STRANGE AND SOLEMN PERFUME
Light changes constantly in the Mournes as clouds bowl their shadows over the rough hillsides and the solid white farmhouses in rushy valleys. Pass in the morning and the fresh whitewash is almost too bright to look at; a minute later everything can be in cold shadow. Hours later it certainly will be. Further up, above the cornfield line, above the sheep-cropped grass you can sit in perfect solitude on a dry-stone wall warmed in the sun. A slight wind sings through the stone tracery, a grasshopper cheeps, a lark spirals, a hawk hunts. Listen harder, for a stream trickles.1
So writes Ian Hill about Mourne Country in County Down. At the foothills of the Mourne Mountains lies the former estate of the Earls of Roden. It is called Tollymore Forest Park, and it is truly one of the most delightful places in Ireland.
Here flows the now quiet, now cascading Spinkwee River, and on nearby Foley’s bridge an inscription reads thus:
Here, in full light, the russet plains extend,
There, wrapped in clouds, the bluish hills ascend,
Even the wild heath displays her purple dyes,
And ‘midst the desert, fruitful fields arise.
It is not the only inscription in Tollymore Park. On a standing stone, another inscription bids the traveller to “stop, look around and praise the name of Him who made it all.” I reckon Jack Lewis would have stopped and done just that.
On the other side of the Mournes lies the idyllic Carlingford Lough area. Across the Lough in County Louth are the Cooley Mountains, the area that, according to Walter Hooper, Jack thought most resembled Narnia.2 I have heard Jack’s stepson, Douglas Gresham, say in public that the landscape of Narnia is the landscape of County Down. I do not doubt him, for County Down lay deep in Jack’s consciousness all of his life. So it seems both County Down and County Louth contributed to the creation of Narnia.
Narnia really all began with a picture Jack had been carrying in his head. Since he was sixteen, he had visualised a faun carrying parcels and an umbrella in a snowy forest. In 1939, the little evacuee girl had asked what was inside the wardrobe at The Kilns. One day in 1948, Jack decided to write a story about the faun. The image was followed by another one of a queen on a sledge; and as he continued a lion came bounding into the story. He had recently been dreaming about lions. Jack did not set out to write Christian books for children, using his stories as a Christian allegory. He stated categorically that The Chronicles of Narnia is not an allegory. Basically he was trying to answer a question. He imagined a land like Narnia; and he wondered what would have happened if the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, had come there as a Lion? Jack didn’t know where the Lion came from, or even why he came; but it was the Lion who pulled the whole story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe together, and six more Narnian stories with it.
Jack did not believe that originality lies in the author of a book. He believed that a writer should not conceive of himself as bringing about beauty or wisdom that did not exist before. He believed a writer’s art should embody a reflection of eternal beauty and wisdom. The writer was to be derivative, gaining his or her inspiration from another source and reflecting it as in a mirror. He believed the New Testament teaches that originality is God’s prerogative alone, and that our writing is to be like clean mirrors, filled with the image of a face that is not our own. Changing metaphors, he saw himself as an adjective pointing to a noun.
So, in Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia, we see the two great qualities which Jack found in the Lord Jesus: intolerable severity and irresistible tenderness. Mr. Beaver insisted that Aslan was not harmless and was not like a tame lion. His roar once shook all of Narnia, from the lamppost in the West to the shores of the Eastern Sea. When Aslan, the High King of Narnia, stooped towards Shasta, though, there was some “strange and solemn perfume”3 that hung about his mane. That perfume has permeated The Chronicles of Narnia, and millions of children have smelled it. It is truly irresistible. Awe, power, and majesty grip the reader; it is pointing beyond this world of changing shadows to that which is fixed and eternal. The Shadowlands point to a light that is beyond that of the sun, moon, or stars.
Jack wrote five of The Chronicles of Narnia between the summers of 1948 and 1951. During this time, Shadowlands had been living up to its name. Janie Moore had had a stroke in 1944 that left her without the use of her left arm. As her age began to increase, she was often in pain from varicose veins and became quarrelsome, bad tempered, and difficult. Eventually she became senile. Warren’s alcoholism did not help things, and on one particular binge in Ireland in June 1947 he was taken unconscious to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, County Louth. Jack received a telegram telling him of his brother’s condition. He went straight to Ireland and stayed at the White Horse Inn for a week visiting his brother. The head of the Order at the hospital, Mother Mary Martin, who showed Warren great kindness, invited Jack to contribute an essay to a book that the hospital was soon to publish. He wrote an essay entitled “Some Thoughts.” The man who had preached to the students at Oxford in 1939 that we always work on the edge of a precipice was still feeling the reality of what he preached. Drogheda was to become Warren’s home-away-from-home for the rest of his life, and he attended the services at St. Peter’s Church of Ireland in the town.
