Elizabeth Turner chatted with Douglas Gresham, Narnia producer and stepson of C.S. Lewis recently on Caspian, imagination, and moral formation.
In looking over Prince Caspian, one of the things that strikes me is the very tangible, sensory feel of the book, which of course will translate well into the movie, and having been to the Kilns, and noticing the setting there, I just feel like it’s a place that easily spurs the imagination.
DG:
Well I certainly think so, I grew up there! But I think it certainly spurred my imagination.
Do you think that there were any places in particular that were especially fruitful for him in crafting these stories and being surrounded in that environment?
DG:
Well I think certainly walking through the woods and around the lake behind the Kilns, would stimulate anyone’s imagination, particularly to do with nature and the lovely mythical creatures that inhabit nature – fauns, centaurs, dryads and nyads, all those people almost haunt the Kilns and the wood and lake to this day.
What was it like for you, the first time meeting him, as the author of these stories?
DG:
Well you have to remember a few things, get the backstory on this: I was a little American boy from upstate New York and I had read the Narnia Chronicles – those that had been published by that stage – I had read the legends of King Arthur and the knights and all of that sort of thing and I was fascinated by that whole thing, so when I got to England at the age of eight and found everyone to be very strange, incidentally, compared to what I was used to, I sort of expected Jack to be a tall, stalwart man wearing silver armor and carrying a sword. Because this man was on speaking terms with High King Peter and the Great Lion Aslan of Narnia. But then of course when I did meet him, he was a stooped, balding professorial looking gentleman, with long, nicotine-stained fingers and teeth and shabby clothes. He was nothing like the image, the sort of phantasm I had erected in my own mind. But his enormous vibrant personality soon eradicated any disillusion I might have, any disappoint I might have in him. And I lost an illusion to gain a friend. Because he was such a wonderful man to be with, you couldn’t be with Jack for more than four or five or ten minutes without roaring with laughter, he was a man of great fun all the time. So I was delighted when I got to know him, though initially I was just a little bit disappointed.
He seems to have had, among his many talents, a particular talent for comforting those who found themselves in different kinds of battle – I’m thinking of his BBC radio addresses, the fact that the LWW begins with children having to be removed from London due to battle, and of course the Screwtape Letters, in a spiritual way. Keeping in mind that he himself was a veteran, how do you see the battle and the conflicts, particularly in a story like Prince Caspian?
DG:
Well we have to remember as you point out that Jack had been a veteran, but more than that, he had fought through six months or more of one of the most horrible conflicts that man has ever inflicted on the planet. He knew the absolute desperateness of being in the trenches, of living in the trenches. In other wars, men go to the battlefield and fight their battle and then go home. In the First World War you went to the battlefield and there you stayed and lived and died – months, years sometimes. It was an amazingly horrible conflict. Jack had learnt an awful lot through that experience, but then of course he was no stranger to personal battles. Before that even, he had lost his mother when he was nine, to cancer, he had been sent away from his beloved northern Irish home to England, to a school which was Dickensian to say the least. He’d been through the mill, he understood what pain was, he understood what temptation was, and he was able to use all of those experiences in the writing of fiction, and it comes through very strongly in his understanding of human nature; his understanding of human beings is amazing.
Do you think some of those personal battles – you mention when his mother died when he was young – feed into his understanding of children’s desire to be taken seriously?
Yes I think they probably did. There was nothing worse than for an intellectual child, an intellectually gifted child, to be taken not seriously. The trouble is, that most teachers, however good they may be, most of the time are dealing with rather simply mediocre children. When they come across a child who’s intellect is something like Jack’s, where his intelligence is extremely high, it’s very difficult for them to relate to those children. And I think Jack did suffer a great deal because of that. And I think that did affect his whole attitude toward the adult world. And therefore enabled him to understand and portray much more accurately the trials and tribulations of children, which come through very strongly in the Narnia Chronicles.
I read once that you and others found him to be extremely “available,” that in his modeling of a Christian man he was available. How do you see that posture that he embodied related to faith? Whether it’s Lucy being available to see Aslan, or our availability to the transcendent? How do you feel that those are portrayed?
Well I think that they’re portrayed very well in various characters throughout the Narnian Chronicles, and particularly in Prince Caspian, with Reepicheep for example, and with Lucy. But I think the availability of people, of one human being to others, is an essential part of what’s availability to God. Which is to be a Christian – and I don’t use that term lightly – I mean someone who really wants to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, believes not only in Jesus, but also believes Jesus. But the first thing one has to learn is to be available to his work. And once one has learnt that, and made oneself available, all sorts of other things flow from that. And Jack’s sense of availability in his protagonists throughout all his literature is amazing, and extremely educating for all of us.
How deliberate do you think he was – how do you think he understood – the interplay of narrative and building virtue? Because availability to others and God is a sensitive character trait. There are other virtues, like courage, or truthfulness embodied in the children’s stories.
Yes, but don’t run away with the idea that strengths such as courage and truthfulness are anything less than further explanations of availability. One cannot become sensitive to others unless one is available to them and to God. One cannot imbue courage in one’s behavior unless one has already assigned oneself to God from whom all courage flows. I think these things are all part and parcel of what Jack was, which was a deeply committed Christian man.
Do you think that fiction functions differently than non-fiction in forming ideas, and loves, and even the soul?
