Megs lifts her head and closes the notebook while George feels doubt in his sister’s tales for the first time. It’s a bad feeling and he wants to dismiss it, but she must have made that story up, the part where Mr. Lewis used different names, the wrong names altogether. Maybe she’s been making all of this up and she never even spoke to the author.
“Those are the wrong names,” he tells her firmly. “Except for Peter, those aren’t the children in Narnia.”
“They are the right names for his first go-round.” She tries to keep her smile from rising, but she can’t and she laughs. She knows he would have noticed and doubted her; she toyed with him.
George shakes his head at her and then thinks about all of it: about first and second go-rounds. About how the genesis of a story isn’t necessarily clear or straightforward. A story can change with time, just as people do. “So,” he finally says, “Mr. Lewis worked on the story of the children, then put it away and changed it later.”
“Yes, he picked it up nine years after he started. He says he went back to it in the summer of 1948, but that’s a different story.” Her voice is fading, like the color is leaving the sound.
She is tired, he can tell, but this is too important to let go.
“That’s only two years ago,” George says.
Megs nods. “Yes. I guess, just as most stories, it changed.”
“Okay, so what’s next?”
“George, there’s only one more story. Don’t you want me to save it?”
“No!”
“Well, he told me about a night he had at the edge of the river with two friends. A night that changed his life. We have to go back about ten years or so, but then we catch up to the day he sat down to really write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
She rustles the pages of her notebook and flips to the end. The bound pages are almost full of her handwriting, not many blank pages left.
“This one is a story about how friendships change the course of our lives.” She stops as if she’s thinking of someone, then clears her throat and continues to read. “So Mr. Lewis first met his dearest friend, Ronald Tolkien, whom he calls Tollers, on May 11, twenty-five years ago and—”
George holds up his hand. “Tollers as in J. R. R. Tolkien?”
“Yes. I am sure . . . yes.”
“Megs! That is the author who wrote The Hobbit.”
“Oh, well, yes, that makes sense, doesn’t it? He’s the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature.”
“Wow. Can you imagine what their conversations are like?”
“I can,” Megs said. “I can.”
George stops his sister with a little pull of her hair and a smile.
“So,” she says with a smirk. “Once upon a wardrobe, not so long ago.”
“And not so far way,” he says as if their voices are combining.
* * *
The River Cherwell rushed by as evening turned to night and the water found its way to the Thames. As Jack and two other men walked along a path behind Magdalen College, Jack’s walking stick swung with the rhythm he always used: tap swing, tap tap swing. Autumn had turned the leaves of the beech trees crimson and gold. Fallen ones crackled beneath their shoes; others stubbornly clung to almost bare branches.
Jack ambled with Tollers and a lecturer at Reading named Hugo Dyson. The men’s heads were bent toward each other in conversation, stopping now and again when a point must be made.
The mile-long pathway called Addison’s Walk was accessible only by an arched stone bridge over the Cherwell. They trod around a small island, the dirt path lined on either side by grass. The regal trees, their roots exposed and grounded both, looked as if they might begin to step across the river and into a nearby field of purple flowers.
Jack walked so quickly that, although they were in deep conversation, the other two had trouble keeping up. Then Jack stopped abruptly. He pointed at a bush, and the other two men looked. “Well, by Jove,” Jack said, his booming voice echoing among the trees. “I was wondering where I left that!”
There, on a flat, low shrub of hornbeam next to a silver birch, rested a brown angler’s hat made of coarse wove wool, its brim holding a puddle of water that reflected twilight’s pink hues. He lifted the hat and shook it, bounced it twice against his trousers, then placed that hat, damp and limp, on his head and kept talking.
Tollers and Dyson looked at each other with a knowing smile, for they admired their friend’s eccentricities. Tollers’s voice rose above the branches as he continued the conversation with Jack. “You, my friend, believe in the importance of myth, as do Hugo and I.”
Jack tapped his walking stick on the soft earth as a young couple floated by on an evening punt ride. “Believing in its importance and believing its facts are not the same. Myth conveys power. Myth gives import to the story. Myth guides us. Myths strike and strike deep. Myths have deep power over our human psyche. But that is not the same as being factually true. We all know that. We’ve all studied the Norse myths and the Celts and the Bible.”
This particular discussion among these gentlemen had been going on for quite some time. The men were debating the truth of Christ’s story, the actual story of Christianity. Jack was an atheist, as his teacher Mr. Kirkpatrick had been, and he argued with his two dear friends. Jack knew of their solid Catholic beliefs, but their friendship did not require his agreement with them.
