C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  The picture which Orfieu and Scudamour show Ransom, Lewis and MacPhee is of a Dark Tower of which they are presently able to see the interior; there a man sits like a graven image, filling them with horror partly by his very unhumanness, but mainly by a poisoned sting like a miniature unicorn’s horn which sticks out from his forehead and with which he stabs or inoculates in the spine a series of normal human victims who come in one by one as into the presence of a god and submit themselves to this agonizing process, which apparently dehumanizes them: ‘they entered the room as men, or (more rarely) women; they left it automata’.35

  For a long time the watchers do not know whether they are looking into the past or the future; but at length they decide that it is the future, and that the Dark Tower is in fact a copy of the Cambridge University Library (opened in 1934) made by a later civilization – as we might model a modern building on the Parthenon. But presently they recognize Scudamour’s exact double among the people whom they see most constantly through the Chronoscope; they see him become a Stinging-man with the unicorn horn – and then in a dramatic moment he and they see his fiancée Camilla, or her exact double, brought to be stabbed and made an automaton by him – and in a sudden unreasoning moment of passion Scudamour flings himself at the Chronoscope and breaks it.

  But in doing so he breaks the time barrier and his soul and that of his double in the Othertime change bodies (rather as the Professor and his pupil do in Conan Doyle’s story ‘The Great Keinplatz Experiment’). ‘You remember what Orfieu said the first evening about time-travel being impossible because you’d have no body in the other time when you got there?’ says Ransom.

  ‘Well, isn’t it obvious that if you got two times that had replicas that difficulty would be overcome. In other words, I think that the Double we saw on the screen had a body not merely like poor Scudamour’s but the same: I mean, that the very same matter which made up Scudamour’s body in 1938 made up the brute’s body in Othertime. Now if that were so – and if you then, by any contrivance, brought the two times into contact, so to speak – you see?’

  ‘You mean they might – might jump across?’

  ‘Yes, in a sense. Scudamour, under the influence of a strong emotion, makes what you might call a psychological leap or lunge at the Othertime … The Othertime occupant of that body is caught off his guard – simply pushed out of his body – but since that identical body is waiting for him in 1938, he inevitably slips into it and finds himself in Cambridge.’36

  The Othertime man occupying Scudamour’s 1938 body escapes from the college and we last see him walking on the ridge of the roof. But it is obvious that in the end the metempsychosis is reversed, for the last quarter of what has survived of the book consists of a third-person account of Scudamour’s adventures in the Othertime as he narrated it after his return. The adventures so far as they go show him in the Othertime Stinging-man’s body discovering that Camilla’s double in the Dark Tower does not contain the 1938 Camilla’s soul, but is in love with him; passing himself off as the Othertimer whose body he is inhabiting; and giving an overlong and laboured account of Othertime scientific experiments leading up to the making of Chronoscopes of their own. But before this is fully achieved the manuscript breaks off suddenly in mid-sentence at the bottom of a page. How much more was written there is no way of knowing, for no more has survived beyond these first 32,000 words or so.

  The story, published as ‘The Dark Tower’ (Lewis gave it no name) in 1977, remains a tantalizing fragment, particularly as it leaves no clue to the real content of the book: there is a suggestion that the Othertimers may be infiltrating into this world, but even that is vague. Yet it is the only possible link with Out of the Silent Planet, and even so it reduces Ransom to a fairly minor character. MacPhee turns up again in That Hideous Strength, but there is not enough to show whether Camilla bears any resemblance to her namesake in the same book: from the few remarks about the earthly Camilla she seems more like a precursor of Jane Studdock.

  ‘All my seven Narnian books, and my three science fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head,’ said Lewis in 1960.37 There is no record of what pictures grew into Out of the Silent Planet; but it seems probable that pictures, or even actual nightmares (to which Lewis was prone throughout his life) were very much in evidence when he started to write ‘The Dark Tower’. The scenes witnessed in the Othertime through the Chronoscope are particularly vivid – indeed it is possible that the slowness of the connecting links and the sheer lifelessness of Scudamour’s investigations in the Othertime explain why Lewis discarded the book: he was carried away by the pictures and did not know what was to happen next.

