By the mid-1930s, Lewis’s tutorial load was heavy. We possess a number of accounts of Lewis’s approach to tutorials during the 1930s, all of which emphasise his acutely critical questioning, his desire not to waste time, and a certain degree of impatience with weaker or lazier students. Lewis did not see it as his responsibility to impart information to his students. He resented and resisted what some then called the “gramophone” model of tuition, in which the tutor simply imparted the knowledge that the student had so signally failed to discover for himself.
Lewis saw himself as enabling the student to develop the skills necessary to uncover and evaluate such knowledge for himself. For example, George Sayer (1914–2005) recalls Lewis using a strongly Socratic method in their tutorials of the mid-1930s, perhaps modelled on his experience when studying at Great Bookham under Kirkpatrick. “What exactly do you mean by the word sentimental, Mr. Sayer? . . . If you are not sure what the word means or what you mean by it, wouldn’t it be very much better if you ceased to use it at all?”364
The most perceptive account of Lewis as a tutor at this time is generally thought to be by John Lawlor (1918–1999), who became one of only two students to study English at Magdalen College in October 1936. Lawlor’s finely observed account of tutorials with Lewis captures something significant about both the man and his pedagogic method. He recalls the jovial and resonant bellow, “Come in,” when the student, wearing a black gown and nervously clutching his flimsy essay, clambered up the stairway and knocked on the doors of Lewis’s rooms; the red-faced bald man, dressed in baggy jacket and trousers, who would sit smoking in his shabbily comfortable armchair, doodling and occasionally taking notes, while the student read his essay for about twenty minutes; and the inevitable scrupulous examination of the essay that followed. Lewis had no hesitation in finding fault with what was said, and perhaps more important, with what had also been left unsaid.365
For Lawlor, it was not difficult to work out that Lewis did not really enjoy tutorials; students who made the experience more engaging and interesting were therefore especially welcome to Lewis. For at its best, as Lawlor rightly notes, the Oxford tutorial provides an “unmatched experience in intellectual exhilaration—a sight of wide horizons and a growing sense of . . . the mastery of the thing.”366 The tutorial was not simply about the accumulation of knowledge; it was also about developing critical thinking—fostering a spirit of analysing and evaluating important ideas or beliefs in an effort to calibrate their quality and to improve them, and to discover unexamined assumptions and challenge them.
Lawlor’s feelings towards Lewis changed as the term progressed. He gradually “passed from dislike and hostility to stubborn affection, and then to gratitude for the weekly bout in which no quarter was asked or given.” Yet for all the argumentativeness and rhetorical force of Lewis’s interaction with his students, Lawlor recalls a point of no small significance: “One thing Lewis never did, in any recollection I have of him. He never imposed his Christianity on the argument.”
By the 1940s, Lewis was famous. John Wain (1925–1994) recalls that students of that period would approach Lewis’s room through an “echoing antechamber of reputation,” to experience “dense clouds of smoke from a rapidly puffed cigarette or pipe,” a “brisk argumentative manner,” and above all “a love of debate.”367 Yet perhaps the most characteristic memory of Lewis’s tutorials concerns his personal appearance. Terms such as “shabby,” “untidy,” or “unkempt” occur frequently in accounts of Lewis the tutor from his students. Warnie once remarked on his brother’s “complete indifference” to the clothes he wore—such as his old tweed sports jacket, or a pair of slightly tattered carpet slippers. Lewis was a heavy smoker, usually puffing a pipe during tutorials, with clouds of smoke enveloping the room. Lewis’s habit of using his carpet as an ashtray added further to the general impression of grand decrepitude usually then associated with confirmed bachelors living on their own.
Yet Lewis’s untidiness was seen with affection by his students—a sign of his indifference to external matters, arising from his love and knowledge of deeper and more significant matters. Furthermore, it fitted perfectly with an Oxford stereotype of that period—the bachelor don, whose only female company was an ageing mother. It suited Lewis perfectly to be characterised in this way, in that it deflected attention from the true nature of his unusual domestic arrangements.
