I was caught off-guard at last week’s wonderful From Wands to Quills Harry Potter Conference at beautiful James Madison University when I learned that the two hours I thought I had to speak turned out to be forty minutes. Caught flat-footed, I was left with little choice but to abandon my original spider-outline on Hogwarts and the modern university and to share instead with friends in Harrisonburg, Virginia, a letter I found in the restroom of the Marion E. Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois. I was there (in the Center, not the restroom) looking for evidence of C. S. Lewis’ hermetic artistry in the Wade collection of Inkling books, letters, and diaries.

What I found instead on top of the hand towel dispenser was a letter in Latin written in mirrored handwriting. The letter was unsigned except for a DA [AD?], is undated, and had no stamp. In the opinion of the Wade Librarians it is almost certainly a fraud – it is the only letter to Lewis at the Wade Center addressed “My Dear Clive” and the author claims to be an alchemist, wizard, and professor at a school of wizardry whose name and location he does not reveal.

The subject of AD’s letter is ‘what makes a book great.’ He claims that Owen Barfield and George Sayer in addition to Lewis wanted him to expand on his comments made at the favorite watering hole with respect to Lewis’ assertion that a great work of fiction is one that makes you “better, wiser and happier.”

I ask in advance that you forgive the awkwardness of my rushed translation from the original, posted below, which, sadly, does not reflect the elegance and eloquence of the Latin original. I turned it over to the Wade-Gringotts guardians for their filing and protection after they made a copy for me, but my Xerographic facsimile was gone the next morning and the librarians incredibly denied all knowledge of it and my giving it to them the day before.

The letter and some quick notes:

My Dear Clive,

Always good to hear from you!

I have received your St. Crispin’s Day note with its kind words about and request that I expand upon our conversation with Tollers, Sayer, and your barrister friend about what makes a work of fiction great. Your kindness in using owl post rather than more conventional mail is much appreciated – as were your comments about our friendship. I hope you understand, as it was I who reached out to you as an admiring reader, that it is I who will always be in your debt for your fellowship and for the congenial sparring of your Inkling companions.

Let me say to start that there really is no need to expand on your simple and satisfying dictum that a good book, poem, or play is one whose artistry and meaning combine in such a way to make a reader “better, wiser, and happier.” My comments in light of my experience and reflections as alchemist and wizard are only offered here as footnotes as to “how” or “why” this is so rather than a challenge or corollary to your elegant and pointed insight.

The reason I read books by non-magical friends like yourself is just because I see, especially, in those intentionally hermetic works — from Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets to your own novels — an alchemical reaction between text and reader that is much like that between alchemist and lead–in-transformation-to-gold, namely, an elision of subject and object in the experience of story, a sort of real magical mirror that we see in so many of the better stories.

As I shared with you at the Bird and Baby, our experience with the best books is much like our interactions with paintings in the magical world which you only know by my report. Unlike your still-lifes, we interact with our art, and, if we say the right word or touch them as they touch us, many open up into worlds behind them, spaces quite literally and much like the metaphorical and imaginative reality we enter in story.

Your remarkable Samuel Taylor Coleridge was referring to the means of this elision and entrance when he wrote of our “suspending disbelief” in an “act of poetic faith.” Forgive me if in obedience to your kind request I attempt an explanation of what your works and our previous conversations reveal you already know, that is, how the Great Stories affect us as they do.

In my favorites, the writer offers my heart or ‘Primary Imagination’ a set of characters that are a picture of the faculties or temperaments of my soul. As these faculties and honored dispositions are realigned and transformed, so are my innermost parts changed, in so much at least as I am engaged and identify whole-heartedly with hero and heroines.

This can be as simple as a doppelganger story in which two characters are transparencies through which we enter and experience the right relationship of our upper and lower natures. As I’ve told you before, this is why I love Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Jekyll and Hyde so much. David Balfour and Alan Beck are faith and passion, innocence and guile, that love and meet one another as Jekyll and Hyde conflict and destroy the “other” that is within. Dickens’ Carton and Darnay and their love of Lucie Manette – the “light of man” — is perhaps the perfect depiction of this story.

Soul Triptychs in which we meet characters representing the three faculties of soul – passion, will and heart or body, mind spirit – are more challenging but that much more powerful. The Russian mage’s Brothers Karamazov is the best of this kind of story, but I love Around the World in 80 Days and its Passepartout, Fogg, and Aoda for the same reason and experience I love in reading about, even becoming for a time Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha. I neglect your Space Trilogy only because we have discussed it at such length already.

My soul in these books recognizes its own disorder, passion and ego driving conscience and will away, and feels itself turned upright and changed. I love schoolboy novels – all of them, from Tom Brown to Billy Bunter – because they not only reflect magical threesomes like we have at the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry where I teach but also because the heart is always the story champion and I am a better person for my time with him.

I reread Little Women every year, though, and return to your Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe and Prince Caspian as often as I do because of the use of the four elements and the soul’s corresponding temperaments taking life in the characters of these books.

Jo and Meg March, Peter and Susan Pevensie as choleric fire and phlegmatic water in opposition; Amy and Beth, Lucy and Edmund as sanguine air and melancholic earth – their adventures and transformation … their contraries change my heart from lead to gold, even give me some experience of the Quintessence.

Whether it is a story of 2, 3 or 4 characters, then, the best written work brings me to a center or origin, a resolution of contraries as we alchemists have it, that carries with it an experience of no little peace. I think this arrival at the center of the cycle of elements or a soul aligned with the heart, our spiritual origin, is also why the best stories echoing Christian scripture are written as circles or rings.

The chiasmus model of narrative in the Old and New Testaments (ABCD-DCBA), the rings of Homer, Virgin and Dante, as well as the poet Rumi and medieval Chinese novelists I wish were available to you in English give us an experience of the completed circle which is defined by and whose greater reality we come to know as its defining center.

[The Latin here is more than a little obscure, forgive me; I think DA/AD tries to describe a department store mannequin over which a dress is draped buty my classical and medieval dictionaries were all but useless here.]

This narrative structure or story scaffolding of the ring with its joined beginning and end as story frame, pronounced turning point echoing opening, origin and finish’s meeting, and the paired analogies and reverse echo of all story chapters before and after this turn fosters the alchemical elision of subject and object, story and reader, that turns us inside-out and right-side- up, again as Coleridge would have it, the inside or center being greater than the outside it causes and defines.

I love this in the there-and-back again story design of Stevensons’ Kidnapped, your Ransom novels and Narnian romps and our friends Charles and Tollers’ remarkable work. Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, again, however, with, forgive me, its mirrored means of travel to and from the antipodes and return on 21 December [12/21 or 21/12], the two and one reflecting each other as the world is circumscribed in story, remains for me the very model of this story template and experience. I hope you’ll reconsider and reread Verne.

A brilliant witch in our tradition taught her students two things I think are relevant here. The first is that “a circle has no beginning.” This is not, as you might thank, a geometric truism about a circle’s circumference but a deft description of its origin or center, which in being invisible does not exist as the circle does – the ‘no’ – but in being origin is it s true beginning, hence ‘no beginning.’ She also taught in Transfiguration class that “Vanished objects go into non-being, that is to say, into all things” because the non-existent, defining center is a greater reality that cause all things created ex nihilo.

Love and the harmony of music I believe are the greatest magic, even before wand work and spells or the alchemy of a wonderful book because they bring us to this center that your St. Augustine was describing when he said that “God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose periphery is nowhere.” The resolution of self and other in love, especially sacrificial love, and of harmony and melody are literally divine and center-ing edifying and transforming.

They are, if I may be so bold before closing this already too long note, something like Communion, another word for elision or transcending of self; with the Logos center that is the cause of everything existent.

