It was during the period of Milton’s disgrace and Williams’s triumph that Lewis received an invitation from the University College of North Wales in Bangor to deliver the Ballard Mathews Lectures (named for a first professor of mathematics at Bangor, the polymath George Ballard Mathews) on a subject of his choosing. Lewis chose Paradise Lost. From these lectures, given on the first three days of December 1941, came his book A Preface to Paradise Lost, with a handsome testimony to what Williams had done to rescue Milton for modern readers: “Apparently the door of the prison was unlocked all the time; but it was only you who thought of trying the handle. Now we can all come out.”
Though his debt to Williams was real, Lewis’s approach to the appreciation of Paradise Lost was characteristically his own. The first task, Lewis said, is to understand the genre with which one is dealing. Paradise Lost is an epic poem, a genre that has its roots in oral recitation and is never merely “original” or idiosyncratic. The “primary epic” (Homer, Beowulf) tells of heroic adventures; the “secondary epic” (Virgil, Milton) treats “great subjects,” events by which the world is forever changed, and uses an elevated style to convey the momentousness of its theme.
W. W. Robson, among others, was of the opinion that Lewis was so intent on defending Paradise Lost that he lost touch with “any of the normal standards and criteria which it is usual to apply to poetry traditionally considered great” and in his “frenzy of special pleading” inadvertently called attention to Milton’s faults. But was it special pleading? That there are defects in Milton’s verse, Lewis freely admits. That there are unattractive elements in Milton’s theology and that he could have done a better job portraying unfallen sexuality, Lewis also admits. But Lewis was convinced that understanding Paradise Lost as an epic meant reading it differently from the way one would read a lyric poem or any essentially private work of art.
In Paradise Lost, Milton took on the greatest of all great subjects, the fundamental Christian story: that God made all creation good while knowing that it would be marred by Satan’s rebellion and mankind’s Fall. For that purpose an elevated style and a high didacticism is certainly in order. To approach the poem through a film of modernist assumptions (the “normal standards and criteria”) is inevitably to miss the point. F. R. Leavis was a good judge of Milton’s verse but a bad judge of Milton’s universe: “It is not that he and I see different things when we look at Paradise Lost. He sees and hates the very same that I see and love. Hence the disagreement between us tends to escape from the realm of literary criticism. We differ not about the nature of Milton’s poetry, but about the nature of man, or even the nature of joy itself.”
When Eric Fenn wrote to suggest a radio broadcast about Paradise Lost, Lewis declined, arguing that the listening audience would not derive any pleasure from Milton. But another possibility suggested itself: a way of defending, not the seventeenth-century Puritan poet himself, but the essential Christian vision of his poem, by transmuting it into a very different kind of story. Fiction can make an argument more compelling than even the best criticism (hence Lewis told T. S. Eliot that Charles Williams would do more good “if only he cd. be induced to write more fiction”—like Descent into Hell—“and less criticism!”). It was time to return to Ransom.
Voyage to Venus
The parting words of Ransom in the fictional letter that concludes Out of the Silent Planet suggest that Lewis did not plan to send his hero on another planetary voyage: “Now that ‘Weston’ has shut the door, the way to the planets lies through the past; if there is to be any more space-traveling, it will have to be time-traveling as well…!”
Tolkien’s attempt to write a time-travel novel had been abortive; now Lewis thought he would give it a try. Sometime during 1938 or 1939, he began The Dark Tower, a sequel to Out of the Silent Planet, discovered in unfinished form by Walter Hooper years after Lewis’s death. Its authenticity, once questioned, is now accepted by the great majority of Lewis scholars; Alastair Fowler remembers having seen it in Lewis’s rooms, and Fr. Gervase Mathew said that Lewis read it to an Inklings meeting in 1939 or 1940. The Dark Tower picks up where Out of the Silent Planet leaves off, beginning with a Cambridge don named Orfieu saying “‘Of course … the sort of time-travelling you read about in books—time-travelling in the body—is absolutely impossible.’” Orfieu invents a “chronoscope” by means of which his friends (among them Ransom) first observe and eventually interact with the alien, mutagenic, parallel universe of Othertime. Perhaps Lewis thought the tale too weird to continue. In any event, he dropped it after a few scenes and instead reopened the door Weston had shut, sending Ransom on another planetary journey, this time to Venus.
