The Narnia Letters

For over thirty years, I have taught literature and writing in higher ed, but my early forays into literary criticism were not promising. In fact, I came to dread the book report, a constant that marked my elementary school years. 
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The book report: read a book, prepare a talk, and create a visual. I loved the reading part, and apparently the talking part, because I always went on too long, rambling about the book to a captive audience.

However, when it came to the visual – I stunk.  I had no ability. I disliked arts and crafts (I preferred to be reading), and I always scored low on the poster or diorama, the only two real options available in the pre-digital world. Oh, the frustration which led me to dread the project: it tainted the practice I very much loved – reading. 

Now, I understand the problem was partly with an assignment that did not help me find ways to share my enthusiasm and instead imposed somewhat rigid expectations: summary and visual. Student creativity would be allowed for in the visual, but if one had no talent in that area, well then, that was that. And while my adult-self recognizes that teachers assigned the book report as an opportunity to learn about new books, my child-self only focused on the assignment as an opportunity to earn a good grade doing something I loved (reading) and to show off my own brilliance (look what a big book I read).

For in these early years, my reading was not generous – it was turned inward. I was jealous, competitive, and insecure – perhaps age-appropriate traits but not attractive ones. I was immature. I focused on whether my classmates listened to me, but during their presentations, I let my thoughts trail off, berating myself for my messy poster that could not compare to so-and-so’s, who, I happened to know, did not like to read. 

Then, in sixth grade, a momentous event happened: some random classmate presented on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, and I listened.

Not at first. Initially, my reaction was true to form. From my seat in the back, I could see a  drawing of the valiant mouse Reepicheep, which took up maybe one-third of the poster board. That was a good drawing. I began to wish desperately that I could draw. My mind wandered right out of the classroom, down a trail littered by my perceived failures, and then suddenly, I stopped. Why? I don’t know. Was the universe nudging me, a force calling from beyond?: “Pay attention; stop daydreaming; face your flaws and understand -- something is happening here that will form your life.”

I listened, and over the course of that report, although I didn’t know it, my relationship with reading changed. After that, my reading no longer focused solely on me and the page. A door opened, and I entered a place where people talked about books, listened to each other, and then forged their own opinions. I joined a world of conversation and connection.

That one fateful book report gave me a glimpse of what reading would do for me as an adult. Now I understand reading as an initially solitary activity which ultimately builds communities and connections.  Reading inspires me to choose generosity and kindness, to make friends. When I share a book I love with a friend, when a friend does the same with me, we invite each other into our souls, and if it’s a book one of us needs to read at that moment (as it so often is), we have helped each other survive the barrage of life’s trials. Friends and books, friends with books remind us that we are more than the sum of our problems.
 
Even now, over forty years later, I am surprised that before that report, I had never heard of Lewis and his wardrobe. As a child, I was an avid reader. The highlight of my summer vacations consisted of our weekly trips to the local library where we would stock up on books for the next six days. My choices varied wildly: I read domestic realism, historical fiction, fantasy, and yet I had never heard of Narnia.

On the day of that report, I went home and told my mother about the novel and the series, The Chronicles of Narnia. Overwhelmed by the demands of small children and domestic duties, my shy, reclusive mother did not conduct many conversations, but she dove into this one as she did into almost any book-centered discussion. I knew, from a young age, I could engage her full attention if I brought up reading.  She knew about Narnia; she also knew that many people chose to read the novel through a Christian lens, that Aslan the lion was a Christ figure and so on. This detail interested me, not for the religious implications but for the idea that a novel (not a parable, not a fable) could be about something more than the story and the plot, that fiction could contain allusions and abstractions that pointed to “deeper meanings.”   

In the middle-school years children begin to develop the capacity for abstract thinking. I was not a precocious sixth grader. I remember struggling in junior high to understand how a pie-making scene in Jack Schaefer’s Shane was about more than pie-making. (What was my classmate talking about?) However, my mother’s Narnia conversation showed me how to consider that stories were more than just stories (or entertainment); they could encourage us to reflect on how to live in the world.

My mother, a prolific reader, certainly knew this about reading, but had she actually read Narnia by the time of the book-report? I can’t remember (and I can no longer ask her because she has moved out of this world). She must have known about C.S. Lewis, as she knew about J.R.R. Tolkien. (I watched her read and reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.) Furthermore, her father was an English professor, and he had Lewis’ Four Loves on his bookshelf as well as other works of Lewis’s literary criticism. (I now have these very books, my grandfather’s copies, on my shelves.)  Lewis was part of the fabric of her childhood.