In my school, there is a place that is not a place that at least one student every generation finds and which house-elves call the “Come and Go Room” and we know as “The Room of Requirement.” It is a-local and varies in size, sometimes being larger even than our whole school as the need of its finder so requires. This ‘inside that is bigger than its outside,’ something of a commonplace in our world, I think is the point defining the circle which the Cross reveals as its intersection. I don’t think I am revealing too much, trusting in your discretion, in sharing that this is why witches and wizards in Logres prefer to start all adventures of learning and discovery at the wonderful station you have named so well as “King’s Cross.” I know you will understand that we do not believe the King in question is a worldly king or the Cross an arbitrary intersection.

I believe that the best stories make us “better, wiser, and happier,” as you say, because they bring us to this Cross and Center and Communion and resurrection consequent to it, a rising from the death of individual self to the life and light that is our cause and hope. Story gives us some “intimation of immortality,” as the poet says.

A beginner in alchemy and magical theory learns first that, the world being mental or logical because it is Logos created, what is in our hearts and heads is what is most real, if least visible. Our magic is based on speech and is most powerful with wands having cores that resonate with the speech that is the fabric of reality. The alchemy of literature is that if lightens us as lead is illumined into gold – we are made lighter, that is, both less weighed down by our selfish concerns, and illumined or enlightened by what is the Light of the world, that “cometh into the world” as your St. John puts it, in every man’s heart.

[AD/DA broke into Old English here because the Latin word for "light" does not have the assonant meaning of "not heavy;" my thanks to my Tolkien friends for help making sense of it the one night I had before the original disappeared.]

We are better, wiser, and happier because in this enlightenment we become more truly human in the elision of reader and the best stories.

I have written too much and too little here , again, all in obedience and all in abashed awareness that I am instructing a master of the subject. I close lest I overtax even my friend Fawkes whose sudden appearance I hope does not overly alarm you.

Until our next meeting, your brother in the love of literary magic,

DA [AD?]

I think readers of the Hogwarts Saga will not, as the Wade stewards did, assume that the author’s use of ‘Clive’ marks the friendly letter as a fraud. It is as reasonable to assume, I believe, that the writer simply prefers to call people by their real names as much as possible.

I have other notes to add to this — speculation from internal evidence as to who might have written the note and when [Prof. Baird-Hardy suggested 1954, and, as usual, I defer to her expertise here] — but some preliminary conclusions about the Hogwarts Saga from his [her?] arguments I offered to the From Wands to Quills banqueters include:

(1) The Potter books have the universal popularity and profound effect they do on readers because of their alchemical symbolism and story scaffolding. Ms. Rowling like other literary alchemists, understand the magic of story telling is an alchemical event  – and that using traditional hermetic signs and themes, even colors, catalyzes this magical experience.

(2) The soul triptych of Harry, Ron and Hermione with body/mind/and spirit reflected in story and with Harry as the story transparency of the human heart or spiritual center is also an engine of those stories’ power over readers. We are turned right side up and inside out as we read and are made “better, wiser, and happier” in the process.

(3) The ring composition of the series, Ms. Rowling’s borderline OCD telling of the story with joined beginning and end pronounced story turns, and “Reverse echo” alignment of every chapter, is a critical part of the success of her writing, the language of which is much better described as “accessible” than “elevating,” poetic or “magisterial.” Her story templates, religiously followed, deliver her readers to a spiritual center and reality much greater than our individual existences.

I look forward to reading your comments and corrections.

It’s “Outrageous Hogwarts Professor Gaffes’ time, again, All-Pros! Not a month after learning I don’t know my King’s Cross stations from my underground tubes, I find out that I have symbolism dyslexia — or is it alchemical myopia? Either way, I’ve got red and gold egg on my face.

Kati from Germany writes:

A note on Gryffindor – the lion isn’t red, as you say (first time on p 12 or 21 of Looking for God, I think) – but rather its ‘natural’ golden colour set on a red background. As to why the symbol of Gruffindor isn’t a Griffin… I guess it would be too confusing with Ravenclaw’s Eagle.

I responded:

Dear Kati, if I may,

Your prayers.

(Sound of hand slapping forehead)

I confess that the names discussion left me cold but I was stunned by the observation above. How could I have missed this — and, more incredible (I’m notorious for blowing details), how could all the serious readers of the Hogwarts Saga have missed my error all these years?

Thank you for the gracious way you shared this. The golden griffin (Griffin d’or) is a golden lion only missing the eagle’s wings. Your conjecture on why it is not a griffin — to avoid confusion with Ravenclaw — is possible but I think it may have at least as much to do with the alchemical symbolism.

How did I make this mistake — and repeat it for almost a decade of talks? I think there are three reasons.

(1) Exeter conditioning: the prep school I went to had a red lion mascot. I think of lions as being red.

(2) Narnia Trips: I have spent just enough time in the alternate reality of C. S. Lewis’ Narniad that it’s a stretch for me not to think of emblems and symbols featuring lions, as in King Peter’s silver shield, as having a red lion on them rather than an Aslan-like golden hue.

(3) Seeing what you want to see: the ‘red lion’ in alchemical lore and Christian art has a special resonance and meaning that helped my argument in the Potter Panic war with the Harry Haters. ‘Gold’ certainly has an alchemical and Christian meaning in itself that is helpful and traditional (the griffin in Dante’s Purgatorio is golden, etc.) but it doesn’t have the association that the red lion has.

Which is to say, I saw what I wanted to see. Doggone it.

Thanks again to Kati for this find and for the kind way she shared my gaffe with me. It’s still crow I’m eating but it’s not quite as humiliating when I learn of my mistakes with an “oh, by the way..” rather than via a bashing.

If anyone has a copy of How Harry Cast His Spell, let us know if the mistake Kati found in Looking for God also made it into the updated edition….

This is exciting news. A. T. Reeves has edited C. S. Lewis’ translations of Virgil’s Aeneid, which consist of long passages from Books 1, 2, and 6. I assume these are the best known sections, most notably, the fall of Troy, the flight to Carthage, death of Dido, and the trip to the Underworld.

As eager as I am to read this work, about which I had never heard or read mention that I can recall, the book has already delivered edifying fruit. Prof. David Downing, C. S. Lewis scholar and accomplished novelist himself, has written a review of the Yale University Press title, a survey explaining CSL’s fascination with this poem and many of the correspondences existing between Lewis’ understanding of the Aeneid and my favorite adventure in the Narniad, The Silver Chair. Read that review here: ‘Journeys to the Underworld and the Silver Chair.’ H/T to Rev. David!

On April 21, I had the great pleasure of visiting the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University at the invitation of the Harry Potter Society and Dr. Joel Hunter, who has the enviable opportunity of teaching a very popular Harry Potter course (which currently holds the record for fastest time for a course to fill during registration!).

In addition to getting to see the beautiful campus of the Barrett Honors College, I had the chance to visit with Dr. Hunter and his wonderful wife Melanie (who apparently make a smashing Snape and Tonks on Halloween), chat with an amazing group of students, and present on the ways in which Rowling’s magical menagerie indicates the influence of C.S. Lewis.

Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University, is a fantastic residential college where bright and promising students learn, grow, and connect with one another. As you can see from the pictures, it’s also a beautiful place to find one’s academic pathway. There is even a fabulous “great hall” in the dining facility!

 On their academic journey, students have the good fortune to be guided by professors like Dr. Hunter, friend of this blog, whose diverse and thorough scholarship make him a perfect guide at this interdisciplinary academy. Make sure you watch for Dr. Hunter’s terrific chapter on magic and technology in the forthcoming Harry Potter for Nerds from Unlocking Press!

Barrett has an active Harry Potter Society, which gathers regularly to discuss our shared text. I was privileged to get to meet many of the delightful students who are active in this group, as well as those who are part of Dr. Hunter’s highly popular Harry Potter course. We talked about Rowling’s work and its literary, social, and personal impact, as well as conversing about other books, writing, and school. My presentation was well attended and followed up with some super questions.  It really was a treat to visit with such engaged students and faculty.

