The Screwtape Letters
Wicked Good
The Screwtape Letters, on page and stage.
By John J. Miller
C. S. Lewis once complained that writing The Screwtape Letters brought him no pleasure. “I never wrote with less enjoyment,” he said. “The strain produced a spiritual cramp.” That’s because Screwtape is a devil, and his letters are pieces of fiendish instruction sent to Wormwood, an apprentice demon who is trying to tempt a soul into Hell. “The world in which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch,” said Lewis. “Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded.”
And yet The Screwtape Letters, published in 1942, is one of Lewis’s best-loved books—it is probably more widely read than any of his titles, with the exception of Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia. It might even be said that in certain respects it was the most important book he ever wrote, if only because it “made Lewis a household name,” according to biographer A. N. Wilson. Would we know Lewis if he had never written Screwtape? Probably. But it’s a little like asking whether we’d know Shakespeare if he had never written Hamlet—removing it from his opus diminishes him.
Anybody who has dipped into the book can sense its power. The concept of a devil writing letters to his subordinate is pure genius, and The Screwtape Letters if full of crackling-good prose. Here’s a sample, from the first letter in the book:
Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false,” but as “academic” or “practical,” “outworn” or “contemporary,” “conventional” or “ruthless.” Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
This is at once a firm denunciation of moral relativism, a bracing plea for coming to grips with its seductive power, and a clear message of warning to readers. Lewis believes that by creating a fictional devil and trying to plumb his ways, his audience will improve its faith.
Screwtape is continually mystified by the agenda of the Enemy—i.e., the God that he and his fellow devils have rejected. This gives rise to one of the best passages in the book, from Screwtape’s eighth letter:
One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like his own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to his. … He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do the Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
There are 31 such letters. They vary slightly in length but average perhaps 1,000 words each. Lewis was a speedy writer, spending only a few hours on each one, and they initially appeared in a weekly newspaper in serial form. (He donated the initial proceeds to a fund for the widows of clergymen.) The letters may be read quickly, too, though they may also be read repeatedly with profit. It might be said that the first half of the book is stronger than the second half, but the book as a whole deserves its status as a popular classic.
I have often wondered how The Screwtape Letters might be dramatized, especially in the wake of last year’s Narnia movie. A splendid audio version of the book is available, performed by John Cleese of Monty Python fame. It is at bottom a recitation of the letters. Turning the letters into an actual story that might be made into a film would require an enormous amount of invention—the creation of characters and situations that are only dimly hinted at in the words Lewis actually wrote. Anybody who attempted it would be accused of deviating from the script.
Last month, I did watch an excellent stage performance of The Screwtape Letters in New York, put on by the Fellowship for the Performing Arts. It opened in January and closed earlier this month. “We have sold out for the vast majority of the performances,” says Jeffrey Fiske, the FPA’s artistic director. “There have only been around half a dozen performances that have not sold out, and the lowest attendance we have had was 75 percent.” The production may move to a larger venue off-Broadway venue in New York, and there is also a hope for shows in other cities.
The presentation is simple enough: Screwtape, played in a bronze smoking jacket by a Robert De Niro-ish Max McLean, recites his letters to Toadpipe, a demonic scribe and dancer played by Jenny Savage. Yet McLean so dominates the stage that The Screwtape Letters seems almost a one-man show. He is both charming and gruesome, which is exactly how theatergoers who are familiar with the book would want him to be. The show is essentially an edited version of the book plus a snippet from “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” a short essay that Lewis wrote in 1962—it clocks in at roughly an hour and 45 minutes (compared to about three hours for the unabridged recording by Cleese). There are a handful of embellishments, such as Toadpipe chanting “Om,” like a 1960s hippie, when Screwtape urges Wormwood to produce “a vague devotional mood” in his patient. At another point, Screwtape, seated in a high-backed brown leather chair, flips through a book about Madonna (i.e., the singer). Between the letters, Toadpipe dances to music—this is a bit distracting, but at least it serves the purpose of breaking up what otherwise would be an extended monologue. All in all, The Screwtape Letters, as produced by the FPA, is an outstanding piece of work.
There have been other attempts to revive Screwtape—I enjoyed this short, unofficial “sequel,” which won a contest sponsored by Lewis’s publisher several years ago. But each one of them owes everything to the original author, who was always finding new ways to instruct his flock of fans, proving that a spiritual cramp for Lewis can be a revelation for the rest of us.
—John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and the author, most recently, of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGVjOGNmYzE5Zjg3OGVjNWRhY2ZmNTE3ZjFiNmUxYjg=
Doing C.S. Lewis Justice
Classic
Doing Lewis justice.
By Frederica Mathewes-Green
Any director who attempts to bring a beloved novel to the screen can expect his fair share of slings and arrows. Just ask Peter Jackson, the hardworking genius behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or any of the parade of directors who have delivered Harry Potter films. The latest to step up for a smackdown is Andrew Adamson, previously known for Shrek, as he offers his fresh and magnificent production of C. S. Lewis’s novel, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Unlike the Potter directors, Adamson has not only junior readers to please, but armies of adults who have treasured every page in this seven-book series over the 50-plus years since it was published. (That accounts for the bulky title: The whole set is The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Wardrobe volume, published first, makes an excellent introduction.) And, unlike Jackson, Adamson has to deal with fairly explicit religious content. J. R. R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, and Lewis were fellow professors at Oxford; they were close friends, and Tolkien facilitated Lewis’s conversion to Christian faith. Both men hoped to use fiction to convey profound truths, and they met regularly to share works in progress. But Tolkien felt that Lewis went too far in Narnia, and warned his friend that the allegory was laid on too thick. Evangelical Christians prize this book because it presents the Gospel squarely, and any attempt to soften those elements would bring out the gangs carrying pitchforks and torches.
Never fear. Thanks no doubt to the guiding hand of Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham (himself a well-known evangelical), the script keeps the faith. Yet the message does not overpower the story (despite Tolkien’s fears), but rather hits the very target Lewis intended. It draws its emotional power from the spot inside that lifts up when we catch the refrain of that “old, old story,” in which a supernatural battle is won by glorious self-sacrifice. This is a story, Lewis would say, that God has prepared human beings to recognize when we hear it, and hid inside our hearts from our creation.
Everything that is strong and good and satisfying in this movie can be found in the book. The main characters are brilliantly realized, and skirt potential problems by wise casting. The littlest of the four children, Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley) is indisputably a child, with a broad face made squarer by a side part, wearing a Peter Pan collar and with a bow pinned in her hair. This is a refreshing change after excessively pretty leads in movies like A Series of Unfortunate Events and Because of Winn Dixie, young actresses who look more like beauty pageant sweethearts than real little girls.
Lucy’s sister Susan (Anna Popplewell) and brother Edmund (Skandar Keynes) are likewise believably real, and only big brother Peter (William Moseley) appears to have been plucked from a teenaged Brad Pitt lookalike file. Unfortunately, Peter also has the most unrelievedly noble role of the four children, and such a character threatens to turn bland even with much more experienced actors.
Tilda Swinton is extraordinary as the White Witch. When I made a recording of this book for my grandchildren, I gave the Witch the full Cruella DeVil treatment, going from oily to raging to haughty to manic in a single paragraph. Well, that’s one approach, and at least one young recipient preferred to listen to the recording with the lights on. But Swinton does something much more intelligent with the role. Even when most exhilarated, at the height of her powers, she is still apprehensive; she breathes with her mouth open, like an animal. She’s pale, hungry and tense. It’s an original approach, and juices up the movie.
Aslan caps all, however. I expected to be disappointed—it would seem that any visible depiction of this majestic character would inevitably reduce it. But this Aslan succeeds, and I think one secret is that the character’s eyes are somewhat hard to read. They’re the same color as his tawny mane, and sometimes hidden by it. This inscrutability preserves mystery in a character who, if he was fully comprehensible, would be too small.
But if the film just misses perfection, it’s because elements that don’t appear in the book have been imported to fit contemporary moviegoers’ expectations. For example, though the book’s battle scene takes just three swift, clean pages, in the film it is a grand set-piece, piled with all the CGI extravagance we now take for granted. There’s an invented sequence in which the children must cross a frozen river as it thaws, and ride an ice floe down the flood, but it feels contrived, not to mention pointless. Not for a moment do we believe that any of these characters are in serious danger. Tension is cranked up and cranked down again, just because that’s the way the formula goes.
Moviegoers expect tension in the dialogue, too. In the book, the children are touchingly polite and sensitive to others’ feelings. In an early passage, when a guilt-stricken Faun tries to tell Lucy that he is a wicked kidnapper, she persists in consoling and reassuring him, not realizing that she is his victim. Yet children aren’t touchingly polite any more, so these characters must bicker at each other (“Why can’t you do as you’re told!” “Mom isn’t here!”). I guess they don’t apologize either; the exchange toward the end, when Edmund asks his siblings’ forgiveness, is quietly dropped. Sarcasm is now ubiquitous, and even innocent Lucy has an occasional snarky line.
Not every new element is unwelcome, however. Book fans will be surprised by the opening, which shows London during a wartime bombing raid. We see the children and their mother huddling for shelter as a formation of planes, regular as a wallpaper pattern, cover the night sky. This supplies the backstory that Lewis’ original readers would have known too well, and explains why the children are sent to the Professor’s countryside estate. In the shelter, Edmund grips a framed photo of his soldier dad, though the glass is smashed. Later, the Faun Tumnus looks at his own father’s portrait, and mourns that he is not as good a Faun as his dad; on a next visit to Tumnus’s cave, the portrait is smashed on the floor. And, when the great battle begins, the flying griffins that hurl rocks on the enemy cover the sky in familiar formation. Visual echoes like these work well in a movie, but would seem forced in print.
The best parts of this film are those that are urgent and authentic—the tense and glittering Witch, the dear, believable child Lucy, the piercing moment of Aslan’s death. The parts that limp are those that were invented to fulfill the dreary rules about what a contemporary family blockbuster must include. Those are the moments that, a few decades from now, will seem dated and out of tune with the harmonious original. But that’s all right, because in the future there will still be fast-forward buttons on home-video systems, when your great-great grandchildren watch and re-watch this marvelous story—as they surely will.