And while her parents were secular humanists, my mother was not. She went off to college, rejected their agnosticism, immersed herself in the study of Slavic languages, and began searching for a Christian tradition to embrace.  She met my immigrant father and chose his inherited Eastern Orthodoxy, encouraging him to participate with a convert’s enthusiasm. She would have been drawn to Lewis, his conversion story, and his Christian apologetics before I came home wondering about a talking lion and faun.

And yes, she went out to buy the complete set. I read it. She read it. My father read it. H, my friend, read it.
 
H, my best friend, lived forty-five minutes from us.  We spoke regularly on the phone (when long-distance bills were a serious consideration), and we saw each other on Sundays at a Greek church on Boston’s outskirts. After service, while our parents dawdled in coffee hour, H and I would wander the neighborhood streets, talking about the books we read and the movies we saw.

And eventually, we talked about Narnia.   

This point is perhaps the critical one. H and I read and reread those seven books over the course of the next four years. 

However, we did more than read. In the years before the internet and online fan fiction, we made ourselves characters in the stories: Princess Elena and Princess Aurora. We lived in Archenland and Narnia, and we wrote each other letters regularly, letters full of gossip and lengthy descriptions of new ball dresses: “This season’s gown is the color of sky at sunset, you know the pink/orange shade that the sun creates as it’s about to disappear . . .”  Our characters sent these letters to each other, and we sent them too, with stamps, via the US Postal service. Daily I ran to the mailbox, hoping to find a letter addressed to Princess Aurora at my childhood address from Princess Elena at H’s childhood address. On the weekends when we managed to have sleepovers, we would entertain ourselves by continuing the stories. One would start and then break at some random point so the other could take over. Hours we spent sitting in our bedrooms, telling those stories.

Why Narnia? Both of us were voracious readers, and we loved romantic tales, but we didn’t find or need romance in Narnia. Lewis’ Narnia tales were stories about friendship that led to redemption. One could be Edmund, mess up, and his friends, human and not, did not give up on him but helped him to find his way. Often those saviors were female. Lewis’s girls were powerful, strong: a girl like Lucy could help save the world. That was a powerful message for two girls entering adolescence and not liking it very much. We were happy to escape to Narnia, to leave behind crowded school hallways and the funk of teenage politics, family responsibilities, our social awkwardness. Narnia empowered children and allowed them to find and exhibit strength in very obvious ways (battling a witch, helping talking animals). Those seven books allowed us to live in that world for a long time. H tells me now that it felt like home, that she thinks we understood the books’ worldview: that all of us, no matter our age or physical, emotional, or material limitations, could fight for the good in the world; that despite our flaws, and we all had them, we were not completely broken. We could be strong, brave, and kind.

We didn’t know all this at the time. We couldn’t have explained it this way. We just read, and talked, and wrote and grew our friendship while doing all that.

I don’t remember when we stopped. Probably early in our high-school careers, when the academic pressure intensified. H is one year older and met the college demands earlier, but we both took Honors classes and had our eyes on the academic prize: acceptance to a competitive college. 

We won that prize; we went off to colleges a half an hour from each other, a mere shuttle bus away. Our friendship continued and still does today, but not the Narnia letters. And frankly, it’s been a long while since either one of us read the books. However, we maintain (and share readily) very strong opinions about new editions. When the books were renumbered, we were apoplectic. You cannot read The Magician’s Nephew first, we insisted. Why do we need chronological order? Did these revisionist publishers assume that children would not understand the concept of backstory? Did they have such a low opinion of their young readers’ intellectual capacity? In protest, we keep our childhood editions, with the older chronology on our shelves.  And sometimes, when we are talking on the phone or in person, one of us will say something like, “I saw this sweater, the color blue, you know that blue when the ocean is so clear you can see your feet, and the sun is high”. . . and we both start to laugh.
 
Something else I don’t remember. Did I introduce H to Narnia, or did she open the wardrobe before I did? I do remember that book report was a revelation, so I am sure H had not shared the title with me if she had read it. 

She doesn’t remember. She read one book, she thinks, The Horse and His Boy, without realizing that it was part of a series. Then she read the series. She thinks I might have gifted her the entire set one Christmas. 

