C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  Meanwhile, the doctor continued to be a friend whom he enjoyed meeting in the evenings. The roughness and sheer wild irrationality of Lewis’s domestic persona were matched by the genuinely warm-hearted impulse which had led him to befriend Havard in the first place.

  Havard, who came to be nicknamed ‘Humphrey’ (because this was what one member of the group thought was his name) and sometimes the UQ or Useless Quack, came to be a much loved friend of them all. His presence among them was highly symptomatic. There was nothing of ‘the ivory tower’, nothing ‘donnish’, about Lewis’s intelligence. In all his talk, and in his writings, he addressed the sympathetic, lively minded ‘general reader’ or ‘average man’. Even his learned writings have the readability and freshness of appeal of ‘popular’ work; indeed, the distinction between ‘learned’ and ‘popular’ is one which seems in reading Lewis to be quite false. And one feels this even when he is at his most learned.

  In all available time not devoted to teaching, to domestic life or to friendship, Lewis had been hard at work, ever since the late 1920s, on the book which was to become The Allegory of Love. Letters to his father in 1928 revealed how he had grown to love the oldest part of the Bodleian – Duke Humfrey’s Library. ‘If only one could smoke and if only there were upholstered chairs, this would be one of the most delightful places in the world.’ Others who have appreciated the painted ceilings, mullioned windows and carved bays of that supremely beautiful room must have felt that one of its great charms resided in the absence of modern furniture and tobacco smoke. Be that as it may, it was here that Lewis began to build up his encyclopaedic knowledge of late medieval literature. As far back as 1925, he had dreamed of a complete history of the love allegory from Ovid to Spenser, and by 1928 two chapters of a more modest scheme, starting with the Provençal troubadours, were finished. But Lewis’s conception of the book changed as he himself changed, and nothing much more got written until 1931.

  The substance of his book – the history of allegorical love literature from the early Middle Ages to the late sixteenth century – was worked out in lectures to undergraduates. Lewis had a distinctive manner of lecturing, which was not greatly altered over the years. He began speaking as soon as he entered the lecture-room, which he generally did five minutes after the hour. He finished five minutes before the hour. He spoke slowly, sometimes at dictation speed, if quoting an author whom he thought his audience should not miss. The lectures were delivered in a full, deep, slightly Irish version of the Oxford voice (‘Lat’n’ for Latin, and rolled Rs), enlivened with amusing analogies and examples from modern life and literature. He had his father’s gift for sensing what sort of an audience he was addressing, and adapting his matter accordingly. He told jokes well. His lectures were above all popular because he packed them with information. Clever undergraduates liked them because of their enormous range. Lazy undergraduates liked them because Lewis did half their work for them – providing summaries of books they would never get around to reading themselves, and lightening his commentaries with entertaining asides. But it was not until the early 1930s that The Allegory of Lave began to take shape as a book, and it was not finished until 1935. It is a phenomenal compendium of lightly worn, deeply read learning, and in every page we see why Lewis was such an inspired teacher. He unselfconsciously expects the reader to be as interested as he is in Jean de Meung or Alanus. In consequence we are, or wish that we were. What is more, it is a big-hearted, generous book. Lewis does not set out to make himself cleverer than the reader, still less cleverer than the authors whom he is discussing. Like an enthusiastic guide in a foreign country, he is anxious to share with us the unexpected treasures he has found and which we might, without his help, have missed. Indeed, if he has a fault as a critic it is in his boyishly enthusiastic generosity towards authors – Thomas Usk, Lydgate – who are not really as interesting as he makes them sound. It is not that he lies about them, rather that only a patient and omnivorous prospector would have found the particular treasures which he quotes. The treasures are real enough. But who would guess, for example, having read some of the Lydgate he quotes –

  And as I stoode myself alloone upon the Nuwe Yeare night,

  I prayed unto the frosty moone, with her pale light

  – what a dull time we should have if we tried to read our way through The Fall of Princes? Supremely, however, this generous desire to show us the best in an author is manifested in his long chapter about Spenser, and there he marks himself out not as a kindly eccentric, but as a pioneer of modern taste. Thanks very largely to Lewis, Spenser is now once more regarded as one of the greatest English poets, having sunk into almost total obscurity before The Allegory of Love was written.