I even enjoyed my plane trip (despite some turbulence), getting to converse with a teacher planning to teach The Hunger Games and a former Mayland Community College (my school) student who is now a U.S. Marine. I also had Dr. Hunter snap a picture of me in the Sky Harbor International airport, which may seem a bit odd to non-Twilight readers, but of course, Bella gives Jasper and Alice the slip in a ladies room in this airport!

Thanks, Dr. Hunter, for the gracious invite, and to Kim Condoulis, for her extraordinarily competent handling of logistics and one super early ride to the airport!

For those wondering if The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was the last Chronicles of Narnia book to be made into a film, the word today is that the film franchise is alive — and that the plan is to go with The Magician’s Nephew rather than The Silver Chair. [Read the story 'New Narnia' at fandango.com; H/T to Candice!]

Believe it or not, I rather like the idea of Nephew being chosen over Chair, though the latter is perhaps my favorite Narniad adventure (and a real shame it is that we don’t get to see more of Eustace Scrubb right away). As the fourth film, Nephew will be the center of the seven part series; this is a good thing because in several important ways it is the pivotal story in the collection.

It was the last book written, believe it or not, though Lewis began writing it almost immediately after The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was published and Nephew was published before Last Battle. In Nephew, I speculate, the author quite vividly reveals several important messages about his artistry and his meaning. Real quickly, the Wood Between the Worlds is a pointer to the “inside bigger than the outside,” the Logos beneath, behind, and within everything created, a theme Aslan’s creative song only reinforces. The magic rings are a transparency for the Ring Composition of each book. And the prize silver apple from the tree in the centre of the garden? The Rev. Michael Ward makes a good case for the astrological meaning of Nephew being venereal, but this light laden fruit is alchemical artistry.

Not to mention the re-write of Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet that is a large part of Jadis’ time in London…

Often put first in the series sequence or next to last, I think Nephew is best understood as the apex of the series and top of an axis that runs through the center of a sphere, with LWW at the center and Last Battle at the antipode (see illustration below). The four remaining books, two travelogues (Voyage and Chair) with a series of adventures and two Royal Restoration stories (Caspian and Boy), define the equator of the sphere with LWW and Aslan as their center.
Looking at this model for understanding the structure of the series — not, I rush to add, anything like an argument for intentio auctoris, just a lens through which to understand the books –  it’s not a bad idea at all to put Nephew at the story center or ‘origin’. Which making it the fourth movie of seven does, in essence.

Three questions for your consideration and comment below:

(1) Do you find the model above helpful?

(2) What do you think of the decision to go with Nephew rather than Chair? and

(3) Which actor and actress should play the parts of the young Digory and Polly?

A good friend sent me a link last night to an archived recording of C. S. Lewis’ BBC broadcast of ‘Beyond Personality’ during WWII, a talk that was published as a book in its own right and then became the fourth and last part of Mere Christianity. It turns out, as is almost always the case with CSL matters, that this isn’t a new discovery but is only new to me. For easier access to the talk and a short introduction, for example, please see this CSL fan’s weBlog.

Still, I confess to being fascinated, even thrilled, to hear ‘the Master’s Voice.’ I imagined the man almost stepping out of the Wardrobe to talk to my family after dinner around the fireplace  — as I think listeners in the UK might have done next to their radios in late March, 1944, if it was a damp, cold night.

I recommend it to you, even if you’ve listened to it before, to ask yourself how much the timbre, pace, and pitch, the musical quality of this voice, matches the one of your imagination as you read, say, The Silver Chair, Perelandra, or Mere Christianity. I confess, this is much more a patrician voive, with the inflection of gentility, than I expected, embarrassed as I am to admit it. He had the common touch, perhaps, but the man was an Oxbridge don, after all.

Still, however avuncular and whatever note there is of condescension in the pacing, the voice is friendly and engaging. Lewis draws you in without making you feel you’re being ‘taken in.’ And that is no small achievement, given the weightiness of the subject and the audience most likely having been immunized against catching the apologist’s drift.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on the broadcast along with any of your memories you care to share of being surprised, delighted, or dismayed on hearing an author’s voice after reading his or her works.

[Editor's Note: Welcome to the next title in the HogPro Book Club: C. S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. To get things started, Professor Pazdziora offers some reflections on literary and spiritual themes in the book. So, grab your copy and your reading memories, and get ready for a great series of challenging discussions on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.]

There Be Dragons

A Reader Remembers
The Voyage of the
Dawn Treader

I know nothing about cartography. So maybe that’s why it’s always seemed to me like a strange and mystical science. There’s poetry in maps. I stare at those squiggled lines and neat text—geological tortures reduced to splotches of ink—the Sahara to Yellow 5 and the Nile to Blue 47—and wonder: have the mapmakers really been there? Did they sketch this from memory? From travellers’ tales?
From dreams?

It’s no surprise, really, that maps are central to modern fantasy literature. Tolkien began it, of course, perhaps following the example of Rider Haggard and the researches of (ahem) Allan Quartermain, or the legendary map that sent Squire Trelawney and the good doctor on their ill-fated adventure.

Any edition of The Lord of the Rings is incomplete without a large foldout of Christopher Tolkien’s painstaking and perfect maps of the Shire, Middle-Earth, and Mordor. Bilbo Baggins began his adventure with a map, of course. A map that showed where the treasure was hidden, a map with a secret door. And on the edge of the map—at the end of the journey—was the dragon.

And so the mapmakers gave us the warning:

Here there be dragons.

That was the legend on the edges of maps, the signifier that admitted fear of the unknown. The ancient cartographers drew dragons around the boundaries of the world. The quarters inaccessible to human voyagers were realms of deathly peril. Sea Serpents. Giant Squid. Sirens. Kraken. And dragons.

We do not know, the maps admit, what lies outside squiggled lines and dream sketches. There are no charts of those seas. We know only that there is terror, there is darkness, there is fear—the downward draw of the limitless void. Here there be dragons. Here, on the edges of knowledge and the borders of possibility, lie the most fearsome creatures to haunt the nightmares of men.

Is it any wonder, then, that the Vikings put dragonhead prows on their ships, to cow the spirits of the water into granting safe passage? And that they had to take down the dragonhead prow when they sighted land, for fear the spirits of the earth would drown their ship from terror? The dragon is the sign of unbounded seas, unguarded and unknown, the untrammelled ferocity of creatures older and more powerful than mankind.

Dawn Treader, of course, bears a dragonhead prow. And it sails beyond the Lone Islands into uncharted lands, toward the eternal East. The way to Aslan’s country lies through the realms of dragons.

In the great tradition of seafaring stories, they’re beset by a Sea Serpent. Like any large serpent, it’s mode of attack is to wind around its prey, and crush it. Swords and arrows are useless against it, knightly valour of little account. This is not a dragon who can be slain—only avoided.

There’s an odd winsomeness to this serpent. It’s an absent-minded, witless creature. There is no malevolence behind its threat. It is simply a large, stupid animal preying on smaller animals. The terror of it is its mindless, predatory impulse combined with its unfathomable size—as long and as large as a chain of islands. It plods through the rhythms of its kill, blissful in its invulnerability. One can imagine it doing the same to a struggling whale, or giant squid. The sea serpent confronts us with the horror of a diffident universe, an uncaring vastness before which the frailty of humankind, of talking animals and food and cheer, dwindles away, and the only recourse is to flee.

This is not the only dragon the voyagers meet. The other dragon is Eustace Clarence Scrubb.

