by A. N. Wilson
Does Mum the Persil-user still believe
That There’s no Devil and that youth is bliss?
As certain as the sun behind the Downs
And quite as plain to see, the Devil walks.
Lewis was possessed by this line of thought in the first year of the war. It was some time after making his first confession that he bumped into a pupil in Addison’s Walk. The pupil had been at Magdalen for a year, and then left to join the Army. He was in uniform, very much in the situation in which Lewis had found himself as an undergraduate at Univ. Having given his news, he asked Lewis what he was writing. ‘I’ve had this idea’, said Lewis, ‘of letters from a senior devil to a junior devil.’10
The Screwtape Letters brought into literary use qualities which Lewis had had to a highly developed degree ever since adolescence. His ability to see through human failings, his capacity to analyse other people’s annoyingness, his rich sense of comedy and satire, had as yet only found their outlet in letters to Greeves, and to a lesser extent in such collections as P’dayta-Pie. In The Screwtape Letters his inspired malice is given creative rein. ‘She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.’11 Or take the old woman who is really a slave to the Gluttony of Delicacy but thinks she is the very model of abstinence:
She is a positive terror to hostesses and servants. She is always turning from what has been offered her to say with a demure little sigh and smile, ‘Oh, please, please … all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast.’ You see? Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others … In a crowded restaurant she gives a little scream at the plate which some overworked waitress has set before her and says, ‘Oh, that’s far, far too much! Take it away and bring me about a quarter of it.’12
To the comedy of such pen-portraits (and Screwtape, it has to be admitted, is a cruel book), is added moral wisdom and a developing religious vision. Lewis is extremely good at describing the actual territory in which the moral life, for most of us, is thrashed out, and the extent to which we enable ourselves to be deluded about ourselves and other people:
When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother’s eyebrows which he learnt to dislike in the nursery and let him think how he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy – if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption.13
It is the last bit of that sentence which contains the punch. Though Lewis is said to have found the task of writing these letters morally exhausting – entailing as it did the ceaseless identification of himself with the malign and diabolical point of view – their great strength is that, rather like a dramatic monologue by Browning, they reveal the speaker without succumbing to his terrible outlook. Although they are the letters of instruction from an older devil to a younger, Screwtape’s sense of what the Enemy (i.e. God) is preparing for his servants cannot fail to break through.
One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for man, and His service being perfect freedom is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out.14
Or again:
He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. For at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are ‘pleasures for evermore’. Ugh!15
Once he started, Lewis appears to have written The Screwtape Letters very quickly. He offered them to the editor of the one periodical which, by this stage, he was in the habit of reading: a High Church weekly, since defunct, called The Guardian. The Guardian published the letters in weekly instalments from May to November 1941. Lewis was paid £2 per article, and the money was paid directly into a fund for ‘Clergy Widows’.16 Ashley Sampson, who had commissioned The Problem of Pain, persuaded his parent publisher to make an offer for the publication of Screwtape in book form. When it was published, in February 1942, the first printing of 2,000 copies was sold immediately. There were two reprintings in March, and the book has been in print ever since, selling over a million copies. What had begun as a jeu d’esprit of a mere 30,000 words or so made Lewis a household name.
The other factor which contributed to this effect was his decision to become a broadcaster. This came about in an equally haphazard fashion. Feeling sheepish about his ineligibility for active service, Lewis had accepted an invitation from the RAF chaplains to tramp around the country and give talks to the men in various RAF stations. Tolkien, who found the contents of these talks, when published, not especially to his taste, nevertheless admired the simple religious feeling which inspired them.
Teaching was his original object. He took it up in a Pauline spirit, as a reparation; now the least of Christians (by special grace) but once an infidel, and even if he had not persecuted the faithful, one who scorned the Faith, he would do what he could to convert men or stop them from straying away. The acceptance of the R.A.F. mission, with its hardship of travel to distant and nasty places and audiences of anything but the kind he was humanly fitted to deal with, lonely, cheerless, embarrassed journeys leaving little behind but doubt whether any seed had fallen on good soil; all this was in its way an imitation of St. Paul.17
The talks which Lewis gave to the RAF were on such basic issues as ‘Why we think there is a Right and Wrong’, and from such simple beginnings he framed, in language which was meant to be arresting to ordinary men in the ranks, an exposition first of the theist position, then of the Christian religion. In February 1941, he was approached by the Director of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC and asked if he would be prepared to give a series of broadcast talks on ‘The Christian Faith as I see it – by a Layman’; and although there was first a certain amount of debate about what the nature and title of the broadcasts should be, Lewis began to do this in the late summer of 1941, taking the train from Oxford to London every Wednesday evening, and broadcasting from 7.45 to 8.00 p.m.18
Sound-broadcasting is a particular skill, not necessarily related to literary ability though impossible without it. That is, one needs the literate ability to express oneself clearly; but one also needs the right voice and the ability to be concise. Lewis’s broadcasts during the war were in three series, and they were written up (published more or less as spoken over the air) as Broadcast Talks (1942), Christian Behaviour (1943) and Beyond Personality (1944). The key to them lies in the tide of the second series – Christian Behaviour. Lewis is better than any modern writer bom at explaining what Christian behaviour should be and at analysing its difficulties.