  Moreover, in showing us what he loves about The Faerie Queene, he shows us in embryo what he hardly knows at this point himself: the sort of books which he himself will excel at. In his descriptions of Spenser’s Christian purpose, his blending of allegory with adventure, his use of homely familiar figures, like St George, side by side with figures from a much older mythology and figures from his own imagination, Lewis is actually writing a recipe for how to construct the Narnia chronicles.

  There is never a moment’s dullness in The Allegory of Love. Its readability partly consists in the enthusiasm which has already been mentioned, and in the liveliness and unexpectedness of the examples: the comparison of Boiardo’s fantasies with Mickey Mouse; the likening of Spenser’s Radigund to Simla memsahibs in Kipling.13 But the essential and unifying feature of the book is the voice of the author. One could say very certainly, therefore, that the book could not be complete until Lewis as a ‘character’ was complete. He is not afraid to come before us in this book as a full-blown figure, someone who is quite recognizable (from earliest school letters and the accounts of Kirkpatrick) as ‘the real Lewis’ but who is also, for the first time, ‘found’ as an artistic voice.

  Johnson once described the ideal happiness which he would choose, if he were regardless of futurity. My own choice, with the same reservation, would be to read the Italian epic – to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight hours of each happy day.14

  Part of the pleasure of reading Lewis, when it is a pleasure, is meeting with this figure. Few academics would think it proper to bring themselves before the reader in this way, particularly in a work of learning. But the important point is not that they would hesitate to do it, but that we would not be interested if they did. Part of Lewis’s discovery of himself as a writer was the discovery of a means of presenting himself to the reader. It is the rhetoric of Romanticism – ‘the egotistical sublime’ – and not everyone liked or likes it.

  Barfield, to whom he dedicated The Allegory of Love, describes a moment when he read Lewis’s ‘Open Letter to Dr Tillyard’. Tillyard, one of the foremost Milton scholars of his day, had suggested that we can only fully understand Paradise Lost when we understand the man who wrote it. For Lewis, this was ‘the personal heresy’, a vivid example of which would be the present biography, which seeks to shed light on a man’s work by researching into the recesses of his mind and the outward events of his life. It is typical of Lewis’s later self that he should have seen no virtue at all in Tillyard’s approach, and that furthermore he should have labelled it ‘heresy’. What struck Barfield, however, was the manner in which this slightly absurd debate was conducted. ‘We have both learnt our dialectic in the academic arena where knocks that would frighten the London literary coteries are given and taken in good part; and even where you think me sometimes too pert you will not suspect me of malice. If you honour me with a reply it will be in kind; and then, God defend the right!’

  Barfield describes how he read this sentence, slapped down the book and shouted: ‘I don’t believe it! It’s pastiche!’15 While such thoughts were inevitable for those who knew Lewis before the great change came upon his life, it was not quite right to speak of ‘pastiche’. It
was all a bit odder than that. After he became a Christian, Lewis did completely change his view not only of his own personality but of human personality in general. ‘My own empirical self is becoming more important,’ he wrote to Barfield, ‘and this is exactly the opposite of self-love.’

  It is said that when he heard his own voice on the radio, some seven years after writing this letter, Lewis was surprised and in some measure disconcerted. In a similar way he might have been surprised by the figure he cut in prose or come to that in life. But he was in no sense putting on an act. The strange locutions, the shabby clothes, the combination of kindliness and brusqueness, the strong ‘personality’ but increasing impersonality of his conversation and interests, were all part of the same process. It is comparable with the oddness which might visit all our outward appearances if we stopped looking in mirrors. The only contrived thing about it was the initial impulse, which interpreted the New Testament injunction to deny self as to ‘live without an image of the self. The ‘image’ of C. S. Lewis, which many were to find rebarbative, was not, as they imagined, stage-managed or rehearsed, but it was none the less odd for that.