Well being somewhat of a cynic about modern literature I would go so far as to say that non-fiction doesn’t, in fact, perform very well in forming anything, much, in forming ethics, morals, or indeed any real values. I think fiction is the vehicle through which one can teach far more effectively what we need to know. I mean, the Narnian Chronicles are those books in today’s world that epitomize the teaching of the great concepts of the 19th century. Such things as personal responsibility, commitment, chivalry, courage, duty, and so forth. All of those things are to be found in fiction and very few are to be found in non-fiction.
How do you think the role of imagination functions in that?
Imagination is absolutely essential, because one has to come up with scenario, and characters, and different worlds, and different environments to stimulate the interest and the fascination of one’s reader. Therefore one’s imagination is the most powerful tool one has when writing fiction.
And what role do you think imagination plays – for instance as a child sits and reads the Chronicles of Narnia, or goes and sees it in a theater – that their imagination helps to make them available to modeling and mimicking certain virtues?
Well I think it’s only imagination that can do this. One of the biggest criticisms I would have of modern video games – most modern video games – and so forth is that they provide everything that the imagination should provide. And therefore they leave no area for the creativity of the child’s own mind. We’ve tried to avoid that in our Narnia video games, by presenting scenarios in which the imagination of how you behave in those scenarios plays a very large part. But I think the problem with television programs today and most of these sorts of things, is they provide what the imagination should be providing and therefore the imagination simply atrophies. It’s vitally important that young people, and older people too, have their imaginations stimulated, baptized, by such wonderful works as the Narnian Chronicles.
Do you think that lack of exercise of the imagination hinders the development of character and virtue?
Yes, very much so. And I think the lack of imagination throughout one’s upbringing results in such regimes as the Third Reich and the People’s Republic of China and places like that, where totalitarianism takes over. In other words, instead of imagining things, and devising things in one’s own mind which will guide one through the morass of difficulties involved in learning ethics and morality, one simply doesn’t learn to function. Never has, never will.
Jack seems to have been comfortable in trying to express and communicate truth both in fiction and in non-fiction, and I would love to hear your thoughts on fiction as it incarnates truth, because many of our readers are people who are very devout in reading scripture and so on. What are your thoughts on the creative, artistic value of taking truths from scripture and creeds and portraying them in the mane of a lion or the sweater of a little girl?
Well I think the imagination applied to such things as scripture is desperately important, because we are presented in scripture with a whole lot of scenarios which we do not actually have a complete grip on because we live in a very different time and a very different world to that in which the scripture were written. Imagination and imaginative fictional renditions of these things allow us to get much, much closer to grips with the realities that lie behind them. The situation’s we’re facing with today such as drugs in our streets, and gun crime, and all of these sorts of things, are things that haven’t happened for a long time and didn’t happen in biblical times. But the same temptations that affected those men back in the biblical times are the same temptations that affect us today. So a fictional rendition of how this works is enormously important to us. And I think the Narnian Chronicles, particularly Prince Caspian, and later the Dawn Treader, are wonderful, wonderful exposees of how this happens. And what to do about it.
It’s interesting that sometimes, I think, things that appear to be complex dilemmas to adults are stripped away –
Are ultimate simplicity, it’s just our own social mores that make them look complicated. And also the work of the Enemy who wants to make everything good look very complicated and difficult, when in fact, it’s very simple and very easy.
What’s your hope for transforming these books into movies? What’s your hope for what they will do for children growing up in our world today?
Well I hope, sincerely, and I think the first already has to a great extent, but I hope they will baptize children’s imaginations, they will provide children with the realization that those great qualities that I enunciated earlier of chivalry, and courtesy, and personal responsibility, and personal commitment, and honesty, and justice – all of those things – are not something that are simply out of date, because we talk in the 20th century as if they no longer matter to us, but are vital to the lubrication of human society. And we need to get them back, and when we do get them back, things run perfectly. To educate children into the ways that people should behave in the world is I think enormously important. And I’m not simply talking the Christian fashion, for children of all race, creeds, colors, in fact even alien races from other planets I think would probably benefit from – if there are any – from reading the Narnian Chronicles and seeing the movies. So I hope these movies will give children a great deal of hope, a great deal of faith in the fact that their future is very important. They – the children of the world – are the most important people in the world, because they are the only future the world has. So I hope that they will get greatly entertained, and by that entertainment greatly educated at the same time.
Are you going to be heading to Oxbridge this summer?
I really don’t know the answer to that, I’m co-producing four movies at the present, my time is somewhat limited. But I expect to be, this summer, deeply involved in pre-production on the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I’m already deeply involved in pre-production on Screwtape, and I think that will be building from now on. And I want to start talking seriously about getting pre-production started on the Silver Chair, so I expect I’m going to be rather busy this summer.
Do you have a time when Screwtape will be coming out?
We don’t have dates yet, no, the only stages are pre-production, but I would imagine it would be sometime in 2010.
Anything else that you’d like to express for your hopes, or your relationships with the man, and his characters?
You know people ask me – I’ve lived in so many countries that when people ask me today, where do you come from, I almost invariably say, “Narnia.” Because that’s the place that’s closest to my heart, in a sense. And I think that all people who go to see these movies will develop a longing to be in Narnia, and I think they’re absolutely right to do so. But my hopes for the movies? Well, there are several. I really hope that people enjoy them enormously. People from all ages and from all backgrounds. And I also hope that we make enough money out of this one to have enough budget to make the next one. And that all depends on the public support of our movies. You know, the more people go and see them, the more chance we have of making the next Narnian Chronicle. It is also our ambition, or my ambition, particularly, to make sure that each of our Narnian films is better than the last.
We’re very thankful for the work that you’re doing, and we’re excited to see it come out on screen, and are excited to see the recruitment of more citizens of Narnia.
Thank you.