C. S. Lewis

#1C. S. Lewis was nine when his mother, Flora, died of cancer in 1908. There was a Shakespeare calendar in the room, and the page for that day carried a line from "King Lear": “Men must endure their going hence.”

#2His father kept the page.

#3After Flora died, the world Lewis knew as home started coming apart. He was sent away to boarding school, and by adolescence the Christianity he'd grown up with had gone too.

#4But childhood didn't disappear completely. Lewis and his older brother Warnie had invented a place called Boxen, a country of talking animals with politics and history of their own. And sometime in his teens, another image settled into his mind: a snowy wood, a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels.

#5There was no Narnia. There wasn't even a story yet.

#6Just an image that stayed.

#7Lewis went to Oxford, but the First World War pulled him away almost immediately. In the army he became close to a young officer named Paddy Moore.

#8The two made a deal. If one of them died, the other would help take care of his family.

#9In 1918, Lewis was wounded at Arras. Lewis came home. Paddy didn't.

#10And the promise came home with him.

#11Paddy's mother, Janie Moore, and his younger sister, Maureen Moore, became part of Lewis's life. What had been a promise between two young soldiers turned into decades of responsibility. Lewis lived with the Moore family and kept caring for Janie as she grew older.

#12At the same time, he was trying to become a poet. His 1919 collection "Spirits in Bondage" came out under the name Clive Hamilton and drew little attention. He spent years on "Dymer", published in 1926, but that didn't make him a celebrated poet either.

#13The strange part is that the career that worked first wasn't really storytelling at all. Lewis became an Oxford scholar, teaching and studying literature written by other people.

#14The writer the world would remember was still somewhere ahead of him.

#15Lewis had left Christianity behind, but myth never quite let go of him. In 1916 he read George MacDonald's "Phantastes", a fantasy he later described as having changed his imagination deeply.

#16That didn't make him a Christian again. Not yet.

#17Years later at Oxford, Lewis met another scholar who loved old languages, legends, and myth: J. R. R. Tolkien.

#18They became close friends, though they disagreed about something pretty fundamental. Tolkien was a Christian. Lewis wasn't.

#19Lewis had a problem he couldn't quite settle. Ancient stories about sacrifice, death, gods, and rebirth could move him. But when Christianity made claims that seemed to echo some of those same patterns, he resisted.

#20By 1929, he had given up atheism and accepted belief in God. Christianity was still another question.

#21Then, on a September night in 1931, Lewis spent hours walking and talking with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson about myth and Christianity.

#22It wasn't a one-night conversion. Lewis had already been changing for years. But something he'd kept divided—myth on one side, religious truth on the other—was getting harder to keep apart.

#23Soon afterward, Lewis became a Christian.

#24The faith he'd lost as a boy hadn't simply returned by the same road. It had come back through books, argument, imagination, and friendship.

#25By the Second World War, Lewis was already an established Oxford academic. In 1941, "The Screwtape Letters" began appearing in a religious newspaper, and that same year the BBC put him on the radio.

#26He wasn't speaking only to students or other scholars. He was talking to ordinary people listening at home during wartime, trying to explain morality and Christianity in language they could follow. Those talks continued, and some of the material later became "Mere Christianity".

#27So Narnia didn't suddenly rescue an unknown writer from obscurity. Lewis was already a scholar, a popular Christian writer, and a voice people had heard on the radio.

#28What he wasn't yet was the children's fantasist history would remember.

#29He'd tried writing a children's story around 1939. It went nowhere.

#30The faun was still standing in the snow.

#31Around 1948, Lewis tried again. This time the old images started finding one another: the snowy wood, the faun with the umbrella, talking animals, children walking through a wardrobe into another world.

#32He began writing "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe".

#33Then he showed it to Tolkien.

#34That made sense. Tolkien was one of his closest friends, loved myth as much as he did, and was building an enormous fantasy world of his own.

#35But Tolkien didn't like Narnia.

#36Lewis had put fauns, centaurs, witches, talking animals, figures from different mythological traditions, and even Father Christmas into the same world. Tolkien worked very differently. He built languages, histories, peoples, and legends that belonged together inside one immense imagined past.

#37They loved some of the same material.

#38They just didn't think fantasy should be made the same way.

#39Tolkien's reaction mattered to Lewis. Then another friend, Roger Lancelyn Green, read the manuscript.

#40Green told him to keep going.

#41So Lewis did.

#42He didn't need to prove Tolkien wrong. He just needed to finish the story that was his.

#43"The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was published in 1950. Lewis was fifty-one.

#44The poet he'd wanted to become in his twenties had never really arrived. Instead he'd become a scholar, then a Christian writer, and only in his fifties did children's fantasy begin turning into the work that would carry his name farthest.

#45Seven Narnia books came out between 1950 and 1956.

