by A. N. Wilson
There is one encounter worth mentioning before we bring to an end this account of Lewis in 1939. Some time during the course of that summer, Dr Havard introduced Lewis to the Roman Catholic Chaplain to the University, Monsignor Ronald Knox. One would have assumed that as two classicists, Punch contributors and men of letters of an old-fashioned Christian temper, Lewis and Knox would have known each other for years. But Knox, who was the most brilliant orator of his generation at Oxford – star of the Union, wit, punster in tongues ancient and modern – had left Oxford before the end of the First World War to become a Roman Catholic, and after his return there as chaplain to the Catholics, it was perhaps understandable that he should have kept a low profile. Lewis greeted him warmly with the assertion that he was possibly the wittiest man in Europe. Knox modestly demurred, but the meeting was said to be happy and humorous. Perhaps they might have developed into friends. Though Lewis was not friendly to Catholicism, the two men had much more of a playful kind in common. Both enjoyed ‘bad’ literature – in Knox’s case, the poetry of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in Lewis’s the novels of Amanda McKittrick Ros. Both were brilliant parodists. Both liked spontaneous rhyming. Their friendship, however, was not to be. Within a few weeks of their meeting, England was at war. Knox had gone into the country to translate the Vulgate into English and Lewis was being prepared by an unseen providence for war work no less surprising.
–THIRTEEN–
SCREWTAPE
1939–1942
‘This is a fallen world,’ J. R. R. Tolkien wrote to one of his sons early in the Second World War. ‘The world has been “going to the bad” all down the ages.’1 Wars tend to prompt religious reawakening in a populace. Although, as Lewis remarked in a wartime sermon, all individuals face the ultimate realities all the time, war quickens and sharpens our awareness. When everyone in the country lives with the prospect of having their house destroyed by a bomb during the night, the Christian talk of Armageddon seems less fanciful than in the ‘weak piping times of peace’. Those who in peacetime seemed brave or merely quaint for believing in all those old doctrines found themselves in wartime much in demand, some as evangelists, some as prophets, some as teachers.
The immediate consequence of the outbreak of war was that Lewis found his circle of friends broken up and changing. The Useless Quack joined the Navy and grew a gingery beard, which enabled Lewis (always anxious to invent fresh sobriquets for his friends) to label him the Red Admiral. Warnie, though forty-four, was recalled to active service, given the rank of major, and sent to France, where he remained until the evacuation from Dunkirk. Most of the friends were too old or too physically enfeebled to be capable of offering themselves for military glory. Dyson had a club foot; Lewis still had shrapnel in his lung. They, Tolkien and Coghill stayed in Oxford and when need arose worked as ARP wardens.
The life of the University both did and did not go on. Young men still came up to the colleges, but they reminded Lewis of his own position in 1917, when his glimpse of Oxford life was just a prelude to the horrors of battle.
The war had its compensations. Not the least of these was that the Oxford University Press moved out of London, and took most of its remaining employees to Oxford. Among them was Charles Williams, who rather surprisingly left his wife and child behind to brave the Blitz in their Hampstead flat while he and his beloved secretary Celia came to take up their (separate) residences in Oxford. He claimed that Lewis was the only person in Oxford whom he really saw, but this was the reverse of the truth. It may have been largely thanks to Lewis that Williams became something of a cult figure, idolized by pious lady dons, aspirant mystics and others. He had real charm, which made canny figures such as Tolkien distrust him. Lewis was bowled over by him, and was anxious that as many people as possible should have the benefit of his wisdom. It was the strange circumstance of wartime which enabled Lewis to put Williams forward as a lecturer in the English Faculty. They needed teachers, and Williams was an experienced public speaker at WEA lectures and evening classes. His lectures on Milton were first given in the beautiful fifteenth-century Divinity Schools, underneath the Bodleian Library. The audience packed this room to capacity.
It was certainly not what undergraduates at Oxford had come to expect from a lecturer. Many were surprised by Williams’s appearance, which was simian and scarlet-faced, slightly boozy. The cockney voice was declamatory, hierophantic. It was more like being present at a seance than at a lecture. He held a copy of Milton’s works in his hands, but whenever he quoted from the poet he held the book aloft, like the Gospel at High Mass, sometimes going so far as to wave it to and fro behind his head as he chanted out the words. The first lecture was on Comus (subsequent talks on Milton had to move to the large lecture-room at the Taylorian Institute, the Divinity Schools being too small). Comus is a masque in which a young lady’s chastity is tried and not vanquished. Some of those who attended the lecture have implied to me that not everyone took it particularly seriously. There were even giggles as this (as he seemed to some of them) funny little man with a funny voice urged the audience to abstain from fleshly lusts.2 But we see what we want to see, and for Lewis this performance by Williams was a revelation.