—Frederica Mathewes-Green writes regularly for NPR’s Morning Edition, Beliefnet.com, Christianity Today, and other publications. She is the author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism, among other books.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDg5ZjA1MDdiNzUzNjNkODhiODRiZDQzZTFkMTJjY2Y=
The Narnia of Lewis
Gentleman Lewis
No Powerpuff Narnia.
By R. Andrew Newman
Maybe I wasn’t alone among fans of C. S. Lewis when I feared that the modern concept of in-your-face girl power might make the trip through the wardrobe in the new Hollywood adaptation of the first novel in the Narnia series. Think The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Would Susan and Lucy join their brothers in combat, smiting the enemy hip and thigh? But luckily I had no need to fear. Somehow, Narnia proved invulnerable to politically correct notions of gender.
In the book, the possibility of the girls wading into the fray is raised and then dismissed. Father Christmas gives Peter a sword and shield and Susan a bow, a quiver of arrows, and a horn, but he makes it clear that the bow is no invitation to fight alongside her brother.. “You must use the bow only in great need, for I do not mean you to fight in the battle.” His gift for Lucy is a healing cordial and a dagger. He tells her, “If you or any of your friends are hurt, a few drops of this will restore you. And the dagger is to defend yourself at great need. For you also are not to be in the battle.”
Hesitantly, Lucy tells Father Christmas she may have what it takes. “I think—I don’t know—but I think I could be brave enough.” Father Christmas will have none of this: “That is not the point. . . . battles are ugly when women fight.” This line was too much for director Andrew Adamson. In fact, he thought it was—wait for it—sexist. Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson, tried to retain such lines, but to no avail. According to World Magazine, Adamson told Gresham: “C.S. Lewis may have had these dated ideals, but at the same time there’s no way I could put that in the film.”
Sexist? Dated ideals? The West is in big trouble if the ideal that boys become men by sacrificing for women is dated and sexist to boot. But here’s the funny thing. Gresham, who played a big role in shaping the book’s adaptation, lost the battle, but he must have won the war. One of Lewis’s more heterodox friends, Owen Barfield, spoke of “saving the appearances.” When institutions and ideas change, he argued, only the surface stays the same. Here, however, the opposite happened: The appearance wasn’t saved, but the underlying reality of the story remained intact.
Lucy and Susan do not take sword in hand and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Peter and Edmund. With a well-aimed arrow, Susan kills the White Witch’s right-hand dwarf, who is preparing to finish off a wounded Edmund. This scene isn’t in the book, but it isn’t outside of Lewis’s vision. The bow and quiver weren’t an invitation to a front row seat in battle, but they weren’t to hang on the wall as pretties either. In fact, this scene is very much in line with the Susan of the later novel Prince Caspian, wherein she demonstrates her prowess with the bow when she rescues a dwarf from two encroaching soldiers.
Likewise, in the movie, the female warriors all appear to be among the archers on the cliff. I haven’t run into many female centaurs, but those with bows look more feminine than the ones with swords. This upholds the distinction that Father Christmas and the rest of the Narnia books make explicit: hand-to-hand to combat is the work of men, but women can lend a hand if they’re needed (and if they keep from the fray).
On screen and on the page, the boys become men by risking themselves for the sake of Narnia and for their sisters. They must be prepared to sacrifice themselves if necessary. Peter first draws blood and makes an initial move from boyhood to manhood when he has to save his sister Susan from a wolf. There’s more to this scene than a simple rescue, however. Good creatures of the forest move to save the daughter of Eve, but Aslan waves them back. “Let the Prince win his spurs. . .” The boy must show what he’s made of.
Susan makes it to the second branch of a tree, barely out of reach of the wolf’s snapping jaw. “Peter wondered why she did not get higher or at least take a better grip; then he realized that she was just going to faint and that if she fainted she would fall off.” Fainting? Oh my, that will never do. And, no, the fainting doesn’t make it to the film.
This is no macho nonsense in the book, mind you. “Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.” Peter knows what he must do: He slays the attacking beast with his blade. The boy is becoming a warrior, a man, but he has a ways to go. He fails to wipe his sword. Aslan knights the boy Sir Peter Fenris-Bane for his achievement, but reminds him, like a father to a son, a man to a boy, “Whatever happens, never forget to wipe your sword.” With very few changes, this scene makes it to the screen.
Peter has passed a milestone on his way to manhood. His brother, Edmund, can be sullen and spiteful, and his treachery leads to Aslan’s sacrificial death. But Edmund is not beyond hope. Once rescued, he shows his courage and smarts in battle. The fight hasn’t been going well, after the White Witch has turned Peter’s forces who come near her into stone. But Edmund battles his way through the monsters to reach Narnia’s self-proclaimed Queen and, instead of trying to attack her directly, he smashes her wand and evens the odds.
In the melee, he is gravely wounded. It is here Lucy takes an important step to womanhood. She remembers for the first time her Christmas gift, the cordial of healing, and tends to her wounded brother.
Susan and Lucy are not bit characters; Lewis does not neglect their growth from girls to nurturing, caring women of strength. Throughout the movie, they prove that they do not lack courage. In the night before the battle between the good and evil creatures of Narnia, Aslan leaves in the dark to face what the Deep Magic demands. The girls worry something is wrong with Aslan, so they follow him. He is glad for their company and (in the novel) asks them, “I am sad and lonely. Lay your hands on my mane so that I can feel you are there and let us walk like that.” The girls do as they are asked and they bring great comfort to the mighty lion.
The last of the journey he has to walk alone. Susan and Lucy, staying out of sight, witness in horror as Aslan submits himself to mocking, humiliation, and death at the hands of the White Witch and her vile allies. The lion’s dead body is left atop the hill. But the girls do not leave him alone. They are becoming women. Remaining with the murdered Aslan through the night, they try the best they can to lessen the indignities the noble lord suffered at the hands of his tormenters.
It is important that Lewis doesn’t end the story with Aslan’s resurrection and the vanquishing of the White Witch. The brothers and sisters do not slip back into the world of men after the battle. They stay in Narnia until their physical selves catch up to their emotional and spiritual selves: “And Peter became a tall and deep chested man and a great warrior, and he was called King Peter the Magnificent. And Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet and the Kings of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage. And she was called Queen Susan the Gentle. Edmund was a graver and quieter man than Peter, and great in council and judgment. He was called King Edmund the Just. But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden haired, and all Princes in those parts desired her to be their Queen, and her own people called her Queen Lucy the Valiant.”
This passage is beautifully and convincingly shown on the screen, as we see the now-older Susan, Peter, Edmund, and Lucy on horseback. With this depiction, thankfully, Narnia’s real message of empowerment for both boys and girls made it to the screen.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODdiZTMyMzEzYjhkOTFkMDEyODY5ZDFjYTdiZGEzZDE=
First Look at The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Into The Wardrobe
A first look at the Narnia movie.
By John J. Miller
First impressions of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which reaches movie theaters this weekend:
Is it any good? Yes, the movie is very good—a solid piece of entertainment in its own right, and fans of C. S. Lewis will regard it as faithful to his book in every important respect. A few plot elements are dropped and several others are added, but each decision makes sense for a movie that’s trying to tell a story in two hours.
What’s new, pt. 1: In the book, Lewis says that the Pevensie kids “were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.” That’s why they wind up in a big house with a strange wardrobe. When Lewis wrote, the evacuations were fresh in many minds and he didn’t need to say much else. That’s not true today, and so the film adds some helpful historical context. The first image is of a German bomber as it flies over Britain.
What’s new, pt. 2: Edmund is the bad egg, of course, and in the book there are indications of this even before he becomes a Turkish Delight junkie. The movie relies far more on Edmund’s sibling rivalry with older brother Peter as a factor in his treachery, and far less on Turkish Delight.
What’s new, pt. 3: There’s a chase scene through a tunnel, an attempted crossing of an icy river, and an encounter with Father Christmas that initially reminded me of how the hobbits first came into contact with the ringwraiths in The Lord of the Rings—it’s a sleight of hand, of course, but an effective treatment and not in the book. Also, after Father Christmas gives presents to the Pevensies and sleds off, Lucy turns to Susan and says, “Told you he was real!” It’s a wonderful line—not in the book, but a clever addition that advances the book’s theme of faith. Another new line comes from Tumnus, imprisoned in the witch’s castle—he says something that recalls Braveheart.
What’s new, pt. 4: J. R. R. Tolkien famously didn’t like The Chronicles of Narnia. “It really won’t do, you know,” he told a friend. One of his main objections was the way in which Lewis mixed different mythological traditions into a Narnian stew. The moviemakers revel in this, fleshing out creatures described only briefly in the book and adding new ones entirely. This may have required their greatest feat of imagination. Think of it as multiculturalism, in the best sense of the word. Personally, I liked it. When I watch the movie again, one of my priorities will be to notice more of these details. Also, the climactic battle scene includes griffins that drop boulders on the witch’s army—they are the mirror image of those German bombers at the start of the film.
What’s new, pt. 5: We get our first glimpse of Aslan early on, in the fireplace of Tumnus’s lair. In the book, we don’t hear about Aslan until the Pevensies get to the beaver dam (and we don’t see him until after that). The passage introducing him is one of the most memorable in the whole Chronicles (“None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do…”). It really can’t be rendered on film and our moviemakers don’t even attempt it here. That’s a wise decision.
It’s funny: The movie has a lot of humor—much more than the book, in fact. “You’re a Daughter of Eve?” asks Tumnus when he meets Lucy. “My mom’s name is Helen!” she replies. (Also new: In the books, we don’t see the mother, as we do in the film, and Lewis never names her.) And I can’t tell you how pleasant it was to sit through a film aimed largely at kids and not hear a single burp or fart joke.
