The Pilgrim’s Regress was not a commercial success: Dent sold only 680 of the 1,000 copies they printed. But it was noticed by the Catholic publishers Sheed & Ward of London; Dents printed a further 1,500 copies and passed them all over to this firm, who brought out an edition in October 1935. Quite apart from the richness of its ideas, The Pilgrim’s Regress – especially because it is an allegory – was found to be too complicated for those who come to the faith by simpler routes. Realizing this, Lewis wrote an explanatory preface and running headlines for the edition Geoffrey Bles brought out in 1943.
Not did the book find universal critical favour. The Regress put many backs up because of the volleys Lewis launched, via the characters ‘Mr Broad’ and ‘Neo-Angular’, at Broad Churchmen and High Anglicans. One of those who criticized Lewis for his hasty generalizations was his Irish acquaintance, Canon Claude Chavasse.* Admitting that his book was over-bitter and uncharitable, Lewis replied on 20 February 1934 that the Broad Church suffered from a ‘confusion between mere natural goodness and Grace which is non-Christian’ and was ‘what I most hate and fear in the world’.30 Writing to Canon Chavasse again on 25 February, Lewis said, ‘What I am attacking in Neo-Angular is a set of people who seem to me … to be trying to make of Christianity itself one more highbrow, Chelsea, bourgeois-baiting fad’ and ‘T.S. Eliot is the single man who sums up the thing I am fighting against.’31
Most critics supposed Lewis to be more Catholic than he believed himself to be. This was probably because he appeared to give more importance to ‘Mother Kirk’ than to faith. He was furious when he discovered that Sheed & Ward had, in a blurb on the jacket of their edition, written ‘This story begins in Puritania (Mr Lewis was brought up in Ulster) …’ thus implying that the book was an attack on his country and the Anglican Church. In later editions Lewis explained that ‘Mother Kirk’ was intended to be ‘Traditional Christianity’.
Lewis need not have resented the Catholic interest in The Pilgrim’s Regress. Had he lived longer he would have found that his book anticipated a number of truths iterated at the Second Vatican Council in 1960–5. It was pagan literature that roused the ‘sweet desire’ that finally led him to orthodox Christianity; however, the fact that God is responsible for such truth as is found in pagan literature and non-Christian religions never led Lewis to minimize the universality of Jesus Christ who is forever ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’. He would, then, have probably rejoiced to find his beliefs about the pagans spelled out in the Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (1965), which states that:
Throughout history even to the present day, there is found among different peoples a certain awareness of a hidden power, which lies behind the course of nature and the events of human life. At times there is present even a recognition of a supreme being, or still more of a Father … The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions … Yet she proclaims and is in duty bound to proclaim without fail, Christ who is the way, the truth and the life (John 1:6).32
One occurrence which more than compensated for Lewis’s belief that he had failed with his new book, was that after Warnie’s retirement from the Army he had arrived at The Kilns during Christmas 1932. ‘He has become a permanent member of our household’, Lewis wrote to Arthur on 4 February 1933, ‘and I hope we shall pass the rest of our lives together … We both have a feeling that “the wheel has come full circuit”, that the period of wanderings is over, and that everything which has happened between 1914 and 1932 was an interruption … We make a very contented family together.’33
The winter of 1932 was brightened further by a children’s story which Tolkien had just written. Lewis found The Hobbit (1937) – as it later came to be called – uncannily good, another door into that world of faerie he first discovered in Phantastes. At the same time, he had mixed feelings about supervising a thesis on George MacDonald. He found it difficult to approach as work something so old and intimate, and felt that the American girl who was writing on ‘The Fairy Tales and Fantasies of George MacDonald’ was quite unworthy of her subject. Nevertheless, he persevered and Miss M.M. McEldowney was awarded the B.Litt. in 1934.
