by Michael Ward
But there is the possibility too of a compulsion to dismiss all introspection as compulsive: a compulsion that might be the manifestation of a defensive avoidance even of those forms of introspection which might be profitable and wholesome. Cuneo again:
. . . what a shock to read a scholar of Medieval and Renaissance
literature say that, “if I had some rare information about the
private life of Shakespeare or Dante I’d throw it in the fire, tell no one, and re-read their works. All this biographical interest is 19. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves (30 May 1916) in The Collected Letters of C. S.
Lewis, Volume 1, ed. Hooper, 187.
20. Cuneo, “Duty With a Stamp: ‘Half my life is spent answering letters,’ ’ www.
cslewis.com/uk.
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only a device for indulging in gossip as an excuse for not reading what the chaps say.”21
Again, however, there are complexities here. It is easy to suppose that Lewis’s distaste for biography was defensive; but this would involve the assumption that defences are always bad. But what is commonly called a defence can often with more justice be regarded as a legitimate mechanism for avoiding pain—or what Keats called “disagreeables”—which has somehow gone wrong. A further possibility—strongly hinted at in the suggestion that we should re-read primary texts instead of writers’ biographies—is that the primary texts, if good enough, will communicate the depths of a person’s experience more adequately than their biographers are likely to. And it may be that, in communing creatively with “the best that has been thought and said” (in Arnold’s vulnerable but indispensable phrase) Lewis was doing introspection in a new key: one whose tonalities he could accept and whose disclosures he trusted.
C. S. Lewis began his academic career teaching philosophy (having got firsts as an undergraduate at Oxford in both classics and English). Metaphysically, he knew that there is more to reality than we can get at through our senses; epistemologically, he knew that there is more to the mind than ratiocination. Other modes of mental activity—often subsumed by Romantic writers under the term “imagination”—may help us become aware of the supernatural elements of experience. As a poet, Lewis realized that “thought”
is a complex term. Writing of thought in poetry he urges us to “understand that ‘thought’ here carries no specially intellectual connotation.”22 He attempts to define how language, in a poem, may momentarily express a state in which the usual rifts between thinking, feeling, and speaking are healed: The poetic speechthought does not exist permanently and as a
whole in the poet, but is temporarily brought into existence in
him and his readers by art.23
Lewis here is not only sharing Coleridge’s recognition that a great poet, such as Shakespeare, directs “self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper than consciousness,”24 he is sharing Coleridge’s awareness, as a poet, of what the process of composition feels like. Further than that, he is aware of a need to exert the intellect to expose and so transcend its limitations: 21. Ibid.
22. Tillyard and Lewis, The Personal Heresy, 147.
23. Ibid.
24. Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Raysor, 1:198.
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From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.25
Again, writing of Spenser, a poet whose reputation never stood higher perhaps than in the Romantic period, Lewis declares an interest in the unconscious activities of the mind:
Spenser, with his conscious mind, knew only the least part of
what he was doing, and we are never very sure that we have got
to the end of his significance. The water is very clear, but we
cannot see to the bottom. That is one of the delights of the older kind of poetry: “thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high
bards were given.”26
Thoughts of the kind generally operative in critical prose may have often only a tenuous relation to the depths of a person’s psyche. In “Shelley, Dryden and Mr. Eliot,” Lewis asserts that a poet should follow his imagination because our imaginations are “constrained by deepest necessities” (my italics) . 27 Poetry can take us beyond or beneath the ratiocinative thinking Lewis was all too good at, into the depths of such reverie as Shelley commends in his essay “On Life.” Thus, we may enter, in writing poems or in reading them, depths of our being that ratiocination barricades us out of, proffering subtlety as an illusory guarantee of depth.
But these emphases are rendered uniquely personal—are given the
quality that peculiarly attracts or repels us—by their relation to the personality behind them.
Lewis ascribes to himself a vein of Celtic melancholy, a more literary and perhaps more acceptable term than “depression.” Yet George Sayer notes that Lewis at times “suffered intensely from the loneliness and depression to which he was liable all his life.”28 Such testimony will strike many as being at odds with the more widespread image of Lewis as jovial (“It is obvious under which planet I was born!”).29 But it may be that this image is the result, in 25. Lewis, “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer,” 143.
26. Lewis, “Edmund Spenser, 1552–99,” published to accompany Lewis’s selections from The Faerie Queene and Epithalamion in an anthology of Major British Writers, vol. 1 (1954); reprinted in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Hooper, 143. The quotation with which my quotation from Lewis ends is from “Third Sunday in Lent,” a poem in John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827), a series of poems for every day of the Christian calendar: “As little children lisp, and tell of Heaven, / So thoughts beyond their thought to those high Bards were given.”
27. Lewis, “Shelley, Dryden and Mr. Eliot,” Selected Literary Essays, ed. Hooper, 207.
28. Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times, 74.
29. Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 140.