Eustace is, by any standards, a swotty little blighter. He gripes. He swaggers. He bullies. He sulks. He whines. One of the most delightfully infuriating chapters in the book is when Lewis—again, in the great tradition of seafaring stories and the adventure novel—lets us read extracts from Eustace’s sea journal. It’s a shrewd lesson in how someone so selfish and obnoxious can be, in their own opinion, straightforward and reasonable.

In the unknown islands, Eustace finds a dragon.

More specifically, he finds a dragon’s hoard, and a dragon dying. He doesn’t know that it is a dragon, since, as Lewis tells us wearily, he’s read all the wrong sorts of books. But he knows unguarded treasure when he sees it. And, like any self-respecting adventurer, he claims the hoard as his own.

Or should I say—like any self-respecting dragon?

Eustace finds a live, flaming dragon when he wakes up to discover he is one.

Interestingly, he’s a much nicer person as a dragon than as a little boy. This isn’t the result of the transformation, not directly. It’s his realization that he is become the outcast, the stranger. He is cut off from the human society he snubbed and scorned. He is severed from his swotty world of posturing and whinging and Proper Thinking, caught in the stuff of legend and nightmare.

Because none of that had gone away. Not really. Not because he didn’t believe in it. He wandered outside of the safe waters, the waters where he knew how to behave and impress, the realms of knowledge that let him pose as a moral, intellectual superior to everyone around him. And in the unknown place, he meets his dragon.

Eustace, you see, really was a dragon all along.

The enchantment of the hoard is not, I think, that it changes people into dragons. It’s that it draws the dragon-like to itself, and breaks them from their pupae. In the unknown lands, on the edges of the map, there are no outward forms, no mental meridians; there are only truths, and the truths have the power to take their own shape. So the dragon, Eustace, sheds his boy-shape, and for the first time recognizes itself.

Eustace, as a boy-dragon seeking after the esoteric, hidden thing—accolade and boasting for the boy, hoard-gold for the dragon—become an outcast. A stranger. A beast. And like the beast, only if it is loved can it be freed.

When the dragon returns to the dragon-headed ship, and the voyagers recognize it, they have—at last—pity on the boy Eustace. He’s not hiding anymore. He’s not pretending that he is somehow ‘In With It’ while they are ‘Out Of It’—whatever It may be. He comes to them as a lost, lonely child in need of affection. They look past the dragon to see the man, and give welcome to the stranger.

It is through their offer of love and the dragon’s acceptance of it that he is, gradually, brought to the place of healing. The dragon, flayed and torn like a crucified thing, enters the baptismal waters and emerges like Adam new born. That, of course, is Aslan’s doing. But the dragon had to be loved first. It had to see itself as an outcast first. The dragon had to realise it was a dragon, before the dragon could be made a child.

Here there be dragons, the mapmakers say, and in many ways they were right. When we enter an adventure, whether a story or a real journey to an unfamiliar place, if we keep our wits open we learn to see dragons. But most importantly, we learn to see that we bring the dragons with us.

When we stray outside the maps we’ve made for ourselves, we lose the structures we’ve built around us to tell us what we are. The enchanted mirrors that sing of our beauty are broken, and the mirror before us shows the face of the beast.

This is the greatness of Story. Not that it exposes our nightmare-consciousness and sub-ego selves (although it can do), but that it helps us look past our facades and games to recognize in ourselves the outcast and the stranger. So Edmund confides in Eustace: you were a beast but I was a traitor. You were the dragon, but I was Judas. Though Edmund never changed form, he recognizes that he, like Eustace, was a monster—that he, like Eustace, was saved and changed through love.

In a letter to a child, C. S. Lewis explained that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was about ‘the spiritual life.’ And perhaps it was partly this transformation that he had in mind—the descent from man to beast, the ascension from beast to child. Any spiritual voyage will bring us eventually to the land of dragons. Any spiritual journey will demand of us that we learn to give hospitality to the stranger. If we will let it transform us, then the story will have done its work.

Here, there were dragons all along.

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‘Welcome back to Hogwarts after our Christmas break! Before we tuck into our New Year’s Eve Eve Feast [editor's note: Yes, Hogwarts is on the Julian Calendar], I wish to introduce our new Magical Language Arts Teacher, Professor John Patrick Pazdziora, on loan from nearby St. Andrew’s University, where he studies Muggle fantasy alongside our non-magical brethren. He will be filling the revived Lake Poets Chair in Literary Alchemy, long neglected, and his classes will be open to all those attempting the Eloquence and Imagination N.E.W.T. — although I must caution older student that you must have attained an Outstanding on your O.W.L. if you wish to take his Advanced Spell Composition class. I have asked him to give us a short talk tonight to introduce his research as we sup on soup and before the main courses are served. I give you Hogwarts Professor Pazdziora.”

Thank you, Headmaster. I am honoured both by the appointment and by the overwhelming kindness of your welcome. As I–like the rest of you–am far more interested in what we are about to eat than what I am about to say, I shall be brief to the point of near silence. You shall not–alas!–always be so fortunate when I speak.

As both a reader and a literary critic, it’s all too easy to lose track of what we’re actually studying and enjoying. We examine places and characters, argue about symbolism and settings, analyze themes and structures. We assess the narrator’s voice, the texture of literary references. We emotionally relate to these characters, live for a while in these places, and engage—creatively and critically—in another world.

But we forget—or I, at least, often discover I’ve forgotten—what these worlds are actually woven from.

These worlds are woven in words. Words, words, words. We do not see the world the author has created. We only see, and hear, and consider her words.

Even in the remarkable collaboration of art and illustration that is the graphic novel—one thinks of the serendipitous partnership between Neil Gaiman and David McKean—the words and the pictures remain distinct, as distinct as the musician and the dancer, moving together in counterpoint but using different tools. It is not that single world is created; two worlds are created on the same frame, illumining and giving meaning to each other.

Certain artist/illustrator pairings can play in a similar counterpoint—George MacDonald and Arthur Hughes (especially in the Curdie books), Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake, Lewis Carroll and Tenniel, James Thurber and himself. But—with perhaps the exception of Thurber—the works remain distinct; the words came first, and the pictures follow as the imaginative response of another artist. What we are given of words.

We never actually see Lewis’s Narnia, for instance—unless we consider Pauline Baynes’s wonderful illustrations, or Chris van Allsburg’s covers. But those can’t really be considered Lewis’s work at all, just more or less drawing inspiration from the texture and pattern of his words. The artists have read about Narnia the same way we have. It is not too much to say that Narnia is a world of words; the words are Narnia, simply and profoundly, and their sound and rhythm and meanings create a verbal wardrobe, that wraps the world around us.

So it comes as no surprise—in fact with great delight—to discover a writer like Gaiman, who uses words so frightfully well, or to rediscover in a writer like Lewis the subtle richness and pattern of words we’ve always read but perhaps overlooked, perhaps forgotten.

Just such a rediscovery of the words of the Narnia books is offered—suitably enough—at Oxford Dictionaries.com. Jeremy Marshall, an editor for the OED and co-author of The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (OUP, 2006), has written a delightful article exploring the verbal wonder of ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wordbook.’ With obvious delight, Marshall points out Lewis’s adroit use of obscure and rare words. What other perennial children’s classics use words like ‘loquacity’ and ‘choriambus’? Marshall writes:

Many readers must simply pass over these without fully understanding them, unless they have a dictionary to hand. But Lewis was, after all, a professor of English literature, and having a rather bracingly old-fashioned approach to education, he thought nothing of throwing a word such as malapert, victualed, or frowsty into a children’s book.

Marshall’s article is a delight to read. Although the introductory matter, explaining Tolkien’s dislike for Lewis’s mismatched mythological references, is familiar territory to CSL devotees, Marshall quickly move into new lexical ground. He encourages us to read Narnia with a good, comprehensive dictionary (presumably the OED) close to hand. Who knew, for instance, that the orrery was a serious tool in Renaissance science, but a poesimeter is Lewis’s own coinage?