People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘if you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life you are slowly turning this central thing into either a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature.19
It is unfortunate that shorthand here makes Lewis imply that the life of subm
ission to Grace is a course of self-improvement. Indeed overall, he says surprisingly little about Grace and next to nothing about the sacramental life; for these reasons one might regret the title which he gave to the three books gathered into one – Mere Christianity – for it implies that he has written a sort of mini-Summa or encyclopaedia of theology. That was not his intention. His intention in the lively fifteen-minute talks was to answer such questions as ‘Can an intelligent person be a Christian?’ ‘What should a Christian’s attitude be towards war, sex or money?’ ‘Is there a heaven and a hell?’ He answers these questions with a breeziness and a self-confidence which on an academic podium would have been totally unacceptable. And the language and idiom of the broadcasts has dated: ‘There has been a great deal of soft soap talked about God for the last hundred years. That is not what I am offering. You can cut all that out … ’20 or ‘The Christian replies [to some Aunt Sally which Lewis has conveniently erected] “Don’t talk damned nonsense … ”’21 or ‘I personally think that next to Christianity Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market.’22 It is hard to read these sentences without a smile. Nor are all his attempts at analogy helpful. Certainly to explain the Incarnation in a quarter of an hour over the air is a tall order, but Lewis could surely have done better than to say, ‘If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.’23 Apart from being offensive, this is bad theology. God made human beings in His own image and likeness. Human beings did not make slugs or crabs. Man could not ‘redeem’ the slugs even if slugs were in need of redemption.
Such lapses were seized upon eagerly by Lewis’s jealous academic colleagues. There is nothing like worldly success on the part of one academic to make all the others hate him or her. Lewis’s immediate success with the general public, and the huge popularity of his theological books, guaranteed him a rough ride with the Fellows of Magdalen, as well as with those in the Oxford Faculties of Theology and English Literature. Of course, it was not just the atheists who disliked him. It was a Christian colleague in the English Faculty who said, ‘The problem of pain is quite bad enough without Lewis making it worse.’ Even those one would expect to have rejoiced at the religious revival which Lewis’s popularity heralded and to a certain degree inspired could only bring themselves to sneer. R. H. Lightfoot, for example, the chaplain of New College, and author of a learned commentary on St John’s Gospel, remarked to a young colleague of Lewis’s: ‘His defection to the area of theology is a sad loss to the English Faculty. I wish it could be said to be a gain to the Faculty of Theology.’ Lewis knew that they were all saying things like this, and it stung. It hurt even more that friends like Tolkien, to whom he had dedicated The Screwtape Letters, could not respond to Lewis’s effusions as ‘Everyman’s Theologian’.
However little his colleagues liked Lewis’s activities as a lay evangelist, there can be no doubt about his tremendous impact on the church of his day. Father Andrew, the saintly co-founder of the Society of the Divine Compassion, wrote to one of his many correspondents: ‘To me it is one of the most hopeful things of this epoch that it has produced C. S. Lewis.’24 As far as the Church of England was concerned, there were giants in those days. Perhaps they were the last days before the final eclipse. T. S. Eliot was completing the Four Quartets. All too briefly, until his untimely death in 1944, there was an Archbishop of Canterbury who was not only a learned philosopher and theologian but was also able, in such writings as his Readings in St John’s Gospel to speak to people at a simple devotional level. Dorothy L. Sayers was writing her series of radio plays about the life of Christ called Man Born to Be King.
Lewis’s popularity was part of this, and it was with more than a scent of victory in the air, victory over the agnostics and freethinkers, that he consented to be involved with the foundation of the Socratic Club in Oxford in 1941. This was an undergraduate debating society, founded with an aggressively Christian purpose by a student at Somerville College called Stella Aldwinkle. Since all undergraduate societies are meant to have one senior member, she asked Lewis to become the President of the Society, a position he held until his departure for Cambridge in 1954. ‘Those who founded it do not for one moment pretend to be neutral,’ Lewis confessed.25 ‘It was the Christians who constructed the arena and issued the challenge … ’ Socratic evenings took the form of two speakers facing one another over some such topic as ‘Is theology poetry?’ or ‘If we have Christ’s ethics does the rest of Christianity matter?’ The ideal Socratic evening came about when one of the speakers was an out-and-out atheist, but some-rimes the society could only find speakers of opposing viewpoints within the Christian fold. When Lewis himself was speaking, it was not always easy to find a tame atheist who was prepared to come along and be mauled in public debate; for on these occasions he reverted to type and became again the P’daytabird prosecuting an unlikely prisoner in the Belfast police courts. No one who witnessed these debates has ever suggested that Lewis played fair. He argued with tremendous vigour, and when he demolished his victims it was with evident relish. There were those who admired Lewis’s moral courage in being thus prepared to testify for the Christian faith, but not everyone found the spectacle altogether edifying.
