C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  Thrusting up evil heads.48

  And it was when Psyche has been left in chains on the hillside,

  When fear had done his worst in the girl’s heart

  That some strange helper came and took her part49

  From the fragment it is also possible that Jardis was to have some vision of the truth which he concealed under the usual story of the jealous sisters, a story, says Lewis, that is

  like the work of some poetic youth,

  Angry, and far too certain of the truth,

  Mad from the gleams of vision that claim to find

  Bye ways to something missed by all mankind.

  He thinks that only envy or dull eyes

  Keep all men from believing in the prize

  He holds in secret. In revenge he drew

  – For portrait of us all – the sisters two,

  Misunderstanding them … 50

  But the fragment breaks off after the proem and half a dozen lines (in two versions) of the beginning of the actual narrative, and it is almost certain that no more was written.

  When the form came to him at length and he began writing Till We Have Faces, Lewis combined Caspian and Jardis into one person, Psyche’s elder sister Orual (the sisters have no names in Apuleius – the only classical authority for the story) who is in a sense both man and woman: almost the personification of Philia and Eros – friendship and sexual love – about which Lewis was already beginning to think deeply as they grew in his understanding towards their place in The Four Loves.

  We do not know how far Lewis had come in the planning of Till We Have Faces when he and Warnie invited Joy to The Kilns for the weekend of 18–20 March, but it was during this visit that Lewis discovered exactly how the story should develop. Writing to Bill Gresham on 23 March 1955 Joy said that on her arrival she found Jack ‘lamenting that he couldn’t get a good idea for a book’. She said they settled into comfortable chairs and ‘kicked a few ideas around till one came to light. Then we had another whisky each and bounced it back and forth between us.’ The next day, said Joy, ‘without further planning, he wrote the first chapter! I read it and made some criticisms.’ Lewis then ‘did it over and went on with the next’. When Joy wrote to Gresham again on 29 April she told him that Lewis ‘is now about three-quarters of the way through the book … and he says he finds my advice indispensable’.51

  As the central character of Till We Have Faces was a woman, Lewis was keen to try the story with other women friends. On 2 April 1955 he explained to Katharine Farrer,* herself a novelist, that in his version of the story

  Apuleius got it all wrong. The elder sister (I reduce her to one) couldn’t see Psyche’s palace when she visited her. She saw only rock and heather. When P. said she was giving her noble wine, the poor sister saw and tasted only spring water. Hence her dreadful problem: ‘Is P. mad or am I blind?’ As you see, though I didn’t start from that, it is the story of every nice, affectionate agnostic whose dearest one suddenly ‘gets religion’, or even every luke-warm Christian whose dearest gets a Vocation. Never, I think, treated sympathetically by a Christian writer before.52

  By the time Lewis wrote to Mrs Farrer again, on 9 July, the book was finished and she had read it. And on 31 July he asked Christian Hardie, the wife of Colin Hardie, to read it. ‘Though the version you have read’, he said, ‘was very quickly written, you might say I’ve been at work on Orual for 35 years. Of course in my pre-Christian days she was to be in the right and the gods in the wrong.’53

  The book was ready in typescript for the publisher by the beginning of February 1956. Two years earlier Geoffrey Bles had retired, and Jocelyn ‘Jock’ Gibb, formerly production manager of Geoffrey Bles Ltd, became the new managing director.* Lewis’s title for his novel was Bareface. Gibb objected to the title and warned Lewis, half jokingly, that it might be mistaken for a Western. ‘I don’t see why people (I mean, people who are interested in what I do next) would be deterred from buying it if they did think it a Western,’ replied Lewis on 16 February. ‘Actually, I think the title cryptic enough to be intriguing. (The point, of course, is that Orual after going literally bareface in her youth, is made really and spiritually bareface, to herself and to all the dead, at the end.)’54 On 21 February Lewis sent Gibb a descriptive note, later revised somewhat in the volume as published:

  In one sense the author has worked on this book most of his life, for this re-interpretation of an old story (readers need not know which when they begin) had lived with him and pestered him to make it ever since he was an undergraduate. Suddenly, last Spring, the form presented itself. All came into focus: and had drawn into it many sympathies that had found no vehicle in earlier books – for the ugly woman, the barbarous idolater, the humane sceptic, and (above all) the friends and lovers of those who have a vocation or even a faith.55