The acting: The four actors who play the Pevensie kids are excellent, especially the girls. (But will they grow up too fast for Narnia sequels?) Tilda Swinton is brilliant as the White Witch; James McAvoy is outstanding as Tumnus. Kiran Shah, as the witch’s dwarf sidekick, kept reminding me of Deep Roy as the Oompa Loompa in the recent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake.
Cool tribute: In Professor Kirke’s house, we overhear a news report on the radio. The voice belongs to Douglas Gresham, who is Lewis’s stepson. It is a fitting family tribute to Lewis, who delivered radio addresses over the BBC during the Second World War. These were later collected as one of his most popular books, Mere Christianity.
The music: Not immediately memorable. And did they have to include a song by Alanis Morrisette? The last time I heard what she liked to do in movie theaters, I wanted to turn off the radio.
The credits: When the credits start to roll at the end of the movie, stay in your seats. There’s a final scene worth watching.
Will your kids like it? The movie is rated PG, appropriately. A few scenes are meant to startle. There is combat and violence, much of it fast and loud. The film is by no means gory—we don’t see the witch actually kill Aslan, for instance, though we do know exactly what she did with her knife. I took my entire brood to a screening last weekend. My eight-year-old boy, who has had the book read to him three times, said the other day, “it was so good, I can’t stop thinking about it.” My six-year-old daughter, who has had the book read to her twice, called it “perfect” as we were walking out of the theater, although later she added that she didn’t like it when Aslan was killed. Of course, she’s not supposed to like that part. It may be worth noting that the scene is like a Star Wars cantina set in the netherworld—full of scary monsters and vicious animals up to no good. A susceptible kid might suffer nightmares. My four-year-old son, who is a budding monster-movie aficionado, squirmed a lot during the film and said he wanted to go home. Later, he said he liked it, especially “when the lion roared really, really loud.” In truth, he was probably too young for the movie, but only because he’s kind of young for movies generally. The biggest problem was keeping him quiet, as it was during last summer’s March of the Penguins.
The best part: We can hope, realistically, that the movie will inspire a whole new generation of children to devour The Chronicles of Narnia.
Want more? I’ve written previously about Narnia for NRO here and here.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGU1NDQ4ZWJmZDNjZmE3Mzk4MGNjODA5OTZkYjdkZTA=
Chronology of Chronicles of Narnia
Narnian Order
Which C. S. Lewis book comes first?
By John J. Miller
Florida governor Jeb Bush has chosen The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as the centerpiece of his “Just Read, Florida!” program, and he’s already coming under left-wing fire. “Some are concerned that the selection is an attempt to Christianize the students of Florida,” complains blogger Michael Schaub.
And so it begins: The controversy over whether impressionable schoolchildren should be exposed to the nefarious influence of C.S. Lewis. It will only grow louder as we approach December, when the big-budget movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe reaches theaters.
But in the meantime, you may have a more basic question. Perhaps you’ve seen the super-cool trailer for the upcoming film, and you’ve decided to read the book beforehand. You go to the bookstore, look up C.S. Lewis titles, and locate the seven volumes in The Chronicles of Narnia. But the label on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe says it’s the second book in the series. The first one is called The Magician’s Nephew. That’s not how you remember it. Aslan moves in mysterious ways, but something doesn’t seem quite right.
So which comes first: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Magician’s Nephew?
The short answer is this: Jeb is right.
The long answer is this: Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe before any of the other Narnia books, and traditionally it has been considered the first in the series. For years, its publisher marketed it that way. Then, about a decade ago, Narnia became a piece of real estate in the HarperCollins empire. The renumbering took place “in compliance with the original wishes of the author,” as a small-print statement on the copyright page of the new editions says.
The decision was based in large part upon a 1957 comment in which Lewis expressed a mild preference for the books to be read not in the order of their publication, but based upon their internal chronology. It also involved the input from Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s son-in-law. “I don’t think people should feel enslaved by the numbers on the books,” he says. “But I recommend starting with The Magician’s Nephew and going from there.”
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the best advice. The irony is that Lewis himself probably would agree that readers shouldn’t look to him for much guidance on the subject. And I’m fairly certain that if Lewis were still around—he died on the day JFK was shot—I could buy him a drink at the pub and persuade him he was wrong.
Just for the record, here are the seven titles in The Chronicles of Narnia, listed in the order of their publication: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950); Prince Caspian (1951); The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (1952); The Silver Chair (1953); The Horse and His Boy (1954); The Magician’s Nephew (1955); and The Last Battle (1956).
Here’s the order HarperCollins now gives to the series (with their traditional numbering in parentheses): The Magician’s Nephew (6); The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1); The Horse and His Boy (5); Prince Caspian (2); The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” (3); The Silver Chair (4); and The Last Battle (7).
Yet the case for reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first rather than second is overwhelming. Most important is the fact that the book introduces the world of Narnia to its readers far better than The Magician’s Nephew, or any of the other books in the Chronicles. Lucy’s initial encounter with Aslan’s domain is one of the great moments in whole series, as she passes through the wardrobe, hears the “crunch-crunch” of snow beneath her feet, and walks toward a light in the distance.
The device of the portal, which transports readers from our world to another, is crucial. For starters, it’s a traditional feature of fantasy literature for children—see, for instance, the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or that railroad platform in Harry Potter. The portal described in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is more detailed and compelling than the ones found in subsequent books, which employ portals but don’t dwell on their significance. (With the exception of The Horse and His Boy, each of the Narnia books has a portal.) The early chapters of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe focus on the important question of whether there can even be portals. “But do you really mean, Sir,” asks Peter, “that there could be other worlds—all over the place, just around the corner—like that?” Replies the professor: “Nothing is more probable.” This is a meaningful conversation on many levels, and not least because it confirms the reality of Narnia in the space of the story.
What’s more, when Lewis began writing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he did not even conceive of writing the other books at all. As a result, he presents Narnia with a freshness that won’t be found elsewhere in the series. You might compare it to the freshness of the crunching snow beneath Lucy’s feet. Not only does Lewis lead his readers into a new world, but he’s looking upon it for the first time himself, and it shows.
There’s no such freshness in The Magician’s Nephew, which begins this workmanlike way: “This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. It is a very important story because it shows how all the comings and goings between our own world and the land of Narnia first began.” These opening words assume readers will know there’s a place called Narnia and that there are comings and goings between it and our world. In other words, the passage takes for granted a familiarity with tales Lewis already has told.
Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead make the point well in their new book, A Reader’s Guide Through the Wardrobe: “To read The Magician’s Nephew first would be to undercut the very fabric by which Lewis so carefully constructed his previous tale. Once readers know ‘all about’ Narnia, they can no longer experience the full strangeness of Lucy’s discovery of a mysterious world within the wardrobe,” they write. “If the reader first experiences Narnia by reading The Magician’s Nephew, all of this significant suspense is lost.”
Then there’s Aslan. He is of course as important to The Chronicles of Narnia as Jesus is to the gospels. And once again, Lewis brings him into the story with enormous care. His name first appears in chapter seven, when the Pevensie kids hear Mr. Beaver speak it: “They say Aslan is on the move—perhaps has already landed.” Next Lewis writes:
And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had enormous meaning—either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now.
This passage certainly belongs in the first book of the Chronicles. That’s especially true for the second sentence: “None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do.” This line could not be spoken to people who already have read other Narnia books. Moreover, the very final words of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe sound like the appropriate final words for the first book in a series: “It was only the beginning of the adventures of Narnia.”
There is nothing comparable to any of this in The Magician’s Nephew. (Final words: “But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.”) No part of The Magician’s Nephew demands that it be read before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It is in fact a kind of prequel to the other six books in the series, but this is no more a problem in the overall narration of the Chronicles than a flashback scene is a problem on a television show.
The case for pushing The Magician’s Nephew to the forefront rests almost wholly on the apparent fact that Lewis himself believed it should be read first. He doesn’t seem to have held this opinion with great conviction. He expressed his view in a letter to a child in 1957, in a conversation with one of his biographers, and evidently nowhere else. He certainly didn’t order his publisher to take any special action. By the time HarperCollins rearranged the titles, Lewis had been dead for more than thirty years.
But even if Lewis had been a fervent believer in the primacy of The Magician’s Nephew—writing manifestos, screaming from rooftops, paying for TV ads during the Superbowl—his readers wouldn’t owe him any special consideration. And Lewis definitely was a fervent believer in this principle.
In the 1930s, when Lewis was a relatively unknown scholar at Oxford, he debated E.M.W. Tillyard over how to interpret John Milton. Tillyard maintained that it was important to understand what was on Milton’s mind as he wrote and that such an understanding would help reveal the true meaning of Paradise Lost. Lewis, by contrast, was frustrated to find many of his students more interested in authors’ lives than their works. And he thought Tillyard’s approach was pure balderdash. In an essay, he called it “The Personal Heresy.” He believed that readers should try to share a poet’s consciousness rather than study it. “I look with his eyes, not at him,” wrote Lewis. “The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him.” Lewis put the matter more succinctly in a letter toward the end of his life: “An author doesn’t necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else.”
Lewis of course understood the meaning of Narnia. But a wise expert is not the same thing as a final authority—and on the question of which Narnia book should come first, Lewis was utterly wrong. Thank goodness the people who are behind new movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—as well as Jeb Bush—got it right. You should, too, if you decide to explore Narnia not just on the silver screen but also on the printed page.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzhmY2ZmOWQxMDYyYjUwNjdmMWViOTMzNWRlNTU4ODM=
Narnia & Its Enemies
Narnia & Its Enemies
Sexist, racist, intolerant Lewis?
By Catherine Seipp
This weekend’s long-anticipated opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first film adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series of children’s fantasy novels, has brought in the past few weeks a torrent of Narnia commentary in the media—most of it intelligent and worth reading, but also, in many instances, absolutely wrong.