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part, of the way that Lewis, “constrained by deepest necessities,” presented himself. Owen Barfield, who knew him well, saw the earlier manifestations of such joviality in Lewis as an act: “Was there something, at least in his impressive, indeed splendid, literary personality, which was somehow—and with no taint of insincerity— voulu [contrived, forced]?”30 The hesitations of Barfield’s syntax here indicates the difficulty he was having in appearing to suggest the possibility of some discrepancy between the way that Lewis actually was and the way he had fashioned himself. He concludes the next paragraph by declaring his love for Lewis, while recognizing that his doubt
“raised issues Lewis himself would have refused to contemplate.”31 The significant word there, I think, is “refused.” Lewis had a dread of mental illness accompanied by a defensive resistance to those who professed to treat it.
He says to Greeves: “We hold our mental health by a thread, and nothing is worth risking for it. Above all, beware of excessive daydreaming . . . .”32
The result of this was an avoidance of introspection, which was sometimes salutary and sometimes desperate. His understanding, as a young man, of how psychological problems form is, by the standards of the singularly accomplished scholar he became, poignantly naïve. Again, to Greeves he says:
“whatever you do, never allow yourself to get a neurosis. You and I are both qualified for it, because we were both afraid of our fathers as children.”33
Significantly, too, Lewis identifies any possible problem as originating with his father, not his mother. Peter Bayley, at first Lewis’s graduate student, then his colleague, recognized that Lewis was “a shy and vulnerable man”
whose “assumed persona was too strong. It is probable that he had early assumed it as a defence from victimization or mockery at school.”34 This is very acute, though I’d like to suggest that Lewis may have had n
eed of such defences before he went to school. Soon, though, the act of knock-down dialectical assertiveness became difficult for Lewis to distinguish from a salutary form of intellectual rigour. He may have defended himself so successfully against the fear of annihilation as to believe he’d never had it.
In an age that idealizes spontaneity and naturalness, we are liable to be suspicious of any deliberate cultivation of a form of behaviour. But as a means of improving aesthetic taste, Coleridge endorsed the Earl of Malmesbury’s principle of “feign a relish till we find a relish come.”35 And Lewis’s 30. Barfield, “Introduction,” xi.
31. Ibid.
32. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves (22 April 1923), 605.
33. Ibid.
34. Bayley, “From Master to Colleague,” 80.
35. Harris, The Works of James Harris, Esq. , 453.
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beloved Jane Austen in Mansfield Park endorses Fanny Price’s recoil from dangerous kinds of acting within a social context in which politeness was acknowledged as a necessary kind. Wordsworth’s concept of “a second Will more wise”36 implies that will may inform behaviour without distorting it.
Lewis eventually seems to have believed that introspection may have a certain value as a means merely of cleansing the mirror of our souls so that God (and the creation) might be reflected more clearly there. Our Christian destiny lies “in being as little as possible ourselves.”37 But how intensive might such cleansing need to be? Lewis often seems hostile to psychoanalysis: he is apt to travesty all critics with an interest in “psychology” as “ama-teur psychologists” whose motive is to debunk dead authors and who are grievously lacking in “the plastic impulse, the impulse to make a thing, to shape, to give unity, relief, contrast, pattern.”38 Yet Coleridge (whom Lewis admired) was a pioneer of psychoanalysis with an epicurean sensitivity to the verbal nuance and “vocalic melody.”39 Lewis indeed, in a poem, praises Coleridge for having “re-discovered the soul’s depth and height.”40 (The
“re-” is characteristic and apposite: Coleridge saw himself as restoring to constrictively post-Enlightenment conceptions of the mind a complexity which Shakespeare had already achieved.) Yet Lewis retained a fascination with the psychological speculation that belied his peremptory dismissals of it. He never had psychotherapy as such. But he went for weekly confessions with a monk whose “wisdom” he acclaimed.41 And, as if recognizing its deep relevance to himself, he was curious about the Freudian principle of repression: “as the psychologist have taught us, it is not the remembered but the forgotten past that enslaves us.”42
It seems likely that, early in his life, Lewis’s conscious cultivation of a Christian outlook had something of the quality of “woodenness” that we impute to actors who haven’t yet found a way to achieve the properly paradoxical state of “acting naturally.” I want to suggest that pessimism was a feature of Lewis’s temperament which was established before he entered his teens and which was permanently confirmed by his mother’s death. His faith required him to counteract his pessimism, which through much, if not all, of his life, continued to reassert itself. Lewis’s battle with despair is 36. Wordsworth, “Ode to Duty,” line 48, The Poems, Vol. 1, Hayden, 606.
37. Lewis, “Christianity and Literature,” 22.
38. Lewis, “On Criticism,” 544–45.
39. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 29.
40. Lewis, “To Roy Campbell,” 80.
41. See Vaus, Mere Theology, 192–93.
42. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” 12.
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evident even in such things as his casual manner of quoting Dunbar: “Man, please thy maker and be merry / And give not for this world a cherry.”43
Here, perhaps, we see the outlines of a self-protective mechanism: serve God: be cheerful, though the world encourages despair.