One of Lewis’s abilities must be noted here, for it is of obvious relevance to his gifts as a writer: his formidable memory. Lewis’s mastery of the Renaissance skill of the ars memorativa unquestionably contributed to the success of his Oxford lectures, enabling him to recite quotes from memory. Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980), an “angry young man” of the 1960s, whom Lewis tutored in the 1940s, recalls Lewis playing a memory game with him. Tynan would read aloud a line he had arbitrarily chosen from a book he had selected from Lewis’s library. Lewis would then identify the work in question, and set the line in its proper context.368
Lewis, it seems, could remember texts primarily because he had absorbed their deep inner logic. His diaries bear witness to his habit of reading an astonishing number of texts; his personal library contains annotations indicating when a book was first read, and then read again. He was good at explaining complex ideas to others, because he had first explained them to himself: “I’m a professional teacher and explanation happens to be one of the things I’ve learned to do.”369 Lewis achieved this feat partly by neglecting other sources of reading—such as daily newspapers. As a result, even his friends sometimes found him worryingly ignorant of current affairs.
William Empson (1906–1984), a leading literary critic who had little time for Lewis’s views on Milton, nevertheless declared that “he was the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read.”370 It showed. Students attending his lectures were impressed by his grasp not simply of the texts of leading works of literature—above all, Milton’s Paradise Lost—but his deeper grasp of their internal structure. Rarely did university lectures both inform and inspire; yet these quickly became the hallmarks of Lewis’s academic lecturing style.
Lewis the Teacher: Oxford Lectures
With such a capacity for memorization, it was perhaps inevitable that Lewis would deliver his lectures without notes. Lewis gave his first lectures at Oxford in October 1924. Even then, he had decided that he would not speak from a full text. Lectures that were simply read out to their audiences, he explained to his father, tend to “send people to sleep.” He would have to learn to talk to his audiences, not to recite his lectures to them.371 He had to engage their attention, not merely discharge information.
By the end of the 1930s, Lewis had established a reputation as one of Oxford’s finest lecturers, drawing crowds that others could only dream of attracting. His robust, resonant, clear tone—described by one hearer as a “port wine and plum pudding voice”—was ideal for lecture podiums. Lewis spoke only from brief notes, which typically identified quotes that were to be used, and points that were to be made. The fluent performance which followed dazzled most of the audience. Perhaps this was just as well, as Lewis did not allow time for questions at the end of his lectures. His lectures were a rhetorical event, a theatrical performance, complete in their own terms. Like a Renaissance artist, Lewis threw open a window on a larger landscape,372 extending his audience’s vision.
It was inevitable that Oxford University would formally recognise Lewis’s abilities. Although Lewis held only a college appointment as tutorial fellow in English at Magdalen, the university bestowed additional titles upon him in recognition of his widening academic role. From 1935, he appears in official Oxford University publications as a “faculty lecturer in English literature”;373 from 1936, as “University lecturer in English literature.”374 While remaining based at Magdalen College, Lewis was gaining wider recognition within the university as a whole. The publication of his Allegory of Love in 1936 would enhance the esteem in which he was
held still further.
Lewis’s most famous Oxford lecture courses were two sets of sixteen lectures, entitled “Prolegomena to Medieval Studies” and “Prolegomena to Renaissance Studies.” These lectures displayed a vast range of reading in the primary sources, arranged and explained in terms that were both accessible and interesting. The substance of these lectures, developed over many years, would eventually appear in his The Discarded Image (1964). Lewis made no secret of the fact that he found deep satisfaction in these older ways of thinking. “The old Model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors.”375
7.1 The Examination Schools, close to Magdalen College, where Lewis delivered many of his lectures during his career at Oxford University. Completed in 1892, when this photograph was taken, these buildings acted as both examination rooms and lecture theatres for the university.
