by C. S. Lewis
The idea which Lewis was following—or with which he was experimenting—was a ‘twist’ of the Eidolon legend. ‘Out of the darkness of the doorway’ came the beautiful Helen whom Menelaus had originally married—Helen so beautiful that she must have been the daughter of Zeus—the dream beauty whose image Menelaus had built up during the ten years of the siege of Troy, and which had been so cruelly shattered when he found Helen in chapter II. But this was the Eidolon: the story was to turn on the conflict between dream and reality. It was to be a development of the Mary Rose theme, again with a twist: Mary Rose 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.
Menelaus had dreamed of Helen, longed for Helen, built up his image of Helen and worshipped it as a false idol: in Egypt he is offered that idol, the Eidolon. I don’t think he was to know which was the true Helen, but of this I am not certain. But I think he was to discover in the end that the middle-aged, faded Helen he had brought from Troy was the real woman, and between them was the real love or its possibility: the Eidolon would have been a belle dame sans merci . . .
But I repeat that I do not know—and Lewis did not know—what exactly would have happened if he had gone on with the story.
II
ALASTAIR FOWLER
Lewis spoke more than once about the difficulties he was having with this story. He had a clear idea of the kind of narrative he wanted to write, of the theme, and of the characters; but he was unable to get beyond the first few chapters. As his habit was in such cases, he put the piece aside and went on with something else. From the fragment written, one might expect that the continuation would have been a myth of very general import. For the dark belly of the horse could be taken as a womb, the escape from it as a birth and entry on life. Lewis was well aware of this aspect. But he said that the idea for the book was provoked by Homer’s tantalisingly brief account of the relationship between Menelaus and Helen after the return from Troy (Odyssey, iv, 1–305). It was, I suppose, a moral as much as a literary idea. Lewis wanted to tell the story of a cuckold in such a way as to bring out the meaningfulness of his life. In the eyes of others Menelaus might seem to have lost almost all that was honourable and heroic; but in his own he had all that mattered: love. Naturally, the treatment of such a theme entailed a narrative stand-point very different from Homer’s. And this is already apparent in the present fragment: instead of looking on the horse from without as we do when Demodocus sings (Odyssey, viii, 499–520), here we feel something of the difficult life inside.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and have been transformed into three major motion pictures.
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ALSO BY C S. LEWIS
A Grief Observed
George MacDonald: An Anthology
Mere Christianity
Miracles
The Abolition of Man
The Great Divorce
The Problem of Pain
The Screwtape Letters (with “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”)
The Weight of Glory
The Four Loves
Till We Have Faces
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Reflections on the Psalms
Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer
The Personal Heresy
The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays
Poems
Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
Narrative Poems
A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis
Letters of C. S. Lewis
All My Road Before Me
The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis
Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays
Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics
On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM HARPERCOLLINS
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Magician’s Nephew
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Horse and His Boy
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Last Battle
FURTHER READING
CREDITS
Cover design and illustration: Kimberly Glyder
COPYRIGHT
“The Shoddy Lands” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, X (February 1956). “Ministering Angels” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, XIII (January 1958). “Forms of Things Unknown” and After Ten Years were first published in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, by C. S. Lewis, copyright © 1966 by the Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis.
THE DARK TOWER. Copyright © 1977 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition February 2017 ISBN 9780062565525
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963, author.
Title: The dark tower : and other stories / C. S. Lewis.
Description: New York : HarperOne, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016030654 | ISBN 9780062643537 (softcover) | ISBN 9780062565525 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Christian / Classic & Allegory. | RELIGION / Spirituality. | RELIGION / Christianity / Literature & the Arts.
Classification: LCC PR6023.E926 A6 2017d | DDC 823/.914—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030654
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1 Robert S. Richardson, “The Day After We Land on Mars,” The Saturday Review, vol. XXXVIII (28 May 1955), 28.
nbsp; C. S. Lewis, The Dark Tower