  Indeed, it is difficult to understand why Ransom’s successful visit to Mars did not immediately suggest sending him to Venus, instead of endeavouring to let him conquer time as well as space. ‘The Dark Tower’ was probably abandoned well before the end of 1939 when Lewis began work on The Problem of Pain, which occupied most of his available time until the following April. On 9 May 1940 he was writing to Arthur Greeves about Out of the Silent Planet, but making no mention of any possible sequel; and the rest of the year was taken up with various lectures and broadcast talks – both in person to Army camps, and on the wireless. On 9 November 1941 he wrote to Sister Penelope: ‘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. This woman has got to combine characteristics which the Fall has put poles apart – she’s got to be in some ways like a Pagan goddess and in other ways like the Blessed Virgin. But, if one can get even a fraction of it into words, it is worth doing.’38

  On 23 December 1941 he was writing to Arthur Greeves about the story: ‘I’m engaged on a sequel to The Silent Planet in which the same man goes to Venus. The idea is that Venus is at the Adam-and-Eve stage: i.e. the first two rational creatures have just appeared and are still innocent. My hero arrives in time to prevent their “falling” as our first pair did.’39 To another friend he wrote on 20 January 1942, ‘Ransom is having a grand time on Venus at the moment’; and finally to Sister Penelope again, on 11 May, ‘The Venus book is now finished except that I find the first two chapters need re-writing.’40

  Apart from the Paradise Lost inspiration, the book grew out of vivid pictures of the floating islands, the golden sky, the towering rocks on the fixed land, and recollections of childhood fears and dreams of gigantic insects in endless caves. Probably the floating islands grew and developed subconsciously from a passage in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (Chapter 13, Section I): ‘In early days on Venus men had gathered foodstuff from the great floating islands of vegetable matter …’; and he may have got the violent rainstorms from the same source. But the world of Perelandra owes little to any previous suggestion: it is Lewis’s supreme imaginative triumph in the creation of another world so vivid that any other picture of Venus becomes preposterous. The undulating islands, the golden sky, the fixed land, the curiously unearthly weather – we can see them so vividly that it is hard to believe that we have not seen them with our actual eyes.

  As with Out of the Silent Planet, this sequel is based on a supposal. In a letter to Mrs Hook of 29 December 1958, Lewis explained that whereas Aslan was ‘an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia” … So in “Perelandra”. This also works out a supposition. (“Suppose, even now, in some other planet there were a first couple undergoing the same that Adam and Eve underwent here, but successfully”.)’41

  Perelandra, which was published on 20 April 1943, opens with Lewis being summoned to Ransom’s cottage near Worcester. Ransom explains that he has been ordered to Perelandra (Venus) because it is rumoured that the Black Oyarsa of Thulcandra (Satan) is planning an attack. ‘But is he at large like that in the Solar System?’42 asks Lewis, who understood that Satan could not venture beyond the Moon. ‘He can’t get there’, answers Ransom, ‘in
his own person … As you know he was driven back within these bounds centuries before any human life existed on our planet. If he ventured to show himself outside the Moon’s orbit he’d be driven back again – by main force … No. He must be attempting Perelandra in some different way.’43

