Eight Children in Narnia. Jared Lodbell
Narnia was an untidy jumble, with Talking Beavers, Fauns, Father Christmas, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve, Witches and all—”L’Après-midi d’un faune, indeed!,” we can hear him remarking (and a very good remark it would be, I think, though the humor might be more Lewis’s than Tolkien’s). The “faun carrying the umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood” was, we know, one of the original pictures (“It All Began with a Picture” in The Radio Times 1960, reprinted in On Stories 1982, p. 53), “This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen [why?]. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it!’” This would give the beginning of the Narnian stories a date around 1938—which would tie in with Lewis’s remark to Chad Walsh in 1948 that, in effect, he was taking this book “After the manner of E. Nesbit” off the shelf. But it leaves unanswered the interesting question, where did this picture come from? When he was sixteen, C.S. Lewis was studying under his father’s tutor W.T. Kirkpatrick at Great Bookham in Surrey, and any teacher less likely to encourage or produce visions of fauns in the snow with an umbrella and parcels, can only be imagined with extreme difficulty—but perhaps it came from reading George MacDonald on the train.
Or perhaps it came from something as quotidian as a description of a man in a fawn-colored overcoat carrying an umbrella and parcels on the streets of London or Belfast or wherever. Or perhaps—I think I incline to this explanation, as agreeing with Lewis’s sense of humor)—young Lewis heard the music of L’Après-midi d’un Faune (Débussy’s tone-poem of 1894) and the picture came from that. After all, the humorist who described a Portuguese gourmet trying haggis as a “Vascular da Gama” certainly had a ready and witty way with words and their connections.
We go on from there to Chapter 4, on writing the Chronicles of Narnia and “realizing” the world of dragons—and specifically we look at “Cair Paravel and the Past in the Present” in Prince Caspian, at the character of Eustace Clarence Scrubb in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, at the question proposed in The Silver Chair, “What exactly is the real world?” and then at the cry “For Narnia and the North” and all it means and suggests in The Horse and His Boy. By “realizing” we mean here “making real”—which is what the authors of works of fiction generally do with their imagined worlds. The difficulty comes, in particular, when there are what we generally think of as unreal components in the imagined world—as, for example, dragons. Or castles like Cair Paravel (or should that be Caer Perlesvaus or something of that sort?).
On Cair Paravel and the past in the present, we can say this experience of the past in the present that is a hallmark of Edwardian (and late Victorian, and early Georgian) fiction—say from the mid-1880s to 1914—might reasonably be expected in the work of a children’s author who was a child at that time. What are the earmarks of this “Edwardian adventure story”? First, the story is framed in familiarity. In this, it is like a fairy-tale, but unlike the fairy-tale, its action is time-specific. Second, the characters are types, though they may rise to the dignity of archetypes (my example from Lewis’s youth would be Sherlock Holmes). Third, and connected with the second characteristic, it is the character of Nature (even a Nature containing dragons), not the characters of the actors, being “realized” (in the French sense of the word). Fourth, the adventurers are not solitary, but they are frequently (in fact, almost universally) a happy few. Fifth, the adventures are narrated (frequently in the first person), by the most ordinary of the happy few. Sixth, there is a recurring motif (perhaps the recurring motif) of the past alive in the present. And seventh, the world of the adventurers is essentially an aristocratic world.
It might also be argued that there are fewer shades of grey in the actions of the characters than we are accustomed to seeing in our present-day world (on all this, see Jared Lobdell, The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy, 2005, p. 167). While there are two time-schemes in the books, they are time-specific, and if the English world is not aristocratic, the Narnian world certainly is. The stories have an omniscient (or almost-omniscient) narrator, which is characteristic of the fairy-tale mode rather than the Edwardian-adventure mode, but they are Edwardian for all that.
Coming to the fifth of our children in Narnia, Eustace, in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” it is noteworthy that Eustace Clarence Scrubb is a humorous name, like Otho or Lotho Sackville-Baggins—or (but this was a real man, in our world and the world of Lewis’s childhood), Archibald Willingham de Graffenreid Clarendon Butt. In fact, it combines, like the full name of Major Butt (who went down on the Titanic), or like Otho or Lotho, Medieval or Norman names with an absurdly English last name. The humor is not far removed from the humor of juxtaposition in the old music-hall song, “I’m ’Enery the Eighth, I Am!”
Eustace and Clarence are noble names from Medieval England and Scrubb is the resounding anti-climax. But Eustace’s coadjutor in The Silver Chair, Jill Pole, should be recognized as having a royal name. When the Welsh claimant to the Lancastrian line, Henry Tudor (nephew of the half-blood to Henry VI Plantagenet), took England by conquest in 1485, there remained (besides his wife, Elizabeth of York), several other Yorkist claimants to the late rights of Edmund Mortimer from Lionel Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence. One of these was Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury, daughter of the Duke of Clarence, who married Sir Richard Pole. She was put to death by Henry VIII, possibly because her claim was better than his, certainly because her children’s claims would be better than his children’s. I doubt if Lewis was unaware that Pole was a royal name. (Jill is, I suppose, from the child evacuee Jill Flewett, who became a friend for the rest of Lewis’s life.) I suspect the “Eustace Clarence Scrubb” name lay dormant in Lewis’s mind a very long time—we shall say more about the name itself in Chapter 4.
But what is real? Not a child named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, to be sure, though possibly a child named Jill Pole. Not a marsh-wiggle named Puddleglum—though certainly Fred Paxford, Lewis’s gardener, who was a model for some of Puddleglum’s characteristics. Of course, the real philosophical question in The Silver Chair is whether the “Overworld” is real—but then, we already know it is, even though Rilian, in captivity, has been brought by the Green Witch to believe the “Underworld” is all. But this is Lewis seeking to get past the watchful dragons, not to realize (“make real”) the world of the dragons, the world of imagination. This is Lewis the apologist, the controversialist, not so much the artist. The artist made Puddleglum on Paxford’s model—that is a work of imagination, with overtones from Punch. The gnomes of Bism (if not the name of Bism) are a work of imagination (even if their origins lie in part in Punch caricatures of workers in Lewis’s youth). We will look a bit more at the philosophical point later on, in Chapter 4: here we are merely noting some other matters along the way.
Here, for starters on the matter of Narnia and the North (and what the North meant to Lewis), is Lewis’s description of the three great imaginative experiences of his earlier youth: “The third glimpse [of ‘enormous bliss’] came through poetry. I had become fond of Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf; fond of it in a casual shallow way for its story and its vigorous rhythms. But then, and quite different from such pleasures, and like a voice from far more distant regions, there came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of Tegner’s Drapa and read ‘I heard a voice that cried / Balder the beautiful / Is dead, is dead.’ I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote), and then, as in the other examples, found myself already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it” (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, New York, 1954, paperback ed., p. 17). Remember, we are not looking here at the North in the Narnian world, but at what “The North” meant to Lewis, in this world, in his world.
And then, some few years after the experience with Balder, but still in his youth (pp. 72–73), there came another such experience. “A moment later, as the poet says, ‘The sky had turned round.’ What I had read was the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. What I had seen was one of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to that volume. I had never heard of Wagner, nor of Siegfried. I thought the Twilight of the Gods meant the twilight in which the gods lived. How did I know, at once and