The new Ransom adventure enabled Lewis to grapple with a question frequently raised about Paradise Lost and only half-answered in his Preface: Did Milton succeed—can anyone succeed—in making plausible the Fall of Man? Can one convincingly portray, can one even coherently imagine, the temptation of a wholly innocent being? What chink could there be in Eve’s armor of holiness and bliss that would make an opening for the serpent’s fatal suggestion? Conversely, can one convincingly portray, can one even coherently imagine, an Eve who is genuinely tempted yet ultimately prevails, a Paradise nearly, yet not finally, lost? To answer these questions, to defend Milton—and with Milton the entire classical Christian Augustinian tradition—called for another imaginative supposal. Venus, Perelandra in the Old Solar tongue, would be a young planet at the Adam-and-Eve stage, Lewis told Arthur; and Ransom would arrive “in time to prevent their ‘falling’ as our first pair did.”
A November 1941 letter to Sister Penelope indicates that the story was in medias res and already at a troubling crux: “I’ve got Ransom to Venus and through his first conversation with the ‘Eve’ of that world: a difficult chapter.” The difficulty was that “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.” Meanwhile, Lewis himself was in medias res and feeling rather like a moral failure; he accused himself of relapsing into old (unspecified) sins and asked the nun, “Have you room for an extra prayer? Pray for Jane if you have. She is the old lady I call my mother and live with (she is really the mother of a friend)—an unbeliever, ill, old, frightened, full of charity in the sense of alms, but full of uncharity in several other senses. And I can do so little for her.”
Venus had an obvious appeal for Lewis, who knew better than any man alive all her attributes in pagan, medieval, and Renaissance mythology; he loved to observe the planet in the morning and evening sky and point out its splendors to his friends, as in this April 1940 note to Warnie: “Every night Venus grows more spectacular. It is true Chaucerian weather! How impossible not to believe, after so many disappointments, that it means what it says.” If one imagines, as Ransom suggests in Perelandra, that the things we hear of in myths are “scattered through other worlds as realities,” the planet Venus, afloat in the ocean of Deep Heaven, younger and closer to the sun than Mars, is an obvious location for the blessed island realms of ancient lore—the Fortunate Isles, the Celtic Tír na nÓg, the Garden of the Hesperides.
But how to connect this book to Out of the Silent Planet? A frame narrative solves the problem by having Lewis recapitulate Ransom’s initial journey. Now it is Lewis who is the Pedestrian, grudgingly making his way to Ransom’s cottage in answer to his friend’s urgent wire, growing more anxious with every step, fearful of meeting the unearthly eldila, of being “drawn in,” of going mad: He is experiencing, as he soon discovers, a barrage by the eldila of the Dark Lord, not unlike the way Christian monks of the desert were bombarded by demonic logismoi. The attack is in the open now because the great siege is drawing to its end. The forces of good and evil (Allies and Axis, Lewis obviously intends us to think) have started to emerge “in something a little more like their true colours,” and ordinary people are being called upon to do the fighting.
Lewis’s p
art in this engagement “with principalities and powers and depraved hypersomatic beings” is small. He is to help Ransom climb naked and blindfolded into a casket that the Oyarsa of Malacandra will send to Venus; in contrast to Out of the Silent Planet, there is no effort here to construct a plausible technology for space travel; preternatural means suffice. Lewis is also charged with summoning the “four or five people whom we can trust”—Inklings, in other words—to convene whenever he returns, with “Humphrey” (another nickname for Dr. Havard, who seemed to invite them) to provide any necessary medical support. Not knowing the details of his mission or why he was chosen for it, Ransom climbs into his “celestial coffin” with a self-abandonment that is at once trusting and despairing. Lewis closes the coffin lid, goes into the house, and is sick.