This sort of examination not just of the stories, but of the words of story—the blood and bones and heartbeat of story—can’t but help to renew our appreciation for great stories and great writing. Because words matter, language matters.

That’s what stories are made of.

Read and report. As always, thoughts, corrections, and questions are eagerly welcomed – later. For now, tuck in!

It is the week of Nativity for traditional Orthodox Christians and it promises to be a white Christmas here in upper New York State where my family and I are living. More than eighty inches of snow since 1 December… In the slow-down to the lead-up to the big day Friday (services begin tomorrow night and will go through the weekend), I’ve put aside my writing and publishing projects for some reading between shoveling shifts. I’m on something of a Charles Williams binge of late after reading David Downing’s Looking for the King in which historical novel Williams is featured. I just finished his The Greater Trumps (1932) and I thought I’d share some very brief notes here for serious Potter readers of the echoes of Williams’ supernatural thriller that we find in the Hogwarts Saga.

In no particular order:

1. The Greater Trumps’ most interesting character is Sybil, the Aunt of the lead character, Nancy. She is not an occult figure or Prophetess as you might expect in a book featuring  Tarot Cards but a woman who is remarkably at peace at all times and a vehicle of love. I offer for your consideration the possibility that Professor Trelawney has the same name with a slightly different spelling and swears by the revelations of her Tarot deck as a hat tip to Williams’ hermetic Christian saint in Trumps.

2. The phrase “All is well” is spoken at three times at critical moments in the plot. We’ve discussed here at some length the possible source’s of the Epilogue’s last words, “All was well,” namely, Julian of Norwich, Henry Scott Holland, and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I don’t think what are almost certainly Julian references in The Greater Trumps displaces any of those possibilities, but I think the Williams book has to be added to the list.

3. The alchemical trappings of the book are not obvious but I do think Williams is deliberately using Henry Lee and Nancy Coningsby as his novel’s Quarreling Couple. We see black-white-red, too, in the beginning of the book being dark to melancholic, the storm of wind and water that Henry conjures at nightfall has the effects one expects in the white stage, and that storm is met in the story’s crisis by a golden mist reminiscent of God’s Glory, “the cloud of the beginning of things.” Nancy’s apotheosis by story’s end — Sybil declares she is the “Messias” — and the brilliance of the Light at the end of Christmas Day, well into the night, reflect her transformation consequent to her decision in church Christmas morning to “adore the mystery of love” (‘Christians, Awake!’ John Byrom). We still don’t have a clue as to what kind of alchemical books Ms. Rowling read before beginning to write Harry’s adventures; if she meant a host of alchemical novels rather than discursive texts on metallurgy or psychology, then Greater Trumps may be in the pile.

4. Love is the power that Aunt Sybil has and which her Nancy niece gains via her adoration (see #3).Sybil is able to heal injuries and mental disturbance with her prayers, which are extendings of her love rather than invocational requests. She also has power over the elements or natural forces others are incapable of enduring or acting on. Her counsel to Nancy in church to “Try it, darling,” that is, to give herself to love, the only reality, reminded this Potter-phile of the Headmaster’s comments about love to Harry. Nancy is a much quicker study…

5. It is love that gives Sybil the equanimity which is both supernatural in origin and in its effect on others. Williams writes: “Equanimity in her was not a compromise but a union, and the elements of that union, which existed separately in others, in her recognized themselves and something other than themselves which satisfied them.” Logos epistemology? I think so, especially given her ability to see The Fool, the naught card of the Tarot Greater Trumps, which Williams uses as a cipher for the Word or Christ. This sight, her transformed vision, reflects her ability to know more because of her identification with the Love that is the cause of existence and all knowledge. Y’know, like Harry Potter. [See Chapter 5 of The Deathly Hallows Lectures if that went right by you.]

6. Williams quite clearly spells out the soul triptych of the story whose powers he calls “grace and intellect and corporeal strength” in the finale by labeling the characters with these name tags as they come down the stairs: “the lovers” Nancy and Henry are Grace as the Couple is at last joined, Mr. Coningsby is “the Intellect” by which Williams means “rational mind” rather than anything spiritual (trust me!), and Ralph and Stephen are “corporeal strength” or body. Ms. Rowling, of course, pins much of the Hogwarts Saga drama on the body-mind-spirit triptych of Ron-Hermione-Harry.

7. One of the few important Tarot references in Harry Potter is the comi-tragic scene in Half-Blood Prince in which Harry sees the distracted Sybill Trelawney walking the halls the night Dumbledore is blasted from the Astronomy Tower. Hours before the Headmaster’s demise, the Divination Professor is flipping Tarot Cards and says:

“The Headmaster has intimated that he would prefer fewer visits from me. I am not one to press my company upon those who do not value it. If Dumbledore chooses to ignore the warnings the cards show –” Her bony hand closed suddenly around Harry’s wrist. “Again and again, no matter how I lay them out – ” And she pulled a card dramatically from underneath her shawls. ” — the lightning-struck tower,” she whispered. “Calamity. Disaster. Coming nearer all the time …” (Prince, chapter 25, p. 543)

All the Greater Trumps in the Tarot deck are present in one scene or more in Williams’ thriller but only one of the cards other than The Fool is featured in a character’s transformation as the subject of a chapter with its name: The Falling Tower. As Williams describes it, it is the card more commonly known as The Lightning-Struck Tower.

8. And is it a Ring Composition? I’d have to give it a much more careful reading than I have to give a definite answer but there are enough signs of this to make the question worth exploring. Note, for instance, that the chapter which is the story center, Chapter 8 – Christmas Day in the Country, is the one in which Nancy decides to “adore the Mystery of Love,” which choice joins the problem set in the beginning and resolved in the end. Williams, too, discusses ‘Wheels within Wheels’ in chapter 15 which, with the near constant references to the Great Dance of the Cosmos reflected in the circular motion of the archetypal figures, the Images, means he understands and is using the circle as a story theme; it’s not much of a jump from that to story scaffolding. Especially as the story is in two neat halves: the last eight chapters are the events of Christmas Day. [For more on the Dance of the Cosmos, see Chapter 8 of E. M. W. Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture, an invaluable little guide.]

That’s all I noted on the first run through but I really wish this were a Charles Williams site, at least for a night, and that y’all had read the book so we could discuss what the man C. S. Lewis called the “esemplastic” element of the Inklings is saying in Trumps about the occult and its relationship to esoteric Christianity, not to mention his use of eye, hands, and light symbolism. Gavin Aschenden writes in his Charles Williams: Alchemy and Integration about the “integration of natural and supernatural” in his novels and it’s not much of a struggle to see why they excited — and inspired — Lewis to try the same (as he did, of course, in Space Trilogy and the Narniad).

Lewis is the more obvious and much more discussed influence on Ms. Rowling, who, to my knowledge, has never mentioned Charles Williams in an interview (I await your correction). I suggest, though, that what Ms. Rowling almost certainly picked up from the one she has second hand from Lewis’ inspiration, Charles Williams.

Your comments and corrections, as always, are coveted.

David C. Downing is a Professor of English at Elizabethtown College and one of the handful of C. S. Lewis scholars whose books reward reading and re-reading. Downing’s  Planets in Peril is the accepted gold standard for understanding Lewis’ Space Trilogy, for example, and his guide to Narnia, Into the Wardrobe, though pre Planet Narnia, is the best of its generation.

Now Prof. Downing has taken up his pen, not to write about one Inkling or to analyze his work, but to write a story involving them all. His novel, Looking for the King (Ignatius, 2010), is subtitled An Inklings Novel and features extended cameo appearances by Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. I read King in one sitting — it’s that good and, to an Inklings junkie at least, something like Turkish Delight — and wrote Prof. Downing some questions. It turned into an interview that he agreed to let me share with you, though it is more of a debate than the usual back and forth between author and reporter. His frankness, good humor, and insights, not to mention his willingness to punch back, made the experience a highlight of my writing for this weBlog.