  But on 29 February Lewis returned to the question of a title. ‘One other possible title has occurred to me: Till We Have Faces. (My heroine says in one passage “How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?”)56 I must, however, warn you that no one on whom I’ve tried it thinks it an improvement on Bareface.’ The second title was finally used, with Lewis’s full approval, though he insisted that ‘Bareface was better per se’.57

  There is a great deal of Joy Davidman in the character of Orual – though how consciously Lewis used her is uncertain; and, of course, he only used her as a creative writer does: he did not draw a portrait of her. Orual’s spiritual journey from Ungit worship through apostasy and by way of the Platonism taught by the Fox, to her final surrender to God (almost a foreshadowing of Christ, one of the ‘good dreams’ that Lewis felt had been permitted from time to time in the pagan world) parallels Joy’s pilgrimage from her Jewish background by way of atheism and Communism, until her conversion to Christianity. There is also in a sense the physical Joy, the middle-aged and not particularly good-looking woman whom Lewis was able to treat for a long time almost as one of his men friends, just as Bardia treats Orual; but although Orual accepts and reciprocates this kind of love – Philia – another kind – Eros – is present on her side though not on his.

  The theme of friendship with the unattractive woman was explored in Till We Have Faces, but not exhausted. It merged into the theme of the beautiful woman married for love in the ordinary sense, and then the sudden question: if we jump forward ten years or so and find her suddenly middle-aged, no longer physically attractive, does love survive? It is the opposite problem to that of Mary Rose in the play by J.M. Barrie (1920) who ‘comes back after many years in Fairyland, but exactly as on the moment of her disappearance – her husband and parents have thought of her, longed for her, like this – but when she does return, she just doesn’t fit’.58 And then, is the love of friendship and affection stronger, better even, than physical love?

  Lewis was asking this question even before Till We Have Faces was published. On 28 May 1956 Green travelled with him from Oxford to Cambridge on the slow through-train – the ‘Cantab Crawler’ as they nicknamed it – and noted that during the three-hour journey they had a ‘delightful talk, mainly on Classical Myths, re a story he has written, and one he plans to write about Helen after Troy, and about my Helen of Sparta which he suggests re-naming Mystery at Mycenae’. The story of Helen became the fragment published in The Dark Tower and Other Stories as ‘After Ten Years’ (Lewis gave it no title). This he began shortly afterwards, but abandoned until 1960 directly after his visit to Greece. On 3 May of that year Green, again at Cambridge, spent ‘all evening until midnight with Jack – mainly talking about the story he’s writing of which he read me all that he had done – about Helen and Menelaus, beginning with Menelaus in the Horse (he’d written the first few pages some time ago and read it to me)’. The story got hardly any further, mainly because Joy’s death the following month seemed to cut off his creative ability; but also because he was becoming less and less sure of the story’s course. One of the odd little group of Greek books which Orual was able to se
cure in Glome was ‘a poem in honour of Helen by Hesias Stesichorus’59 and, although his poem, the Palinodia, has not survived, the theme is well known: that Helen remained in Egypt while her double or eidolon or ka went to Troy with Paris and caused the disastrous war, and that Menelaus found the real Helen in Egypt on his way home, still innocent and beautiful (as in Euripides’ play Helen) – the legend which Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang had already adapted in The World’s Desire (1891), an early favourite of Lewis’s.

  When Lewis began ‘After Ten Years’ the idea seems to have been that, after Menelaus had found Helen at the fall of Troy – Helen grown old and commonplace and an utter disappointment after his dreams of ten years – he was to find her young and beautiful, as before the war, when he reached Egypt on the way home; and there was to make his choice between the two, the elderly, tired Helen being the real woman. By the end of August 1960 Lewis had written one more chapter, a trial section from the Egyptian portion of the book: but he was not decided what the eidolon was to be:

  ‘Daughter of Leda, come forth,’ said the old man.

  And at once it came. Out of the darkness of the doorway60

  There the fragment breaks off in mid-sentence, and there Lewis’s invention or inspiration failed him – or Joy’s death had shown him that he was working in the wrong direction, but did not reveal what the solution should be.