There we elders heard what we had despaired of hearing – a lecture on Comus which placed its importance where the poet placed it – and watched ‘the yonge fresshe folkes he or she’ who filled the benches listening first with incredulity, then with toleration, and finally with delight, to something so strange and new in their experience as the praise of chastity.3
The lecture, and Williams’s conversation, turned Lewis’s own thoughts to Milton. In the second year of the war, he was asked to deliver some lectures at Bangor – the University College, North Wales – and he chose as his theme Milton’s Paradise Lost. The lectures, which were subsequently published as A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, represent Lewis at his very best. If someone had never read Lewis before, and wished to get a taste of him, there would be no better book with which to start. In its asides – quite apart from what he tells us about Milton – we see what it was about Lewis which struck W. T. Kirkpatrick as so remarkable, and which made him such a valued teacher and friend to so many people in the course of his life. Here is evidence of a mind abundantly stocked with reading which the author has enjoyed – effortlessly, intelligently, and selflessly enjoyed – and he wishes to communicate this enjoyment to us. The range is so impressive – everything from Lucretius to Tristram Shandy, from Virgil to Kinglake, from Beowulf to T. S. Eliot has been absorbed, not for the sake of being bookish but always – one feels – in an outward-looking manner. There is a great moral self-confidence and a common sense in the writing – as when he offers one possible explanation for why so many people, reading Paradise Lost, have supposed Satan to be the ‘hero’.
To make a character worse than oneself it is only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the Satan, the Iago, the Becky Sharp, within each of us, is always there and only too ready, the moment the leash is slipped, to come out and have in our books that holiday we try to deny them in life.4
There is, too, a constantly intelligent conversational quality about the writing which makes one see how very good his talk must have been. One thinks of him saying, of the Odyssey, ‘The poem is an adventure story. As far as greatness of subject goes, it is much closer to Tom Jones or Ivanhoe than to the Aeneid or the Gierusalemme Liberata.’ Or, apropos of the necessity of having a good historical imagination when reading, ‘I had much rather know what I should feel like if I adopted the beliefs of Lucretius than how Lucretius would have felt if he had never entertained them.’ On a purely aesthetic level, one is frequently haunted by his (at first sight paradoxical) defence of Milton’s preference for Hebrew over Greek lyrics. ‘But if any man will read aloud on alternate mornings for a single month a page of Pindar and a page of the Psalms in any translation he chooses, I think I can guess which he will fi
rst grow tired of.’5
So much for the asides – but how good is Lewis on the subject he sets himself – on Milton? I think I have read most of what was written by or about him in English between the seventeenth century and, say, 1975. There are not many better books than Lewis’s. The passages on Milton and St Augustine, Milton and angels, Milton’s theology, are all first-rate. He has done more theological ‘homework’ here than he did for some of his own religious books, and it shows, even though learning was never more lightly worn. Moreover the basic picture of Milton himself, though only sketched in very lightly, is completely authentic:
He is a neat, dainty man, ‘the lady of Christ’s’; a fastidious man, pacing in trim gardens. He is a grammarian, a swordsman, a musician with a predilection for the fugue. Everything that he greatly cares about demands order, proportion, measure and control. In poetry he considers decorum the grand masterpiece. In politics he is that which of all things least resembles a democrat – an aristocratic republican who thinks ‘nothing more agreeable to the order of nature or more for the interest of mankind than that the less should yield to the greater, not in numbers but in wisdom and virtue’.6
An extraordinarily high proportion of Milton scholars have chosen to disregard these truths about their subject, and have decided that because Milton was on the side of the regicides this made him a revolutionary and, because a revolutionary, therefore a man of the Left, perhaps even an agonized Marxist, or at least a sympathizer with the Diggers and Levellers of his own day. The less biographical or historical evidence there is for this view of Milton, the more the scholars believe it, producing readings of Paradise Lost which ignore Lewis’s golden rule, ‘You must, so far as in you lies, become an Achaean chief while reading Homer, a medieval knight while reading Malory, and an Eighteenth Century Londoner while reading Johnson. Only thus will you be able to judge the work “in the same spirit that its author writ”.’7 Lewis does present in his Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ a very convincing impression of having read the poem which John Milton set out to write and meant us to read. If that seems like faint praise, you should read the dozen most recent books on Paradise Lost.
Very little criticism as such survives the generation in which it is written. The same is true, incidentally, of most philosophy and theology. Those who practise these branches of study often mistake them for spheres of knowledge when they are more accurately seen as examples of dialectic or rhetoric – ideas which may be better aired in talk. All critics, however dispassionate, bring to their subject thick encrustations of personal prejudice and, which they are probably even less well equipped to notice, assumptions which are attributable to the spirit of the age. Lewis’s debate in the Preface with other Milton critics – with Saurat, Eliot, I. A. Richards or Leavis – all seems pretty dead to us now, since not many people would read any of the aforementioned critics nowadays as critics unless they were interested in the history of criticism for its own sake. What makes Lewis’s criticism rather different is a combination of two very rare qualities. One is contained in the sentence which is most often mocked in the Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’: ‘A schoolboy who reads a page of Milton by chance, for the first time, and then looks up and says “By Gum”, not in the least knowing how the thing has worked, but only that new strength and width and brightness and zest have transformed his world, is nearer to the truth [than the critics].’8 Lewis never lost his schoolboyish sense of wonder and enjoyment. It is what makes him such a refreshing literary historian. He was not ashamed of the ‘By Gum’ school of reading. What we also notice in the chapters dealing with the Fall, and in particular with Adam and Eve, is that this is not just a book by a scholar in a library. It is also a reading of Milton by a creative intelligence. In stories of great temptation, of interplanetary flights, wrestlings with the powers of good and evil, Lewis found something which had already engaged his own pen, and would continue to do so.