For those unfamiliar with the stories, (and given the power of the Hollywood publicity machine, I wonder how many remain?), Narnia is a magical country in a parallel universe created and ruled by a Christ-like lion deity named Aslan. Various English schoolchildren find themselves transported there by magical means; the wardrobe of the first book, for instance, leads to an snowy enchanted forest, which an evil White Witch has made “always winter and never Christmas.”
The series is generally called Christian allegory, but that’s simplistic as well as somewhat misleading. Lewis, whose theological writing for adults made him one the 20th-century’s great Christian apologists, coined the word “supposal” to describe Narnia—suppose the Son of God appeared as the King of Beasts in a land of talking animals? And suppose that humans, with all their sins, entered this world? What then?
To call the stories allegory also gives no hint of why readers return to them many times (as I have over the years, even past childhood), long after the page-turning adventures hold no more surprises. Lewis was a master stylist, and his children’s series are marked by the same dryly witty prose, comic characters, and shrewd insight into the human condition that distinguish The Screwtape Letters and his other books for adults. Yet Narnia has its enemies, and now they are out in force.
Chief among them is the British fantasy writer Philip Pullman, whose popular His Dark Materials trilogy was conceived as an atheistic answer to Lewis’s vision. Pullman, as the Washington Post reminded readers Thursday, sees Narnia as “a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice.” In the British Guardian last week, Polly Toynbee wrote that “Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America—that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right.”
Even critics generally appreciative of Lewis have come up with some strange notions. Last month, in The New York Times Magazine, Charles McGrath wrote that the Narnia stories “are not nearly as well written” as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. And writing in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik declared that a lion isn’t a very Christ-like animal—Aslan really should have been a humble donkey instead.
So let’s consider these complaints:
Narnia is sexist. “Girls always come second to boys,” Alison Lurie wrote last week in the Guardian. “They have fewer adventures.” Actually, Lewis typically makes his main protagonists in each story one boy and one girl, and the girl is usually more sympathetic. The English child who discovers Narnia in the first book is a girl, the brave and virtuous Lucy, who also has the closest relationship to Aslan.
Lewis clearly favors independent, free-thinking girls over those stuck in traditionally frivolous female roles. In The Horse and His Boy, Aravis, a girl escaping a forced marriage in an autocratic land south of Narnia called Calormen, runs into an old acquaintance who seems to be something of a Maureen Dowd in miniature: “The fuss she made over choosing the dresses nearly drove Aravis mad,” Lewis writes. “She remembered now that Lasaraleen had always been like that, interested in clothes and parties and gossip. Aravis had always been more interested in bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming. You will guess that each thought the other silly.”
Narnia is racist. Speaking of those Calormenes, McGrath’s complaint in the New York Times that they “are oily cartoon Muslims” is typical, if not quite correct; actually, they are pre-Islamic Islamofascists who keep slaves, oppress women, and worship a Baal-like god named Tash. That they have dark complexions, which Lewis’s critics harp on more than Lewis did, really isn’t the problem. As it happens, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’s evil White Witch, interpreted by Tilda Swinton as an Aryan goddess in the movie, is “not merely pale,” as the book describes her, “but white like snow or paper or icing-sugar…proud and cold and stern.”
The Calormenes speak in a flowery, Arabian Nights-style manner worthy of Osama bin Laden, but Lewis gives them their due for that. In Calormen, he explains in The Horse and His Boy, story-telling “is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.”
Lewis is religiously intolerant. Critics are horrified that a bland, minor character named Susan doesn’t make it to heaven in The Last Battle, which depicts Narnia’s Armageddon. Susan had convinced herself that Narnia wasn’t real, and was “interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.” Philip Pullman accuses Lewis of condemning Susan for reaching puberty, although since she was supposed to be about 21 during her nylons-and-lipstick phase, puberty would seem to be long past. The passage appears to be more about the danger of focusing only on material things—and denying the truth—than sexuality.
In any case, those upset by Susan’s exclusion from heaven in The Last Battle never mention that in its final chapter, an honorable (but Tash-worshipping) Calormene is surprised to find himself face to face with a welcoming Aslan. As Gregg Easterbrook noted in The Atlantic a few years ago, the message here is that “paradise awaits anyone of good will.” So it hardly seems fair to lump Lewis with Left Behind fans.
Aslan should have been a donkey. Adam Gopnik’s complaint in The New Yorker is interesting, but he forgets that Aslan exists in a post-Christian universe: Jesus has come and gone from earth centuries before two Victorian children travel from London to witness Aslan’s creation of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew. So, since he’s already risen as the King of Kings, there seems no reason that his new incarnation shouldn’t be the King of Beasts.
J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman are better writers than C. S. Lewis. This is just jaw-droppingly wrong. Rowling and Pullman are writers of great accomplishment, and both the Harry Potter and His Dark Materials books are absorbing page-turners. But leaving religion entirely out of it, I can’t imagine reading anything in either series more than once. Pullman’s imagined worlds are fascinating and powerfully eerie, but his characters are flat, humorless, and generally annoying. Rowling, unlike Pullman, writes with sympathy and charm, but the Potter stories often descend into potboiler mode. Maybe in a generation or two Rowling and Pullman will prove to be as enduring as Lewis, but I doubt it. And until then, he stands head and shoulders above them.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Y2RkM2U4NmJhZTg0MTU3ODI2NTc5NzQ5NzliNTBmMjM=
Aslan as Christ
Xmas in Narnia
Have Yourself a Merry Little Aslanmas?
By John J. Miller
There is no Christ in Narnia—there is only Aslan, the lion who dies for the sins of others and returns in glorious triumph. So instead of Christmas, shouldn’t the Narnians celebrate Aslanmas? And shouldn’t Lewis have left Father Christmas out of his books entirely?
This is more than just a rose-by-any-other-name semantic dispute, because it goes to the heart of a fundamental criticism that many people level at The Chronicles of Narnia: The books are full of maddening inconsistencies.
When we first encounter Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for example, we learn that a permanent winter has descended upon the land. This creates a problem later in the story, as Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead describe in their new book, A Reader’s Guide Through the Wardrobe:
Another friend [of Lewis's], poet Ruth Pitter, recalled with pleasure her good-natured “win” over Lewis, when she caught him in a textual error in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: where did the beavers obtain certain foodstuffs (e.g., potatoes, flour, sugar, oranges, milk) for the dinner they provided for the Pevensie children, given that it was winter and (by Lewis’s own setup of the story) no foreign trade was allowed? According to Pitter’s memory of the conversation, Lewis had no answer and was “stumped.”
Maybe the food was smuggled into Narnia from Calormen, a country to the south. But that’s pure speculation. And even if this were the case, it is a flaw on the part of Lewis: A good story doesn’t create puzzles for readers; it answers questions before they’re even asked. Lewis is perhaps under a special obligation to explain the food, given that the feast with the beavers is one of the most sensual passages in the book. Where did those big rodents get their chow?
The beavers create other problems as well. “There’s never been any of your race here before,” says Mr. Beaver to the Pevensie kids. As we learn later in the series, however, this isn’t true. Perhaps this can be chalked up to Mr. Beaver not knowing any better. Yet his statement is actually the result of Lewis not knowing any better. When he started writing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he did not plan to compose six sequels. Later books suffer from some near-sightedness that found its way into the first one.
Gee, Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Middle Earth
Narnia simply wasn’t prepared with the meticulous attention to detail that J. R. R. Tolkien lavished upon to Middle Earth. And Tolkien famously criticized Narnia as an awkward mishmash of a world. It must have pained him to do so: He and Lewis were not only colleagues at Oxford, but also personal friends. Tolkien played a key role in Lewis’s decision to become a Christian, in what is probably one of the most significant conversions of the 20th century. The author of The Lord of the Rings might not have finished his own masterpiece but for Lewis’s unflagging enthusiasm and encouragement. So he probably would have liked to return the favor and cheer on Lewis in the writing of Narnia. Yet Tolkien was a relentlessly honest man and he could not hide his antipathy for the Narnian project: “I hear you’ve been reading Jack’s children’s story,” he told a mutual friend. “It really won’t do, you know!” (To his buddies, Lewis was known as “Jack.”)
Perhaps Tolkien was jealous that Lewis could whip out seven books in seven years—the man wrote at a delirious speed, and Tolkien couldn’t have kept pace even if he had tried. Yet his critique of Narnia contains both substance and merit. Tolkien believed that Lewis veered too close to Christian allegory. Lewis denied this, calling his tales suppositions: “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would have happened.”
Maybe you have to be an English major to care about the difference between an allegory and a supposition. Tolkien’s primary objection to Narnia, however, raised another issue entirely. He thought that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was an irritating blend of different cultural traditions: centaurs and fauns from the Greeks, dwarves from the Norse, and so on. And that’s even before we get to this strange business about Jesus, Aslan, and Father Christmas.
Lewis was a great borrower, and it drove Tolkien bonkers. In Perelandra, a science-fiction book published in 1943, Lewis makes a reference to “Numinor.” This was meant as a kind of tribute to Tolkien, who wrote of the “Numenor,” which was a kingdom of Middle Earth. Note the slightly different spelling, which may be the result of Lewis being sloppy or thinking the word’s root was “numinous.” Whatever the case, it was not in keeping with Tolkien the philologist’s carefully crafted linguistics. It was a dabbler’s error, the sort of dumb blunder that Tolkien strove to banish from Middle Earth.
The Numenor-Numinor controversy is of course an exceedingly small thing for casual readers of Tolkien and Lewis. The introduction of Father Christmas into The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, on the other hand, is obvious and jarring, even if you don’t compose elaborate letters from Father Christmas every year (as Tolkien did). Shouldn’t St. Nick just stay on our side of the wardrobe?
Kids!
Perhaps. But he does play an important role in Narnia. Lewis has a wonderful line early in the book about how the White Witch has made it “always winter but never Christmas.” If we cross out the Christmas half of it, the line doesn’t carry nearly half the punch: the witch doesn’t seem nearly so terrible, nor does the plight of the Narnians seem quite so grave. That’s especially true for children, for whom Christmas is a time of magical importance. And the arrival of Father Christmas presents the first clear evidence that the tables have turned against the witch. “I’ve come at last,” he says to the Pevensie kids. “She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The witch’s magic is weakening.” With that, the spell over Narnia begins to break.