After the jump, then, the publisher’s fly-leaf summary of the story and the HogPro interview with David C. Downing, author of Looking for the King:

The story line of Looking for the King:

It is 1940, and American Tom McCord, a 23-year-old aspiring doctoral candidate, is in England researching the historical evidence for the legendary King Arthur. There he meets perky and intuitive Laura Hartman, a fellow American staying with her aunt in Oxford, and the two of them team up for an even more ambitious and dangerous quest.

Aided by the Inklings-that illustrious circle of scholars and writers made famous by its two most prolific members, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien-Tom and Laura begin to suspect that the fabled Spear of Destiny, the lance that pierced the side of Christ on the cross, is hidden somewhere in England.

Tom discovers that Laura has been having mysterious dreams, which seem to be related to the subject of his research, and, though doubtful of her visions, he hires her as an assistant. Heeding the insights and advice of the Inklings, while becoming aware of being shadowed by powerful and secretive foes who would claim the spear as their own, Tom and Laura end up on a thrilling treasure hunt that crisscrosses the English countryside and leads beyond a search for the elusive relics of Camelot into the depths of the human heart and soul.

Weaving his fast-paced narrative with conversation based on the works of the Inklings, author David Downing offers a vivid portrait of Oxford and draws a welcome glimpse into the personalities and ideas of Lewis and Tolkien, while never losing sight of his action-packed adventure story and its two very appealing main characters.

Sound good? It is good. But every serious reader has their ideas about what makes a book work, and, as you know, I am no exception to this rule. I tried to press Prof. Downing, then, on points of implicit, embedded criticism his book seemed to me to be making of Ward’s Planet Narnia. I also asked him more than once about whether his story was An Inklings Novel in the sense of just being about that group of writers or also in the sense that it was written in the spirit and with many of the same elements as a Lewis, Williams, or Tolkien piece. I look forward to reading your comments about the give and take of our Q&A.

Thank you, Prof. Downing, for joining us at HogwartsProfessor for an e-interview about your new book, Looking for the King. I loved it, frankly, and recommend it to anyone who has read any Inkling fiction more than once and thought about the community of writers those books sprung from. I confess, though, to being a little worried that King won’t take off or be enjoyed much outside the community of CSL scholars and devotees, legion though we are. I don’t think we’re going to see Looking for the King Mania…

Yes, I would say that my basic fan-base for the novel is Lewis and Tolkien devotees. Of course, I don’t expect J. K. Rowling or Dan Brown types of sales, because the novel is built around the idea of getting to know several authors whom the reader may already admire—Lewis and Tolkien especially, but also readers of the less well-known Charles Williams. I’ve already had different readers and reviewers single out a Lewis chapter, a Tolkien chapter, or the Williams chapter as their favorite, so I my sense so far is that the novel has appeal to all three communities of readers.

I don’t see any signs of a “Looking for the King Mania” yet. But the novel has almost gone through its first printing in six weeks, and has accumulated over 1700 followers on Facebook in just three weeks. So I would have to say it is running a bit of a fever . . .

I enjoyed the story and want to hear your understanding of it, but, forgive me for straining against the restraints of hospitality, I want to jump right into what interested me most about the book, namely, what I think you were ‘after’ in writing it.

Twice in King, Tolkien reproves Tom McCord, the central character, for his speculations about the origins of books and says his friend Jack is on board with this sentiment. The big push, if you will, in Inkling criticism today, though, is just this sort of criticism; it’s the air we’re breathing on the Planet Narnia.

But you don’t include this criticism, any of it – I think of Sanford Schwartz’ book on the Ransom Trilogy, Michael Ward’s book Planet Narnia, or Gavin Ashenden’s Alchemy and Integration — in your bibliography. My assumption, because the Tollers quotations are repeated and they are the exact ones used by Ward critics like Brown (‘Planet Narnia Spin, Spun Out’) and Vaus (Blog Book review), is that your novel is an implicit criticism of the revisionist, esoteric critics’ challenging interpretations of Inkling work.

Yes, I realize I’m committing the crime in asking this question that I suggest you are prosecuting in your book, but I’d still like to hear from you just how far off I am in this.

I portray Tolkien dismissing source criticism to Tom twice for the simple reason that both Lewis and Tolkien had an aversion to source criticism. They both claimed that overly-ingenious theories as to an author’s sources were nearly always mistaken. Tolkien, for example, got tired of hearing that LOTR was an allegory of World War 2, and that the One Ring symbolized an atomic bomb. He pointed out that the basic outline of the story was in place long before that war or the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. Lewis and Tolkien also complained that source criticism too often undermines a close reading of the text by almost making a game of discovering what lies behind the text. This reduces the literary artist to a mere redactor of literary motifs rather than a creative synthesizer. (See Tolkien’s letters and Lewis’s “Fernseeds and Elephants” and “The Anthropological Approach.”)

I tried to keep my bibliography short, focusing on books that would help readers understand Lewis and Tolkien as we meet them in 1940. I didn’t leave out any contemporary critics as an ideological statement, but rather because their work focuses mainly on work that hadn’t been written at the time of the novel. (I myself have written a book on Lewis’s Ransom trilogy and one on the Narnia Chronicles, both of which discuss his creative sources. And I certainly didn’t leave out my own books as an implied criticism of my own scholarship!)

I think you are assuming I used Tolkien as a mouthpiece for my own opinions, when actually I was just portraying Tolkien’s own convictions–ones that I don’t wholly agree with, as seen in my other books.

That is good to hear – and you’re right that this was my assumption!

Your point, too, is certainly well taken that you’re not criticizing your own work by leaving them out of the bibliography. Before I let you off the hook on that one, though, I’m obliged to note you’re ducking my point. You aren’t writing as a revisionist critic. And I know you don’t think of Michael Ward’s CSL studies and Gavin Aschenden’s Williams work as anything like tit-for-tat allegorical interpretations like “Tolkien’s book is a World War II transparency.” Let me put my King “smuggled message” question a different way.

The recent cadre of Inkling scholars argue – and I’d say they argue cogently – that the accepted view of these men as essentially evangelical writers, “dinosaurs,” to risk Lewis’ self-description, advancing a devotional piety and Victorian morality, is too restrictive if not just wrong. They offer the Inklings as esoteric Christians with unconventional religious ideas and whose artistry and meaning is more nuanced and profound than the usual “Aslan is Jesus” exegesis allows.

Reading King in the context of this new and challenging critical perspective, I found your novel something of a counter-argument – and a compelling one — in defense of the misrepresented “old view.” King, in brief, seems both an explicit exposition and example of what you believe Inkling fictions were designed to do, in the same modes and on the scaffolding those authors used. It is an evangelical novel, it has Christian occult elements, and it offers three dimensional pictures of these scholars and friends writing books to be understood without decoder rings.

How far off am I in thinking Looking for the King is your non-discursive retort to Ward and Company on the subject of how the Inklings’ books are best understood?

I believe you are conjecturing about attitudes or motives that simply weren’t present in my (conscious) mind while I was writing the novel. (I’m beginning to see why Lewis was so concerned about what he called the “Personal Heresy”!)

I have to confess, I am not naturally drawn to mystagogic interpretations, secret meanings and patterns, what Lewis called “seeing figures in the fire.” I find that most such interpretations are usually derived from the ingenuity of the interpreter, not the ingenuity of the original author.

Let’s talk about King, which, again, I want HogPro readers to know, is simultaneously a lot of fun and carries a lot of Inkling freight. Readers, if you’ve read Lewis, Tolkien, or Williams, or all three, you’ll love this book.