In celebration of Warnie’s retirement, the Lewis brothers decided to combine a holiday at sea with a visit to their uncles (Albert’s brothers) in Scotland. On 3 August 1933 they took a train to Arrochar, Dunbartonshire, where they stayed the night. The next day they spent walking on the shores of Loch Long and Loch Lomond and across the mountains between them. Lewis, who wilted in very hot weather and claimed to have the constitution of a polar bear, was delighted on discovering a pool tucked away in the mountains near Loch Lomond. There they stripped and lay in the pool under a little waterfall. This glorious day was followed by a week’s visit to their uncles Bill and Dick Lewis at Helensburgh.34 Uncle Bill, whom they had nicknamed ‘Limpopo’, bore a strong resemblance to their father, and in a letter to Arthur on 17 August Lewis said, ‘It was uncannily like being at home again – specially when Uncle Bill announced on the Sunday evening “I won’t be going into town to-morrow”, and we with well-feigned enthusiasm replied “Good!”’35
The next day, Monday, 7 August, they sailed from Glasgow in a Clyde Shipping Company boat down the River Clyde, crossed the Irish Sea, and docked in Belfast the following morning. After walking about Campbell College and Little Lea, they visited their old parish church, St Mark’s, so that Warnie could see for the first time the stained-glass window they had erected there in memory of their parents. They sailed again at one o’clock the same day from Waterford and arrived in Plymouth on 10 August. En route to Oxford they visited Romsey Abbey (14 August). Lewis, on learning that one of the twelfth-century abbesses had rejoiced in the name of ‘Joan Jack’, observed to his brother that she ‘must have been a comfortable, easy-going kind of person’.36
Back in Oxford, Lewis was taken to the cinema on 17 August to see Noël Coward’s Cavalcade. He expected it to be interesting historically but came out feeling he had been at a debauch. He was, nevertheless, lured back a few weeks later to see King Kong, which he liked because of its Rider Haggardish atmosphere. Still, he never cared for this kind of amusement. Once, when Hooper suggested that they see a film, Lewis summed up his attitude to the cinema: ‘I like some science-fiction, some romances of high adventure, but I can’t take’ – (holding his nose) – ‘dram – a!’
Immediately after King Kong Lewis settled down to work. He had been one of the public examiners in the Honours School of English from 1931 to 1933 and, once free of this obligation, he disappeared into the Duke Humfrey Library of the Bodleian to finish his book on medieval love poetry. The only substantial break he took before the book was completed was a week’s walking tour with Warnie in January 1935 during which they toyed with the delightful notion of devising a ‘beer map’ of England in which each area would be depicted with a different colour to indicate which Beer Baron controlled it.
Finally, after eight years of research and writing, Lewis informed R.W. Chapman of the Oxford University Press on 18 September 1935, ‘I have now finished my book The Allegorical Love Poem and am in search of a publisher.’ After outlining the chapters, he went on to say: ‘The book as a whole has two themes: 1. The birth of allegory and its growth from what it is in Prudentius to what it is in Spenser. 2. The birth of the romantic conception of love and the long struggle between its earlier form (the romance of adultery) and its later form (the romance of marriage).’37
Kenneth Sisam, the great medieval scholar who was assistant secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press, was asked to look after the book and he wrote to Lewis on 20 September to say that the Delegates of Oxford University Press wished to consider it at their first meeting in Michaelmas Term. He also thanked Lewis for consenting to write the volume on English Literature in the Sixteenth Century for the Oxford History of English Literature – a promise which Lewis’s former tutor, Professor F.P. Wilson, had extracted from him a
few months earlier.
On 29 October the Delegates announced that they definitely wished to publish The Allegorical Love Poem and thereafter things began to move with unusual speed. Dom André Wilmart, the Patristic scholar, was asked to read and comment on the first two chapters, after which the book went to press and Lewis received the first batch of proofs before Christmas 1935. But Lewis, as will be seen, was not the only one to read them, and that other proof-reader, Charles Williams,* must now be introduced.
