Perhaps there’s no better illustration of this than the 2005 film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Although a large budget and new special effects technologies have finally made it possible to visually approximate Lewis’s Narnia, the emotional mechanics of the book had to be fundamentally changed for modern audiences. It’s easy to picture the filmmakers puzzling over the adaptation, realizing that, despite Lewis’s reputation as a Christian proselytizer, his values don’t necessarily mesh well with the American-style piety of Walden Media, the company that produced the film.
Above all, assertions about the preeminence of family feeling had to be inserted. The book dispenses with the “air-raids” in a sentence or two, while the movie lingers over scenes of the Blitz and the siblings’ tearful good-byes with the hitherto faceless Mrs. Pevensie. The movie children talk mournfully about being separated from their parents, and Edmund’s nasty behavior is made to seem a symptom of his distress at his father’s absence. (He almost gets himself killed when he leaves the air-raid shelter to retrieve a photo of Mr. Pevensie in his soldier’s uniform.) Instead of lecturing Peter and Susan about Plato when they come to him with their worries about Lucy, Professor Kirk scolds (nonsensically), “You’re a family. You might just start acting like one.” By my count, the film uses the word “family” in this charged, almost fetishistic fashion over a half-dozen times. In the book, it appears just once, and then only in reference to the lineage of the giant Rumblebuffin, who, Mr. Tumnus informs Lucy, comes from “an old family. With traditions you know.”
I noticed this shift in emphasis most in the scene where Lucy leads her brothers and sisters to Tumnus’s cave, eager to introduce them to her new friend, only to find his house ransacked and a notice announcing that the faun has been arrested by the White Witch. In Lewis’s book, this discovery precipitates a discussion. Susan immediately suggests that they flee back through the wardrobe, and Lucy cries, “Don’t you see? We can’t just go home, not after this. It is all on my account that the poor Faun has gotten into this trouble. He hid me from the Witch and showed me the way back…. We simply must try to rescue him.” After a debate (with Edmund grumbling), the children agree, and even Susan, the most domesticated of the bunch, admits, “I don’t want to go a step further and I wish we’d never come. But I think we must try to do something for Mr. Whatever-his-name-is — I mean the Faun.” This conversation never happens in the film.
In Lewis’s book, what draws the Pevensie siblings further into Narnia is a sense of obligation having everything to do with honor and friendship (and perhaps even that most neglected of Christian virtues, charity), but little to do with “family values.” The difference between movie and book becomes even more marked later in the story, when the film tries to portray the children’s involvement in the revolt against the White Witch as largely motivated by their desire to rescue Edmund and get back “home.” In the book, it never seems to occur to the Pevensies not to do all they can to help Narnia and the Narnians, even if that means fighting in a war. They are in no particularly hurry to get back to England or their parents.
It’s not that Lewis didn’t cherish family; he would spend much of his adult life living with his brother, after all. However, the Chronicles show his recognition that children hear a powerful call from the outside world, where their destiny ultimately lies. Relationships with friends and the ethics of those relationships are one of childhood’s great preoccupations. It was in friendships with Arthur Greeves, Tolkien, and other men that Lewis finally found the kind of community that suited him best. He had a great talent for friendship. In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, that talent would make him the gravitational center of the Inklings, a group of like-minded men, including Tolkien, who met regularly to talk about literature and to read their own writings aloud.
Although the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, one of the Inklings’ regular hangouts, has become a pilgrimage site for their fans, most of the group’s weekly readings (including the first readings of The Lord of the Rings) were held in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College. The rooms, supplied as part of his fellowship at Magdalen, were shabbily but comfortably furnished, and warmed by a coal fireplace. Bookshelves stood against the walls, and on a long, battered table, the Lewis brothers served tea, beer (when they could get it), and delicacies sent by Lewis’s readers via the transatlantic post. The snug picture of these friends gathered by the fire, sharing stories that would later captivate readers all over the world, is a key element in the ongoing popular fascination with the Inklings. Humphrey Carpenter, in his eponymous history of the group, devotes an entire chapter to imagining a typical Thursday evening in Lewis’s rooms, complete with the lighting of pipes and the chiming of Magdalen’s clock tower.
One thing that makes this image so charming to so many readers is its resemblance to that scene by the fire in Mr. Tumnus’s nice little cave. The fans would surely be disappointed, then, to learn that none of the Narnia stories were ever read aloud to the Inklings, mostly because Tolkien disliked them. Lewis showed the manuscripts of the books to Roger Lancelyn Green, an expert on children’s fiction who would later become one of his biographers, but others among his friends were astonished to learn of the Chronicles’ existence. Dom Bede Griffiths, a former pupil at Magdalen who became a Catholic monk and one of Lewis’s regular correspondents, told Wilson that he discovered the books only after Lewis’s death and marveled to find in them “a power of imaginative invention and insight of which I had no conception before.” Griffiths’s Lewis had always presented himself as “a plain, honest man with no nonsense about him.” So perhaps Tolkien’s disapproval is not entirely to blame for the fact that, with respect to the Inklings, Narnia remained Lewis’s private concern.
Once again, his life was divided. It could recover its unity only between the covers of a book. The part of Lewis that produced the Chronicles of Narnia was not especially welcome among the Inklings, and while this strikes me as a little sad, it is also not surprising. The Inklings smoked, drank beer, argued philosophy, and subjected one another’s work to ungentle criticism. (“Not another fucking elf!” Hugo Dyson famously moaned at the start of one of Tolkien’s readings.) There was no place for the likes of Lucy, really, in the bluff, masculine social world Lewis had created for himself. She was, however, more than welcome in Mr. Tumnus’s sitting room, and perhaps that’s why the picture of them whiling away an afternoon over sardines and sugared cakes feels so extraordinarily gratifying, less like a first meeting than a longed-for reunion. In Narnia, if nowhere else, the little girl and the learned bachelor can sit down together at last.
Chapter Seven
Through the Looking-Glass
Not long ago, I read a picture book entitled Andy and the Lion to my three-year-old friend Desmond. The book, by James Daugherty, retells Aesop’s fable of Androcles, a runaway slave who removes a thorn from a wild lion’s paw; when Androcles is later captured and condemned to be thrown to the lions, the same beast saves him, and the emperor spares them both as exemplars of friendship. Daugherty recasts the tale as the story of a barefoot American farm boy who helps an escaped circus lion he meets on the way to school. When I got to the part where a whistling Andy nears a turn in the road and notices just the tip of the runaway lion’s tail peeping around the corner, Desmond scrambled anxiously to the other end of the sofa and hid behind a cushion. Next, we read Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express, and at the moment when Santa put his arm around the book’s narrator and called for a cheer from the crowd of onlooking children, Desmond sat up straight, radiating pride.