I want to try some “source criticism” again, believe it or not: your story models. We have, as Thomas Howard writes in his book blurb, pointers both to Williams’ War in Heaven and to Lewis’ That Hideous Strength in your lead couple. My guess is that you modeled the young unmarried American couple, believer and “apathist,” on the married Studdocks of Strength (if only because of the depth and quality of your understanding of the Ransom finale).

Laura Hartman, with her visionary dreams, is an “homage” (a fancy word for ‘rip off’) to Pauline Anstruther in Williams’ DESCENT INTO HELL and Jane Studdock in THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH. But there is not too much resemblance beyond their power of “dreaming realities.” The young female characters in the Williams and Lewis novels are troubled and neurotic at the beginning of their spiritual journeys. Laura Hartman is more mature, spiritually settled, and sure of her convictions. She doesn’t change much as the novel progresses, except that she is more open to a relationship with Tom as the story progresses, once she sees that he is beginning to mature emotionally and spiritually.

Mark and Jane Studdock begin THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH as a pair of anchorless modern intellectuals whose marriage is in serious jeopardy. They both undergo spiritual transformation as the novel unfolds–Jane through her association with the community at St. Anne’s and Mark by the via negativa of undergoing (and recovering from) a Dante-esque descent into ever deepening circles of depravity at NICE. My characters in LOOKING FOR THE KING are at the tentative beginnings of a relationship, whereas the Studdocks are very near the end of one, unless they change directions—which they both do. So I don’t think the analogy with BOTH Studdocks and the “quarreling couple” archetype is very strong. Also, the banter between my two characters is often more light-hearted and flirtatious, whereas Mark and Jane can barely stand each other’s company for most of the novel.

I think, as I said above, that King is sub-titled “An Inklings Novel” not only because it features the Inklings and their students but also in its being written like an Inklings novel. Even on a first read, I was struck by the many front to back parallels, verbal direct echoes, story set-up and pay-offs — with the central story turn echoing and pointing to the story conjunction of beginning and ending – a macro-structure very much like Lewis’ Ransom Novels.

Yes, I do have the usual echoes and call-backs to provide an underlying, symphonic structure to the novel. The main action of the quest story begins and ends in Glastonbury, Tom’s suffers from physical vertigo in one scene, spiritual vertigo in a later one, etc.

Am I right, then, in thinking there is a two-fold meaning to “An Inklings Novel”?

Yes, I wrote a novel which featured several key Inklings as characters, but it is always written somewhat in the spirit of the Inklings, in that it is founded on a Christian understanding of the cosmos and of human nature.

But, as you have pointed out, the Inklings were by no means a monolithic group with common subjects for their stories or similar narrative styles. It is almost be easier to say why Looking for the King isn’t an Inklings novel in the second sense. It isn’t like Tolkien, since it takes place in a historical time and place on Earth, not in a sub-created world like Middle Earth. (The closest analogy to Tolkien would be his “Notion Club Papers,” his unfinished carnival-mirror portrait of the Inklings published posthumously.) And my novel isn’t very similar to Williams, because there are only passing references to the occult, and the book doesn’t delve into obscure symbolic paradigms to convey its meanings. (For the record, I have never belonged to the Order of the Rosy Cross!)  And it’s not like the first two books of the Ransom trilogy because it takes place on our own world. By default, that would make this novel most similar to That Hideous Strength, especially the first half of the book, before more and more fantasy elements begin creeping into the storyline.

You cite Glyer’s The Company They Keep in your bibliography and I heard echoes from it in reading your portrayal of the Inklings as a writer’s group and one in which the individuals all touched and shaped the others’ work.

To anticipate a criticism others may have, because this disconnect struck me, what I didn’t find in King was any sense of this group’s diversity and creative friction that Glyer details in Company. Barfield and the repercussions of the Great War on Lewis’ thinking are all but absent — and along with it the group’s consequent pre-occupation in this time period with discussions regarding the relation of subject and object. There’s none of the Catholic-Anglican-Anthroposophist-Occultist tension or any hint that these men aren’t sitting in the same congregational pews each week. And, as you know, they weren’t a happy, ecumenical bunch.

Actually, I didn’t read Diana Pavlac Glyer’s book until most of the novel typescript was finished. My most direct source was Humphrey Carpenter’s THE INKLINGS, plus the biographies of Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams listed in the bibliography. In the novel, I am portraying the Inklings in the spring and summer of 1940, which one might consider their “golden age,” as the tensions between Tolkien and Williams were not yet too apparent. Obviously, a novel portrays a slice in time, so it would be anachronistic to bring in Lewis’s “Great War” with Barfield from several years earlier or to dwell on tensions that emerged between Tolkien and Williams in the next few years.

In Looking for the King, I am introducing the Inklings as individuals to readers who may not know what they were like in real life. I am planning to write a sequel, set in 1942, in which the differences and tensions you describe will start to become more apparent. Tolkien will be more open about his disappointment that Lewis stopped his pilgrimage at Canterbury and did not continue on to Rome. He will also become increasingly annoyed with Williams and his interest in the occult, calling Williams “an old witch doctor” at one point (something Tolkien actually did say). The differences are there in Looking for the King, but they are latent. When Lewis talks about writing more popular theology, Tolkien replies that that sort of thing ought to be left to trained clergy. Tolkien shows no enthusiasm or support when Lewis floats the idea of writing his own children’s stories, and he clears his throat in rumbling disapproval when Williams assumes that the Spear of Longinus is the same as the bleeding lance of Arthurian romance. Note also that Williams, Tolkien, and Lewis have three different ideas about where Tom and Laura should look for the spear of destiny, each a product of their own values and interests. As I say, these differences will become more pronounced in the sequel–though it can be argued that tensions among the Inklings can be overstated, especially in those “golden years” of the late 30s and early 40s.

You are saying, then, that you are presenting the group historically, that is, with realist motives rather than as symbols or transparencies with spiritual referents. I jumped to that latter sort of reading because the Inklings you represent in the story didn’t seem realistic to me. The three principals are only superficially like, or, better, only essentially like the real-life because, as I said, they have none of their faults or misgivings about their friends (especially Tolkien-Williams). It’s border-line iconography, I thought, so a symbolist reading seemed appropriate.

Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien are given the most page space, the only personal interactions with our Jane and Mark, so I assumed – along the lines of this being “An Inklings Novel” doing what those novels do rather than just a novel featuring Inklings — that you wanted us to experience them imaginatively, say, as the perfected faculties of soul we know from Lewis’ ‘Men Without Chests’, that we see in the three hobbits on Mt. Doom or the Frodo-Strider-Gandalf triptych.

That’s not what you were after?

I can’t decide if you are giving me too much credit in my portrayal of the Inklings or too little credit! I intended these to be essentially realistic portrayals of Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams–admittedly idealized—even to the point of accurately portraying their appearance, style of dress, mannerisms, and habits of speech. As you can see from my endnotes (is that a first for a novel?), I tried to stay very close to the actual opinions and speech patterns of my principal characters. I don’t see any of the characters as “types” or ‘archetypes,” but simply as themselves, in so far as I can convey them in a relatively slim novel.

I suspect that, as a reader, you have a fondness for multi-layered novels with intricate arabesques of structure and symbol. I’m flattered that you suspect there may be Williams-esque “wheels within wheels” in this novel, but basically I just tried to give the plot enough wheels to carry it from the first chapter to the last.

Are you concerned that readers will find the implicit altar call for the True King at story’s end a little too heavy handed and easy? I do think Tom’s conversion makes my case, at least in part, that you’re writing “an Inklings novel” as you understand it rather than a book about Inklings.

The novel was published by a Christian press, Ignatius, so its underlying worldview may not appeal to those with a more open-ended and provisional approaches to spirituality.

