C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  Excepting perhaps Hugo Dyson, Lewis was unrivalled at punning, and one of his students has recorded one of his most brilliant efforts. The occasion was a dinner-party at which one of the courses was a haggis, the national dish of Scotland, consisting of the blood and guts of sheep. Seated next to Lewis was a Portuguese dignitary who, while eating the haggis, remarked that he felt like a ‘gastronomic Columbus’. ‘The comparison is wayward in your case,’ replied Lewis. ‘Why not a vascular da Gama?’9

  Since Dymer appeared in 1926, Lewis had published four book reviews in The Oxford Magazine and two letters in literary journals. Though The Allegory of Love was still being written, Lewis was anxious to air some of his literary views in print. On 3 March 1930 he read a paper to the Martlets on ‘The Personal Heresy in Poetics’ in which he attacked the notion that poetry is the ‘expression of personality’ and is useful for putting us into contact with the ‘poet’s soul’: in short, that a poet’s ‘Life’ and ‘Works’ are two diverse expressions of a single quiddity.

  Two writers whom he accused of being specially guilty of the ‘personal heresy’ were E.M.W. Tillyard (1889–1962) in his book on Milton (1930), and T.S. Eliot who in his essay on ‘Dante’ claimed that ‘The rage of Dante … the deep surge of Shakespeare’s general criticism and disillusionment, are merely gigantic attempts to metamorphose private failures and dis-appointments’.10 Lewis was confident that he could get the essay published in some orthodox literary journal but he wanted it to be seen by the ‘heretics’ themselves, to take a swipe at them on their own home ground. ‘Let it be granted’, Lewis said in the essay, ‘that I do approach the poet; at least I do it by sharing his consciousness, not by studying it.

  I look with his eyes, not at him. He, for the moment, will be precisely what I do not see; for you can see any eyes rather than the pair you see with, and if you want to examine your own glasses you must take them off your nose. The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him.11

  Lewis offered the essay to T.S. Eliot for publication in The Criterion. Oddly enough, Eliot did not trouble to acknowledge it and, after six months’ waiting, Lewis wrote again on 19 April 1931 suggesting that, as he believed Eliot ‘had some sympathy with’ his ‘formal proof’ that poetry ‘never was nor could be the “expression of personality” save per accidens’, he might at least get round to accepting or rejecting the paper. ‘I do not’, he added, ‘wish by any pressure on you to reduce my own chances of reaching a public on a subject about which current views exasperate me beyond bearing.’12

  It is regrettable that Lewis very rarely saved letters addressed to him. Even those few which missed the waste-paper basket survived because they were useful as book-markers. Our ignorance, then, of what was in Eliot’s letters is entirely owing to Lewis’s habit of eternally ‘tidying up’ his desk rather than any ill-will he may have felt towards the writer. Eliot, apparently, asked if he were writing other essays of a similar nature for Lewis said in a letter of 2 June 1931:

  The essay does, as you have divined, form the first of a series of which I have all the materials to hand. The others would be 2. Objective Standards of Literary Merit. 3. Literature and Virtue (This is not a stylistic variant of ‘Art and Morality’: that is my whole point). 4. Literature and Knowledge. 5. Metaphor and Truth. The whole, when completed, would form a frontal attack on Crocean aesthetics and state a neo-Aristotelian theory of literature (not of Art, about which I say nothing) which inter alia will re-affirm the romantic doctrine of imagination as a truth-bearing faculty, though not quite as the romantics understood it.13

  The ‘Personal Heresy’ essay got no further with Eliot than did Lewis’s ‘Eliotic’ poems of 1925 and was eventually returned. Having failed, then, to get into the columns of The Criterion, Lewis threw his energies into the more scholarly works he had in hand: The Allegory of Love and – an offshoot of it – an essay on ‘What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato’, which appeared in Essays and Studies for 1932. The autumn of 1931 and the winter of 1932 turned out to be profitable months because, in writing the papers he mentioned to Eliot, Lewis found an opportunity for formulating and clarifying his ideas about literary criticism.