  The Allegory of Love was sent in manuscript to the offices of the Oxford University Press in London. As with much else in Lewis’s life, it seems as though there was a Providence in its journey, for it landed on the desk of a man called Charles Williams.

  –TWELVE–

  THE INKLINGS

  1936–1939

  W. H. Auden, the rising star of the English poetic firmament, met Charles Williams about a year after Lewis did. Auden had been asked by the Oxford University Press to prepare The Oxford Book of Light Verse, and he went along to discuss this with Williams at his office in Amen House. At this period in his life, Auden was still a subscriber to the bundle of ideologies – leftist in politics, atheist in religion, Freudian in psychology – which went with being a 1930s intellectual. Yet, in the presence of Williams, he felt ‘for the first time in my life … in the presence of personal sanctity … I had met many good people before who made me feel ashamed of my own shortcomings, but in the presence of this man – we never discussed anything but literary business – I did not feel ashamed. I felt transformed into a person who was incapable of doing anything base or unloving.’1 T. S. Eliot, who published many of Williams’s books, felt the same. Eliot had first met Williams – of all unlikely settings – at a tea-party given in London by Lady Ottoline Morrell, and felt ‘a kind of benediction’ emanating from this curious bespectacled creature who ‘appeared to combine frail physique with exceptional vitality’.2

  Williams was a man who was able to hold many apparently contradictory ideas in harmony. For example, he was able to reconcile membership of the Church of England (rather High) with belonging to such occult groups as the Order of the Golden Dawn. Thomas Cranmer and Aleister Crowley were held in uneasy balance in his sympathies. A rather unsatisfactory marriage was glorified in his imagination by high-sounding comparisons between himself and Dante, while his largely innocent office romances – which do not appear to have gone much beyond crushes on secretaries – were seen in terms of Launcelot’s devotion to Guinevere and the threatened breaking of the Round Table. Entirely self-educated and cockney in speech, Williams (rather like Blake in an earlier generation of London mystics) had an almost matter-of-fact awareness of the other world. Angels – or ‘angelicals’ as he would have preferred to call them in his strange idiolect – were as real to him as omnibuses or mortgage repayments – and far more likely to obtrude into his consciousness. In his theological writings, it is not always easy to see at what point he steps over the borderline between magic and religion. In his fiction, there is an analogous blurring of distinctions, shocking or thrilling depending on the reader’s taste. Once Oxford University Press had accepted The Allegory of Love for publication, it was sent to Charles Williams, who worked on their editorial desk in London. It so happened, entirely by coincidence, that Coghill lent Lewis a copy of Williams’s novel The Place of the Lion at precisely this moment.

  The merits contained in any Williams novel – and this one has many – are not purely literary. Indeed, none of his novels is well shaped or well written. The characters have improbable names and say improbable things. The excitement of The Place of the Lion is in its power to shake the reader up – to make us feel that the world is not the place we thought it was. Here, for example, we meet a very ordinary young woman with the very extraordinary name of Damaris Tighe. She is the sort of girl we might meet in the pages of a Barbara Pym – a bit of a scholar, leading a spinsterly existence in a middle-class house in an English country village. But she is in fact in grave theological and spiritual error. Her ‘subject’ is the relationship between the angels of medieval philosophers and the Ideas and Forms in Plato. Her paper The Eidoli and the Angeli is not a suitable one to read to the little study group which meets in a neighbour’s house: the group, it transpires, is actually in touch with the world of spirits. These people are not, like Damaris, dry-as-dust, unbelieving intellectuals. They are magicians and hierophants. The Eidoli and the Angeli have power to invade even dull suburban English houses. Damaris discovers that she has been guilty of intellectual sin in failing to believe, to realize imaginatively, the nature of the material she is studying. This is rather like the moment in Lewis’s life when he described philosophy as a subject and Barfield replied that to Plato, philosophy was not a subject but a way. In The Place of the Lion, the Platonic archetypes of which objects and creatures in the world are but reflections or repetitions actually appear. A lion which at the beginning of the book seems as though it might just be an escaped animal from a nearby zoo turns out to be the great Lion of Strength. Perhaps the most extraordinary moment in the story is when the Butterfly appears and all the butterflies in the world, in a great swarm, are absorbed back into his essence.