After a little more than a year, during which “we had raids and bad news and hopes deferred and all the earth became full of darkness and cruel habitations,” Ransom returns. He emerges from his coffin like St. Antony from his cave, glowing with vitality and wondering why his friends look so pale. The only injury he bears is a wound that bleeds incessantly from the heel, suggesting an affinity with the Fisher King, a mirror of Christ. Conversations with B. (Barfield) and “a sceptical friend of ours called McPhee” elicit the unsettling fact that Ransom has “seen” the Platonic Form of Life itself, has had a taste of Paradise and a foretaste of the Resurrection—a reality “too definite” to be put into words, in which bodily experience is not transcended but “engulfed.”
This Paradise roofed by a golden sky is indeed a world to be sensed and tasted—a swooning landscape of islands floating on a sweet-water green-gold ocean, lush vegetation, bubble-trees that drench body and soul, and great clusters of fruit that fall into the hand, so delicious that “for one draught of this on earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed.” Remembering what he learned on Malacandra, Ransom resists the temptation to reach for more of this ecstatic refreshment. The “itch to have things over again … was it possibly the root of all evil?” After a reassuringly comical first encounter with a sentient being, a small dragon that likes to have its belly stroked, Ransom meets the Green Lady, who is queen of the realm, newly created by Maleldil and green in every sense of the word. She is naked, innocent, as spontaneous as the floating islands on which she dwells; they undulate freely to every wave Maleldil sends, while she absorbs whatever He desires her to know. Ransom and the Green Lady converse in Old Solar, and the dialogue prospers—until interrupted by the arrival of Weston, armed with gun and provisions.
No longer the positivistic scientist with imperialistic designs on other planets, Weston has embraced the philosophy of the Life Force, worshipped as a “blind, inarticulate purposiveness thrusting its way upward and ever upward.” This new, spiritual Weston is a great deal worse than the old materialist Weston; he is so committed to serving the Life Force that he invites that most spiritual of beings, the Devil, to take up residence within him, to the ruin of his personality and selfhood. His transformation into the “Unman” is, one reviewer wrote, “the most terrifying and convincing instance of diabolical possession in English letters since Benson’s The Necromancers.” Foregoing sleep, the Unman makes a relentless verbal assault on the innocence of the Green Lady, interrupted only by vacant interludes spent eviscerating small frogs, urging her to disobey a seemingly arbitrary divine command against sleeping on the Fixed Land.
Ransom counters with the case for obedience, speaking of the joy of surrendering one’s own will; the Unman presses the paradox that to disobey will be to give up her deepest will. The debate continues until Ransom realizes that the contest will not be won with words; he must fight the Unman physically, to the death, just as “far away on Earth … men were at war, and whitefaced subalterns and freckled corporals who had but lately begun to shave, stood in horrible gaps or crawled forward in deadly darkness, awaking, like him, to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions.” Battle ensues, Perelandra is saved, and the Oyarsas of Malacandra and Perelandra descend in an operatic finale to crown the queen and her king (largely absent from the narrative) in a scene whose bridal mysticism owes much to Charles Williams’s Way of Affirmation.
To some readers, the conclusion of Perelandra was over the top; others felt that Lewis had produced “an inspired litany of love and homage” on the level of Dante. The poet Ruth Pitter (whose friendship with Lewis is discussed below) was so taken with the ending that she transcribed it into “irregular Spenserian stanzas” in order to memorize it. Alistair Cooke, by contrast, found the reverence for chastity so galling that he could only assume that Lewis’s “secret fear that unchastity is the best pleasure” was its real subtext: “It is at this point that an earthly book-reviewer must uncross his gross legs and tiptoe out, leaving Mr. Lewis to the absorbed serenity of his dreams.” This seems an eccentric—or deliberately provocative—reading of a book so full of delight in unfallen sensuality that one feels at times that one is bathing nude along with Lewis in Parson’s Pleasure.