Yet it would be unfair to dismiss Lewis as antiquarian and backward looking. His point, as we shall see, is that the study of the past helps us to appreciate that the ideas and values of our own age are just as provisional and transient as those of bygone ages. The intelligent and reflective engagement with the thought of a bygone era ultimately subverts any notion of “chronological snobbery.” Reading texts from the past makes it clear that what we now term “the past” was once “the present,” which proudly yet falsely regarded itself as having found the right intellectual answers or moral values that had eluded its predecessors. As Lewis later put it, “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”376 The quest for a philosophia perennis—a deeper view of reality that underlies all things at all times—was unquestionably one of the factors in leading Lewis to rediscover the Christian faith.
Yet some at Oxford around this time formed the impression that Lewis saw his obligatory tutoring and lecturing as getting in the way of the thing he really wanted to do—write books. Tutorials and lectures might inform those books; nevertheless, Lewis preferred reading books and discussing them with informed colleagues—the Inklings being a case in point—to listening to somewhat amateurish and uninformed evaluations of their significance from his students. In what follows, we shall look at Lewis’s first prose work, and explore how it both illuminates his past and foreshadows his future.
The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933): Mapping the Landscape of Faith
In January 1933, Lewis wrote to Guy Pocock, an editor at the London publishing firm of J. M. Dent. Would they be interested in publishing a book he had just completed? It would be “a kind of Bunyan up to date”377—a reference to John Bunyan’s classic Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–1684). Lewis’s hesitant tone in this letter clearly reflects some embarrassment about the poor sales figures of his earlier work Dymer. He hastens to assure Pocock that this new book would be published under his own name. Within three weeks, Pocock had made the decision to publish The Pilgrim’s Regress.
Lewis wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress, his first novel, in a burst of sustained literary activity between 15 and 29 August 1932, while visiting his close friend and confidant Arthur Greeves at his Belfast home, Bernagh. (This was just across the road from Lewis’s own recently sold childhood home, Little Lea.) Lewis’s first prose book is best understood as an imaginative mapping of the landscape of faith. As both its title and the correspondence with Pocock suggest, this book can be thought of as taking its inspiration from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Yet it is important to approach this work on its own terms, and not to expect it to be either a simple retelling of Bunyan’s allegory for the modern age or a narrative account of Lewis’s own conversion. For Lewis, the key issue he wanted to explore was not the personal story “Lewis meets God,” but the intellectual issue of how reason and imagination may be both affirmed and integrated within a Christian vision of reality.
The Pilgrim’s Regress can be read at several levels. It is most plausibly read as Lewis’s attempt to clear his mind—to put into words and images the processes of thought that had shattered his settled intellectual world during the previous three years. Lewis’s conversion had forced him to redraw his intellectual maps, renegotiating his “treaty with reality.” The new “treaty with reality,” set out in this early work, creates space for reason and imagination within an ordered world. It offers meaningful norms and criteria of evaluation without degenerating into either the anti-intellectualism of more extreme forms of Romanticism, or the emotionally impoverished forms of rationalism that eliminate the transcendent as a matter of principle.
Lewis was a strongly visual thinker, often using images to make important philosophical and theological points—for example, his famous image of the beam of light in a dark toolshed to make a distinction between “looking along” and “looking at.” The Pilgrim’s Regress is not a philosophical defence of faith, but the construction of an almost medieval mappa mundi—a cosmographical account of the situation in which humanity finds itself and its struggle to find its way to its true goal and destiny. Lewis treats the ability of the map to make sense of human experience as an indication of its reliability.
To many readers today, this work seems opaque and complex, peppered with a needlessly large number of difficult quotations. This sense of an impenetrable text (Lewis himself later admitted the book’s “needless obscurity”378) is perhaps heightened by the book’s original title, Pseudo-Bunyan’s Periplus: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism, wisely shortened when Lewis corrected the proofs. Lewis himself seems to have belatedly realised the difficulties that many readers experienced in engaging with his first book, and appears to have learned from this in his later writings.