I intended for Tom’s “epiphany,” I would call it (a more erudite and complimentary term than “altar call”!), to mirror Lewis’s own spiritual journey. Lewis spent most of his teens and twenties as a “foul-mouthed atheist,” as one acquaintance called him. But after a few years associating with Tolkien, Dyson, Coghill, et al, he underwent a major paradigm shift, feeling that his world was being turned upside down, as he said in Surprised by Joy. Lewis called himself “the most reluctant convert” (hence the title of my earlier book about Lewis’s spiritual pilgrimage), because he didn’t like the idea of submitting his will to Another.

Tom’s three months interacting with the Inklings is intended to be a telescoped version of Lewis’s own experience from about a decade earlier. That may be too “easy” for the reader, but it was apparently not at all easy for Lewis–or for Tom!

In my sequel, I will introduce Tom as having backslidden almost to the point of unbelief. He is like those old phosphorescent watch faces. If you held them close to a light, they would glow themselves for quite a while. But after too long in the dark, the light dims, the glory departs. At the end of this novel, Tom thinks he has reached a sort of spiritual summit. But later on, from back down below, the mountaintop will be shrouded in mists.

At HogwartsProfessor, readers have noted that the best-selling books of our time – Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games – as well as many older books – Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, Tale of Two Cities – have as their main character a story transparency for what Jesus calls the “heart,” Coleridge “Imagination,” and Lewis “conscience.” These novels work, the theory goes, because the reader’s heart recognizes and identifies with its story reflection.

King doesn’t have one of these. You didn’t include the ‘heart’ character, the Reepicheep, or the Christ, say, Aslan; no human seeker or Divine Mind, nor their conjunction. Lewis made this mistake in the Ransom books but corrected it in the Narniad. Because Voyage of the Dawn Treader is on our minds, Eustace Scrubb must be redeemed, but until he is, the reader needs a hero to identify, even elide with imaginatively. King lacks the Reepicheep equivalent, the cardiac mouse figure by which to gauge our right relation with Eustace/Tom in his changes.

Again, I’m not quite sure what you mean by a “heart character,” unless that is the character we are most emotionally involved with, rooting for. Tom McCord is the main character whose spiritual journey we are following. He starts out somewhat callow and ambitious, interested mainly in making a name for himself—by getting an Arthurian book published at the very least, but perhaps to become the one who proves that Arthur was indeed a historical figure. Notice how quickly he changes his quest, from a search for the historical Arthur to the quest for the spear. This is partly because he wants to be wherever Laura is. But ambition can be flexible and mercurial. So if he can make his name by locating the Spear, that will serve his ego-needs just as well, or better, than finding evidence for an actual King Arthur.

As the novel progresses, Tom’s straightforward quest to become “somebody” gets more complicated—first by attraction to Laura and seeing her other-centered personality, then by getting to know the Inklings as individuals. Far from being hungry for fame, Tolkien is writing his Rings epic mainly for his own amusement and in reverent practice of “Sub-creation,” creating imagined secondary worlds as an expression of the imago dei in him. (Lewis had to encourage and cajole Tolkien for years to get him to finish the Rings epic and submit it for publication.) The things the Inklings find so important—camaraderie, faith, story-telling—reveal to Tom sources of identity and fulfillment he hadn’t been considering.

That works. To push the Eustace analogue, I didn’t like Tom at the start but I enjoyed very much the deft way you presented his redemption. The conversations with the Inklings were perhaps too ideal for his transformation not to invite a symbolist reading, but as a depiction of a thoughtful man’s conversion, it delivers wonderfully.

Let me toss out another criticism of the book before I reveal too openly my admiration for it.

Looking for the King could have used more tension between boy and girl or sense of danger or urgency in their being followed. Tom’s concern about the barn doors at story’s climax seems like too much and too late. He hasn’t been afraid or even alarmed the whole book; why start now? For the union at end to have any sense of conjunctio oppositorum, too, you need to separate the pair in question (think the Green Lady and the King or Mark and Jane…). Was there anything in King but their occasional disagreement or misunderstanding to suggest how different and contrary they were? I missed that part.

Yes, I agree there isn’t too much sense of danger or jeopardy in the novel, at least until later chapters. I didn’t really conceive of the novel as a “thriller,” with gunfights, car chases, corpses in the closet. I think of it as more of a mystery; in many detective stories, the investigators are not themselves in jeopardy; they are simply trying to figure out what is going on. I conceived of the storyline somewhat in the vein of a Dorothy Sayers mystery of the BBC series “Foyle’s War.” Instead of starting with a murder, though, my starting point is the two ruffians who try to discourage Tom, but who only pique his interest in discovering some mysterious, priceless relic that they obviously don’t want him to find.

The Inklings were mainly writers, thinkers (and talkers!), not soldiers, spies, or smugglers. So any attempt to portray them as real-life characters is going to be a novel of ideas and conversation, more than one of pitched drama and overflowing passions. One radio interviewer referred to Looking for the King as a “cloak and dagger novel,” and I replied that I thought of it as “a cloak-and-lager novel.” After all, there are several scenes set in pubs in which the characters sit around with pints of ale discussing history and story, faith and doubt, the texture and meaning of ordinary events as well as extraordinary ones.

As I said, I am currently beginning work on a sequel, again set mainly in Oxford. At the end of Looking for the King, Tom says he may well return to England in uniform, and Laura longs to study at one of the women’s colleges. I plan for the two of the them to be re-united in Oxford  in 1942, this time with more palpable danger and a blossoming of their budding romance. Once again, they are going to face some secretive but menacing foes, and will need to call upon the help and advice of the Inklings. (In this novel you will see the divergence between the three more clearly.) I just learned recently that women were sometimes invited to attend social gatherings in Lewis’s rooms with several members of the group that later became famous as the Inklings. I am very optimistic that Laura will be granted this privilege.

We have a resident Dorothy Sayers reader at Hogwarts Professor; I know he’ll be distressed that his favorite doesn’t even stroll through a scene in King. Any chance of a Sayers cameo at one of these sequel open meetings or in a pub, with or without secret love-child? What a story that could be…

Sayers doesn’t come into the novel because she was never an Inkling; she was a personal friend to Williams and Lewis, but she never attended any Inklings meetings nor identified herself with this literary circle.

Back to why a book I like a lot probably won’t be more than an Inklings Society cult book: I think King may have tried to be too much — spiritual thriller, Arthurian ‘romance,’ and apologetic allegory, all at once. That is one of the reasons I really enjoyed it, though, and look forward to multiple readings of it; it’s a simple book but it is courageous in its reach and in standing against the current tide of criticism. Your implicit denial of hermetic, anagogical artistry and meaning a la Coleridge, Barfield, and Williams that revisionist critics are bringing to the fore, in what struck me as your defense-delivered-by-story of Old School Inkling reading, while I disagree with it, struck me as perhaps the best and most effective counter to Planet Narnia excesses.

Again you lost me in the passage about “implicit denial of hermetic, anagogical artistry.” I would assume that works of fiction should be judged on their own terms, not according to some a priori assumptions about how successful stories should be structured. I think of storytelling as more of an organic process that does not lend itself to preordained “rules.”  Interestingly, none of the theorists you name—Coleridge, Barfield, or Williams—produced any enduring fiction of the sort that may well have readers still poring over The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia Chronicles a hundred years from now. As the old saying goes, “There are three rules for writing successful fiction. But unfortunately no one agrees on what they are.”

I will leave off with that wonderful saying and by saying, “Thank you, Prof. Downing,” for your time today and especially for your novel, Looking for the King . I’m looking forward to discussing it with the serious readers at HogwartsProfessor and to reading the sequel you’ve mentioned.

[Readers interested in Prof. Downing's insights into the Dawn Treader film and about the Narnia franchise in Hollywood can find his review at IgnatiusInsight.com.]