaking as plainly as he knew how, in as many ways as he knew how, of the Gospel.

Who was this ruddy apologist with the baggy tweeds, booming voice, bald head, horn-rimmed specs, and sensitive nostrils? The British were becoming aware of him by the time The Screwtape Letters appeared in 1942; his voice was coming to them frequently over the BBC in a series of Broadcast Talks defending Christian orthodoxy. Anyone who has ever heard that voice pursuing its lucid and relentless way through an argument, or who has read Mere Christianity (the title given to the published collection of three of his series of BBC talks) knows something of the sheer force and magnificence of Lewis in argument. There is nothing snide, nothing petty, nothing ad hominem, disingenuous, or irrelevant. All is magnanimity, clarity, and craftsmanship. Lewis knew backward and forward the art of argument—of rhetoric, actually, in its Renaissance meaning, designating the whole enterprise of opening up and articulating and working through a given line of thought.

He had been taught this by a tutor whom he called The Great Knock. This man, whose name was Kirkpatrick, had taken Lewis as a private pupil in 1914, after Lewis’ schooldays, which had been mostly unhappy, not because Lewis was a dull student (he wasn’t) but because he hated English public school life with its hearty and vulgar bonhomie, its enforced games, and the general caddishness of the bloods.

The Great Knock was an atheist, and Lewis went up to Oxford in 1917, having had every vestige of religion scoured from his being. The desultory Anglicanism of his background had flagged during his schooldays, and now it was gone indeed. Like most young atheists, Lewis felt brisk and free. God’s not in his heaven, all may not be right with the world (Lewis in fact left Oxford for a year or two for the trenches of France, where he was wounded), but at least I am in control.

Unhappily for Lewis’ spanking-new atheism, God, who was not supposed to be there, began to crowd in on him during the next decade. To his chagrin he discovered that the people he admired and liked the most at Oxford were turning out, one after the other, to be Christians. A tiresome business. It’s all very well for old ladies at Evensong, and for Baptist evangelists; but Oxonians? God was the last thing Lewis felt like encountering, but he does not appear to have been given much choice in the matter (always affirming, of course, the mystery of free will). He tells the story of his reluctant conversion in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy. Finally, as he puts it, . . . the fox was in the open. No more cover. The chase was on, the Hound in full cry. And he was caught. In 1929 he knelt in his rooms at Magdalen College, the unhappiest man in England that night, and admitted that God is God. It was a conversion to theism. Two years later, riding in the sidecar of his brother Warnie’s motorcycle en route to Whipsnade Zoo, he crossed the line into Christian faith. He puts it this way: When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.

This makes it sound capricious and subjective in the extreme, as though one chases religious impressions like foxfires in a swamp. To have this notion dispelled, one may read Surprised by Joy. Lewis’ conversion was the least religiousconversion imaginable, if by religious we mean rhapsodic, or emotional, or impressionistic. It was almost entirely an intellectual conversion, as far as Lewis understood it at the time. His mind was commandeered by God: he became convinced of the philosophically untenable nature of atheism, then of agnosticism; then the Christian claims began to seem not so out of the question, and so forth.

The rest of the story is mainly the story of books. Lewis’ life was humdrum, judged by the sensationalism dinned at us so shrilly by TV and popular journalism. He never traveled. His holidays tended to be walking holidays, that favorite pastime of Oxford dons, when they take a map and a stick, put on old shoes, and set out for the Cotswolds, Westmoreland, or the West Highlands. He moved in no chic literary / artistic circles like Evelyn Waugh’s or Virginia Woolf’s. He liked monotony—he sought it—since monotony (not to be confused with ennui) allows one the luxury of getting on with one’s work with some sort of rhythm and regularity and tranquillity.

There were no major events in Lewis’ life. His career went along slowly. Oxford University never honored him with a professorship, even though he was a formidable scholar and a popular lecturer. Many observers have attributed this to a certain pique on the part of the university over Lewis’ unabashed Christian witness and his insistence on writing book after book not in his field—space fantasies, and Christian apologetics, and children’s books forsooth. It was all so unbecoming.