Not least among the new friendships which Lewis formed during the war was his friendship with an Anglican nun called Sister Penelope (Lawson) of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage. She was eight years Lewis’s senior, and a woman of high intellectual abilities. Richard Hunt, former Keeper of Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library and a considerable Medieval Latinist himself, once told me that he thought Sister Penelope the best translator from Latin in her generation. It was not, however, of learned matters that she first wrote to Lewis but of science fiction. She had enjoyed Out of the Silent Planet. ‘At ordinary times we do not read novels at all, as you may imagine, but the right novel at the right moment can have a real spiritual value.’ In return for a book of her own – God Persists – Lewis sent Sister Penelope The Pilgrim’s Regress, and she noted his acerbic satire on High Anglicans. He admitted to her, ‘I’m not … what you call high. To me the real distinction is not high and low, but between religion with a real supernaturalism and salvationism on the one hand and all watered-down modernist versions on the other.’
This sounds like a true distinction, but in real life things are a little different. An Anglican may not wish to be seduced into all the absurdities of church politics, still less into the hobby of church ceremonial. But the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ in so far as they are doctrinal do of necessity affect devotional practice. An instance had arisen on a walking tour Jack and Warnie took in Derbyshire in 1936. Coming to the parish church at Taddington, they found a notice to say that the Blessed Sacrament was reserved there and should be treated with ‘special reverence’. The two brothers later had an argument about it over their lunch. Warnie ‘said that there was room only for a clear cut division of opinion – if one is a Catholic, the aumbry contains Our Lord and of course even prostration is hardly reverence enough: but if one is Church of England, it contains but a wafer and a little wine, and why in front of that should one show any greater reverence than in any other part of the church? … Jack was not satisfied and seemed to think that there was a middle view between the two.’9 Seven or eight years later, by the time he preached his remarkable sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’, C. S. Lewis clearly had a full belief in the Eucharistic Presence, or there would be no force in the rhetoric of his ‘Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.’
It might be imagined by those who are not themselves Anglican that the habit of ‘going to confession’ is limited only to markedly ‘High’ churches, but this is not necessarily the case. The practice does take place in the Church of Ireland, though as it happened, it did not seem to have come Lewis’s way at St Mark’s, Dundela. In Oxford, after his conversion, things were different. Among his Anglican friends, Coghill probably went to confession. Dyson certainly did. It was very much the custom of most churches in central Oxford, even though it has never been obligatory in the Anglican Communion. ‘All may; some should; none must’ is the Church of England rule. Lewis undoubtedly felt that he should, but was nervous about taking the plunge. His friendship with Sister Penelope somehow made it easier. ‘The decision to do so was one of the hardest I have ever made: but now that I am committed (by dint of posting the letter before I had time to change my mind) I began to be afraid of opposite extremes – afraid that I am merely indulging in an orgy of egoism.’ He had written to Father Walter Adams, who had a strong reputation as a confessor and spiritual director. He was a member of the Society of St John the Evangelist, an Anglican religious order popularly called the Cowley Fathers and based in Oxford.
The drama of the moment was recaptured in Perelandra, the second in the science-fiction trilogy, where Ransom remembers the strength which was given to him in a moment requiring supreme moral courage.
It happened once while he was trying to make up his mind to do a very dangerous job in the last war. It had happened again while he was screwing his resolution to go and see a certain man in London and make to him an excessively embarrassing confession which justice demanded. In both cases, the thing had seemed a sheer impossibili
ty; he had not thought but known that, being what he was, he was psychologically incapable of doing it; and then, without any apparent movement of the will, as objective and unemotional as the reading on a dial, there had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge ‘about this time tomorrow, you will have done the impossible’.
Having been to confession and passed through ‘the wall of fire’, Lewis wrote to Sister Penelope, ‘the suggestion about an orgy of egoism turns out, like all the Enemy propaganda, to have just a grain of truth in it, but I have no doubt that the proper method of dealing with that is as I intend to do, to continue the practice.’*
The practice of confession brought before Lewis the drama of redemption as a perpetual game of cat and mouse with the Devil – the Enemy. The very particularity of the sacrament forces upon the penitent the sense that it is on the here and now – that row we had with the neighbours, the bad temper with which we did the washing-up, this specific uncharitable thought or unchaste deed – that salvation and damnation depend. It is in the small area of our own conscience and our own personal behaviour that the good angels and the bad angels are wrestling over our souls, an idea which is both stupendous and slightly comic. Betjeman’s poem ‘Original Sin on the Sussex Coast’ makes a point unwillingly learnt from his old tutor when it depicts the sheer wickedness of children bullying one another, unseen by the sentimental eyes of the mother whose mind has been washed by modern advertising techniques and the vacuous optimism of the age:
