‘An amusing question whether my trilogy is an epic!’ Lewis wrote on 14 January 1951 to William L. Kinter of the USA. ‘Clearly, in virtue of its fantastic elements, it could only be an epic of the Ariosto type. But I should call it a Romance myself: it lacks sufficient roots in legend and tradition to be what I’d call an epic. Isn’t it more the method of Apuleius, Lucian and Rabelais, but diverted from a comic to a serious purpose?’77
Mr Kinter was to correspond at length with Lewis about his fiction. ‘What it is to have a real reader!’ Lewis wrote to him on 27 November 1951. ‘No one else sees that the first book is Ransom’s enfance: if they notice a change at all, they complain that in the latter ones he “loses the warm humanity of the first” etc.’78
‘“By the Furioso out of the Commedia” is not far wrong,’ Lewis wrote to him on 28 March 1953. ‘My real model was David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus which first suggested to me that the form of “science fiction” should be filled by spiritual experiences. And as the Furioso was in some ways the science-fiction of its age, your analogy works. But mind you, there is already a science-fiction element in the Commedia: e.g. Inferno xxxiv 85–114.’79
‘I think That Hideous Strength is about a triple conflict,’ Lewis wrote on 30 July 1954, ‘Grace against Nature and Nature against Anti-Nature (modern industrialism, scientism and totalitarian politics): I should be very surprised if I owe anything to Politian or Ascham. Taking the word Humanist in the old sense in which they are Humanists, I am solidly anti-Humanist: i.e. though I love the Classics I loathe Classicism.’80
With That Hideous Strength Lewis came virtually to the end of his science fiction. The moment it was finished he embarked on The Great Divorce. That book, though cast in narrative form, must be considered with The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Screwtape Letters among Lewis’s theological writings; it would be an even greater effort to include them in science fiction than to include Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Lewis did in fact write three science-fiction short stories towards the end of his life, which have been collected in The Dark Tower and Other Stories. The first two, ‘The Shoddy Lands’ and ‘Ministering Angels’, were published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in February 1956 and January 1958, and conquer no new worlds. ‘The Shoddy Lands’ are those of a rather trivial young woman’s mind explored in visible form by a dreamer for a few minutes; ‘Ministering Angels’, though actually set on Mars (definitely not Malacandra), takes place entirely in a scientific ‘space station’ set up there, and is a light-hearted skit on the serious suggestion that if men were to spend long periods in space or on the planets, concubines should be supplied ‘to relieve tensions and promote morale’.81
The third story, ‘Forms of Things Unknown’, is of much greater interest. Lewis did not publish it, perhaps meaning to revise and simplify it after Green, to whom he read it, had pointed out that few readers would take the point. How few has been shown by two American scholars and students of Lewis’s works, the first of whom asked what the Gorgons were, and the second assumed that Medusa was the only Gorgon and that her head could somehow be floating about on the Moon – actually she, the only mortal Gorgon, could not have lived in space any more than an ordinary man without a space-suit, while her sisters Sthenno and Euryale, being immortal, could perfectly well have done so. But in fact the Gorgons are not mentioned by name or as such, and the reader is left to realize, with a cold thrill, what it is that turns all Selenauts into stone.
The description of the landing on the moon and of the scenery and physical conditions as Jenkin, the Selenaut, explores the area where previous space voyages have disappeared so mysteriously, is brilliantly imagined and described. And this must owe a great deal to a picture, or rather an astral dream, which Lewis described in a letter to his father on 30 March 1927:
I dreamed that I was walking among the valleys of the Moon – a world of pure white rock, all deep chasms and spidery crags, with a perfectly black sky overhead. Of course there was nothing living there, not even a bit of moss: pure mineral solitude. Then I saw, very far off, coming to meet me down a narrow ravine, a straight, tall figure, draped in black, face and all covered. One knew it would be nicer not to meet that person: but one never has any choice in a dream, and for what seemed about an hour I went on till this stranger was right beside me. Then he held out an arm as if to shake hands, and of course I had to give him my hand: when suddenly I saw that instead of a hand he had a sort of metal ring which he closed round my wrist. It was sharp on the inside and hurt abominably. Then, without a word, drawing this thing together till it cut right to the bone, he turned and began to lead me off down the same long valley he had come from. It was the sense of being on the Moon you know, the complete desolateness, which gave the extraordinary effect.82
* * *
* ‘ruling essence’.