In the end, it was the other university that honored him. In 1955, Cambridge offered him the Professorship of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at its Magdalene (spelled with an e) College, and he accepted. The only event in his life was his marriage to Joy Davidman in 1956. She was a victim of cancer, and they had what they thought was a deathbed marriage ceremony. But she was granted a remission (Lewis saw it as a healing miracle), and he experienced with her in later middle life all the intense romantic joy that had passed him by in his youth. The ravaging and profound grief at her death in 1960 is recorded in his book A Grief Observed, which appeared in 1961 under the pseudonym of N.  W. Clerk, but which immediately had all readers familiar with Lewis’ style scrutinizing every line narrowly under the strong suspicion that this was none other than Lewis himself. He died on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

Not a terribly exciting life. It would be hard to make a big box-office film out of it. But one wonders whether, five thousand years from now when the archaeologists are sifting through the dust of our epoch, they won’t end up with Lewis’ name among a very few others as one who had a long-lasting effect on the race.

One might also venture to guess that it will be on the basis of his works of imagination as much as on his essays and apologetics that Lewis’ lasting reputation will rest.

One way of putting what Lewis saw as his literary task would be to say that he wanted to lead his readers to a window, looking out from the dark and stuffy room of modernity, and to burst open the shutters and point us all to an enormous vista stretching away from the room in which we are shut. He despaired of finding any furniture, pictures, or objects in that small room that would suggest what he wanted to say to us; we must come to the window and look out.

It sounds odd to speak of modernity as a dark and stuffy room. Our common, blithe supposition is that the last century or two have witnessed our escape from the dark and stuffy room of tradition, and that the whole point of everything since the Enlightenment is, surely, that light has finally been let in, or better still, that we have at last come out into the light. It is the light of emancipation on all fronts. We have come into our real patrimony as human beings: alone in the cosmos, autonomous, self-defining at last. The ancients toiled along, fondly supposing that the gods were there and that men were accountable for their actions to this high tribunal. They thought that there was angelic and demonic traffic hurrying up and down the universe, and that there were bright celestial entities to be adored, and dark infernal entities to be dreaded. They thought that Goodness and Evil were huge fixities; the one was to be sought and the other eschewed, the end of the one being bliss and of the other damnation. They surrounded human behavior with all sorts of taboos, and cluttered things up with sacrifices since (they thought) if they did not they would be in trouble. You couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that, not because it was inappropriate but because it was sin.

We now have the tools at our disposal to come at the plain truth of things: the analyst’s couch, the test tube, the questionnaire, the computer. These will deliver us, where the aspergillum, the thurible, the Gospel book, and the crucifix failed. It will take a long time, of course, to clear the space, but we are at last beginning, and soon can get down to building the real edifice, the temple of Man.

So runs the contemporary mythology.

Lewis struggled to find a way of speaking to an epoch with which he shared virtually no suppositions at all. He called himself an Old Western Man, meaning thereby that he held the view of things generally held in Judaeo-Graeco-Christian tradition. He witnessed with dread, even with sickness of soul, the program of modernity and tried to find a way to lodge in the modern imagination some reminder of an alternative vision.

I may illustrate this problem by referring to my own experience of teaching prep school and college students. I have sometimes given a class the following list of words: majesty, magnanimity, valor, courtesy, grace, chastity, virginity, nobility, splendor, ceremony, taboo, mystery, purity. The reaction is quite predictible: a total blank, embarrassed snickers, or incredulity. The entire list of words lands in their laps like a heap of dead basalt meteorites lately arrived from some other realm. They don’t know what to do with them. They have never encountered them. The words are entirely foreign to the whole set of assumptions that has been written (or I should say televised) into these students’ imaginations for the whole of their lives. Majesty? The man must be mad. Valor? What’s that? Courtesy? What a bore. Virginity? Ho-ho—there’s one for you! Chuckle, chuckle.

After I have gotten my reaction I point out to them that this awful list of words names an array of qualities that any Jew, any pagan, and any Christian, up until quite recently in history, would have not only understood, but would have extolled as being close to the center of things. Their vision of reality presented them with a picture in which these things appeared as not only natural, but blissful.

Lewis understood the daunting improbability of awakening the stultified modern imagination to ancient and eternal blisses and realities. He understood the task, and he undertook it by means of the