  This time, instead of a spaceship, Ransom is transported to Perelandra by the Oyarsa of Malacandra. It is a young world of floating islands; Ransom climbs on to one of the islands and finds himself in a world of such exquisite colours and other sensuous delights that, speaking of it later, he complains of it being ‘too definite for language’.44 The next day he finds himself in the company of a small and friendly dragon. This leads him to wonder if all the things that appeared as mythology on Earth are scattered through other worlds as realities. He next meets the ‘Eve’ of that world, a naked woman he calls the Green Lady because she looks like a goddess carved from green stone. Despite the fact that Ransom can speak with her in Old Solar, it is very difficult to understand her. ‘Never had Ransom seen a face so calm, and so unearthly … a calm which no storm had ever preceded.’45 The Lady, for her part, is puzzled by Ransom’s self-consciousness. ‘I have never done it before,’ she says, ‘stepping out of life into the Alongside and looking at oneself living as if one were not alive.’46 Ransom learns that there is a King, her husband, but he does not appear until the end of the book. This ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ of Perelandra are in unbroken communion with Maleldil, who speaks directly to them.

  The Lady allows Ransom to accompany her to the ‘Fixed Land’ – the one part of Perelandra that does not float. There he learns that while Maleldil allows the Lady and the King to go there he has forbidden them to spend the night on it. As they speak they see something fall on the Fixed Land, and Ransom is heartsick to discover that Dr Weston has arrived in a spaceship. Weston, as always, is obsessed with finding new territory for man to spread himself. ‘Man in himself’, says Weston, ‘is nothing. The forward movement of Life – its growing spirituality – is everything … To spread spirituality … is henceforward my mission.’47 When Ransom mentions that the Devil is a spirit, Weston says, ‘Your Devil and your God are both pictures of the same Force … The next stage of emergent evolution beckoning us forward, is God; the transcended stage behind, ejecting us, is the Devil.’48 In the course of Ransom’s arguing with him Weston shouts, ‘The world leaps forward through great men and greatness always transcends mere moralism.’49 Moments later he says, ‘I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil. I call that Force into me completely.’50 The next instant he is seized by a convulsion that leaves the Devil in possession of his body. From this point onwards Ransom is unsure whether the man he knew as Weston still exists, and he calls this new creature the ‘Un-man’. Lewis thus gives an important new ‘development’ to his ‘Silent Planet Myth’. By himself Satan was unable to venture beyond the Moon’s orbit, but as Ransom explains in Chapter 9: ‘Weston’s body, travelling in a space-ship, had been the bridge by which something else had invaded Perelandra – whether that supreme and original evil whom in Mars they call The Bent One, or one of his lesser followers.’51

  It soon becomes evident that the Un-man is there to tempt the Lady to spend the night on the Fixed Land. When she reminds him that Maleldil has forbidden them from dwelling on the Fixed Land, he counters that Maleldil hasn’t forbidden her from thinking about it.52 The Temptation of the Lady of Perelandra is at the heart of the book, and it is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing in the whole Lewis oeuvre. Ransom does his best to counter the Un-man’s arguments but his task is complicated by the Un-man’s use of the Church’s own theology.

  The whole of the ninth chapter is based on one of the great theological issues. In the fourth century St Augustine gave classical formulation to the Church’s belief that Adam’s Fall brought more good than evil. His expression, Felix peccatum Adae, is rendered ‘O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam’ in the Easter liturgy of the Catholic Church. The Un-man tries to convince the Lady that only by disobeying Maleldil will she emerge from her present ‘smallness’ into ‘Deep Life, with all its joy and splendour and hardness’.53 Finally, Ransom turns on the Un-man and, addressing him as the Devil, says: ‘Tell her all. What good came to you? Do you rejoice that Maleldil became a man?’54 The remembrance of what the Incarnation still means to him causes the Un-man to howl like a dog, and he abandons the temptation. Ransom is so exhausted that he can hardly remain awake. Wondering when Maleleldil will send his ‘representative’55 to stop the temptation, he realizes with a shock that he is that representative.

  Although he expects to fail, Ransom chases the Un-man to the Fixed Land with the hope of killing the body being used by the Devil. There follows a battle in which the Un-man’s body is destroyed. When he is well enough to travel, Ransom finds a bleeding wound in his heel where he was bitten by the Un-man. This is a reference to Genesis 3:15 where God says to the Serpent, ‘I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.’