* Sister Penelope CSMV (1890–1977) was born Ruth Penelope Lawson in Clent, Worcestershire. She attended the Alice Otley School in Worcester, where she developed a devotion to the Blessed Virgin and a love of Greek and Latin. In 1912 she entered the Convent of the (Anglican) Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage, and from this time on was Sister Penelope CSMV. She studied Theology at Oxford, and over the years she published many works of theology and translated various works of the Church Fathers. On 5 August 1939 she wrote to Lewis about Out of the Silent Planet, and thus began a long and fruitful friendship. Her many works include The Wood for the Trees (1935) and a short autobiography, Meditation of a Caterpillar (1962). See her biography in CG.
* Dorothy Leigh Sayers (1893–1957) was educated at Somerville College where she took a First in Modern Languages. She came to fame through her detective nobleman, Lord Peter Wimsey, in Whose Body? (1923) and other novels. It was her theological writings which attracted Lewis, his favourites being The Mind of the Maker (1941) and the radio-drama, The Man Born to be King (1943). When she was about fifty she became passionately interested in Dante and one of her great achievements was a translation of Dante’s Inferno (1949), his Purgatorio (1955) and the Paradiso (1962) which she left unfinished at her death but which was completed by Barbara Reynolds.
* There survives an undated fragment of verse in one of Lewis’s notebooks which runs:
The floating islands, the flat golden sky
At noon, the peacock sunset: tepid waves
With the land sliding over them like a skin:
The alien Eve, green-bodied, stepping forth
To meet my hero from her forest home,
Proud, courteous, unafraid; no thought infirm
Alters her cheek –
At first sight this might suggest that Lewis began with the idea of writing Perelandra as a narrative poem. But a study of the fragment makes it seem much more likely that he is writing about his own creation – perhaps on the very night described above.
* Jane Agnes ‘Janie’ McNeill (1889–1959), whose family lived near the Lewises in Strandtown, was the daughter of James Adams McNeill, headmaster at Campbell College, 1890–1907. She was educated at Victoria College, Belfast, and would have gone to the university except that she felt she should stay and look after her mother. Besides her long friendship with the Lewis family, she was close to the medieval scholar and translator, Helen Waddell. See her biography in CG.
NOTES
1 The Allegory of Love, p. 361.
2 Lewis was using Bernardus Silvestris, De Mundi Universitate, ed. Carl Sigmund Barach and Johann Wrobel (1876).
3 Ibid., Liber Secundus, III, 91–100, p. 38.
4 The ‘Cosmographia’ of Bernardus Silvestris, trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (Columbia University Press, 1973), ‘Microcosmos’, ch. III, p. 96.
5 The Allegory of Love, p. 361.
6 That Hideous Strength, ch. 13, pt 4, p. 314.
7 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fol. 2.
8 Ibid., fol. 74.
9 Mark R Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (1967), p. 138.
11 Of This and Other Worlds, pp. 35–6.
12 Letters, pp. 321–2.
13 Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947; Fontana edn, 1960), ch. 15, pp. 137–8, n. 1.
14 Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces, p. 42.
15 An Experiment in Criticism, ch. 5, pp. 41–4.
16 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845; University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), Introduction, section 21, pp. 29–30.
17 Ibid., ch. 4, iv, p. 127.
18 Christian Reflections, p. 220.
19 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 33.
20 Revelation 12:7–9, RSV.
21 Out of the Silent Planet (1938; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 11, p. 68.
22 Ibid., ch. 16, p. 105.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., ch. 18, pp. 121–2.
25 Ibid., p. 123.
26 Ibid., ch. 20, pp. 141–2.
27 Ibid., p. 143.
28 The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, Volume Four: 1951–1957: In the Midst of Life, ed. Barbara Reynolds (2000), p. 118.