  But this was far in the future when, in the full flush of inspiration, he wrote Till We Have Faces, and dedicated it to Joy Davidman in 1956: it was certainly his most unexpected book, and his greatest tour de force; to many readers, and to himself, his best work of fiction (even if Perelandra remained his favourite) – and his nearest approach to failure with his reading public since Dymer. ‘The great disappointment of his career has been the reception in England of Till We Have Faces – in America it’s been received rather better,’ wrote Jane Gaskell of an interview with Lewis published in Books and Bookmen in November 1958.

  One reason for its cool reception, even among those who bought Lewis’s other books by the hundred thousand, is probably that (except perhaps in the visions of the last few chapters) Till We Have Faces is utterly unlike anything else Lewis wrote. One looks again and again for his style, his mode of argument, his outlook; but broadly speaking one looks in vain. For he has succeeded to an amazing degree in becoming someone else, Orual, while he wrote – and at the first reading this is curiously off-putting. But it is a book that grows on the reader at each reading, and at each reading the mythic quality has a deeper and deeper effect.

  It is natural that such a book should have proved peculiarly tempting to those who would analyse and allegorize and interpret; and indeed researchers of this kind were busy on it immediately, particularly in America.

  One of the first of these was Professor Clyde S. Kilby. Lewis replied to his interpretation in a letter dated 10 February 1957, five months after the book’s publication, and though it is included in the Letters of C.S. Lewis (1988), it is of such importance that it must be reprinted here:

  An author doesn’t necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else, so I give my account of Till We Have Faces simply for what it is worth. The ‘levels’ I am conscious of are these.

  1. A work of (supposed) historical imagination. A guess at what it might have been like in a little barbarous state on the borders of the Hellenistic world of Greek culture, just beginning to affect it. Hence the change from the old priest (of a very normal fertility mother-goddess) to Arnom; Stoic allegorizations of the myths standing to the original cult rather as Modernism to Christianity (but this is a parallel, not an allegory). Much that you take as allegory was intended solely as realistic detail. The wagon men are nomads from the steppes. The children made mud pies not for symbolic purposes but because children do. The Pillar Room is simply a room. The Fox is such an educated Greek slave as you might find at a barbarous court – and so on.

  2. Psyche is an instance of the anima naturaliter Christiana making the best of the Pagan religion she is brought up in and thus being guided (but always ‘under the cloud’, always in terms of her own imagination or that of her people) towards the true God. She is in some ways like Christ because every good man or woman is like Christ. What else could they be like? But of course my interest is primarily in Orual.

  3. Orual is (not a symbol) but an instance, a ‘case’ of human affection in its natural condition, true, tender, suffering, but in the long run tyrannically possessive and ready to turn to hatred when the beloved ceases to be its possession. What such love particularly cannot stand is to see the beloved passing into a sphere where it cannot follow. All this I hoped would stand as a mere story in its own right. But –

  4. Of course I had always in mind its close parallel to what is probably happening at this moment in at least five families in your home town. Someone becomes a Christian, or in a family nominally Christian already, does something like becoming a missionary or entering a religious order. The others suffer a sense of outrage. What they love is being taken from them! The boy must be mad! And the conceit of him! Or is there something in it after all? Let’s hope it is only a phase! If only he’d listen to his natural advisers! Oh come back, come back, be sensible, be the dear son we used to know. Now I, as a Christian, have a good deal of sympathy with those jealous, suffering, puzzled people (for they do suffer, and out of their suffering much of the bitterness against religion arises). I believe the thing is common. There is very nearly a touch of it in Luke 11.38, ‘Son, why hast thou so dealt with us?’ And is the reply easy for a loving heart to bear?61

  This letter shows how far Lewis was on his way to the achievement of his book on The Four Loves of which the first version (originally given as recorded lectures broadcast in America) was written in 1958. All four, Affection, Friendship, Eros, and at least the foreshadowing of Charity, are explored in Orual: level 4 in the letter is closely paralleled on a passage in The Four Loves about ‘two inconsistent jealousies which chase each other round in the sufferer’s mind’,62 and many passages in the novel foreshadow the more analytical treatment of the study. In ‘After Ten Years’ Menelaus is offered the choice Lewis mentions in The Four Loves:

  Suppose it is possible that you were offered the choice of two futures: ‘Either you two will cease to be lovers but remain forever joint seekers of the same God, the same beauty, the same truth, or else, losing all that, you will retain as long as you live the raptures and ardours, all the wonder and the wild desire of Eros. Choose which you please.’ Which should we choose? Which choice should we not regret after we had made it?63

  Lewis in fact learnt of love as he learnt to love. He knew all too much of Affection run riot from his years with Mrs Moore. He knew and valued Friendship as it is valued and known by all too few in the present age. Eros in its wilder, saltier forms he had known in youth, he had fought against with quiet acceptance since his conversion – even to the point of abstaining from certain foods because of their aphrodisiac qualities; Eros in a deeper, gentler form was already beginning imperceptibly to draw him towards Joy. Charity he had sought – and found it more nearly perhaps than the majority of us.

  In August 1955 Joy moved to Oxford, living in one half of number 10 Old High Street, Headington, a mile or so from The Kilns, and was a frequent visitor once more. Chad Walsh and his wife, Eva, visited Oxford that summer. Walsh said they ‘had a chance to observe Joy and Lewis together. She seemed to be at The Kilns a good deal. My wife firmly declared, “I smell marriage in the air.” Whether Lewis smelled it is more doubtful.’64

  * * *

  * Helen Joy Davidman (1915–60) was born in New York on 18 April 1915 of Jewish parents who abandoned their religion before she was born. She took a BA in English from Hunter College in 1934 and a MA from Columbia University in 1935. After teaching English in New York high schools she devoted herself to writing. She spent six months in Hollywood as a junior screenwriter for MGM, and then returned to New York. Becoming a Communist,
she worked as a journalist for the Party magazine, New Masses. While a member of the Party she published a volume of poems, Letter to a Comrade (1938). She published two novels, Anya (1940) and Weeping Bay (1950). In 1942 she met and married William Lindsay Gresham. The story of her conversion in 1948 is told in These Found the Way: Thirteen Converts to Protestant Christianity, ed. David Wesley Soper (1951). She and William Gresham were divorced in 1954, and Lewis married her in 1956. She and Lewis had three years together before her death from cancer on 13 July 1960. See Lyle Dorsett, And God Came In: The Extraordinary Story of Joy Davidman, her Life and Marriage to C.S. Lewis (1983).

  † William Lindsay Gresham (1909–62) was born in Baltimore but moved to New York in 1917. After high school he held a variety of jobs. In 1935 he married a New York woman and set out to become a freelance writer. He left to become a Freedom Fighter in the Spanish Civil War. He returned to New York mentally ill, and after an attempt to commit suicide he turned to psychoanalysis and the Communist Party. He met Joy Davidman at a meeting of the Party and in 1942 he divorced his first wife and married her. His novels include Nightmare Alley (1946) and Limbo Tower (1949). The story of his conversion in 1948 is told in Soper, These Found the Way. In 1954 he divorced Joy and married Renée Pierce.

  * David Lindsay Gresham (1944– ) was born in New York. His mother took him to live in England in 1953, and he attended Dane Court School in Surrey, 1954–7, and Magdalen College School, Oxford, 1957–62. He was a pupil at the North West London Talmudical College, London, 1962–3, and in the United States, 1963–6. After a period at the Hebron Yeshiva in Jerusalem, he entered Cambridge University where he read Oriental Studies, graduating in 1972. Since then he has devoted himself to the study of Hebrew, Latin and modern languages. He lives in Ireland and is married with two children. See Dorsett, And God Came In, and CG.

  † Douglas Howard Gresham (1945– ) was born in New York. He moved with his mother and brother to London in 1953, and Oxford in 1955. He was educated at a number of schools, including Dane Court School in Surrey, 1954–7, and Magdalen College School, Oxford, 1962. Following some agricultural experience he married Meredith Conan-Davies in 1967, and they have five children. He spent the years 1967–93 in Australia where he was, among other things, a farmer, a radio and television broadcaster, and a restaurateur. Since 1993 he and his wife have lived in Ireland where they run Rathvinden Ministries. See his autobiography, Lenten Lands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis (1988).