Some years before Dr R.W. Chambers had asked Lewis if he had read the ‘spiritual shockers’ of Charles Williams. Lewis made a mental note to try one but had not bothered till, in February 1936, when visiting Nevill Coghill in Exeter College, he heard his host praising Williams’s novel The Place of the Lion (1931). That night he took Coghill’s copy home and read it. It seems a pity to contradict the story Lewis told in the Preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947) about how he wrote a fan letter to Williams twenty-four hours later, but it does not appear to be entirely accurate. What did happen was that he wrote to Arthur Greeves on 26 February saying:
I have just read what I think a really great book, The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams. It is based on the Platonic theory of the other world in which the archetypes of all earthly qualities exist: and in the novel … these archetypes start sucking our world back. The lion of strength appears in the world and the strength starts going out of houses and things into him. The archetypal butterfly … appears and all the butterflies of the world fly back into him. But man contains and ought to be able to rule all these forces: and there is one man in the book who does, and the story ends with him as a second Adam ‘naming the beasts’ and establishing dominion over them. It is not only a most exciting fantasy, but a deeply religious and (unobtrusively) a profoundly learned book. 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 it before. I have learned more than I ever knew yet about humility … Do get it, and don’t mind if you don’t understand everything the first time … It isn’t often now-a-days you get a Christian fantasy.38
Then, so captivated was he by the novel, he sent Coghill’s copy to Cecil Harwood and a note to Barfield urging him to read it next. He also mentioned the book to Sir Humphrey Milford, the head of Oxford University Press.
On 11 March 1936 Lewis wrote to Charles Williams praising The Place of the Lion and suggesting that they meet. Williams, who was on the editorial staff of the Oxford University Press, answered by return of post:
12 March 1936
My dear Mr Lewis,
If you had delayed writing another 24 hours our letters would have crossed. It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author of a book while he at the same time was admiring me. My admiration for the staff work of the Omnipotence rises every day.
To be exact, I finished on Saturday looking – too hastily – at proofs of your Allegorical Love Poem. I had been asked to write something about it for travellers and booksellers and people so I read it first. I permit myself to enclose a copy of what I said, because I wrote this on Monday and yesterday our Sir Humphrey told me in the afternoon that he understood you had been reading my Lion. So if ever I was drawn to anyone – imagine! I admit that I fell for the Allegorical Love Poem so heavily because it is an aspect of the subject with which my mind has always been playing … 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 … As to your letter, what can I say? The public for all these novels has been so severely limited (though I admit in some cases passionate) that it gives me very high pleasure to feel that you liked the Lion … I do think it was extremely good of you to write and extraordinarily kind of the Omnipotence to arrange the coincidence. You must be in London sometimes. Do let me know and come and have lunch or dinner … I am here practically every day for all the day, and if you will send me a post card first I will see that I am … Do forgive this too long letter, but after all to write about your Love Poem and my Lion and both our Romantic Theology in one letter takes some paragraphs.
Very gratefully yours,
Charles Williams39
During the latter part of March, when Lewis was compiling an index for his book, the publishers suggested that the title be altered as the word ‘allegorical’ – though not ‘allegory’ – tended to put people off. Among the list of titles which Lewis thought of using instead was The House of Busirane, after the ‘vile enchanter’ Busirane who, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, symbolizes unlawful love. The publishers felt, however, that this made it sound too much like a novel and several of the staff, including Charles Williams, felt that The Allegory of Love might give a better idea of what the book was about. Lewis was persuaded to agree and the book was published on 21 May 1936 as The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition.