When he first met Tollers, Jack was already immersed in the myths. Tollers had invited Jack to join the Coalbiters club, a private club that read Nordic texts in the original Old Icelandic language. Jack learned the Norse language just to join the group. Hugo was also a member of the Coalbiters. They, all three, were also part of the Inklings. So this discussion alongside the river, although started only an hour before, had been going on in different forms for years.
Tollers stopped short. “Jack, a myth can be true on more than one level.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “A myth tells a truth without the facts. You do not have to believe it is true to see the truth. In this, we agree, but myth is still myth. It is not something to believe in!”
They continued their walk as the trees turned blue in the shade of day’s end, and the birdsong quieted and the creaking sounds of night began: branches rubbing in the wind, wings flapping the air. Jack sensed a deep longing, a personal echo he’d heard all his life that told him truth waited somewhere near. He lifted higher the collar of his coat to guard from the wind.
“Myths show us the way the world should be, or could be, instead of how it is,” Tollers said, stopping to watch a squirrel scamper up the tree and disappear in the higher branches. “That is why we want more and more of them.”
Jack already knew this. “Yes,” he said, “that is their power.”
“Think of all the myths and origin stories,” said Hugo with his jowly smile, his rumpled tie loose. “Of all the gods who sacrifice their lives to save others.” He stopped and straightened his hat, eyeing Jack with a look both casual and intense.
Jack stopped. “In almost every tradition there is the dying god who rises again,” he said, turning to his friends. His eyes, always alert and warm, held their gaze. He was never tired of this conversation about myth and story, and yet this one seemed to be going in circles. “Yes. Balder. Adonis. Bacchus.” He named just a few gods from his favorite pagan myths. “And of course, Jesus Christ.”
“The difference,” said Tollers, “is that the story of Jesus Christ is true. It really happened. Christianity is not less than a myth, but more than one. The true one.”
“The only true myth,” added Hugo.
“The myth of the dying God . . . ,” Jack said, and the three friends continued their walk and talk.
Jack resisted.
He debated.
He listened.
They talked into the night, walking round about that river island until well into the early morning when Jack saw light—not of a rising sun, but of a spiritual conviction. He finally understood what his friends had wanted to show him, what he could see only in the middle of the night while the birch trees swayed in the wind alongside the river. All those years with the Knock, arguing logic, Jack had known that his intellect stood over his imagination, that the two hemispheres, as it were, of his mind were in sharp contrast. He realized that all he’d loved, he believed to be imaginary, and all he’d believed was real, he thought grim and meaningless.
Near dawn, Jack went home, and morning rose over the Kilns to see him a different man.
Something within him had shifted.
“Even if Christianity isn’t my favorite myth,” he told Warnie, “it’s the only one that is true.”
* * *
George sits quietly and stares at his sister, who is still gazing at the notebook. There’s more, but she’s stopped.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
She looks to him with brimming tears. George hates when Megs cries because there is rarely anything he can do to fix it. “I don’t want this to end,” she says.
“I don’t either, but everything ends.”
“Honestly, George.” She shook her head and put down the notebook. “How do you know more than me when you are so much younger?”
“That’s silly. You can add numbers in your head. You can—”
“But in the things that matter, you know more.”
George thinks about this. Maybe it’s true he knows more than her about some things, but he doesn’t have the time to know about everything. He wants to know if it’s true that there’s something more when this something ends. Not whether there is a doorway in the back of his wardrobe; he knows that is just a way to tell a story about something more. But maybe in the back of his life there is a place he will go, a place they will all go.
He wipes a tear from his sister’s face. “Tell me what’s left in the notebook.”
“Well,” she says without even looking at it, “after that night with his friends, Mr. Lewis began to write books, almost a book a year—stories, allegories, and arguments for God’s very existence: The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters. He wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Great Divorce. He met with his writer friends, the Inklings, in a pub called The Eagle and Child—Bird and Baby is its nickname—every Tuesday between one and two in the afternoon.”
“Have you been there?” George asks.
“I have. It’s a lovely place, and they have gorgeous fish and chips.”
“Have you ever seen the Inklings there? Reading to each other and such?”
His sister shakes her head. “No, when they read their manuscripts out loud it was in Mr. Lewis’s Magdalen rooms on Thursday nights. They stopped meeting years ago, but they are all still friends. Mr. Lewis’s dearest Inkling, Charles Williams, has died. But this group of men all shared their stories and work.” She half smiles. “No women far as I can tell.”
