Though “Narnia” appears in Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (a book very much part of Lewis’s mental furniture), it is in fact under the name “Nequinum” in that passage in Horatius at the Bridge that I once memorized (and I daresay the Lewis brothers, or at least their father, did too): “Aunus from green Tifernum / Lord of the Hill of Vines / And Seius whose eight hundred slaves / Sicken in Ilva’s mines / And Picus, long to Clusium / Vassal in peace and war, / Who led to fight his Umbrian powers / From that grey crag where girt with towers / The fortress of Nequinum lowers / O’er the pale waves of Nar.” The identity of Nequinum with Narnia is found (for example) in the notes to the Harper English Classics (W.J. Rolfe and J.C. Rolfe) 1894 edition of the Lays, p. 138, “Nequinum. The name applied before the Roman conquest [454 A.U.C.] to Narnia, one of the most important cities of Umbria, situated on the Nar, eight miles above its junction with the Tiber”—thus fifty-six miles from Rome.
Lucia (Brocadelli) da Narni (1476–1544), a Third-Order Dominican and recipient of seven divine visions, was a young lady of Umbria who married in 1494, was absolved from her vows, entered a convent at the age of twenty in 1496, under the protection of Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, at which time (or shortly thereafter, by 1500) she received the stigmata. She remained there at the Convent until her death, eventually as Prioress. I know of no similarity between the visions of Santa Lucia da Narni and the experiences of Lucy of Narnia (nor even if Lewis read her Visione), but I do not believe the similarity of names is accidental. (Walter Hooper, by the way, recalls a map Lewis once owned with the name of Narnia underlined.) The only part of the Umbrian Narnia (other than the name) that seems to have made its way into Lewis’s creation is the castle girt with towers (which in fact is Macaulay and not Umbrian) and perhaps the almost subterranean (certainly Arcadian rather than Olympian) classical world of fauns and satyrs and strange powers.
We know very little of the Umbrian Narnians, except that the Umbrian leader, Lar or Lars Porsena, under whom Picus of Nequinum (Narnia) fought, did in fact conquer Rome, the efforts of Horatius and Spurius Lartius and Herminius notwithstanding. But if we remember how Morgan le Fay set all Britain on fire with ladies that were enchantresses, we can see how the mysterious pre-Roman history of Rome—or possibly (but less likely) the intrigues of the Borgias with the countervailing piety of Lucia da Narni—could have helped set Lewis’s imagination on fire. He was, after all (as Ronald Tolkien once told me), a “voracious and retentive” reader prone to “echoic borrowing”—and the furniture of whose mind, by my understanding, was stored in many mansions.
In a way, this matter of the name of Narnia can serve as an introduction to the story I want to tell here of my experience of C.S. Lewis. When I was studying for my confirmation into the Episcopal Church my parents urged me to read some of his little books we had on the library table, The Case for Christianity, Beyond Personality, Christian Behavior, The Problem of Pain, Miracles. Besides these works of what I learned were called apologetics, there were also The Screwtape Letters (“You would enjoy that!”), The Great Divorce, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, The Abolition of Man, The Weight of Glory, the reprint of Pilgrim’s Regress.
Being twelve years old when I was confirmed, I read none of them, but the next year, being thirteen, curiosity got the best of me—though I turned almost automatically to the books my parents had not specifically recommended, beginning with Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, and then The Great Divorce—and only then the apologetics and The Screwtape Letters.
And once I began reading C.S. Lewis, I read him voraciously and retentively. And if he even so much as mentioned a book in one of his, I sought to read it. That was why, a few years later on, I asked my parents for the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings as a Christmas present—and why I read George MacDonald’s Curdie books, and Layamon, and Malory, and Brother Lawrence and Julien Benda and—once I came across his volume on English Literature in the Sixteenth Century in the Oxford History of English Literature (“OHEL”)—why I read the “Scottish Chaucerians” and indeed the Bannatyne Manuscript (four volumes from the Scottish Text Society), even translating “The Reed in the Loch Says” in my collegiate days for the Yale Literary Magazine. “Though raging storms make us to shake / And winds make waters overflow / We yield to them but do not break / And in the calm bent up we grow / So banished men, though princes rage, / And prisoners, be not despaired / Abide the calm while it assuage / For time such causes has repaired.”
And along the way, I read Chad Walsh’s C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, and then my parents began to give me the “children’s books” as birthday and Christmas presents, along with anything else Lewis published in those years. I had been raised on some of Lewis’s favorite books, The Wind in the Willows among them, and Andrew Lang’s Prince Prigio, besides the Henty books Warnie (W.H.) Lewis read, but not his brother. And, by the way, as soon as they began to come out, I bought or my parents bought me the W.H. Lewis books on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, and one of these days I’ll publish in that field also—I began some of the essays and studies long ago (“Letters from the Huguenot War of 1627–28” or “Charles de Batz-Castelmore”)—and I had his encouragement through Owen Barfield. Maybe I will finally get back to them when this is finished. It’s only been nearly fifty years. And since I own the letters, no one has gotten to them before me.
I enjoyed the Narnia books, but they couldn’t be part of the furniture of my mind as the Ransom books were (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength), and I did not enjoy them the same way I had enjoyed The Wind in the Willows or Prince Prigio, which, of course, I had read at the appropriate age. To me The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a kind of helter-skelter grab-bag of a book, not unlike That Hideous Strength in that respect, though far less recondite—and I valued it for the aspects of roman (or fairy-tale) à clef and for the references as much as for the story. One thing: I certainly did not read the books as character studies. Perhaps because of my age, perhaps because I was reading the books as a kind of literary exercise, or simply to be in touch with the mind of the author, rather than simply as story-books, I did not think of the four Pevensies as real children.
On the rare occasions earlier in grade school when my friends got me to read the Hardy Boys books, I couldn’t think of the Hardy boys as real “teenagers” or “big kids” either. Every once in a while there was a real “kid” moment in Narnia—Edmund saying (in Prince Caspian, p. 99) that he should challenge Trumpkin because “it will be more of a sucks for him if I win!”—but they were few and far between. Certainly it was the stories and not the characters that were of interest, perhaps in line with Lewis’s saying that those who have strange adventures should not themselves be strange. In any case, these are children’s books and not “young adult” books, and I believe they are in many ways “improving” books like the Sunday School tracts of the nineteenth century—but with far greater imagination, accepting imagination and literary tradition as legitimate parts of the endeavor. At least, that is how I saw them, and still see them.
Before I finished the Narnia books—indeed before they were all published—I read Surprised by Joy and Lewis’s own favorite, Till We Have Faces, and one of mine, his inaugural address at Cambridge, De Descriptione Temporum, with its great peroration. And then I went to Yale, where I searched down index references to Lewis in the Times Literary Supplement, in Time & Tide, in the Review of English Studies, and so on, then read the pieces. I had already read (almost memorized) my favorite Lewis verses (“Awake! My Lute”), quoted in full in C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, the verses that begin “I stood in the gloom of a spacious room / Where I listened for hours on and off / To a terrible bore with a beard like a snore / And a heavy rectangular cough.” (Verses reminiscent of “When you’re lying awake / With a dismal headache / And repose is taboo’d by anxiety . . . ”) By the time The Last Battle came out, I was far more familiar with Lewis’s whole work than I had been when I first read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But I cannot say my view of Lewis had changed, and my view of Narnia remained