On the one hand, this is strange to me. How can we not remember? How do we only discuss this detail now, roughly 40 years after the fact? Maybe that’s because who-read-it-first is not important. What is important: what we did with what we read once we shared that reading.
 
In “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “One must be an inventor to read well. . . There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.”

I share this passage with my students to emphasize that they are not just in the classroom to read and summarize but to create in response to what they read. I don’t want them to produce some version of my ten-year-old book report.  Instead, I ask them what they want to do with what they’ve read? Can they connect the ideas with other texts, with their lives?  Do they want to argue with a premise and create their own? Might they take their reading outside the classroom and respond in some non-academic way?

The Narnia stories inspired H’s and my creativity. We were not content to summarize but instead were inspired to participate. Our letters, our stories formed our responses and ignited our imaginations in a medium that I could use: words. While the visual component of the book report was made to inspire response, my lack of skill in that area kept me from doing so. I didn’t understand that I was supposed to respond, and maybe that was because visual art was not my medium. Twyla Tharp, in The Creative Habit, writes of our “creative code,” our “artist’s DNA” (37). We all have our own “code,” and it “determine[s] the forms we work in” (37).  I “work” exclusively in words (although I have been known to knit a hat). H, on the other hand, is gifted in many ways, but, in particular, she has an eye for images, which is reflected in the photos she takes, the ways she arranges a gift box, the pictures of ballgowns she drew in the Princess-Elena letters she sent.

But there is another creative energy that reading those books inspires: the energy of connection. H and I strengthened our friendship because we read those books. Although I had been an avid reader from first grade (late by the standards of today’s helicopter parents), I had thought of it as a solitary activity. Certainly, that was the case with my book reports; I did not use those to connect with others. It never occurred to me that I should or could. But with H and Narnia, something changed, and certainly this energy, this “creative” response, has informed my life since then.

My college roommate B and I continue to share book titles. We reach out to each other when our favorite authors publish a new book: writers like Elinor Lipman, Mameve Medwed, Terry McMillan, Anna Quindlen. I keep a book B gave me in college: John Jakes’ Heaven and Hell (we were avid fans of the North and South television miniseries, and Patrick Swayze was my celebrity crush). For one birthday, I gave B a copy of Anton Myrer’s Last Convertible, the 1978 novel that explores the collective friendship of five Harvard men from college to middle-age. What was it about that novel that attracted us? We both keep well-read copies on our respective shelves, now part of the landscape of our college memories. Then there is the group romance novel we began writing with dorm friends after reading the first novel of Lisa Kleypas (then, a young alum). Someone still has that draft.

Now, another friend M and I share cookbooks and essays about food. We sometimes cook for one another. E and I met in a graduate literary program, and we still share a love for poetry and some novels (although we have strong dissenting opinions on others). A college romance has transformed into a lovely middle-age friendship enhanced by our reading of novels we then “discuss” in emails and text messages. Granted, we do not always approve of each other’s choices. I still cannot fathom his disdain for the oh so moving Howard’s End.

C.S. Lewis famously wrote, “Friendship . . . is born at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .’” (78). That understanding permeates many of my friendships, but for the friendships forged in my early years, I don’t remember any one “moment” of recognition. Samuel Johnson (via Boswell) provides another framework: “We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over. So, in a series of acts of kindness there is, at last, one which makes the heart run over.”

Perhaps it is not necessary to know one “moment,” or “act.” Our friendships are not our romances. With romances, even when they ignite after a slow burn, we focus on “firsts,” and there are many: the first knowing look, the first date, the first kiss, and so on . . .

Friendships, however, to quote E, operate differently. We don’t have or need these markers.  Certainly, the case with H and me. With B, with E.  We share histories with many memories, but there was not one pivotal moment. 

Andrew Sullivan, in Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival, makes a similar point: “If love is sudden, friendship is steady. At the moment of meeting a friend for the first time, we might be aware of an immediate ‘click’ or a sudden mutual interest. But we don’t ‘fall in friendship’” (203). I don’t remember any “clicks” for my earlier friendships, but now, as an older person, plagued by time-sucking responsibilities, there are a few, particularly when there are obstacles. I meet a person and think “we could become good friends, if we can make the time.” Oh, the frustration: the lack of time to explore so many possible new relationships while nurturing my cherished older ones. However, my frustration gives me hope. I still “have it,” the desire, the ability to see possibilities for connection. Sometimes, in response, I give that person, my future friend, a book.  Now I realize what I’ve been doing: marking my place in their lives, hoping we will grow more together one day.  I am trying to create a space in our lives for each other.