It is of course possible that Lewis might have accomplished the same trick, from a narrative standpoint, without importing Father Christmas. It is also perfectly legitimate to stand with Tolkien and declare that Father Christmas has absolutely no business sledding around a fantasy world in which there is an Aslan but not a Christ. But perhaps this misses the point. The Chronicles of Narnia, after all, are written for children. My own kids love the Father Christmas scene, and I suspect that on some level they grasp its real meaning. To say that it doesn’t belong in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is to argue against the actual experience of countless readers who also have enjoyed it and grasped it. In the end, it may in fact be a very grown-up kind of critique—sober and logical, but blind to the imaginative sensibilities of kids. Can you picture an 8-year-old who would care about the spelling of Numenor/Numinor? That’s a discussion for adults—and even then, only for adults of a very certain type. Narnia, by contrast, is a great big fantasy playground—and as Lewis makes clear throughout the Chronicles, grown ups can’t go there. So maybe Father Christmas is a kid thing, and you just wouldn’t understand.
So is it Christmas or Aslanmas in Narnia? Maybe we should just leave it a mystery, like the beaver’s food. Or we could call it Xmas, using “X” in the algebraic sense of “solve for X.” But let’s remember that most kids don’t like algebra either.
If you’ve made it this far, it probably means that you haven’t yet suffered from Narnia fatigue. Here are three other pieces I’ve written for NRO on C.S. Lewis and Narnia: a general appreciation, an argument on the order in which the Narnian books ought to be read, and first impressions of the new movie.
—John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and the author, most recently, of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America..
Aslan: The Lion King
The Lion King
by John J Miller
When Lucy Pevensie says that she has walked through a wardrobe and discovered a new world called Narnia, her older brothers and sister don’t believe her. But little Lucy insists. By the fifth chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the classic book by C. S. Lewis, two of her siblings begin to worry that the poor girl has lost her head. So they approach Professor Kirke, who is looking after them during World War II. “There are only three possibilities,” he says. “Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”
, the classic book by C. S. Lewis, two of her siblings begin to worry that the poor girl has lost her head. So they approach Professor Kirke, who is looking after them during World War II. “There are only three possibilities,” he says. “Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”It turns out, of course, that Lucy really is telling the truth, and it isn’t long before all the Pevensie kids have traveled to Narnia. Untold numbers of readers have followed them there — more than 85 million copies of the seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia series are in print — and millions more will join them when a film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe reaches theaters. The movie’s commercial potential is huge. If Narnia weren’t by now one of the great brand names in 20th-century children’s literature, its backers might have pitched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Hollywood as a cross between The Lord of the Rings and The Passion of the Christ. That’s because it is both a fantastic adventure story and a profound expression of Christian belief. Because of this, Lewis’s famous tale not only stands on the threshold of blockbuster success, but also holds the potential to become the next great battleground in the culture wars.
Narnia certainly has its enemies. One of them is the White Witch, the fiendish creature who brings perpetual winter to the land. Another foe, in our own realm, is best-selling children’s author Philip Pullman, who has described the Narnia series as “one of the most ugly and poisonous things I’ve ever read.” (Pullman has explained his own motives for writing books for kids this way: “I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.”) The Narnia movie may not deserve to generate controversy, but there can be no doubt that it will, especially from the quarters that objected to Mel Gibson’s interpreting the story of the crucifixion. Watch for Pullman to go on a new round of opportunistic Lewis-bashing, the New York Times to print hand-wringing articles about Narnian theocracy, and the ACLU to threaten litigation against public-school teachers who read the book to their students or encourage them to see the movie. When Florida governor Jeb Bush chose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as the centerpiece of a statewide reading program, a columnist for the Palm Beach Post pounced. Frank Cerabino complained about “this cabal of Christian commerce” and added, “We’re opening up the public schools to some backdoor catechism lessons.” As this manufactured controversy unfolds, there will be crude references to the author’s odd personal life, which included a lengthy relationship with the mother of a close friend — the source of endless gossip and speculation and controversy. Others will reproach Lewis for letting the word “darkies” appear in the Chronicles (he was a racist!), accuse him of preferring his male characters to his female ones (he was a sexist!), and theorize about why he spent most of his life as a bachelor and enjoyed the company of men (he was a closeted homosexual!). The attacks will begin from the moment movie reviewers — not an especially conservative group of people — file their first dispatches. The entire assault may prove relentless.
That’s because the Narnia stories are much more than meaningless entertainment for children. Some readers have said that the stories are Christian allegories — i.e., literary representations of Biblical events. Lewis denied this, but he did call them suppositions: “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would have happened.” And so Aslan comes into Narnia as a talking lion, suffers and dies for the sins of a child, and rises again. Most grown-ups understand what’s going on here, even if many of the kids who listen to this as a bedtime story don’t have a clue.
Clive Staples Lewis, of course, was the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. He was born near Belfast in 1898; he died at the age of 64, on the same day JFK was shot. None of his contemporaries could compete with his wit, intelligence, or influence, and arguably none has matched him since. He spent most of his adult life as a professor at Oxford and Cambridge, and by the 1930s he had established his reputation well enough that he was handed the prestigious assignment of writing the third volume in the Oxford History of English Literature. It covered the 16th century and took years to finish — frustrating Lewis so much that he wondered whether the pronunciation of its acronym, “Oh Hell,” was more than a coincidence. Yet many Lewis aficionados consider it his finest work. Today Lewis is revered as a popularizer of the Christian faith who also produced some literary criticism; in truth, Lewis viewed himself as an academic who wrote about religion on the side.
He certainly possessed a remarkable vocation for it, in part because as a young man he had succumbed to atheism. Just as some of the most penetrating critics of Communism have been ex-Communists, Lewis’s own period of irreligiousness equipped him with a disarming ability to explain and defend the principles of Christian life and thought. His conversion did not spring from a sudden epiphany, but was more like what his brother Warren called “a slow steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness of long standing.” It was, above all, a carefully considered decision. His friend J. R. R. Tolkien, a fellow Oxford professor and an orthodox Catholic, was instrumental in coaxing him along. (Lewis returned the favor: Tolkien once said that he never would have finished The Lord of the Rings without his friend’s unflagging encouragement.)
The writings of G. K. Chesterton also helped sway Lewis, especially Chesterton’s observation that when Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, he was revealing himself to be either a crazy or a phony — or, in fact, the flesh-and-blood Son of God. This insight would have a profound effect on The Chronicles of Narnia and their depiction of Lucy’s initial comings and goings through the wardrobe. Before that, however, it would help Lewis craft one of the most famous passages he ever wrote about his faith.
During World War II, Lewis delivered a series of radio broadcasts over the BBC. These were eventually collected in a book, Mere Christianity, which remains one of his most popular titles. In one of its short essays, Lewis noted that many skeptics are willing to call Jesus “a great moral teacher” but unwilling to accept his divinity. Lewis held a dim view of this position:
It is a jarring passage — by no means an iron trap of logic (it is conceivable that a madman might utter wise words), but surely a line of reasoning that forces clear thinking. Protestant evangelist Josh McDowell has called this set of choices — Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord — the “trilemma.” In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Professor Kirke presents the Pevensie kids with their own trilemma as they consider Lucy’s talk of Narnia. Call it “liar, lunatic, or logic.” Before long, the children enter Narnia together and the older ones apologize to their sister for disbelieving her story.
As it becomes clear to them that Lucy is neither a liar nor a lunatic, Lewis’s grand purpose begins to emerge. After asking Lucy’s forgiveness, the Pevensies wonder where they should go. A robin flies into sight and offers itself as a guide. One of the kids questions whether they should follow it. Could it be leading them into a trap? “That’s a nasty idea,” says Peter, the oldest. “They’re good birds in all the stories I’ve ever read.” As Jonathan Rogers points out in The World According to Narnia, “This is the first instance of a theme that recurs throughout the Chronicles: The children know what to do because they have read the right imaginative stories.”
Yet Lewis worried that the right imaginative stories were in short supply. (Another subtle theme of the Narnia books is the inadequacy of British schooling.) “There is too little of what we really like in stories,” Lewis once told Tolkien. “I am afraid we shall have to try to write some ourselves.” In offering Narnia, one of his main goals was to save children from his own fate of falling into the snare of disbelief. Lewis believed that a powerful sense of compulsion spoiled his religious upbringing. “Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ?” he once asked (in what was for him an uncommonly stilted passage). “I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.” Then he continued: “But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency.” If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then Narnia is the continuation of Sunday school by different devices.
And so each of the books in the series contains elements of Christian instruction: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe confronts the challenge of belief and introduces the concepts of sacrificial death and resurrected life; Prince Caspian describes a period of corruption and restoration; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader includes a baptism scene; The Silver Chair recounts a descent into hell; The Horse and His Boy takes on the problem of unbelievers; The Magician’s Nephew offers a creation story and reveals the origin of evil; and The Last Battle depicts the end of the world. Many children who encounter these stories miss the analogues completely. That was all right by Lewis. “I am aiming at a sort of pre-baptism of the child’s imagination,” he once said. So when Professor Kirke explains why Lucy’s reports of Narnia might be true, Lewis isn’t hoping that kids will think of Chesterton. But he does hope to create the conditions for them to gain a sophisticated understanding of their faith, when they’re ready to grasp it.