  The last two chapters of Perelandra are stunningly beautiful. In a valley of the Fixed Land Ransom is greeted by the Oyarsa of Malacandra and the Oyarsa of Perelandra. There he also meets the King and the Lady, ‘Paradise itself in its two Persons’,56 and he sees Perelandra hand over the governance of the planet to the King. Lewis then incorporates his Silent Planet Myth into the prediction of the Second Coming in Matthew 24:29–31. Echoing the biblical ‘the moon shall not give her light’, the King explains the part he and other unfallen creatures will take in this: ‘We will fall upon your moon, wherein there is a secret evil, and which is as the shield of the Dark Lord of Thulcandra … We shall break her.’57 Ransom is then returned to Earth.

  Lewis must have seen Perelandra more clearly than any of his readers can, and probably more clearly than he saw any of the mind-pictures out of which his stories grew: for he liked Perelandra best of all his works of fiction, though he considered Till We Have Faces his masterpiece in this kind. Green remembered walking round Addison’s Walk at Magdalen in the middle of an idyllic summer night when the trees and spires stood out against a skyline lit by a low, unseen moon, and the dome of the sky was bright with stars. Brightest of all shone a superb planet: ‘Perelandra!’ said Lewis with such a passionate longing in his voice that he seemed for a moment to be Ransom himself looking back with infinite desire to an actual memory.*

  Presently Green quoted some lines from Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, and Lewis took them up and completed the passage, surely the epitome of the whole conception of the ‘Field of Arbol’, of Malacandra, Thulcandra and Perelandra:

  Venus near her! smiling downward at this earthlier earth of ours,

  Closer to the Sun, perhaps a world of never fading flowers.

  Hesper, whom the poet called the Bringer home of all good things.

  All good things may move in Hesper, perfect peoples, perfect kings.

  Hesper – Venus – were we native to that splendour or in Mars,

  We should see the Globe we groan in, fairest of their evening stars.

  Could we dream of wars and carnage, craft and madness, lust and spite,

  Roaring London, raving Paris, in that point of peaceful light?

  Might we not in glancing heavenward on a Star so silver-fair

  Yearn, and clasp the hands and murmur, ‘Would to God that we were there’?58

  This was perhaps a unique moment, for Lewis seldom revealed his deeper feelings. A more typical reaction to the heavenly bodies came when Warnie asked him one night why stars twinkled while planets did not. ‘Well, obviously,’ said Jack, ‘because the stars are lit by gas and the planets by electricity.’59

  Lewis would seldom explain how he came to invent names in his stories: often, indeed, they came to him in more or less the same way as the pictures out of which the stories grew. His advice on finding new names was to spell old ones backwards and see what the result suggested: but few of his nam
es can be traced in this way. He did admit that Thulcandra, the Silent Planet, might have been reached by a ‘portmanteau word’ method: ‘thick’, ‘dull’ and ‘sulk’ giving Thulk; on this analogy Malacandra for Mars might derive from the Latin malo – ‘I would rather be’ – ‘would to God that we were there’, as in Tennyson’s couplet, but in this case a straightforward desire to be in an unfallen world. Perelandra has no obvious original, unless we equate it with ‘Peri-landra’, i.e. ‘fairyland’: however, it is worth noting that in the first edition of Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 15) Venus appears as ‘Parelandra’, possibly from ‘parallax’, Lewis having ‘Paradise’ in mind – Tennyson’s ‘world of never fading flowers’. But all this is guesswork.

  Perelandra repeats the fears which Lewis had voiced in Out of the Silent Planet about the way in which Weston and scientists like him would carry out a ruthless extermination of any possible inhabitants of other planets so as to preserve earth’s human race at all costs:

  Professor Weston … was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over the planet in obscure works of ‘scientifiction,’ in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines … It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond that lies the sweet poison of the false infinite – the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species – a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality.60