Warren continued to have severe drinking problems and was admitted to the Ackland Nursing Home in Oxford in February 1949, when Jack was halfway through writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. By June 1949, Jack was in the Ackland himself, suffering, his doctor maintained, from exhaustion. Ordered to take a month’s rest, Jack wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves to tell him that he was “coming home” to Belfast for a month; it is interesting to note that for Jack Lewis “home” was still Belfast. This was despite his public fame as a Christian apologist based in Oxford. Time Magazine, for example, had featured him on its front cover (8 September 1947) across the United States, and Professor Chad Walsh in the Atlantic Monthly (September 1946) had called him “the Apostle to the Sceptics.” Despite his long association with Oxford and academia, when he was ordered to rest he wanted to go home. The landscape of Narnia was calling. Sadly, another drinking binge of Warren’s prevented the journey.
Despite calls from at least two different American friends to take a holiday in the United States, Jack stayed closely tethered to his work. Warren settled down to continue his writing about seventeenth and eighteenth century France. He eventually had quite a few books published on the subject, and also read some of his work to The Inklings, who held him in deep affection. Jack was now well into his third Narnian story, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
The autumn of 1949 brought Jack one of his greatest disappointments. On Thursday evening, 27 October 1949, no one turned up for The Inklings’ meeting. The Tuesday-morning gatherings continued, but one of the delights of Jack’s life was over. Jack’s comment that this life is but an inn by the side of the road proved to be true again and again. As he battled on for the cause of Christ’s kingdom, the Thursday-evening gatherings of The Inklings had been a comfort and an inspiration to him. They had given him security, reassurance, and downright happiness.
“Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all,” wrote the psalmist.4 Another affliction Jack faced was the harsh response his friend J. R. R. Tolkien gave to The Chronicles of Narnia. He never liked them; it is reckoned that he considered them to be superficial and to have been written too hastily. When Jack read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Tolkien in February 1949, he reacted by saying that Jack had made a mistake in assembling too many mythical creatures in Narnia. Tolkien didn’t think it worked to have Father Christmas, a white witch, nymphs, fauns, and beavers all together in the same country. Since Jack held Tolkien’s opinion in very high esteem, he reeled under his criticism.
The saviour of The Chronicles of Narnia turned out to be the Deputy Librarian of Merton College, Roger Lancelyn Green. The world owes Roger Green an incalculable debt. As a friend and former pupil of Jack’s, he enthusiastically encouraged Jack’s writing of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Roger Green gave the book high praise without which Jack probably would never have even completed writing the book, let alone have it published. Other friends praised the book while Jack was writing it; but Roger Green is singled out for having the greatest influence. He is a shining example of the truth of “the power-of-one.”
History is full of other examples of this truth. One vote gave Oliver Cromwell control of the United Kingdom. One vote caused Charles I to be executed. One vote brought Texas into the Union. One vote gave Adolf Hitler control of the Nazi party. One man’s prayers (Moses’) saved Israel from being abandoned by God. One pair of trained eyes gave the world penicillin. In 1928 Sir Alexander Fleming made the accidental discovery of a blue mould growing in a petri dish lying amongst a lot of other dishes on his bench. A crater on the moon was named after him—maybe they ought to name one after Roger Lancelyn Green for saving The Chronicles of Narnia.
But Lewis faced other afflictions at home. In April 1949, Janie Moore had fallen out of bed three times in one night, and consequently her situation needed constant attention. She was admitted to Restholme at 230 Woodstock Road, Oxford, a nursing home run by a Miss Watson. Again, Jack’s plans for a holiday in Ireland during 1950 were thwarted. He simply could not afford a holiday in addition to the cost of keeping Mrs. Moore in the nursing home. He visited the now senile Janie more or less daily. These were distressing visits, as Janie gradually returned to a state of infancy. She died on 12 June 1951 and was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry.
Janie Moore’s death brought Jack Lewis release from a commitment that had lasted for thirty years. He was now free to visit friends, to travel more widely, and to escape the drudgeries of the past years of domestic life. He was also free to invite friends to stay with him at The Kilns. Yet there was something deeply mysterious about Jack’s relationship with Janie Moore. In it is to be found the virtues of loyalty to a promise and incredible kindness. His love for her may have been eros to begin with, but it most certainly became and ended with agape.
As a sixteen-year-old, Jill Flewett arrived at The Kilns as an evacuee from London and spent two years there. She later wrote of the many happy times Janie and Jack had together, and how that Janie “adored him absolutely.” Now Lady Jill Freud, wife of Sir Clement, she is on record as saying that Janie’s “whole life was centred around him and around him alone. The running of the house, the cooking, the meals—everything she did was geared for Jack’s happiness and comfort.”5 I take it that what Lady Freud wrote is absolutely true. The horrendous times of the First World War had brought Jack and Janie together; and there is something noble in the way Jack protected and cared for Janie for the rest of her earthly life. If ever loyalty was tested, it was in Jack Lewis, and he came through with flying colours.