The miracle of the forthcoming movie may be that its producers didn’t try to distort Narnia beyond recognition. There have been attempts to do this in the past. During the 1990s, for instance, Paramount owned the film rights to The Chronicles of Narnia and began to develop a script for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Moving the book’s setting from wartime Britain to modern Los Angeles (and replacing air raids with earthquakes) was the least of its flaws: The Pevensie children apparently entered Narnia not through a wardrobe but through a swimming pool, and the White Witch tempted Edmund not with Turkish delight but with cheeseburgers and hot dogs. Worst of all, Hollywood proposed that perhaps Aslan shouldn’t be killed. That would have represented a literary sacrilege, like rewriting The Passion of the Christ so that Jesus doesn’t die. “Some of these ideas really shocked me,” says Douglas Gresham, a stepson of Lewis and an executor of his estate. “Ultimately these scripts were never made into movies because nobody really wanted to make them.” One of the key factors must have been the concern that an unbowdlerized version would be seen as little more than Christian propaganda. Indeed, even HarperCollins, the publisher of Lewis’s work, has felt the urge to neuter Narnia. Four years ago, it announced plans to release a new series of books based on Lewis’s characters. “We’ll need to be able to give emphatic reassurances that no attempt will be made to correlate the stories to Christian imagery/theology,” said a memo that was leaked to the media. Lewis fans gnashed their teeth, and HarperCollins had the good sense to shelve this rotten idea.
By 2001, Paramount’s rights to Narnia had lapsed. Walden Media, a Boston-based company headed by Michael Flaherty (who briefly worked for National Review in the early 1990s), bought them from Gresham. One of Walden’s strategic aims is to take outstanding children’s books and turn them into films. In the last two years, it has produced Holes and Because of Winn-Dixie; next year will see the release of a live-action Charlotte’s Web. (For The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and its budget of more than $150 million, Disney ultimately became a co-financier.) Refreshingly, Walden has embraced Narnia’s Christian themes. The movie is true to the book in almost every way. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a short book, so it’s easy to get everything in,” says Flaherty. The film actually contains several helpful flourishes. It provides extra historical context for the German bombing of London and the evacuation of city children into the English countryside. (At one point, a news broadcast plays over a radio in the background, and the voice belongs to Gresham — a thoughtful tribute to his stepfather’s own wartime commentaries.) In the book, Father Christmas makes a joyful appearance in Narnia; in the movie, the scene closes with Lucy gently scolding her older sister Susan, “I told you he was real.” Lucy is blessed with an extraordinary gift of faith, a quality that allows her to accept the reality of Narnia when her older and supposedly wiser siblings won’t. Her new line, which she doesn’t speak in the book, actually enhances the story in an understated but compelling way.
Unlike the works of other literary giants, which are often more admired than read, C. S. Lewis’s writings have had an increased readership owing to the widespread acclaim. Yet Lewis is not great because he is popular; he is popular because he is great. His greatness has been ignored by some, especially in English departments. Others have scorned it. Such assessments won’t change this winter, as Narnia achieves its highest level of public exposure. Instead, opinions of Lewis are bound to intensify. But the larger effect will be positive. Lewis enthusiasts massively outnumber Narnia’s naysayers. Their ranks will swell, as moviegoers become book readers and book readers dust off an old favorite. And a new franchise may be born, as Hollywood becomes excited at the prospect of six moneymaking sequels. It seems hard to believe, but the importance of C. S. Lewis will increase rather than diminish. As Professor Kirke tells Lucy’s brother and sister, when they come to grips with the possibility of worlds beyond our own: “Nothing is more probable.”
http://www.holyspiritinteractive.net/columns/guests/johnjmiller/thelionking.asp
Who’s Afraid of C.S. Lewis?
Who’s Afraid of C. S. Lewis?
Narnia critics should relax.
By Rich Lowry
A few months ago, it seemed unlikely that the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe could achieve anything like the commercial liftoff of that other film embraced by Christians, The Passion of the Christ. Controversy sells, and The Passion had about it an alleged whiff of anti-Semitism. “Narnia,” based on the beloved children’s books, has no such thing, but it turns out that the movie’s whiff of Christianity alone has been enough to stoke a roiling prerelease debate.
C.S. Lewis, the late Christian apologist and Oxford don who is the author of the seven-book Narnia series, has been the subject of critical, even contemptuous, pieces in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. The press coverage of the movie has emphasized how a (tiny) proportion of its marketing budget has been directed at—gasp!—Christians. The British author Philip Pullman has said the Narnia books are based on “reactionary prejudice,” and the British paper the Guardian attacked the stories for representing “everything that is most hateful about religion.”
For anyone who has been enchanted by the stories (100 million copies sold), this reaction must be bizarre. Who is afraid of C. S. Lewis, and why?
His frank Christianity has a lot to do with it. To put it in terms of the current war over season’s greetings, the Narnia books aren’t “happy holidays” kinds of stories, but instead verily shout “Merry Christmas!” (Father Christmas is a character in them.) Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien, also a believer, thought Lewis laid on the Christian allegory too thick. But it is also Lewis’s sensibility that irks the elite guardians of a culture that so treasures skepticism and irony. In the Narnia stories, Lewis is making the case for the opposite, for a child’s openness to what might seem impossible to the narrow “adult” mind.
In the story, four children enter through a wardrobe into a parallel winter world, Narnia, where Aslan the lion, who is the Christ-figure, and the White Witch do battle. The most important influence on Lewis’s work was his concept of “joy,” the sense of longing for a world beyond and more marvelous than our own. He always found that literature and myth best captured this sense, and the key moment in his conversion was when Tolkien convinced him that Christianity was “true myth.”
Lewis and Tolkien wanted to reinvigorate the powers of the imagination so it would be primed to detect the hints of a higher and deeper reality—“further up, further in,” as Lewis put it. A theme of the Narnia books is that the children instinctively know the right thing to do because, as Lewis scholar Jonathan Rogers explains, “they have read the right imaginative stories.” Lewis and Tolkien undertook their project against the grain in a mid-20th century that was an age of desiccated rationality.
We have gotten more desiccated since. Now everything tends to be viewed through the postmodern trinity of race, gender and sex. British fantasist Philip Pullman has said the Narnia stories are racist since the villains are dark-skinned. What does he make, then, of the aptly named White Witch, who represents Satan? Then, there’s the charge of misogyny and a sexually repressive Puritanism.
The New York Times Magazine essayist regrets that Susan, one of the children, is denied salvation at the end of the series “merely because of her fondness for nylons and lipstick,” because in other words, “she has reached puberty [and] become sexualized.” That’s not it at all. The point is that, as one character says, Susan “always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.” For Lewis this meant losing the capacity to be childlike, with its guileless receptivity to wonderment and joy.
The Christian signposts will be lost on many viewers of the movie, who will simply relish a good yarn and its accompanying wonderment and joy. Lewis critics should relax and experience some of it themselves.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjFlZGQ3NGI2NWMxYTY4MjMzZTc4YTNhZTI4Y2ZjMDQ=
Christmas in Narnia
Xmas in Narnia
Have Yourself a Merry Little Aslanmas?
If ever there were a case for taking Christ out of Christmas, it’s arguably in Narnia.
There is no Christ in Narnia — there is only Aslan, the lion who dies for the sins of others and returns in glorious triumph. So instead of Christmas, shouldn’t the Narnians celebrate Aslanmas? And shouldn’t Lewis have left Father Christmas out of his books entirely?
This is more than just a rose-by-any-other-name semantic dispute, because it goes to the heart of a fundamental criticism that many people level at The Chronicles of Narnia: The books are full of maddening inconsistencies.
When we first encounter Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for example, we learn that a permanent winter has descended upon the land. This creates a problem later in the story, as Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead describe in their new book, A Reader’s Guide Through the Wardrobe:
Another friend [of Lewis's], poet Ruth Pitter, recalled with pleasure her good-natured “win” over Lewis, when she caught him in a textual error in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: where did the beavers obtain certain foodstuffs (e.g., potatoes, flour, sugar, oranges, milk) for the dinner they provided for the Pevensie children, given that it was winter and (by Lewis’s own setup of the story) no foreign trade was allowed? According to Pitter’s memory of the conversation, Lewis had no answer and was “stumped.”
Maybe the food was smuggled into Narnia from Calormen, a country to the south. But that’s pure speculation. And even if this were the case, it is a flaw on the part of Lewis: A good story doesn’t create puzzles for readers; it answers questions before they’re even asked. Lewis is perhaps under a special obligation to explain the food, given that the feast with the beavers is one of the most sensual passages in the book. Where did those big rodents get their chow?
The beavers create other problems as well. “There’s never been any of your race here before,” says Mr. Beaver to the Pevensie kids. As we learn later in the series, however, this isn’t true. Perhaps this can be chalked up to Mr. Beaver not knowing any better. Yet his statement is actually the result of Lewis not knowing any better. When he started writing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he did not plan to compose six sequels. Later books suffer from some near-sightedness that found its way into the first one.
Gee, Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Middle Earth
Narnia simply wasn’t prepared with the meticulous attention to detail that J. R. R. Tolkien lavished upon to Middle Earth. And Tolkien famously criticized Narnia as an awkward mishmash of a world. It must have pained him to do so: He and Lewis were not only colleagues at Oxford, but also personal friends. Tolkien played a key role in Lewis’s decision to become a Christian, in what is probably one of the most significant conversions of the 20th century. The author of The Lord of the Rings might not have finished his own masterpiece but for Lewis’s unflagging enthusiasm and encouragement. So he probably would have liked to return the favor and cheer on Lewis in the writing of Narnia. Yet Tolkien was a relentlessly honest man and he could not hide his antipathy for the Narnian project: “I hear you’ve been reading Jack’s children’s story,” he told a mutual friend. “It really won’t do, you know!” (To his buddies, Lewis was known as “Jack.”)
Perhaps Tolkien was jealous that Lewis could whip out seven books in seven years — the man wrote at a delirious speed, and Tolkien couldn’t have kept pace even if he had tried. Yet his critique of Narnia contains both substance and merit. Tolkien believed that Lewis veered too close to Christian allegory. Lewis denied this, calling his tales suppositions: “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would have happened.”
Maybe you have to be an English major to care about the difference between an allegory and a supposition. Tolkien’s primary objection to Narnia, however, raised another issue entirely. He thought that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was an irritating blend of different cultural traditions: centaurs and fauns from the Greeks, dwarves from the Norse, and so on. And that’s even before we get to this strange business about Jesus, Aslan, and Father Christmas.