29 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fol. 83.
30 Marjorie Nicholson, Voyages to the Moon (1948), pp. 251–5.
31 Out of the Silent Planet, ch. 22, pp. 159–60.
32 Ibid., Postscript, p. 167.
33 The Dark Tower and Other Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (1977; Fount, 1998), ch. 1, p. 3.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., ch. 2, p. 22.
36 Ibid., ch. 4, p. 47.
37 ‘It All Began with a Picture …’ Radio Times, ‘Junior Radio Times’ (15 July 1960), p. 2. Reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, p. 79.
38 Letters, p. 361.
39 TST, p. 492.
40 Letters, p. 366.
41 Ibid., p. 475.
42 Perelandra (1943; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 2, p. 18.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., ch. 3, p. 29.
45 Ibid., ch. 4, pp. 53–4.
46 Ibid., ch. 5, p. 58.
47 Ibid., ch. 7, p. 89.
48 Ibid., p. 92.
49 Ibid., p. 94.
50 Ibid., p. 95.
51 Ibid., ch. 9, p. 111.
52 Ibid., ch. 8, p. 102.
53 Ibid., ch. 9, p. 119.
54 Ibid., p. 121.
55 Ibid., ch. 11, p. 141.
56 Ibid., ch. 16, p. 209.
57 Ibid., ch. 17, p. 217.
58 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), 183–92.
59 ‘C.S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, ch. 8, p. 213.
60 Perelandra, ch. 6, p. 79.
61 Fern-Seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity, ed. Walter Hooper (Fount Paperback, 1998), p. 74.
62 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fols 8–10.
63 Ibid., fol. 11.
64 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 342.
65 AMR, pp. 266–7.
66 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (1945; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 1, pt 1, p. 1.
67 Ibid., p. 4.
68 Ibid., ch. 9, pt 2, p. 199.
69 Ibid., ch. 1, pt 1, p. 2.
70 Letters, p. 379.
71 That Hideous Strength, ch. 1, pt 4, p. 12.
72 Letter to Roger Lancelyn Green of 17 July 1971. Estate of Roger Lancelyn Green.
73 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 16.
74 Ibid., fol. 17.
75 Ibid., fols 19–20.
76 The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, Volume Three: 1944–1950: A Noble Daring, ed. Barbara Reynolds (1998), p. 177.
77 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/1, fol. 167.
78 Ibid., fol. 171.
79 Ibid., fol. 181.
80 Ibid., fol 185.
81 Preface, The Dark Tower and Other Stories, p. xi.
82 FL, pp. 678–9.
8
TALK OF THE DEVIL
When the war broke out in 1939, Warnie, who had remained in the Army Reserve, was called into active duty and posted to the Base Supply Depot at Le Havre. He was now forty-three, had enjoyed seven years of retirement, and the ‘romance’ of Army life which he had felt as a young man had palled. Even the Enemy, which had been somewhat amorphous during the First World War, had become grim and dreadful in the person of Hitler – the one modern man so bad that Lewis (in ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’) put him in Hell. At the same time, Lewis had no sympathy with the modern view that killing or being killed is the greatest possible of all evils and he did not believe in pacifism. Expecting a Leftist and a Rightist pseudo-theology to emerge in England, he would not accept the tempting belief that his country was without fault. Thus it was that when the vicar of his parish church, the Reverend Thomas Bleiben,* prayed on the morning of 10 September 1939 that God might prosper ‘our righteous cause’, Lewis protested to Warnie against the ‘audacity of informing God that our cause was righteous’.1
During the First World War Lewis had not only his brother’s life to worry about but his own. Now that he was left behind, in the relative security of his college, he worried about Warnie and whether he would come out of the war alive. Maureen Moore later told Walter Hooper of the elaborate means he went to in order to hide his deepening sorrow from the family. Once when Mrs Moore sent her into his study to call him for tea, she found Lewis reading. This she knew to be a ruse when she noticed that the book he was holding was upside down. Some idea of his mental anguish comes through the pages of one of his notebooks where he tried to put his prayers for his brother into a poem. Scribbled throughout the notebook are various versions of the lines
How can I ask thee Father to defend
In peril of war my brother’s head to-day?