Up to this time Lewis was hardly known outside Oxford. With The Allegory of Love he firmly established himself as a first-rate scholar and a writer of exceptional imaginative power. The reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, adding one bouquet to another, said that in his chapter on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde ‘Mr Lewis reaches his full stature as a critic. His … appreciation of Chaucer’s marvellous poem [is] of the very highest quality … the proof, if the reader of his book needs any, that the historical method, in the hands of one who can keep imaginative control of the facts, adds depth to appreciation while taking nothing from its immediacy.’40 Since its publication The Allegory of Love has, over and over again, been classed as one of those rare books, such as A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), W.P. Ker’s Epic and Romance (1897), and John Livingston Lowes’s Road to Xanadu (1927), which not only shed fresh light on literature but which are truly ‘unputdownable’.
It would be misleading to talk about what the critics said about Lewis’s book as it goes on being praised by many – as well as debunked by a few who believe the author made too little use of the Patristic Fathers or that he was wrong in suggesting that romantic love was an invention of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, to give some idea of how immediately successful The Allegory of Love was with the most eminent scholars of the 1930s, Professor R.W. Chambers wrote to Lewis on 28 January 1938 saying that ‘on second reading it seems to me quite the greatest thing done in England for medieval studies since Ker’s Epic and Romance’. In 1937, when Lewis and Dr E.M.W. Tillyard were midway through their controversy over the ‘Personal Heresy’ in the pages of Essays and Studies, Tillyard broke off to congratulate his opponent:
May I be allowed to say what lively pleasure and admiration I experienced in reading the Allegory of Love? Not only have I learnt a very great deal but I got that rare joy – the sense of much matter marshalled, digested into a book. At last, I exclaim, a medievalist who is also a critic. And I found the preliminary matter quite as thrilling as the rest: the account of how allegory arose was something that I had long been wanting. And your plea for accepting allegory and your putting of that acceptance to critical use does seem to me to matter enormously. It casts light on what should not be but undoubtedly is a disgracefully dark place … I see you are whacking back at me in the next volume of Essays and Studies;41 and I look forward to the article provided the mincemeat you reduce me to is not too small.
One of the most recent criticisms of Lewis’s scholarly works came from his former pupil, Professor John Lawlor.* ‘The Allegory of Love’, he said, ‘remains compulsively readable, as few other works of historical literary criticism can claim to be, even in isolated passages; and if anyone can be said to have ended a tradition of dullness in scholarly writing, it is surely Lewis in his great, forever readable book.’42 More than that, said Professor Lawlor, Lewis’s scholarly works are ‘not so much accounts of literature in the past as themselves instances of literature�
�.43
With the publication of Spirits in Bondage, Lewis’s desire for fame had begun to inhibit the natural itch to write that he had felt ever since he first put pen to paper. His conversion, though it had helped him accept the fact that he might never be a successful poet, led him further to question the value of all cultural activities. Was he – or, for that matter, was anyone – justified in spending so much time on literature? Was it not very much like fiddling while Rome burned? By the time The Allegory of Love was published he had come a long way towards answering this question. The conclusions he reached combined with other areas of his work in forming his distinctive approach to literary history and literary criticism.
The essence of the problem for Lewis was the conflict between Objectivity and Subjectivity. A thumbnail sketch of this is found in Lewis’s essay ‘The Empty Universe’:
The process whereby man has come to know the universe is from one point of view extremely complicated; from another it is alarmingly simple … At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god … The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account: classified as sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not rest there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves.44
We have seen Lewis expressing this view to E.M.W. Tillyard, who was for many years a Fellow of English at Jesus College, Cambridge. In their ‘Personal Heresy’ debate Lewis maintained that the Subject (the reader) was becoming gorged and inflated at the expense of the Object (poetry). Literature, insisted Lewis, is not ‘the private furniture of the poet’s mind’ but ‘an acquisition, a voyage beyond the limits of his personal point of view, an annihilation of the brute fact of his own particular psychology rather than its assertion’.45 We noticed earlier, in our chapter on ‘Conversion’, that Lewis accepted Christianity, not because it consists of subjective theories about God, but because it is about ‘real things’ – ‘the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection’.
C. S. Lewis Page 19