Ontological Insecurity
We don’t yet know much about Lewis’s mother. Her letter to Albert Lewis of 14 November 1886 suggests confusion about her own impulses, rather than simple warmth and spontaneity of affection: “I may not be demonstrative, indeed I know I am not, but when I think of how many nights I have cried myself to sleep . . . I do not feel that I deserve to be thought of as heartless.”44 However, George Sayer (who also loved Lewis) remarks that
“This is the most emotional sentence to be found in what we have of her correspondence.”45 In relation to such an impression (again rather at odds with the view of his mother promoted, in filial love and loyalty, by Lewis), Lewis’s self-declared “hostility to the emotions” becomes a little less enig-matic.46 Those unacquainted with, or unsympathetic to, the psychoanalytic concept of a defence (an unconscious mechanism for deflecting traumati-cally painful emotions) will perhaps find it invidious of me to suggest that Lewis’s relationship with his mother may have been in any important way disappointing to him. Yet perhaps we should investigate more cautiously Lewis’s account in Surprised by Joy of what the experience of his mother’s death meant to him:
With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tran-
quil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be
much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of
the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent
has sunk like Atlantis.47
I wonder how fully do we register the implications of this passage: “all settled happiness”; “all sea and islands now.” The shock-waves of Lewis’s 43. Lewis, The Four Loves, 84. The text of Dunbar’s poem “The Reign of Covetice”
(covetousness) actually runs: “Man, please thy Maker an’ be merry, / And set not by this warld a cherry.” It is characteristic of Lewis to have replaced the archaic “set not by”
with the more contemporary and, for non-specialists, intelligible “give not for.”
44. Quoted in Sayer, Jack, 7.
45. Ibid.
46. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 160. Lewis states that he early learned “to fear and hate emotion,” 32.
47. Ibid., 23.
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grief, at ten years old, extend not only to the man in his fifties remembering them, but to all regions of his life in between. He describes a radical and comprehensive sense of loss. And what he has lost is not his mother’s presence, only, but all faith in the goodness of the world. I state this baldly in order to solicit full recognition for the calamitous nature of what Lewis is asserting. His language represents his mother as the fulcrum on which the stability of the world rests, or as the presence in whose embrace the world finds peace. She is, as mothers may often be for children, the primum mobile within which all known reality is held; or else a region of fixed stars in relation to which all terrors of the child’s experience become bearable. When she dies, the world, which had previously partaken of the reassuring and loving qualities of his mother’s presence, is deprived of them and becomes suddenly bleak (Lewis’s word), frightening, untrustworthy, and insecure.
Lewis himself believed that his mother’s death had been instrumental in giving him an outlook in which disappointment is avoided by expecting the worst:
I think that though I am emotionally a fairly cheerful person
my actual judgement of the world has always been what yours
now is and so I have not been disappointed. The early loss of my
mother, great unhappiness at school, and the shadow of the last
war and presently the experience of it, had given me a very pes-
simistic view of existence. . . . I still think the argument from design the weakest possible ground for Theism, and what may be
called the argument from un-design the strongest for Atheism.48
But I want to go beyond the mere fact of death and suggest how the reverberations of this loss shook Lewis ontologically: radically unsettled his sense of his own saf
ety in the world. And it may be, moreover, that there are factors involved of which Lewis remained unconscious, or of which he never gave any inkling of being aware. Did he feel securely and lovingly held by his mother? Was he welcomed into the world? Was there an appre-hensiveness before his mother’s death which turned into fear and misgiving afterwards? We would need to know a lot more about Flora Hamilton, and her feelings towards her son, in order to be able even to speculate with any confidence. All we have for certain is Lewis’s repeated insistence on a profound ontological trauma which he attributed to his mother’s death.49
48. Lewis, letter to Dom Bede Griffiths (20 December 1946), The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 2, ed. Hooper, 747.
49. See also his letter to Phyllis Sandeman (31 December 1953), The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 3, ed. Hooper, 398.
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Lewis had an especially acute need to find stability in the world. This gave to his moral and metaphysical thinking an unusual depth and urgency that his poet’s gifts as a prose writer made it possible for him to express with special felicity and force. He located the security he yearned for beyond the world. The difficulty he encountered in making his sense of reality seem plausible to sceptics is comparable, perhaps, to the difficulty of gaining respectful attention for a psychoanalytic imagining of the realities of early childhood. The Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, for example, speculated that children who had observed, in overburdened, depressed, ill, or otherwise preoccupied mothers “the conscious and unconscious signs of aversion” (which need not be obvious, except to the child) suffer a weaken-ing of “their desire to live,” even if, in later life, “this was resisted by a strong effort of will.”50 Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst who, as we have seen, follows Wordsworth’s practice of minutely imagining the experience of infants, considers that the way a mother holds an infant is “the only way in which [she] can show the infant her love of it. There are those who can hold an infant and those who cannot; the latter quickly produce in the infant a sense of insecurity.”51 Freud had already argued that the cleverness of clever infants might be unconsciously exploited by a mother in postponing the satisfaction of the desire, for instance, to be fed. Clearly all such notions are speculative as is their relevance to Lewis. The assumption that Lewis’s pessimism is entirely explained by the fact of his mother’s early death is equally debatable.