  Still, the thing Lewis most wanted to say remained unsaid: the story of the ‘wanting and having’ experience of Joy that led to his conversion. He believed the experience to be common to most people and of almost universal interest. To recapitulate, up until 1929, when he became a theist, Lewis saw no conscious connection between Joy and God, and in the autobiographical poem written in 1922–3 he explained it as best he could. Second, he managed to convey the ecstatic aspect of Joy in the short poem, entitled ‘Joy’, published in The Beacon in 1924. His third attempt followed on the heels of his conversion to theism when he wrote the first draft of a prose autobiography – or ‘the prose It’ as he called it – which was discussed in the last chapter.

  In the spring of 1932 he had another go at writing the story of Joy leading on to conversion. This, like the first attempt, was to be in the form of a long narrative poem. Only thirty-four lines of it have survived, in a letter written to Owen Barfield on 6 May 1932 in which he says, ‘I am not satisfied with any part I have yet written and the design is ludicrously ambitious. But I feel it will be several years anyway before I give it up.’ As Lewis had read most of G.K. Chesterton’s theological books by this time it does not seem fanciful to suppose that Lewis’s idea of a spiritual ‘voyage’ was based on an idea suggested by Chesterton in his book, Orthodoxy (1908). ‘I have often’, wrote Chesterton, ‘had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas … His mistake was really a most enviable mistake … What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again.’14

  This new verse autobiography, which Lewis included in the letter to Barfield of 6 May 1932, begins with an idea of his Chestertonian ‘voyage’:

  I will write down the portion that I understand

  Of twenty years wherein I went from land to land.

  At many bays and harbours I put in with joy

  Hoping that there I should have built my second Troy

  And stayed. But either stealing harpies drove me thence,

  Or the trees bled, or oracles, whose airy sense

  I could not understand, yet must obey, once more

  Sent me to sea to follow the retreating shore

  Of this land which I call at last my home, where most

  I feared to come; attempting not to find whose coast

  I ranged half round the world, with fain design to shun

  The last fear whence the last security is won.

  Lewis wrote another 100 lines of this new autobiographical poem before he went on his annual spring walking tour with Barfield and Dom Bede Griffiths* shortly after Easter 1932. After this his tight schedule did not afford a break till 16 May when he and Barfield went to hear Wagner’s Siegfried at Covent Garden, and then he was overwhelmed with work till the end of July. As soon as he was free, he wrote – exhausted – to Arthur Greeves asking if he might be his house-guest in Belfast from 15 to 29 August.

  After so many attempts to tell the story of his conversion, it sounds incredible to say that Lewis wrote his first full-length prose work, The Pilgrim’s Regress, during his fortnight’s holiday in Ireland. Nevertheless, we have it in his own words that he did. On 25 March 1933 he told Arthur that he wished to dedicate the book to him because, as he said, ‘It is yours by every right – written in your house, read to you as it was written.’15 After sending the manuscript to Barfield for criticism, Lewis wrote to him on 29 October 1932 saying that, because of his ‘long preparation by failure in the prose “It” and the autobiographical poem’ (the
last one), the book ‘spurted out so suddenly’ that he had very little objective judgement of it.

  In turning from a ‘voyage’ by sea to a journey by road, Lewis is of course imitating John Bunyan. In casting his story into the form of an allegory, he is not only following Bunyan but using a medieval technique for which his years of work on The Allegory of Love had eminently qualified him. The difficulty is that modern people, unfamiliar with allegory, seem to suppose that it is a code to be cracked. In allegory, Lewis explained in The Allegory of Love, you

  represent what is immaterial in picturable terms … You can start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and can then invent visibilia [visible things] to express them. If you are hesitating between an angry retort and a soft answer, you can express your state of mind by inventing a person called Ira [Anger] with a torch and letting her contend with another invented person called Patientia [Patience]. This is allegory.16

  Lewis found that the commonest mistake made about such an allegory as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

  comes from the pernicious habit of reading allegory as if it were a cryptogram to be translated; as if, having grasped what an image (as we say) ‘means’, we threw the image away and thought of the ingredient in real life which it represents. But that method leads you continually out of the book and back into the conception you started from and would have had without reading it. The right process is the exact reverse. We ought not to be thinking ‘This green valley, where the shepherd boy is singing, represents humility’; we ought to be discovering, as we read, that humility is like that green valley. That way, moving always into the book, not out of it, from the concept to the image, enriches the concept. And that is what allegory is for.17

  Though he never used allegory in any of his later books (except, perhaps, for Father Time in The Last Battle), Lewis found in the case of The Pilgrim’s Regress that it provided a sudden release for what he wanted to say. In the verses attached to the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan says that while working on quite a different book, he ‘Fell suddenly into an Allegory’ and that once he had his ‘Method by the end; Still as I pull’d, it came’.

  Not only did Lewis’s allegory ‘come’ as unimpeded as Bunyan’s, but he found it the perfect receptacle for describing his progress from ‘popular realism’ to Christianity and the particular part which Joy had played in it. He was, at the same time, spared from putting himself into the limelight as it is his pilgrim, John, who undergoes the journey. A number of Lewis’s recently composed religious poems, mentioned in the previous chapter, found their way into the narrative.

  The central character in The Pilgrim’s Regress is the Pilgrim, John, a kind of Everyman. He is born in Puritania and grows up in fear of an unseen Landlord who is portrayed as a moral despot. John is beset by longings for an Island, which is both an enjoyment of, and a desire for, ‘Joy’. He first makes the mistake of supposing that the Island is a disguise for Lust. When this deception is unmasked, he sets off to find the Island. Along the way he meets people who are allegorical personifications of ideas and schools of thought Lewis had encountered over the years. Examples include Mr Enlightenment (who is nineteenth-century rationalism) and Sigismund (who is Freudianism).

  John is eventually captured by the Spirit of the Age, who is portrayed as a giant whose eyes make everything he looks at transparent. When John is able to see his own insides (lungs, intestines, etc.), the giant attempts to persuade him that this is all a man is. John is rescued by Reason, who leads him as far as the Grand Canyon, on the other side of which is the continuation of the Main Road.

  While wondering how to cross the Canyon, John meets Mother Kirk (the Church), who gives him an account of the Sin of Adam (the Grand Canyon). She explains that she is the only one who can carry him across the Canyon safely. He doesn’t trust her, and seeks another, much longer way. Turning north John meets ‘cerebral’ men such as Mr Sensible (cultured worldliness), and Mr Humanist. They talk as if they had ‘seen through’ things they’ve never seen at all. Finding he cannot get on to the Main Road this way, John turns south. After meeting Mr Broad, representing modernist religion, John becomes friends with Wisdom. From him John learns the inadequacy of many of the philosophies he had once found so attractive, such as Idealism, Materialism and Hegelianism.

  On leaving Wisdom, John is helped by a Man (Christ), who tells him he must accept Grace or die. Having accepted Grace, John feels bound to acknowledge God’s existence. There follows a chapter in which Lewis repeats what he gave in the ‘Early Prose Joy’ as his main reason for not wanting to be a Christian. He wanted to call his soul his own. Now he realizes that to acknowledge the Lord he is ‘never to be alone; never the master of his own soul, to have no privacy, no corner whereof you can say to the whole universe: This is my own, here I can do as I please.’18

  John stops for a while with History and in the chapter ‘History’s Words’ we find some of the most valuable ideas in the book. Lewis pointed out in the running commentary for the 1943 edition that ‘Morality is by no means God’s only witness in the sub-Christian world’,19 that even pagan mythology contained a ‘Divine call’. Thus, all men are given an imaginative ‘picture’ of the Island, which stirs up ‘sweet desire’ or Joy. However, the pagans (like Lewis at one time) mistook the ‘pictures’ and ‘desires’ for what they were not, and instead of turning to Mother Kirk became ‘corrupt in their imaginations’.20 On the other hand, the Landlord gave the Shepherds (the Jews), Laws and set their feet on a ‘Road’. But in the end, says History, neither is enough. ‘The truth is that a Shepherd is only half a man, and a Pagan is only half a man, so that neither people was well without the other, nor could either be healed until the Landlord’s Son came into the country.’21

