A Wardrobe and a Chair

“Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

— Matthew 18:3, KJV

Pictures in His Head

Lewis always said that his stories began not with ideas but with pictures. Since he was about sixteen, he said, he had carried in his mind a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels through a snowy wood. For many years he did nothing with it. In 1939, when the evacuee children came to the Kilns, he began a story about four children sent away from London who find their way into another world, and wrote a few sentences. Then he put it aside. Nearly ten years later, in 1948 and 1949, he took it up again and finished it.

He read it to Tolkien, who disliked it intensely. Tolkien thought it a hasty jumble of different mythologies, with fauns and Father Christmas and talking beavers all in the same wood, and he said so. Lewis was discouraged but not deterred. He read it to Roger Lancelyn Green, a former pupil who wrote children’s books, and Green loved it. Lewis went on.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published in October 1950, with illustrations by a young artist named Pauline Baynes. Six more books followed, one a year, until 1956. Together they became The Chronicles of Narnia. The last of them, The Last Battle, won the Carnegie Medal, the highest award for children’s literature in Britain.

This book does not retell them. Lewis insisted that they were not allegories, in which each character stands for something else, but stories in which he imagined what the Son of God might be like if there were another world and he came into it. Readers of every age have found in them the goodness, the terror and the joy of Christ, and they have been read by many tens of millions of children since. Readers who want them should go to the books themselves.

Why Children’s Books?

People were surprised. Lewis was a bachelor in his fifties who had no children of his own and little experience of them. Many of his friends thought it an odd turn. Lewis gave several explanations, in essays written later. He said that the fairy story was simply the best form for what he wanted to say. He said that a story for children could sometimes slip past what he called the watchful dragons: the stiffness and reluctance that many people feel about religion because they were told as children that they ought to feel certain things about God. And he held that a good story for children ought to be one that grown-ups could enjoy as well.

There may also have been a more personal reason. Lewis had lost his own childhood suddenly, at nine, and had spent much of his youth longing for something he could not name. The man who wrote the Narnia books was writing, in a sense, for the boy at Little Lea. He was giving to other children what he would have given anything to have been given himself.

Letters From Children

The children wrote to him. They wrote in thousands, from Britain, America and all over the world, and he answered them. His letters to children are among the most charming things he wrote: patient, funny, never condescending, and always taking their questions seriously. When a child worried that he loved Aslan more than Jesus, Lewis wrote back gently that the child could not really do so, since the things he loved Aslan for were the very things Jesus had done and said.

Cambridge

In 1954 the University of Cambridge created a new chair, the professorship of Medieval and Renaissance English, and the electors offered it to Lewis. He at first declined. He did not want to leave the Kilns or Warnie, and he did not think he could manage the move. The electors, among them his friend Tolkien, persisted, and the college to which the chair was attached, Magdalene, offered him a fellowship and rooms. It was arranged that he could spend the week in Cambridge during term and come home to the Kilns at weekends. In June 1954 he accepted.

It was the recognition that Oxford had never given him, and it made a great difference to his life. On 29 November 1954, his fifty-sixth birthday, he gave his inaugural lecture in Cambridge to a crowded hall. In it he argued that the great divide in the history of Western culture was not between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as most scholars thought, but between the whole of the old Christian world and the modern one, and he presented himself, half jokingly, as a surviving specimen of the older kind. On 1 January 1955 he moved into his rooms at Magdalene.

He was happy at Cambridge. The atmosphere was kinder than at Oxford, and he found his new colleagues welcoming. He had no undergraduates to tutor, only lectures to give and research students to supervise, and after thirty years of tutorials it was a great release. Magdalene, a small, friendly, rather old-fashioned college, suited him well. He spent the week there during term and went home to Oxford by the slow cross-country train at the weekends.

Two Books of 1955 and 1956

In 1955 Lewis published Surprised by Joy, the account of his early life and conversion. He had been working on it for years. Its title, taken from a sonnet of Wordsworth, named the longing he had known since childhood. His friends would soon enjoy the joke that he was about to be surprised by a Joy of quite another kind. In 1956 he published Till We Have Faces, a retelling of an ancient myth, which he thought the best book he had written and which most readers at the time ignored. It was dedicated to a woman who had helped him with it: Joy Davidman, an American writer who had been his friend for several years. Their story belongs to the next chapters.

As Little Children

The verse at the head of this chapter is Jesus’ warning that no one enters the kingdom of heaven without becoming like a child. Lewis was the most learned man most people had ever met. He read a dozen languages and knew the whole of European literature. And yet, in his fifties, he turned to writing stories for children, and some of what he most wanted to say he said in them. It is a kind of parable. The scholar who had once thought religion beneath a grown man’s intelligence had learned that the kingdom belongs to those who receive it as children, and he spent the best of his imagination on helping children receive it.