And sometimes this happens: I will have known someone for some time. Our interactions are friendly but nothing more. Then somehow, we discover that we are both readers, and “click.”  Suddenly we are more than friendly acquaintances. 

So many of my strong relationships now are nurtured through reading – the sharing of titles, the gifting of books, the discussion of thoughts raised by something we read. I have forged friendships with seemingly unlikely candidates, but books cut through the external differences. We might seem incompatible due to personality, background, current life situation, but the love of reading, the love of books, the reading suggestions that fly back and forth, particularly when one of us is sad and needs a particular kind of book at a particular time – that is when we discover what we share: perhaps, in my life, these are the Lewis “moments” or the Johnson “drops.”   

My mother died very suddenly early one October Saturday, although we don’t know the exact moment she left this world. Instead, we were left with a series of drops.

A pain in her chest woke her up.  My father drove her to the crowded ER to have her pacemaker checked. In and out of the waiting room she went as they ran tests: in to test, out to sit with my father and me while we waited for some results, assuming this all was routine. We talked about books, the ones she had just finished. She scrolled through her digital reader.  They called her in for another scan. “I’ll need a wheelchair if you’re going to take me back there,” she said as she went through the double doors, shortly before her heart gave out. These were the last words I heard from her, and at the time I was just happy that she had demanded something for herself. 

By coincidence, H arrived from across the country the next day. We had planned she would spend two weeks at my house, taking advantage of pandemic-created remote working conditions. However, instead of deplaning into a whirl of coffee-dates and autumn-walks, she came into a cloud of mourning. My mother was like her second mother, my father another father. That’s how it was: my sisters, her sister and brothers: hers, mine and ours; our families had messy boundaries.

I told H that my four sisters and I would serve as my mother’s pall bearers; later that night, she texted me, from another room, a Moth podcast by Mary Kate O'Flanagan: a story of sisters who buried their father and carried his coffin to the grave. I shared this with my sisters, and I listened again and again. I was reminded of how artists of all types soothe us in the ways that science cannot, the ways hard "facts" delivered in the ER never will.

H and I have been finding solace in artists’ work for most of our friendship. The books we share, the stories we tell, the photos she sends from London business trips at Christmas – we soothe each other’s spirits.
 
Two days after my mother died, one day after H arrived, H and I made our way up to what was now just-my-father’s house. Sister K was there with him, and there was a package on the counter, newly arrived, from bookshop.org.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Something mom ordered,” my broken father said. 

Inside the brown cardboard sleeve, one of the last books my relentlessly book-buying mother would buy: Once Upon a Wardrobe by Patti Callahan, a story inspired by Narnia, C.S Lewis, and his talent for friendship. 

We were astounded. There it was: a good-bye to us. In many ways, my relationship with my mother did not reflect the idealized mother/child bond, but we shared a love of books. My reserved, reclusive mother always knew the “right” book for me, and she showered me with many of those “right” books. Book-sharing was her love language. She avoided crowds and parties, but if she met someone who liked to read, she started to talk. She talked to me, to H, and all those years she nurtured our love of Narnia with gifts of new copies, supplementary materials, and conversations at the kitchen table. 

Now it seemed that she was waving at us from the wardrobe door. She was off to find the places and characters we read and talked about. She would defeat the White Witch; she would join Aslan, and she would finally find her peace and joy.  
 
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Works Cited
Boswell,  James.  The Life of Johnson. 1791. James Boswell.info
https://www.jamesboswell.info/content/we-cannot-tell-precise-moment-when-friendship-formed

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” 1837. Digital Emerson: A Collective Archive.
http://digitalemerson.wsulibs.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/text/the-american-scholar

Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. Harcourt Inc., 1960, 1988.
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Sullivan, Andrew. Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival. Vintage Books,
1999.

Tharp, Twyla.  The Creative Habit. Simon and Schuster, 2006.
 
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Maria Jerinic is a faculty member and Associate Dean in the Honors College of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Also, she is a co-editor of and contributor to Finding Light in Unexpected Places (Palamedes Publishing 2019) and Finding Light in Unexpected Places Volume 2: Covid 19 Edition (Palamedes Publishing, 2022). Her academic and personal essays have appeared in a variety of print and digital  publications, including, for the latter category, Cocktails with Miss Austen; 9 Lives: Life in Ten Minutes; Literary Mama, and Herstories Project.