  Lewis was overwhelmed by reading this book. In the course of time, we begin to read Williams’s influence in Lewis’s own work – the Lion of Strength will reappear as Aslan, Judah’s Lion, crushing the Serpent’s Head in the Chronicles of Narnia, for example. The immediate impact in February 1936 was inner and self-disciplinary. ‘The reading of it has been a good preparation for Lent as far as I am concerned: for it shows me (through the heroine) the special sin of abuse of intellect to which all my profession are liable, more clearly than I ever saw before. I have learned more than I ever knew about humility. In fact, it has been a big experience.’3

  If Lewis had been learning more than he knew before about humility, Williams had been learning more than he knew before about medieval literature. At the very moment Lewis was finishing The Place of the Lion, Williams was reading The Allegory of Love with great admiration. ‘I regard your book as practically the only one that I have ever come across, since Dante, that shows the slightest understanding of what this very peculiar identity of love and religion means,’ Williams wrote, signing himself ‘Very gratefully yours’. The bulk of Lewis’s book is pure literary history, though its earlier chapters refer to the strange pseudo-religion of Love which appears to have originated in twelfth-century Provence. But it is entirely characteristic of Williams, whose head was always buzzing with Dante, and with the dangerous borderlines between sacred and profane love, that he should have read The Allegory in that way.

  Not long after this, Lewis and Williams met in London, as they continued to do at irregular intervals for the next three years. They really were very different types. Williams was emotionally exuberant, Lewis was profoundly buttoned up. Lewis was plump, and rather coarse in appearance; Williams, who has been unkindly likened to a monkey, was actually rather ethereal in manner, with his long fingers and piercing eyes. The ugly voice was not merely ugly; it was, by many accounts, half-hypnotic. But different as they were in appearance, temperament and background, they discovered in common a strong belief in the absolute reality of the supernatural world. It had been latent in Lewis ever since his encounter with God in Magdalen in the summer of 19
29. But to meet Williams was to make the belief yet more inescapable.

  Many readers of The Place of the Lion would be unable to convict the heroine of ‘sin’ at all. She is a modern woman, with a modern consciousness. How can we expect her to adopt the thought patterns of an earlier age? This problem of historical relativism is one of the most besetting for anyone who wishes to read an old book without either getting it hopelessly wrong or, worse, assuming that the fact that we are modern and the author of the book ‘medieval’ or ‘old’ implies the superiority of one or the other. Quite apart from the problem of the factual reliability of old books (is it so, for example, that there really are such eidoli and angeli as Williams, Abelard, Pseudo-Dionysus and Plato believed?), we meet, much earlier, the simple difficulty of adjusting to old meanings. Learning an old language – Middle English, Old French, Latin – is more than an exercise in matching modern word for old word. It often involves the modern mind’s entering into old concepts for which there is no modern equivalent. What writers from past centuries believed about the world, the sky, themselves is often untranslatable, and we will never quite master it without the help of a guide. This was the task Lewis set himself. The Oxford lectures which he gave at this time were eventually to be published as The Discarded Image, perhaps the most completely satisfying and impressive book he ever published. One could wish it eight times as long, a great compendium like Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The subtitle of the book is An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. But this is not a work of criticism, nor an attempt to make you like The Faerie Queene or the Confessio Amantis. It is a wide-ranging analysis of the world picture which almost all the old writers would have taken for granted but which we, our minds fed with different mythologies and sciences, would very easily mistake. How, for instance, did a medieval man look at the sky? Having early disposed of the false idea that in the Middle Ages people believed in a flat earth, Lewis tells us to look at the sky itself.