#46And hidden inside that success was another abandoned beginning.

#47Before the first Narnia book had even appeared, Lewis had tried to write the story of how Narnia itself began. He got stuck and put it aside.

#48The idea didn't go away.

#49Years later, it came back as "The Magician's Nephew". This was the book that explained the creation of Narnia, where the Witch came from, why there was a lamppost in the forest, and eventually where the wardrobe itself came from.

#50It was the beginning of the whole world.

#51And it was published sixth.

#52It also took Lewis longer to complete than any other Narnia book.

#53He opened the door first.

#54Only later did he work out where the door had come from.

#55While Lewis was finishing Narnia, Joy Davidman entered his life. She was an American writer, and their relationship began with letters and long intellectual conversations.

#56They entered a civil marriage in 1956. At first, there was a practical reason for it: the marriage helped Joy remain in Britain.

#57Then she was diagnosed with cancer.

#58Once death was close, that practical explanation no longer covered what their relationship had become. Lewis had to face how deeply he cared for her, and the two were married in a Christian ceremony.

#59Then the expected ending was delayed.

#60Joy's condition improved. They were given time.

#61For a man who had spent much of his adult life looking like the classic bachelor Oxford don, married life arrived in his late fifties.

#62It didn't last long. The cancer came back.

#63In the spring of 1960, Lewis and Joy traveled through Greece with friends. He'd spent a lifetime reading and teaching the ancient world. Now he was walking through part of it beside his wife.

#64On July 13, 1960, Joy died.

#65Lewis had already written a book about suffering: "The Problem of Pain".

#66He'd thought about how pain could exist in a world governed by a good God. After Joy died, the question moved.

#67It wasn't across the desk anymore.

#68It was in his house.

#69Lewis started writing through his grief. His faith shook. Anger appeared. So did fear. He even began to distrust memory itself. What if, as time passed, he stopped loving the real Joy and started loving a version of her that his own mind had built?

#70A writer who could invent an entire country had discovered something else imagination could do: it could try to replace a dead person.

#71Those notes became "A Grief Observed".

#72But when the book appeared in 1961, C. S. Lewis wasn't the name on the cover.

#73The author was N. W. Clerk.

#74More than forty years earlier, Lewis had published his first poetry under the name Clive Hamilton. Near the end of his life, he hid his name again—this time on one of the most personal things he'd ever written.

#75Joy had also left two sons. Lewis had already accepted them as his own, and he remained a father to Douglas Gresham and David.

#76As a young man, he'd lived with the family of a friend who died in war. Late in life, he stayed with the sons of his dead wife.

#77The circumstances weren't the same.

#78But the action echoed: when someone disappeared, Lewis kept living with the people left behind.

#79Lewis's health declined after Joy's death, though he kept writing about prayer, literature, language, and the medieval imagination. By 1963, illness had forced him to give up his Cambridge position.

#80On November 22, Lewis died at The Kilns, his home in Oxford. He was one week short of his sixty-fifth birthday.

#81That same day, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Aldous Huxley died too.

#82The world's attention went somewhere else.

#83Lewis himself hadn't assumed his reputation would last forever. It was easy enough to imagine his name fading with the generation that knew him.

#84His mother was gone. Paddy was gone. Joy was gone.

#85Now Lewis was gone too.

#86After Lewis died, his brother Warnie chose the words for his grave: “Men must endure their going hence.”

#87They weren't new.

#88They were the words from the Shakespeare calendar hanging in the room when their mother died in 1908—the page their father had kept.

#89Fifty-five years later, the sentence that had been there for Flora Lewis's death came back for her son.

#90But the books stayed. Readers kept opening them. People kept coming to The Kilns. Douglas Gresham, Joy's son and Lewis's adopted son, later became involved in producing Narnia films.

#91And then the timeline folded back on itself once more.

#92A new Narnia film is scheduled for 2027. It isn't starting with "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe".

#93It's starting with "The Magician's Nephew".

#94The origin story Lewis once tried to write and couldn't finish. The idea he put away, came back to years later, published sixth, and took longer to complete than any other Narnia book.

#95For Lewis, it was the beginning that arrived latest.

#96More than sixty years after his death, that late beginning becomes the first story again.

#97Paddy Moore's younger sister Maureen stayed connected to Lewis long after the war that killed her brother. Decades later, when Lewis was seriously ill in hospital and struggling to recognize people, she came to see him.

#98By then, her own life had taken an unlikely turn. She had inherited a title and become Lady Dunbar.

#99Lewis recognized her. When the question came up of how he could possibly remember that she'd become Lady Dunbar, he reportedly joked that something so much like a fairy tale was hard to forget.

#100A family connection that began with a promise between two soldiers had lasted long enough to leave one small fairy-tale scene at the end of a fantasy writer's life.