All my letters from Lewis (and some of those from Ronald and Christopher Tolkien, and my Lewis books, including Mark v. Tristram, and my first American edition of The Lord of the Rings) were stolen in a break-in when I was in Massachusetts in 1976–77. Three of the books, which had my name in them (Till We Have Faces, Studies in Words, Christian Reflections), were purchased by or given to Wheaton College and returned by them to me in 1985, when I was there for a Conference. Another, the Hooper-Green life of C.S. Lewis, found its way back to me through Taylor University in 2003, when I was there for a Conference. So I no longer have the letters, or my first American editions of all the Narnia books, or much else of the actual copies of the Lewis books I grew up on.
And perhaps in part for that reason, I have something more than I might otherwise have of the voice that speaks through his books. I think Lewis had something to do with my wanting to be a teacher; I know he had something to do with my being a Christian (but then, my being a Christian, and of his denomination, had something to do with my being—you might say—a “Lewisite”). What I tried (in my better times) to learn from C.S. Lewis, and hope I have learned from him, was what I recognized as a habit of thought, engaged but judicious, convinced but reasoning, knowing the value of tradition and the past but carrying out today’s daily tasks, with the strengths of a life of the mind such that (in Scipio’s sense) I would never be less alone than when alone, with other minds—like Lewis’s—and “all the company of Heaven” to be with me. (And, indeed, the Somnium Scipionis was another book I read because Lewis mentioned it.)
I finished writing a first draft of this book eight or nine years ago, but time went on—as it has a way of doing—until it was evident it would be necessary to bring the book up to date if it were to be published at all. So I began extensive revisions, finished some of them, cut some of them short, and finally assembled the book we have here. Along the way, the title changed, and some of the chapters and their titles changed, but the cast of my mind has not, nor has my understanding of the cast of Lewis’s—rebellious, ironic, witty—versifier, editorialist, and satirist. And makar (as we will shortly see).
But this book is not the one I finished first-draft back in 2006. One cannot think—even off and on—about a project for eight years without that project changing shape in one’s mind. Particularly I have thought more about Lewis and History—as part of thinking more about Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien (and Barfield), and the Figure of Arthur. Some of the results of that additional thought may be seen, especially, in Chapter 7.
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The Conscious Decision to Write a Children’s Story
So let us take up this matter of the “conscious decision to write a children’s story” in somewhat greater detail. We’ll begin with Lewis’s childhood and his childhood reading, and here he has carved part of the way for us, in his memoir, Surprised by Joy. What is a little curious about that memoir is his relative indefiniteness as to the books that greatly influenced his childhood. It’s true that he records how the idea of Autumn came to him (Surprised by Joy, p. 16) from Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin (1903), which he could easily have read at the “appropriate” age, and which may have come into his life at the same time as the toy garden he mentions in Surprised by Joy (p. 7). That was the toy garden which gave him the first idea of the beauty of nature. But there is little or no trace of Beatrix Potter in his dressed animals in Boxen. As he records, the mood of the systematizer was already strong in him—not the mood of the Romantic. That was the eighteenth-century mood of Swift or Defoe, the Medieval mood of Lydgate or Aquinas (or earlier Isidore of Seville)—not the Romantic mood of the century into which he was born.
He read Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel (he doesn’t mention The White Company) and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for its Arthurian story, not for its “vulgar ridicule”—but better was E. Nesbit’s trilogy, Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), The Story of the Amulet (1906). “The last did the most for me. It first opened my eyes to antiquity, ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’” (Surprised by Joy, p. 14—though he doesn’t have all the original titles quite right in the book—The Phoenix and the Wishing Carpet, for example). And then “Gulliver in an unexpurgated and lavishly illustrated edition was one of my favorites, and I pored endlessly over an almost complete set of old Punches which stood in my father’s study. Tenniel gratified my passion for dressed animals . . . Then came the Beatrix Potter books, and then at last beauty” (pp. 14–15).
After that came Tegner’s Drapa in the Longfellow version, and that is where his story of his childhood reading ends, at least in Surprised by Joy. One might say, “But that is quite a lot about his reading as a child—you said there was very little.” But there is no mention of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, no mention of popular books at the time (barring Sir Nigel, in parts in The Strand). Nothing else mentioned of Conan Doyle’s, though much more was available to him in The Strand. The Longfellow was his father’s (and there was Tennyson also), I believe, but of his father’s favorites, Trollope (for example), he says little—possibly he didn’t read them until later. He apparently did not have The Boy’s King Arthur, or Dasent’s East of the Sun and West of the Moon, or Heroes of Asgard (though one writer, Ruth James Cording, says he did have that one). And he did not read George Alfred Henty’s books for boys (or not with pleasure), though his brother “Warnie” (W.H. Lewis) did.
From his account (and from reading Boxen), one is left with the conclusion that the great neglected pieces of C.S. Lewis’s mental furniture from his childhood (neglected by the critics and historians) were Gulliver’s Travels and the back files of Punch. The importance of Punch we mentioned in the last chapter; the importance of Gulliver (as I have pointed out in my book on The Scientifiction Novels of C.S. Lewis) may be greater for the Ransom stories (especially Out of the Silent Planet) than for Narnia—but it is still there for Narnia. And also, because of his negative comments on Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, the importance of the Lays has been underrated. What all these portend, when we put them all together, we will see in our final chapter, which I have called (for the pun) “A Good Swift Kick toward Success.”
The curious thing about his childhood reading, as he recounts it, is how little of it was books that other children of his time seem to have read—but against this we may set his choice (for the “Book Club” as noted in a letter home 22nd November 1908) of The Strand (with Warnie getting Pearson’s and “Field The Captain”). We know he read Sir Nigel in The Strand, though we have no evidence he read Sherlock Holmes. A study of The Strand from, say, 1905 (perhaps earlier) to 1910 or 1911 or even 1912 might well be of considerable value here (Pearson’s and The Captain less). In The Strand, E. Nesbit, H.G. Wells (“The First Men in the Moon” in 1901), W.W. Jacobs, Morley Roberts (“The Fog” in 1908), Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerville and Ross (The Further Adventures of an Irish R.M.), even (in 1901) Lewis Carroll, all come to mind.
In fact, it may be suggested that much of Lewis’s childhood reading, apart from the books—including bound volumes of Punch—at Little Lea, was determined by what was in The Strand. And yet, he certainly exercised choice—Sir Nigel, but not, apparently Sherlock Holmes, or at least not with anything like the same interest. (Though certainly he was aware of Sherlock Holmes, as The Magician’s Nephew shows, and his father enjoyed detective stories.)