Lewis was a great borrower, and it drove Tolkien bonkers. In Perelandra, a science-fiction book published in 1943, Lewis makes a reference to “Numinor.” This was meant as a kind of tribute to Tolkien, who wrote of the “Numenor,” which was a kingdom of Middle Earth. Note the slightly different spelling, which may be the result of Lewis being sloppy or thinking the word’s root was “numinous.” Whatever the case, it was not in keeping with Tolkien the philologist’s carefully crafted linguistics. It was a dabbler’s error, the sort of dumb blunder that Tolkien strove to banish from Middle Earth.
The Numenor-Numinor controversy is of course an exceedingly small thing for casual readers of Tolkien and Lewis. The introduction of Father Christmas into The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, on the other hand, is obvious and jarring, even if you don’t compose elaborate letters from Father Christmas every year (as Tolkien did). Shouldn’t St. Nick just stay on our side of the wardrobe?
Kids!
Perhaps. But he does play an important role in Narnia. Lewis has a wonderful line early in the book about how the White Witch has made it “always winter but never Christmas.” If we cross out the Christmas half of it, the line doesn’t carry nearly half the punch: the witch doesn’t seem nearly so terrible, nor does the plight of the Narnians seem quite so grave. That’s especially true for children, for whom Christmas is a time of magical importance. And the arrival of Father Christmas presents the first clear evidence that the tables have turned against the witch. “I’ve come at last,” he says to the Pevensie kids. “She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The witch’s magic is weakening.” With that, the spell over Narnia begins to break.
It is of course possible that Lewis might have accomplished the same trick, from a narrative standpoint, without importing Father Christmas. It is also perfectly legitimate to stand with Tolkien and declare that Father Christmas has absolutely no business sledding around a fantasy world in which there is an Aslan but not a Christ. But perhaps this misses the point. The Chronicles of Narnia, after all, are written for children. My own kids love the Father Christmas scene, and I suspect that on some level they grasp its real meaning. To say that it doesn’t belong in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is to argue against the actual experience of countless readers who also have enjoyed it and grasped it. In the end, it may in fact be a very grown-up kind of critique — sober and logical, but blind to the imaginative sensibilities of kids. Can you picture an 8-year-old who would care about the spelling of Numenor/Numinor? That’s a discussion for adults — and even then, only for adults of a very certain type. Narnia, by contrast, is a great big fantasy playground — and as Lewis makes clear throughout the Chronicles, grown ups can’t go there. So maybe Father Christmas is a kid thing, and you just wouldn’t understand.
So is it Christmas or Aslanmas in Narnia? Maybe we should just leave it a mystery, like the beaver’s food. Or we could call it Xmas, using “X” in the algebraic sense of “solve for X.” But let’s remember that most kids don’t like algebra either.
If you’ve made it this far, it probably means that you haven’t yet suffered from Narnia fatigue. Here are three other pieces I’ve written for NRO on C.S. Lewis and Narnia: a general appreciation, an argument on the order in which the Narnian books ought to be read, and first impressions of the new movie.
— John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and the author, most recently, of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.
Much Has Changed in Narnia
Much Has Changed in Narnia
Too little Lion, too much Witch, no Wardrobe.
By Thomas S. Hibbs
A wonderful scene in the second half of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian — the second film in the Narnia series, based on C. S. Lewis’s beloved books — highlights the importance of cultivating a memory of the past in the face of strong cultural and political tendencies toward decay and decline. Returning to Narnia after a one-year absence (1,300 years in Narnia time), the Pevensie children — Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) — find themselves in a cave whose walls are covered with ancient drawings. The drawings are memorials to them and their heroic feats in Narnia; it turns out that they have entered a sort of crypt built around the stone tablet on which Aslan was murdered and from which he rose to defeat the White Witch.
The sense of the remote past, as both almost lost and yet recoverable, permeates Lewis’s book. Yet, apart from the scene in the cave, the film neglects this theme in favor of grand battles and a budding romance between Caspian (in a rather lackluster performance by Ben Barnes) and Susan. Indeed, devoted readers of Lewis’s books will likely take umbrage at the many changes the filmmakers have introduced. The unsettling question they ought to be asking themselves is whether the film transforms what, following Chesterton, we might call a great romance of orthodoxy into a Hollywood bubble-gum romance.
Having issued that harsh charge, I hasten to add two qualifications. On its own terms, the film version of Prince Caspian has much to offer. It is a solid piece of entertainment, with rousing battle scenes and many moments of humor. (The CG character Reepicheep, the honorable and hilarious mouse, steals every scene in which he appears.) But Caspian is more: it contains moving portrayals of the seductive power of temptation, and profound reflections on heroism — including a lesson on how the inordinate use of violence harms the perpetrator as well as the victim. Perhaps most impressive, particularly for those who have seen the first film, is the transformation of Edmund, who remains repentant for having disbelieved Lucy and for having treacherously served the White Witch. In a splendid performance, Skandar Keynes makes Edmund’s moral development credible and palpable; he is now wiser, more faithful, and more resolute.
The other thing that needs saying about the film is that the book from which it is drawn presents greater challenges to the filmmaker than does The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Director Andrew Adamson, who directed the first Narnia film after achieving fame for his work on the Shrek movies, takes more liberties with Lewis’s book than he did in the first film, of necessity. In the first half of Lewis’s book, he brings the Pevensie children (and his readers) up to date on the 1,300 years of Narnian history since the events related in the first book.
Lewis is doing more here than giving us a prolix prelude to a final battle. He is attempting to captivate his audience with the art of storytelling and with the superiority of real history over what passes for knowledge of the past in contemporary culture or in an ordinary academic setting. Lewis is also telling us something about the eponymous Caspian, a royal son, raised by his scheming uncle Miraz — who, it turns out, murdered Caspian’s father, and whose opportunistic desire to care for Caspian dissolves once his own wife gives birth to a son. We also learn that Caspian is from his youth a “lover of the Old Things,” in contrast to his uncle, who actively seeks to suppress the ancient and heroic history of Narnia.
Now, it makes sense to streamline Lewis’s historical narration, but, apart from the scene in the cave, the film fails to find a way to inject its version of the story with Lewis’s sense of devotion to the “Old Things.” Stressing Caspian’s longing to revive a lost way of life would have given his character greater gravity, something needed in the film to counterbalance the boyish good looks of Ben Barnes. His pretty appearance, the lack of character depth, and the filmmakers decision to focus on his innocuous flirtations with Susan render him a less than persuasive embodiment of Lewis’s main character.
That is not to say that all the changes are ill-conceived. One addition that works effectively is a longish battle scene in which Peter leads a surprise attack on Miraz’s castle, from which his army has to retreat in humiliation and sorrow, leaving behind many dead comrades.
Another addition concerns the reappearance of the White Witch, whose return is mentioned in the book as a possibility, but which never comes to pass. In the film, she returns — and who can blame them for bringing back Tilda Swinton’s chilling menace? — paralyzed in ice, which is a marvelously fitting image that recalls both her commitment to making Narnia always winter and never Christmas, and Dante’s vision of Satan as paralyzed in ice. This time, she is a powerful temptation not to Edmund, but to Peter.
The real problem with the film, I’m saddened to report, has to do with Aslan. This is due in part to the book’s relegation of him to a more marginal role than he had in the first book. On screen, he seems almost like one of the other animals — more powerful, certainly, but not all that mysterious. Except for when he roars, he is more cuddly than fearful. His admonitions to Lucy about the importance of fidelity to him come off as formulaic. A sign of the extent to which Aslan has been diminished in the film is evident in the penultimate scene, in which the children depart Narnia. In the book, they say goodbye to everyone else and then, last, “wonderfully and terribly,” as Lewis puts it, “it was farewell to Aslan himself.”
By contrast, in the film, the parting culminates with Susan’s sorrow over leaving Caspian. The scene is sweet and innocent enough, but it cultivates in the audience the mundane sense of unrealized romantic possibility, rather than the grand appreciation, both terrible and wonderful, of a cosmic romance of redemption.
— Thomas S. Hibbs is distinguished professor of ethics and culture at Baylor University and author of Arts of Darkness.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTk3M2FjYzdlOTU0MDA3MWJhNDM3ZDViMDQxZDgwNjM=
Crowning Prince Caspian
Crowning Prince Caspian
Behind the movie.
By Rebecca Cusey
Douglas Gresham, co-producer of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, is the stepson of the author of the Narnia series, C. S. Lewis. A child when Lewis married his mother, Joy Davidman, Gresham and his brother grew up in Lewis’s household and inherited Lewis’s estate. Much of Gresham’s life has been spent safeguarding his stepfather’s legacy, and pursuing the dream of properly adapting the series into film. In a phone conversation, I asked him about life on the set and behind the scenes of the movie, which hits theaters this weekend.
What is the essential thing that they absolutely have to get right in this movie?
The underlying messages of the story are so important, and so vital in fact, to the story; [they] are the return to faith, truth, justice, honesty, honor, glory, personal commitment, personal responsibility. All those things come out so strongly in the movie and were very important to me. Also the message is of vital importance, No matter how far away we stray, there’s always just one way back.
Do you think they got Aslan right?
Oh, yes. Far better than last time even. Aslan, in this movie, has all those characteristics which were so difficult to attempt last time. We’ve taken the technology that we’ve pioneered in some respects, but we’ve pushed out again. So, [with] this huge Aslan, you get this great character who is not only a great lion and beautiful to look at, but he’s warm and he’s welcoming, and just a tad bit forbidding, all at the same time. He’s not a tame lion. It’s all there now.
This film, even more than the other, seems to embody the idea of Muscular Christianity — fighting for what is right against desperate odds — that is apparent in C. S. Lewis’s writings. Would you agree that it is there in this film?