Lewis justly regarded Perelandra as his best book to date and was overjoyed to hear from readers who understood it. In this novel, more completely than in any of his other works, all the Lewises—the literary scholar, the philosopher, the moral psychologist, the satirist, the critic, the fantasist, the evangelist—are present and working in harmony. On the cover of The Saturday Review of Literature for April 8, 1944, a wood engraving by the well-known portraitist Frances O’Brien Garfield shows a dreamy, contemplative Lewis set against a backdrop of stars, planets, and a hieratic dragon, with the caption “C. S. Lewis has gone down again into his bottomless well of imagination for a captivating myth.” The portrait is a poor likeness, but the caption is correct.
A Kingdom Hidden in the Heart of Britain
By the time Perelandra appeared in 1943, a sequel, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups, was almost ready for the printers, thus bringing to completion the commedia that began on a spaceship headed for Mars. The title came from a verse about the Tower of Babel (“the schaddow of that hidduous strenth”) by one of Lewis’s OHEL figures, the sixteenth-century Scottish poet Sir David Lyndsay. During a time “vaguely ‘after the war,’” the Shadow looms over a small university town in the English Midlands, as an academic squabble becomes a full-scale engagement with powers and principalities. Upon this stage, Lewis unfolds a broadly satirical supernatural tale that packs in the multitudinous moral and social concerns he had addressed in The Abolition of Man and in his controversial essays of the postwar years: the miseducation of young minds; the evils of eugenics, vivisection, social engineering, “humane” rehabilitation of misfits, and police-state propaganda; the encroachment on the humanities of the fetish for “research” and practical results; the nature of true fellowship; and the value of hierarchy. Barfield’s observation about Lewis that “somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything” is amply confirmed.
At the same time, That Hideous Strength is the Lewis novel most clearly indebted to Charles Williams: the Arthurian themes, the esoteric Christianity, and the mundane setting all testify to Lewis’s fascination with his visionary friend. Readers expecting another planetary romance were puzzled and even offended by what seemed an indiscriminate blending of realism with science-fantasy. But Lewis was attempting a third kind of novel altogether, in which, as he explains while writing of Williams’s works, there is a “violation of frontier” and the everyday world finds itself “invaded by the marvellous.”
Ransom has changed; his spiritual transformation complete, he has become director of a small company reminiscent of Williams’s Companions of the Co-inherence and a figure of Arthurian legend. The bleeding heel at the end of Perelandra had already signaled his identification with the Fisher King. Now an even greater mystery is revealed: he is none other than the Pendragon, successor to King Arthur and sovereign over all that remains of the Arthurian kingdom of Logres, the true, spiritual Englan
d that lies buried in the heart of Britain and haunts its history. Ransom remains offstage for the most part, as the action centers on two parallel tales of temptation and conversion: that of Jane Studdock, a would-be scholar with an unfinished doctoral thesis on Donne’s “triumphant vindication of the body,” and her husband, Mark, a fellow in sociology at venerable Bracton College, founded in 1300 near an ancient walled woodland (Bragdon Wood) at whose center, paved in Roman-British masonry, is “Merlin’s well.” Despite the setting, Bracton College is a modern institution, increasingly in the hands of the “Progressive Element” who hold the key to Mark’s advancement.
In sketching Mark Studdock’s character, Lewis traces the process by which the desire to belong to the “Inner Ring” (as Lewis called it in a 1944 address to undergraduates at King’s College, London) gradually chokes out other interests. The desire for the Inner Ring, Lewis maintained, is “one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action,” a temptation more insidious than ambition or lust, more “skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things,” more liable to take over one’s personality. “Unless you take measures to prevent it,” Lewis warned the students in his audience (who might have hoped to hear a pep talk rather than a jeremiad), “this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care.”
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings Page 40
