Jack squirmed at the idea of all the attention, but he did enjoy the trip north to receive the degree. Warren accompanied him, and the two brothers spent a few days at the seaside in Scotland. It reminded them of their summer vacations at the beach at Castlerock as children back in Ireland.
While Jack was away in Scotland receiving his honorary degree, Mrs. Moore’s health deteriorated further, to the point where she could hardly get out of bed. However, this did not stop her from yelling instructions from her upstairs bedroom. Her illness had become a burden to Jack, leaving him feeling guilty if he stayed away from The Kilns for a whole day, much less overnight.
To make matters worse, things were not going well with the Inklings either. After Charles Williams’s death, the number of men regularly attending the group began to dwindle. J. R. R. Tolkien continued to come and to read pieces from a book he had been writing for years now about a magical place filled with hobbits and elves, but the personal relationship between him and Jack was becoming more distant. No one knows for sure all of the reasons that caused this cooling in their friendship, but one reason had to do with the volume Jack had just completed for the Oxford History of English Literature. The book was on English literature during the sixteenth century, and in it Jack had fallen into some of his old Protestant Irish habits when categorizing Catholics. He referred to them as papists instead of Catholics, and he tended to play up the role of early Protestant pioneers at the expense of gifted Catholic theologians, writers, and thinkers. All of this struck a sour note with Tolkien, who saw Jack’s new volume as anti-Catholic. Tolkien took the matter personally, creating a wedge that slowly began to push the two men apart.
The book Miracles: A Preliminary Study was published right about the same time that a book by Bishop Barnes titled Rise of Christianity was published. The two books took totally different views on miracles. Jack argued that miracles occur when God decides to intervene in human affairs. The bishop argued that there is no such thing as a real miracle, but that what we see as a miracle has a natural cause that we do not yet understand.
Both books sold well upon their release, and many Christians bought them both so that they could decide for themselves what they thought about miracles. Of course, it was natural that the Oxford Socratic Club would become engaged in the debate. One night Jack found himself arguing for his point of view against a well-known Catholic philosopher named Elizabeth Anscombe. The meeting took place in February 1948. Elizabeth came prepared to debate Jack, particularly regarding chapter three of his book. Her response to Jack’s argument for miracles revolved around her argument that naturalism is self-refuting.
The debate was lively. Elizabeth was sharp and insightful in her critique of Jack’s argument, leaving Jack at times stumbling for words as he responded to the points she made. Some of those attending the packed meeting said that it was the liveliest debate ever held at the Socratic Club. Those in attendance were at odds as to who won the exchange. Some said that Jack came out the winner, while others thought Elizabeth was clearly on top. Jack for his part was not sure. He was shaken by the whole experience and wondered just how much could be achieved in advancing Christianity through intellectual argument alone. In light of some of Elizabeth’s criticisms, Jack revised chapter three of his book for future editions.
Despite his experience at the Oxford Socratic Club, by now Jack was one of the most famous Christians in Great Britain. He was so influential that he was invited to join a group of archbishops to discuss the future of the Church of England. Jack attended the meetings, though it was difficult for him to leave The Kilns. By way of explanation in accepting the invitation he wrote, “My mother [Mrs. Moore] is old and infirm, we have little and uncertain help, and I never know when I can, even for a day, get away from my duties as a nurse and domestic servant (there are psychological as well as material difficulties in my house). But I will come if I possibly can.”
The situation at home at The Kilns was made more difficult because Warren nursed an intense dislike for Mrs. Moore and often coped with the stress at home by drinking too much.
While Jack dealt with the constant stress that now inhabited The Kilns, he returned to an idea he had first visited during the war—an idea for a fairy tale for children. The notion had started as the germ of an idea long before that. When Jack was sixteen years old, an image had popped into his head. It was of a faun walking upright through a snowy wood, carrying an umbrella in one arm and parcels in the other, nothing more than that. But the image was so vivid that Jack determined to use it one day in something he wrote. Now the image had come back to him, and he decided to see what he could do with it.
As Jack thought the concept through, he realized that he had spent little time with children throughout his life. There was Maureen, of course, who was twelve years old when he first met her. There were also the girls who had come to stay at The Kilns after being evacuated from London. At the time, Jack had written to Warren, “Our schoolgirls (i.e. evacuees) have arrived and all seem to be very nice, unaffected creatures and all most flatteringly delighted with their surroundings. They are fond of animals, which is a good thing.” Then a couple of weeks later he continued his commentary. “I have said that the children are ‘nice,’ and so they are. But modern children are poor creatures. They keep coming to Maureen and asking ‘What shall we do now?’”
Jack’s mind began to churn with ideas. What could he possibly do with an umbrella-carrying faun running through a snowy wood, and a group of evacuee children who were bored living with an elderly couple? Soon Jack had the hazy outline of a story:
This book is about four children whose names are Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter. But it is most about Peter who was the youngest. They all had to go away from London suddenly because of Air Raids, and because Father, who was in the Army, had gone off to the War and Mother was doing some kind of war work. They were sent to stay with a kind of relation of Mother’s who was a very old Professor who lived by himself in the country.