Later – perhaps for the purpose of disguising his feelings from others – he amends ‘brother’ to ‘dearest friend’, and takes the poem a bit further:
How can I ask thee, Father, to defend
In peril of war my dearest friend to-day,
As though I knew, better than Thou, the way,
Or with more love than thine desired the end?
When I, for the length of one poor prayer, suspend
So hardly for his sake my thoughts, that stray
And wanton, thrusting twenty times a day,
Clean out of mind the man I call my friend;
Who, if he had from thee, no better care
Than mine, were every moment dead. But prayer
Thou givest to man, not man to thee: thy laws
Suffering our mortal wish that way to share
The eternal will; at taste of whose large air
Man’s word becomes, by miracle, a cause.
The war advertised itself everywhere. Three schoolgirls were evacuated to The Kilns, and Mrs Moore set Lewis to hanging up blackout curtains. So great was the shortage of space near London that the Government appropriated many college buildings for the billeting of soldiers. Lewis, fearing the worst, was delighted that New Buildings, which contained his set of rooms, was not used and that there were enough undergraduates to begin Michaelmas Term.
Meanwhile, the loss of Warnie was somewhat compensated for by the appearance in Oxford of Charles Williams. Though Williams was given something of a hero’s welcome by Lewis he was, as we have seen, not universally admired by the Inklings: Tolkien told Walter Hooper some years later that ‘Lewis has always been taken in by someone. First, it was Mrs Moore, then Charles Williams, and then Joy Davidman.’ As it has become fashionable to speak of the ‘influence’ of Charles Williams on Lewis and to draw parallels between the two men’s books, it is not, perhaps, amiss to record a conversation Hooper once had with Lewis on the subject. After a meeting of the Inklings some years after Williams’s death, Dr ‘Humphrey’ Havard drove Lewis and Hooper out to The Trout inn at Godstow. Over lunch Hooper asked Lewis what he thought of the current vogue for tracing the ‘influence’ of Williams in his work. ‘I have never’, replied Lewis, ‘been consciously influenced by W
illiams, never believed that I was in any way imitating him. On the other hand, there may have been a great deal of unconscious influence going on.’ Then, bursting into laughter, he said, ‘By the by, I notice that every time I have a pork pie you have one too – is that “influence”?’
It may have been partly the great unconscious influence or the mental stimulation of Williams that made the war years some of Lewis’s most productive. Some months before the Oxford University Press moved to Oxford, Lewis received two unusual requests for a layman. One came from the Reverend T.R. Milford asking if he would preach before the University in the Church of St Mary the Virgin, and the other from the publisher Ashley Sampson* requesting him to write a book on pain.
Lewis often said that if anyone had told him in his atheist days that he would someday step into a pulpit and preach he would have considered that man raving mad. Nevertheless, he accepted the invitation, conscious while doing so of both his duty to take on whatever tasks of this kind he was given and the curious ‘about-face’ actions which God sometimes requires of a once cheeky atheist. He was at this time writing his essay on ‘Christianity and Culture’ and the sermon is quite obviously an outgrowth of it. The vicar of St Mary’s was pleased with the script Lewis sent him and he mimeographed copies to pass out after the sermon. So, on Sunday evening, 22 October 1939, Lewis climbed into the pulpit to preach to a very large congregation of dons and undergraduates, one of whom was Roger Lancelyn Green. The sermon was entitled ‘None Other Gods: Culture in War Time’,2 and Lewis chose as a text the verse ‘A Syrian ready to perish was my father’ from Deuteronomy 26:5. The sermon appeared, under the title ‘Learning in War-Time’, in Transposition and Other Addresses (1949), and was reprinted in Fernseed and Elephants (1975).
C. S. Lewis Page 29