Loss of The Inklings’ Thursday-evening meeting, loss of Janie Moore, criticism of his writing by one whom he honoured, Warren’s drinking binges—could there be any more disappointment for him? It came in the form of academic disappointment. Jack had already been championed by Tolkien for the Merton Professorship of Modern English Literature, but he discovered that other electors were against Jack. They pointed out that his most successful books were three novels and some popular religious or theological books. They thought his election would lower the status of the professorship, and even discredit the English school. When the Professorship of Poetry fell vacant, several of Jack’s friends nominated him. Again there was opposition, amongst other reasons for his up-front preaching of Christianity. One particular academic, who strongly disliked Jack’s Ulster background, skilfully used University politics and moved against him. Out of the thousands who were eligible to do so, less than four hundred of the Senior Members of the University voted, and the Professorship went to C. Day Lewis, who won by nineteen votes. Warren recorded in his diary that he was astonished at the virulence of the anti-Christian feeling.
There were many admirable qualities in Jack’s Christian life, but one of the most commendable was his lack of bitterness in the face of disappointment. He could have lashed out against his critics, or turned in upon himself and become sour in spirit and full of self-pity. There was none of this. In a time of loss and disappointment, he proved the truth of Isaiah’s great statement about God:
He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might he increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall; but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.6
Even as Jack waited for trains, he had a practise of walking up and down the platform praying to the Lord. Such people soar, even in turbulent winds. In fact, turbulent winds seem to enable them to soar even higher. It is important to remember that some of the exquisite passages in The Chronicles of Narnia were written at a time of bleak crosswinds in the life of their author. This fact proves again the biblical truth that, although all things that happen to those who love God are not good in and of themselves, they always work together for good.7
In March 1951, Jack returned home to Northern Ireland. He stayed in the little County Down village of Crawfordsburn, near Bangor, where his friend Arthur Greeves had a cottage. Jack enjoyed staying at the seventeenth century “Old Inn,” which still enjoys a favourable reputation in the twenty-first century. Throughout the centuries it has played host to highwaymen, presidents, pop stars, and even Tsar Peter the Great. This time, it sheltered the creator of Narnia. Around him were the Holywood hills, and his spirit was deeply refreshed as he walked once more in his childhood haunts. He was home.
Beginning in the Michaelmas Term of 1951, Magdalen College gave Jack a sabbatical year. Its purpose was to let him complete volume three of The Oxford History of English Literature, entitled English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. The work involved a mountain of reading in the Duke Humfrey’s Library, part of the Bodleian in Oxford. Jack read the complete works of about two hundred authors, including the entire works of Luther, Calvin, Sir Thomas More, and Tyndale. The book was a tour de force. It was radical, controversial, startling, deeply thoughtful, witty, and humorous. It was also compellingly readable in its magnificent sweep across sixteenth century English literature. From the point of view of Christianity, its third chapter holds great interest, since in it Jack looks in detail at “religious controversy and translation,” and how the sixteenth-century text reads on the page. He presents his opinion of the writing of leaders like Tyndale, Latimer, Cranmer, John Knox, Sir Thomas More, Richard Hooker, John Foxe, Cardinal William Allen, and John Donne. Jack shows that the Puritans, who wished to abolish episcopacy and remodel the Church of England on the terms which Calvin had laid down in Geneva, had doctrines not of terror but of joy and hope; and that the experience of the Reformation was one of relief and buoyancy. In the entire work, some literature was debunked and some exalted. John Donne was put in the caste of a minor poet. Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is not highly praised; his sonnets, though, receive very high accolades.
The book got some excellent reviews; but for me the most adroit and perceptive summary was given in the Oxford Magazine:
I have often heard Lewis’s excursions into what has been called popular theology adversely commented upon, and sometimes even with the suggestion that he was neglecting his proper business. I will express no opinion upon these activities, but I will insist that this book is not only a triumphant refutation of the view that they have been a mere distraction, but a triumphant justification of the interests and studies that have lain behind them.8
Sir Winston Churchill obviously did not think Jack had been neglecting his proper business. In the King’s Honours List of 1951 he offered Jack a CBE.9 It was Warren who wrote of the reason for Jack’s refusal of this high honour. He said, “Jack felt obliged to refuse this: his appearance in a Conservative Honours List might, he felt, strengthen the ill-founded case of those who identified religious writing with anti-leftist propaganda.”10
By August 1951, when Jack was holidaying again at the Crawfordsburn Inn, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had been published, and he had finished writing Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Horse and His Boy. The Magician’s Nephew had already been started. He, who had spoken of the coming arctic wind of old age, was finding instead that God had given him a breath of spring. When certain central features of his life had come to an end, this was a time of new beginnings. God never ends with an end, of course; He always ends with a beginning. The following year was to bring Jack the sort of beginning that any confirmed bachelor would have laughed off.