One day, soon after coming up with this rough outline, Jack sat staring at the large, wooden wardrobe his grandfather had built and intricately carved years before. Perhaps, he thought, I might be able to work that into the story as well.
Around the same time, Jack began having a recurring nightmare involving a lion—in particular, a large male lion with a bushy mane. Jack gave the lion a name—Aslan—and began searching for a way to work him into the story too.
Jack also began thinking back to the stories of Edith Nesbit that he had read as a boy. He particularly called to mind her trilogy of stories: Railway Children, The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Story of the Amulet. He remembered how in The Story of the Amulet some children discovered an amulet that was able to transport them back in time to strange new worlds. And so Jack began to integrate some of the ideas from these stories into his thinking.
While Jack was busy teasing out his idea for a children’s fairy tale, Roger Green, a former student and now a friend of Jack’s, asked him if he would read a manuscript of a story that he’d written for children. Jack found the manuscript, titled The Wood That Time Forgot, to be very exciting, and Roger’s story inspired him to keep on writing his own story. Sometimes images from Roger’s manuscript or pictures from Jack’s past would pop into Jack’s head as he wrote. At other times Jack made things up as he went along. He described his own writing process this way:
With me the process is much more like bird-watching than like either talking or building. I see pictures. Some of the pictures have a common flavour, almost a common smell, which groups them together. Keep quiet and watch and they will begin joining themselves up. If you were very lucky (I have never been so lucky as all that) a whole group might join themselves so consistently that there you had a complete story; without doing anything yourself. But more often (in my experience always) there are gaps. Then at last you have to do some deliberate inventing.
The story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was beginning to take shape. It involved the Pevensie children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—whose names had changed from the Ann, Martin, Rose, and Peter that Jack had originally conceived for them. The children are evacuated from London and go to stay in the country with Professor Kirke and his bossy housekeeper. The Pevensies become so bored in their new surroundings that they decide to play hide-and-seek in the old professor’s home. In the process Lucy discovers an ancient wardrobe in the attic and climbs in to hide. She pushes herself to the back of the pile of fur coats hanging in the wardrobe and tumbles into a strange, snowy land, where she encounters a faun hurrying along carrying an umbrella and some parcels. The faun, whose name is Mr. Tumnus, stops and talks to Lucy and takes her back to his place to have a cup of tea. Lucy spends all afternoon at the faun’s house before he leads her back to the lamppost that marks the entrance to the back of the wardrobe, the portal to this magical world the reader learns is called Narnia.
Although she thinks she has been away all afternoon, when she emerges from the wardrobe, Lucy discovers that only minutes have passed, and her older brothers and sister refuse to believe that she has spent the afternoon with a faun in a strange, cold land.
As Jack wrote on, he slowly arranged circumstances in his story until finally all the Pevensie children were in Narnia. There Edmund is deceived by the White Witch, who entices him with his favorite treat—Turkish delight—to betray his brother and sisters. Eventually Edmund’s eyes are opened to the treachery of the White Witch, but not until it’s too late to stop the high price his betrayal will exact on the inhabitants of Narnia and, in particular, Aslan the lion. However, by the time the story winds toward its close, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy have all proved themselves in battle and in service to the inhabitants of Narnia. The four of them are crowned as kings and queens of Narnia and in so doing, fulfill an ancient prophecy, the very thing the White Witch was trying to keep from happening. After many years of ruling over Narnia from Cair Paravel, the capital, the Pevensie children take a long horse ride through the countryside and come upon an overgrown lamppost. The sight of the lamppost calls to mind a distant memory of another place and time. As they search about, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy stumble into the back of the wardrobe and arrive in the attic room of Professor Kirke’s home on earth, where, despite what seems to them like an absence of many years in Narnia, only a short time has passed on earth from the time they entered the wardrobe.
The story came together quickly, and when it was finished in March 1949, Jack wondered whether he had created anything that anyone would want to read. He showed his manuscript to J. R. R. Tolkien, who, despite the growing rift in their relationship, was still his most trusted editorial friend.
The result was devastating. Tolkien hated the story. He believed that a person should not mix various cultural mythologies and complained that there were far too many types of characters in the story. Some of them, like the White Witch and the nymphs, came from Greek myths; knights were from the Middle Ages; and then there was Father Christmas, based on a church bishop, and two talking beavers who sounded like they were friends of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit.
Jack argued that the jumbled cast of characters lived happily together in his imagination, but Tolkien replied that they certainly could not live in his imagination, at least not at the same time. Tolkien shook his head sadly and told Jack that if he could find a publisher, this book would stand out as an embarrassment to him and the entire group of Inklings.