Most modern readers find The Pilgrim’s Regress to be like a cryptic crossword puzzle. It provides baffling clues about people and movements in English intellectual and cultural life in the 1920s and early 1930s that need to be decoded and disentangled. Whom did Lewis have in mind when he wrote about “Mr. Neo-Angular”? In fact, Lewis had T. S. Eliot in his gunsights here. Yet most readers will wonder what all the fuss is about. By making his book so focussed on intellectual and cultural movements of his own time, Lewis made himself less intelligible to later readers, who don’t know these people or movements, or why they might be important.
Lewis himself realised there was a problem. By 1943, a decade after the work’s original publication, Lewis conceded that there had been a “profound change” in patterns of thought,379 so that the movements he described were no longer familiar to many readers. The world had moved on; old threats had passed into history, and new ones arisen. In one sense, The Pilgrim’s Regress is likely to be of interest mostly to intellectual historians. It is now one of the least read of Lewis’s works.
Yet the work can be read without the need to make such connections. Indeed, Lewis himself condemned “the pernicious habit of reading allegory as if it were a cryptogram to be translated.”380 The best way to understand this book is to see it as a quest for the true origins, objects, and goals of human desire. Inevitably, this involves identifying and critiquing “false turns,” which Lewis often engages in such detail that he loses his readers’ attention. In what follows, we shall explore the main themes of the work, without becoming trapped in the fine details of Lewis’s analysis.
The central character of The Pilgrim’s Regress is the pilgrim—“John”—who has visions of an Island that evokes a sense of intense yet transitory longing. At times, John is overwhelmed by this yearning as he struggles to understand it. Where does it come from? What is he yearning for? A subsidiary, yet important, theme concerns a sense of moral obligation. Why do we long to do right? Where does this sense of obligation come from? And what does it signify—if anything? For Lewis, human experience—moral and aesthetic—is littered with false attempts to understand this sense of longing, and equally false understandings of this longing’s true object. The Pilgrim’s Regress is basically an exploration of these false turns along the road of life.
Like many before him, Lewis chose to describe this philosophical quest in terms of a journey. He use
s the image of a road leading to the mysterious Island, with badlands on either side. To the north lie objective ways of thinking based on reason; to the south, subjective ways based on emotion. The farther John departs from the central road, the more extreme these positions become.
It is clear that the relationship between reason and imagination is of critical importance to Lewis. The Pilgrim’s Regress defends rational thought against arguments based purely on feeling, yet refuses to accept an exclusively rational approach to faith. For Lewis, there has to be a position which reconciles reason and imagination, as indicated in his sonnet “Reason,” probably written in the 1920s. This poem contrasts the clarity of reason (symbolised by the “maid” Athene) with the creativity of the imagination (symbolised by Demeter, the earth-mother). How, Lewis wondered, might these seemingly opposed forces be reconciled?381
As the narrative of The Pilgrim’s Regress proceeds, it becomes clear that such a reconciliation can be provided only by “Mother Kirk”—an allegorical figure which some have interpreted specifically as Catholicism, but which Lewis clearly intended to be an image of nondenominational Christianity. This was the “mere Christianity” of which the Puritan writer Richard Baxter (1615–1691) wrote, and which Lewis increasingly came to expound in the 1940s.
As John travels north of the road, he encounters ways of thinking which are deeply suspicious of feeling, intuition, and imagination. The coldly and clinically “rational” northern region is the realm of “rigid systems,” wooden orthodoxies characterised by “an arrogant and hasty selectiveness on some narrow a priori basis,” which leads to the incorrect conclusion that “every feeling . . . is suspect.” To the south of the road, however, he encounters “boneless souls whose doors stand open day and night” to anyone, especially those who offer some kind of emotional or mystical “intoxication.” “Every feeling is justified by the mere fact that it is felt.”382 The rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment, romantic art, modern art, Freudianism, asceticism, nihilism, hedonism, classical humanism, and religious liberalism are all located on this map, only to be tried and found wanting.
C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 18