  In the chapter ‘Archetype and Ectype’ John asks Wisdom about the thing that had terrified Lewis when he learned he would have to obey God. ‘I am afraid’, says John, ‘that the things the Landlord really intends for me may be utterly unlike the things he has taught me to desire.’ ‘They will be very unlike the things you imagine,’ replies Wisdom. ‘But you already know that the objects which your desire imagines are always inadequate to that desire. Until you have it you will not know what you wanted.’22

  John struggles to withdraw, but Reason will not allow it, and he returns to Mother Kirk. In the chapter entitled ‘Securus Te Projice’23 she tells him to dive to the bottom of a pool and come up on the other side. When he says he’s never learned to dive, she says, ‘The art of diving is not to do anything new but simply to cease doing something. You have only to let yourself go.’*24

  John at last finds the Island of his dreams, and discovers that it is the other side of the Eastern Mountains he has known all his life, the home of God.

  Before the book was vetted by Barfield, Lewis asked Arthur Greeves for his criticisms and Arthur suggested that the shower of Greek and Latin quotations either be translated or omitted. This Lewis was not prepared to do for, as he said in a letter of 17 December 1932, ‘one of the contentions of the book is that the decay of our old classical learning is a contributory cause of atheism’.25 Arthur would also have had him aim at greater simplicity of meaning. Lewis argued that, though the spirit of man must ‘become humble and trustful like a child and, like a child, simple in motive’, Christ did not mean that the ‘processes of thought by which people become Christians must be childish processes. At any rate,’ he went on to say, ‘the intellectual side of my conversion was not simple and I can describe only what I know.’26

  Arthur criticized as well Lewis’s style, urging him to be more ‘correct, classical and elaborate’.27 Lewis’s answer to this is very valuable for it shows that his intention was, from the first, to write simply and clearly. His later books are more readable, but even in The Pilgrim’s Regress it is obvious that he had a natural sensibility for idiom and the cadences of popular speech. ‘I aim’, he wrote to Arthur on 4 December 1932, ‘chiefly at being i
diomatic and racy, basing myself on Malory, Bunyan, and Morris, tho’ without archaisms: and would usually prefer to use ten words, provided they are honest native words and idiomatically ordered, than one “literary word”. To put the thing in a nutshell you want “The man of whom I told you” and I want “The man I told you of”.’28

  By Christmas 1932 Lewis had finished revising the manuscript, drawn a map to go on the end leaves and sent it to J.M. Dent & Sons. They accepted it on condition that it be shortened and the title altered. At the last moment they wanted to illustrate it – an idea that Lewis was successful in resisting. The title that appeared on the proof copy was The Pilgrim’s Regress, or Pseudo-Bunyan’s Periplus: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. Dents knew there would be some who would not understand the meaning of ‘Periplus’ (circumnavigation) and Lewis was prevailed upon to omit that part of the title before the book was published on 25 May 1933.

  The Pilgrim’s Regress picked up some excellent reviews. ‘It is impossible’, said The Times Literary Supplement of 6 July 1933, ‘to traverse more than a few pages of the allegory without recognizing a style that is out of the ordinary … Moreover when John, the pilgrim-hero of this “Regress”, begins to find the way to salvation he is inspired to break into fragments of song … revealing a poetic gift that may rightly be called arresting.’29 ‘Thanks to a mind of quite remarkable acuity,’ said George Sayer in the Catholic magazine, Blackfriars (4 January 1936), ‘he is able to expose, in only a few lines, the most essential weakness of almost every contemporary doctrine.’ Another Catholic journal, the Downside Review (January 1936) congratulated the author on making ‘a notable contribution to Catholic literature’.