On top of all his other commitments, Lewis was writing the second volume of his space trilogy. ‘I’ve got Ransom to Venus and through his first conversation with the “Eve” of that world: a difficult chapter … I may have embarked on the impossible,’ Lewis wrote to Sister Penelope on 9 November 1941.26 The effort shows in the writing. Perelandra is the most ambitious of the outer-space stories, and the one with the most single-minded theological aim: nothing less than an imagined temptation-scene between Satan and Eve in which she does not succumb. For the purpose of saving her, Ransom (veteran of the journey to Malecandra in Out of the Silent Planet) is actually made a Ransom for her, a sort of Christ figure sent to wrestle with the wicked scientist Weston who tries to bring about the Fall on the newly inhabited planet Venus.
Not even John Milton’s imagination had attempted such a theme. It is no wonder that Perelandra is an artistic failure. How could it have succeeded? This is not to say that it does not contain many magnificent passages, some comic, some sublime. And, almost more than any of his other fiction, it reveals what Lewis as a writer was chiefly concerned to achieve. He wanted nothing less than a revival of the Romantic movement in literature, only a revival under firm Christian management. The key passage, from this point of view, is the temptation offered by Weston/Satan (the Un-Man) to which the Woman all but yields: the image of herself as a great soul. ‘Greatness, tragedy, high sentiment – these were obviously what occupied her thoughts.’ The new Eve momentarily wants to be a tragedy queen; for a few flickering instants, she wants to be like almost all the characters in literature whom we find most beguiling – Cleopatra, Anna Karenin, Madame Bovary, Eve herself in Paradise Lost – a figure who has risked everything for the sake of une grande passion. To set against this the prosaic virtues of humility and obedience, and to make them seem not merely right but also interesting, is – when the writer is a fallen creature writing for other fallen creatures – an impossible task. Lewis tried, and inevitably blundered this way and that, sometimes falling into appalling sentimentality, sometimes writing ridiculous masculine-minded nonsense about ‘a woman’s place’.
The story does, however, abound in felicities; the physical descriptions of the planet, for example, are superb. And there are scenes of great moral effectiveness, as when Ransom, plucking up his courage for the struggle with Weston, recalls that ‘at that moment, far away on earth … men were at war, and white-faced subalterns and freckled corporals who had but lately begun to shave, stood in horrible gaps or crawled forward in deadly darkness, awakening like him to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions.’27 The effectiveness of that is not just to make Ransom’s struggle real, but also to demonstrate the metaphysical excitement of all moral choices, on the silent planet as w
ell as beyond the music of the spheres.
Outwardly, the plot of Perelandra is borrowed from Milton’s Comus, and its chief ideological failing stems from this. Milton never makes clear exactly how the Lady’s virtue is saved. In the end, it would seem that she is not strong enough to resist Comus’s wiles without the intervention of Sabrina. Likewise in the case of Lewis’s Eve: if she is ransomed by Ransom’s struggle with the Un-Man in the underworld, a sort of Harrowing of Hell sequence, how can she be said to have resisted the temptation on her own; and if she has not really resisted through her own strength – if she is to be rewarded with immortality and felicity for something she has not done herself – where is the justice in the punishment, on another planet, of Eve and her descendants, for something which again was not wholly her responsibility? Are we to suppose that human beings only exercise free will when they sin – or, worse, only sin when they exercise free will? These questions were to make John Milton abandon any discernible belief in the doctrine of Grace and become a sort of Stoic. Lewis never seems to have faced the problem, either in his imaginative writings or in his works of theology. If the woman resisted Weston’s voice simply out of obedience to Maleldil, then what was the function of Ransom? This was the question, in notional form, which he had asked Tolkien and Dyson during the September night of 1931 when they talked Lewis into becoming a Christian. ‘My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ “saved” or “opened salvation” to the world … What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else “whoever he was” 2000 years ago could help us here and now.’28
Perelandra shows that even on the mythopoeic level this most difficult of doctrines had not been absorbed by Lewis. Another decade was to pass before it really sank in, and he could write, ‘What an ass I have been both for not knowing and for thinking I knew. I now feel that one must never say one believes or understands anything … ’29 This was an admission made to Sister Penelope in 1951. In 1941 he was still very content with an unrealized, cerebral exposition of the Christian gospel which was to lead him into many distortions. Nevertheless, the sisters of the Community of St Mary the Virgin were very happy to receive the dedication to Perelandra: ‘To some ladies in Wantage’.