I think it is certainly there in this film to a certain degree. What you have to bear in mind is that the Narnian side tried everything they could, even to the extent of single combat with Peter, to avoid a bloodbath; it was the evil side in the end that brought it about. And that is of course, exactly what happens in our world. At the time that they were being written, Chamberlain [made an] effort to make peace with Hitler, right up until Hitler had betrayed everything they had agreed on. And of course we see it in our world today, where we are trying, Western society is trying — desperately almost — to the mistake of rolling over and playing dead, to pander to everyone else who is attacking it, one way or another. Eventually, of course, what will happen is people will dig their heels in, just as in Narnia, and the thing will be forced upon them. I think there are causes which are important to fight for, and I think that comes out in Prince Caspian.
It resonates throughout the whole of our society. We have to become more and more conscious of that fact, by the way. Most of us go about our little lives hoping that these things will go away and just leave us alone. Well, they won’t. The forces of evil are always going to be there. We’re always going to have to fight them. As Tolkien himself said, “All wars are lost. THE war goes on.”
Did you meet Tolkien?
Yes I did. Fine man, I liked him enormously.
Can we talk a little bit about Susan and Lucy’s more active role in the movie? How do you think Lewis would have responded to that?
Well, I’ve been persuaded by Andrew Adamson, that Lewis’s attitude toward women changed to some extent after he married my mother. Now there was a wonderful occasion that epitomized this to some extent. We’d had a problem in the wood with trespassers coming into the wood, local youths breaking down the trees, carving their initials into the trees, throwing rubbish into the lake, including each other and so forth. Mother said, “Jack we’ll just build a barbed wire fence to keep them out.” Jack said, “It’s no good my dear, they’ll just cut the wire and steal it.”
So, my mother, being from the Bronx, said, “If they do that, I’ll buy a shotgun.” They did steal the wire. Well, she bought one. Small gun. Threw a few pellets, never hurt anybody. She used to blast into the leaves of the trees whenever she saw a trespassers and they all chickened out and went somewhere else.
One day, Jack and my mother were walking up the hill ahead of me. Suddenly, out from the shrubbery, leapt a young man with a longbow and a quiver of arrows, casting himself in the part of a latter day Robin Hood, perhaps. Jack said, “Excuse me, but this is private land and you really shouldn’t be here. Would you mind leaving?” The man’s answer was to put an arrow to the string and draw the bow and point it at them. Immediately, Jack stepped in front of my mother to shield her from the arrow. He stood there for a moment, a very chivalrous thing to do, until he heard my mother in tones of chilled steel behind him saying “Goddamn it, Jack, get out of my line of fire.” He stepped sideways very smartly. That whole kind of experience of my mother’s determination and personality, I think changed Jack’s ideas toward women. In the first book he said “battles are ugly when women fight,” and he was right. But in the second, he did from there on, give them an active role for fighting for truth and justice and what was real.
I’m not entirely comfortable with it, because I do believe battles are ugly when women fight. I think they’re pretty ugly to start with, more so when women get involved. I believe what George MacDonald said was very true, which is that it’s every man’s responsibility to protect every woman, first of all from himself.
So what is the role of chivalry in a world where women take part in battles?
That becomes a very difficult thing to define. I don’t really think women should be involved in active combat. I don’t think it’s fair for the men who are fighting beside them, or the men who are fighting against them. And it’s not fair for the women themselves. I think the idea that women have to become men in our current society is a very bad one.
How do you think passionate fans of C. S. Lewis will receive this movie?
I think passionate purist fans of Jack’s works are going to have some interesting surprises when they see this movie. There is no more purist, more passionate fan of Narnia than myself. After all, I grew up there. I think the people who think about changing the book to a movie will see it was absolutely essential to do what we’ve done.
How involved were you?
Well above my neck, you might say. They call me a co-producer, but so much is under my umbrella of responsibility, there isn’t really a credit for what I do. I’m involved in the development of the screenplay, involved in just about every facet of the film and everything related to it. Video games, merchandise. And of course, we’re working on the next one as well.
How often were you on set?
I spent a lot of time on set. We had some interesting experiences. We were in a valley, way in the mountains, deep in the bush of New Zealand. It rained so savagely. There was a ford to get across the little stream to get into the place. Of course the river rose. No body could get in. It was just myself and about four others were the only people left in the whole base camp. For four days nobody could get in or out. I was on set as much as my other responsibilities to the movie would allow.
What do you do when you’re not making movies?
That depends. A lot of my life is spent overseeing everything that is being done in the publishing department of Lewis’s work. My spare time is largely filled, at the moment, with chopping down a forest of prickly pears in a field I’ve just bought. My life is pretty full.
You have children and grandchildren?
We have five children and we have nine, about to be ten, grandchildren. The keenest thing about having kids is grandkids, believe me. It’s wonderful when they hand you grandbabies and you spoil them rotten and when they turn an interesting green color, you hand them back.
— Rebecca Cusey writes from Washington, D.C.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2VjZTY2YzcwZDVjODdiMDBhZjZiYmEzMDA1MTQ1OGY=
C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, a commentary by William Griffin
The Whos and Whats of Mere Christianity
Millions of people have read Mere Christianity, but few can give forthright answers to the following two questions:
WHAT IS MERE CHRISTIANITY?
The words “Mere Christianity” weren’t original to Lewis. In the seventeenth century Richard Baxter, an Anglican divine with Puritan predilections, used the words “Mere Christianity” in his book The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. The work was something like the sixteenth-century Spaniard Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises in that it prepared the soul, through a series of measured steps, for its heavenly home. The first ten chapters described Heaven, who’ll be there and who won’t, and why one must pursue Heaven strenuously while on earth. The last six chapters prescribed the Anglican method, with Puritan overlay, of pursuing the heavenly, and indeed heavily contemplative, life.
Nor did the concept of “Mere Christianity” originate with Lewis. In the sixteenth century, Richard Hooker created a distinctive theology for a denomination that needed one—the new Anglican Church—and the prose he did it in was masterful. As Lewis said in English Literature of the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, “The style is, for its purpose, perhaps the most perfect in English.”
Of Hooker’s masterwork, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a multi-volume work published in the 1590s, Lewis had this to say:
Hooker had never heard of a religion called Anglicanism. He would never have dreamed of trying to “convert” any foreigner to the Church of England. It was to him obvious that a German or Italian would not belong to the Church of England, just as an Ephesian or Galatian would not have belonged to the Church of Corinth.
Hooker is never seeking for “the true Church,” never crying, like Donne, “Show me, deare Christ, thy spouse.” For him no such problem existed. If by “the Church” you mean the mystical Church (which is partly in Heaven), then of course, no man can identify her. But if you mean the visible Church, then we all know her. She is “a sensibly known company” of all those throughout the world who profess one Lord, One Faith, and one Baptism.
Sometime in 1943, Lewis began making the words “Mere Christianity” his own. That was in his Introduction to St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, translated from the Greek by his friend Sister Penelope Lawson, CSMV. “The only safety [against the theological errors in recently published books],” wrote Lewis, “is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (‘mere Christianity’ as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.”
In 1952 Lewis used the words again, this time in a book title. Mere Christianity was the overarching title for the BBC Radio talks, which had already been published in three books: The Case for Christianity, published in England under the title Broadcast Talks (1943), Christian Behavior (1943), and Beyond Personality (1945).
In the Preface to this combined work, Lewis gave a descriptive definition of Mere Christianity.
Ever since I became a Christian, I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.
Is Mere Christianity, then, a denomination?
Clearly, Mere Christianity isn’t a denomination, but if it isn’t, how may one describe it?
If one were to make a pie chart using a real pie—a really good pork pie or game pie available at most British pubs in Lewis’s time—the slices would stand for the denominations (Methodist, Anglicans, Presbyterians, etc.), and the size of the slices would indicate the membership, greater or lesser depending on the day the pie was sliced. Where is Mere Christianity on this chart? It’s not any individual slice, but one may discover it if one describes a small circle with the focal point at the center of the pie.
This concentric circle, crossing as it does all the denominational lines, constitutes what may be called Mere Christianity. It’s omni-denominational in one sense, and yet in another, it’s nulli-denominational. It looks like a pork pie, tastes like a pork pie, and yet, centered around the center, it smacks of Heaven for all Christians. Now you taste it, now you don’t. It’s how you cut the pie. And Lewis cut it circularly.
“It is at her center,” wrote Lewis in as generous a spirit as Hooker’s, “where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine. And this suggests that at the center of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.”
WHO IS A MERE CHRISTIAN?
If there’s such a thing as Mere Christianity, but if Mere Christianity isn’t a denomination, then can there be such a thing as a Mere Christian? I’ve yet to meet one. I presume there are many, but there’s no way to count them or indeed no reason to hold them to account. There’s no sacrament to mark them as MCs (if I may so abbreviate), no membership card, no sacred certificate declaring baptism or marriage, no profane piece of paper stating birth or death. Hence, the MC, if he or she exists, is an invisible, mysterious, perhaps even mystical, being.
I suppose a case could be made that one who buys a copy of Mere Christianity is an MC, in potency if not already in act, but even here there’s a fallacy. One is not what one reads. One may approach the cash register or cash point with a book plainly entitled Homosexuality, and not be a homosexual, no matter what the snoops in the line may think; and the same holds true for the purchaser of Mere Christianity.
After all, Democrats buy books by Republicans, and Tories buy books by Laborites. The obese buy diet books, and the obtuse buy how-to books. Hence, it’s not much of a hop, skip, and jump to Christians who buy copies of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian or A.N. Wilson’s Against Religion: Why We Should Try to Live Without It. All readers buy books in order to know, not necessarily to follow. Which is another way of saying that buying a copy of Mere Christianity however ostentatiously, and reading it, however surreptitiously, and stashing it under one’s pillow. however superstitiously, doesn’t make one an MC.
But if one takes the contents of Mere Christianity to heart and tries to put into practice some of its prescriptions, then one may be well on his or her way to becoming a bonafide MC. But who would know? Not many, if any. How, then, would one MC identify another? There’s no secret handshake, no variation in the Sign of the Cross. But Jesus Christ would know, and if that’s the case, that’s really all that matters.