“Did Mr. Lewis take Narnia to them? Did he read it to them when he wrote it?” George is afraid she’ll skip over the part that matters. The part where the author shares his story with his friends.
“Let me go on,” Megs says and opens the notebook once again. “One afternoon at the Bird and Baby, pints on the dark wood table, low lighting casting shadows across their pages, Jack turned to Tollers and a conversation among the Inklings began about what they should write next.”
She stops and takes his hand.
“Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago . . .”
George smiles and closes his eyes. “And not very far away . . . in a pub in Oxford.”
* * *
Jack, Tollers, Warnie, Hugo, and man named Dr. Havard, those Inklings who were there that afternoon at the Bird and Baby, were settled on chairs and on the long bench along the wall. Frothy pints, tobacco tins, and matchboxes littered the table under a circle of lamplight in a small alcove called the Rabbit Room. Wood-paneled walls almost glowed. The men’s hats hung on a stand in the corner with their coats.
Tollers, his thinning gray hair swept back from his high forehead, his angular features beginning to soften with age, tapped his pipe on the table and ordered another pint. Spectacles low on his nose, he said, “I despair for the state of children’s literature these days. They are reading pure rubbish.”
Jack nodded, his laughter at something Warnie had said fading. “Yes,” Jack said, “no more Edith Nesbit or Beatrix Potter. That’s true.”
“If we”—Tollers took a long swig of his pint, then slammed his hand on the table—“if we are to read something like that then . . .”
“We must write it,” Jack declared, crossed his right leg over his left, and nodded as if he’d just won a debate point.
There under the low-slung ceiling and on hard benches, with their rustling papers and ink-stained fingers, all the Inklings agreed.
Jack Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien decided they would write what they would have wanted to read when they were children. Tollers began working on a story called The Lost Road. His book The Hobbit was already a huge success. And Jack remembered the story with the four children who tumbled out of his pen in 1939.
One afternoon in the summer of 1948, after Jack had completed a lecture at the library and answered his correspondence, he sat down in his study at the Kilns and began the story.
“Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy . . .”
And this time, he didn’t stop writing.
* * *
Megs ruffles the pages of her notebook, turning to the end. George interrupts the jolly good story to tell his sister, “Look at you!”
George sits straight and turns to her, placing his hand on her shoulders. “Did you just hear what you told? That was so beautiful. You described it perfectly. Megs, you’re . . . a storyteller!”
She blushes, truly blushes, and kisses George’s cheek. “This is fun.”
“So what did his friends think of it? Surely he brought those pages back to the pub, right? To the Inklings.”
“Yes. Some loved it, but sadly, Tollers didn’t like it so much. He said that Jack mixed up too many mythologies.”
George nods. “Maybe he did, but it worked to make something mighty, so what does that matter?”
Megs laughs at George, and a warm flush of love flows through his chest. She is everything good and true, he thinks.
George remembers something from the story and it rushes to the top like cream. “You said he also started his autobiography a few months before that. So he’s been writing about his life at the same time as he’s been writing about Narnia.”
“Oh, yes. Yes,” Megs says, kicking back a blanket. “Look at you, making connections that skipped right by me. Maybe that’s why he’s sharing it with us, his life, I mean, because he’s writing about it and it eased its way into Narnia. That’s as good a guess as any, but he’s working so hard on writing more Narnia stories, so I don’t know where his head is exactly. Maybe his thoughts are in both places—his life and Narnia . . . so . . .”
“Yes!” George exhales. “So maybe his imagination is in both places while he writes both books, real and made up, and they crisscross.” He closes his eyes and sees the stories, words weaving over and around each other, fashioning a net of a story to catch him in. “Like a web, all those stories making another story, flowing in and out of one another.”
“That’s as good a guess as any,” Megs says.
“It’s more than a guess,” George says. He wants his sister to truly understand what he means. “Like when you know the answer to a math equation but you don’t know how you got there.”
She nods and her lips draw in and there are red splotches mixed in with her freckles. He knows the look; she is going to cry and doesn’t want to.
George also knows the stories are over, even as in some ways they are just beginning.
He can’t find anything else to say, so he closes his eyes to imagine the man who wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He sees C. S. Lewis walking at the edge of a river on a small island behind Magdalen College. A lion is hiding in the far woods, and the man’s heart is filling with a truth that years and years later he pours onto paper—another myth, another story to reveal the truth.