Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper

as a result of this Lewis assumed what he called his intellectual ‘New Look’. ‘There were to be,’ he insisted,

no flirtations with any idea of the supernatural, no romantic delusions. In a word, like the heroine of Northanger Abbey, I formed the resolution ‘of always judging and acting in future with the greatest good sense? And good sense meant, for me at that moment, a retreat, almost a panic-stricken flight, from all that sort of romanticism which had hitherto been the chief concern of my life.⁶

      Lewis had just arrived at this ‘New Look’, with its rejection of anything supernatural, when Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood became followers of Rudolf Steiner and the theosophical beliefs expressed in anthroposophy. ‘I was hideously shocked,’ said Lewis:

Everything that I had laboured so hard to expel from my own life seemed to have flared up and met me in my best friends. Not only my best friends, but those whom I would have thought safest…As I came to learn…what Steiner thought, my horror turned into disgust and resentment. For here, apparently, were all the abominations; none more abominable than those which had once attracted me. Here were gods, spirits, after-life and pre-existence, initiates, occult knowledge, meditation…There was no danger of my being taken in. But then, the loneliness, the sense of being deserted.⁷

      The ‘Great War’ was to last until 1931, when Lewis converted to Christianity.

      In a word, HarperCollins and I were determined that the three volumes would contain not a ‘selection’ of Lewis’s letters but all. The reader can see from the frequency of the abbreviations ‘BOD’ and ‘W’ that most of the letters are from the two major collections in the Bodleian Library and the Wade Center. But for the purpose of this volume, the net was thrown very wide, and this volume contains the letters I have found in all the Lewis collections I know about. When I began work on Volume III, I guessed that, with the addition of the Supplement, it would be only a few hundred pages longer than the other two. However, as word spread that this would be the final volume, I received numerous Lewis letters preserved in private collections. And so the book grew to be the size it is.

      Despite our efforts to include in these volumes all of Lewis’s letters, there are a few that either I forgot about or which turned up too late to be fitted in. No doubt others will come to light. We should not be discouraged. This happens with the letters of nearly all eminent people. I doubt we can say we have all the letters written by anyone. Letters from Dr Samuel Johnson have shown up hundreds of years after his letters were first published, and despite the efforts of the many editors of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Letters and Diaries, over a period of fifty years, letters from Newman still show up from time to time. While I have no doubt that most of Lewis’s letters are contained in these volumes, I expect the occasional letter will be popping up for the next 100 years. If this happens, perhaps HarperCollins will publish an additional volume of letters.

      The theme of this volume is Narnia, Cambridge and Joy, but up to the end of 1949, there was almost nothing to suggest that the last thirteen years of Lewis’s life would involve any of those things, that it would be the fullest of all, and that the period would yield so many letters. In short, there was no reason for Lewis to imagine a revolution taking place in his life. He was very tired from years of looking after his aged companion, Mrs Moore, and he would have been glad of an occasional day of freedom. Thus, when Don Giovanni Calabria wrote from Verona at the beginning of 1949, urging him to write more, Lewis replied on 14 January:

I would not wish to deceive you with vain hope. I am now in my fiftieth year. I feel my zeal for writing, and whatever talent I originally possessed, to be decreasing; nor (I believe) do I please my readers as I used to…My aged mother, worn out by long infirmity, is my daily care…Perhaps it will be the most wholesome thing for my soul that I lose both fame and skill lest I were to fall into that evil disease, vainglory⁸

The clearest evidence that his ‘zeal for writing’ was decreasing was that he had written no stories since the last Ransom novel in 1945. For Lewis story-writing was never a matter of effort, but depended entirely, as he said, on ‘seeing pictures in my head’.⁹ But there were no ‘pictures’. And in any event, Lewis was poised, after years of preparation, to begin writing English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), the volume of the Oxford History of English Literature which he once complained ‘lies like a nightmare on my chest’.¹⁰ The burden of that ‘nightmare’ would have been eased had he received more help from his brother, Warnie. The brothers were the greatest friends, but Warnie would periodically disappear to Ireland on drinking binges, often absenting himself at the times when Jack needed most help with Mrs Moore.

As I mentioned in the Preface to Volume II, it was shortly after Lewis thought his talents to be ‘decreasing’ that he began dreaming of lions.¹¹ ‘At first,’ he said about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ‘I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Asian came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time…Once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.’¹²

      The extraordinary burst of inspiration that led to the writing of the Narnian stories was beyond anything he had experienced since his interplanetary stories. How did it happen? As he explained,

In the Author’s mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariably begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form: verse or prose, short story, novel, play or what not. When these two things click you have the Author’s impulse complete. It is now a thing inside him pawing to get out. He longs to see this bubbling stuff pouring into that Form as the housewife longs to see the new jam pouring into the clean jam jar. This nags him all day long and gets in the way of his work and his sleep and his meals. It’s like being in love.¹³

      The first two chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe were probably composed soon after he wrote to Don Giovanni on 14 January 1949, and they were ready for Roger Lancelyn Green to read when he visited Lewis in March. This first ‘Chronicle of Narnia’ was completed by the end of May, and in June Lewis made a start on what became The Magician’s Nephew. He dropped this story when he ran into some difficulties with it, and in September 1949 he wrote Prince Caspian. In August 1949 Lewis signed a contract with publisher Geoffrey Bles for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and by Christmas Pauline Baynes had illustrated it.

Volume III opens in January 1950, when Lewis was writing a third story, The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’. This was followed by The Horse and His Boy, which he was in the middle of when he found it impossible any longer to look after Mrs Moore. On 29 April 1950 she was moved to Restholme, a nursing home at 230 Woodstock Road. There Lewis visited her every day.¹⁴ ‘The old lady’s retirement to a Nursing Home,’ he wrote to Dr Warfield Firor on 6 December 1950, ‘has made me a good deal freer in a small way. I can plan my days and count on some domestic leisure as I have not been able to do these last fifteen years.’¹⁵

      The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, always the most popular of the stories, was published on 16 October 1950. The Magician’s Nephew was not completed until the spring of 1954, but all the other five were finished