by A. N. Wilson
To this extent, Tolkien argued, ‘doctrines’ which are extracted from the ‘myth’ are less true than the ‘myth’ itself. The ideas are too large and too all-embracing for the finite mind to absorb them. That is why the divine providence revealed himself in story. Lewis claimed that this was tantamount to ‘breathing a lie through silver’, a riposte which Tolkien felt sufficiently challenging to require a written reply. The result was the verse known as ‘Mythopoeia’, some of which he quoted in his essay. Its ‘argument’ repeated the discussion which he and Lewis shared with Dyson on that memorable September night. Myth was the exact opposite of a ‘lie breathed through silver’. Man’s capacity to mythologize was a remnant of his pre-lapsarian capacity to see into the life of things:
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
And keeps the rags of Lordship once he owned.
It was a completely still, warm evening, and the three friends walked round and round the mile-long circuit of Addison’s Walk beneath the avenues of beeches. Quite suddenly, at a crucial point in the conversation, there was a rush of wind, causing the first fall of leaves in the season. They stood in the dark and listened. At first the pattering leaves sounded like rain.
It was at this point that Tolkien reiterated the argument already made familiar to Lewis by Barfield. We speak of ‘stars’ and ‘trees’ as though they were entities which we had mastered in our post-Newtonian, materialist fashion. But for those who formed the words star and tree they were very different. For them, stars were a living silver, bursting into flame in answer to an eternal music in the mind of God. All creation was ‘myth-woven and elf-patterned’. It was late; the clock in Magdalen Tower had struck three in the morning before Lewis let Tolkien out by the little postern on Magdalen Bridge. Dyson lingered, and he and Lewis found still more to say to one another, strolling up and down the cloister of New Buildings. They did not part until four a.m.
Nine days later, on 28 September, there was an outing from The Kilns to Whipsnade Zoo. Minto and Maureen, accompanied by an Irish friend called Vera Henry and the dog Mr Papworth, who had recovered his strength before going hence and being no more seen, were to travel by car. Jack and Warnie were to go by motorcycle – Daudel as Warnie called it – with Warnie in the saddle and Jack in a low-slung sidecar. It was a thick, misty day, but when the two brothers got beyond the small market town of Thame, the fog gave way to bright sunshine. They stopped for beer and then waited anxiously at an agreed spot for Minto and the others. They had still not turned up by two o’clock, and since their sandwich lunch was in the car, Jack and Warnie were feeling ‘uncommonly peckish’. At two-twenty Minto’s party appeared, saying that the reason for their delay was that Liddiat, the handyman employed by Minto at The Kilns, had pumped up the tyres of the car so hard that it was impossible to drive at more than fifteen miles per hour. In spite of the frayed tempers caused by this, it was an enjoyable expedition. Everyone, but especially the two Lewises, loved the zoo, and Jack made friends with a bear whom he nicknamed Bultitude. He said how much he would like to adopt the bear – which, in a sense, he was to do, for Bultitude appears as one of the characters in the final volume of his space trilogy That Hideous Strength.25
To all appearances, it had been a completely normal day. Only, as Lewis tells us in Surprised by Joy, ‘when we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.’26 When confiding the news to Greeves, he said, ‘My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.’27
We are told that Janie Moore bitterly resented the final stages of Lewis’s conversion, chiding him when he resumed the practice of Holy Communion for attending ‘blood feasts’.28 There is something puzzling here, since Mrs Moore, though an unbeliever, had been happy to have her own daughter confirmed, and there is a steady succession of references in Jack’s letters and diaries, during the years 1919–1931, of attendance at church with Minto. We must assume either that Warnie’s memory exaggerated the virulence of her hostility to Jack’s conversion, or that there was some particular thing about it which affected her more than anyone else.
We cannot know – and she was by this time fifty-eight years old to Jack’s thirty-three – whether she felt personally slighted by the change. We do know what Jack’s views were of the Christian and sexual morality: ‘There is no getting away from it: the Christian rule is “Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.”’29 In later years, offered the objection that celibacy is not always possible, Lewis the radio evangelist was to be quite unambiguous: ‘Faced with an optional question in an examination paper, one considers whether one can do it or not; faced with a compulsory question, one must do the best one can … It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.’30 The letters to Greeves suggest that he did not find this part of a Christian’s duty very easy (‘Daily Castration Prevents Master Bation’).31 But he was not a man to say one thing and do another. He meant his Christian commitment to be total.
This commitment grew out of profound emotional changes over which he had no control, and of which he himself perhaps had only an imperfect knowledge. The first change, the move to theism, happened in 1929 and coincided more or less directly with the death of his father. It would be far too glib to suggest that he consciously made the second change, to adopt Christianity, merely to give himself an excuse to abandon sexual relations with Mrs Moore, whatever the nature of those relations had been.
There are some men who pay prostitutes not for overtly sexual favours, but for humiliation of the most humdrum kind. Such people, caught in a strange web of masochism, find their emotional fulfilment not in acts of love but in being made to scrub kitchen floors or scour out pans. ‘He was as good as an extra maid,’ said Minto.
Certainly, as his mind prepared itself for the acceptance of the Christian orthodoxies, he was making dogged attempts to come to terms with his sado-masochistic tendencies. In February of 1931, he and Warnie had attended a production of James Elroy Flecker’s Hassan at the Oxford Playhouse.
It was not very well done, but well enough for me: indeed to see it really well acted would be too much for me. In reading it the cruelty is just about balanced by the extreme beauty of the lyrics and much of the dialogue, so that the total effect, tho’ sinister, like a too bright dream which is sure to turn into nightmare before the end, yet is bearable. On the stage, where one has less time to dwell on the cadence or suggestion of the individual words, the cruelty is unendurable. Warnie went out half way through. I felt quite sick but thought it almost a duty for one afflicted in my way to remain, saying to myself, ‘Oh, you like cruelty, do you? Well now stew in it’ – the same principle on which one trains a puppy to be clean – ‘rub their noses in it’. It has haunted me ever since.
The disturbing thing about this letter to Arthur Greeves is the extent to which he does not see that the remedy proposed sounds all too like the disorder he wishes to eliminate. For the shaming pleasure of voyeuristic torture, he has substituted the pleasure of having his nose rubbed in it. Like many sexually naive people, Lewis supposed that if he eliminated the consciously erotic elements of his sexuality from the surface of life, he would be able to dispel the habits and characteristics of which these particular tastes were a mere symptom. Perhaps if he had worried less about them, and taken a less self-reproachful line, the outlines of his personality would have softened with the years. Perhaps, too, if they had known about his ‘tastes’, his friends would have been less puzzled by two of his most mysterious personality traits: his delight in verbal bullying, of students or intellectual opponents, and his apparently cheerful domestic enslavement to Mrs Moore.
The college grind of meetings and tutorials went on. Lewis had by now settled into the role of tutor, but he did not relax in it. His pupils nearly all felt (particularly the first pupil of the morning, at ten a.m., who watched him lay down his steel-nibbed pen with an air of resignation) that tutorials were an interru
ption to what he considered his real work. And he had a notorious asperity for which he was afterwards sometimes penitent. Treating his pupils to the compliment of rational disagreement sometimes spilled over into a verbal contest so fierce that the young person concerned was abashed or even frightened. The feelings may be imagined of the pupil who rashly let fall a slighting reference to Sohrab and Rustum, to be answered by Lewis’s brandishing an old regimental sword of his brother’s which stood in the corner of his room and shouting, ‘The sword must settle this!’ The experience of the others was probably less dramatic, but they all knew the sharp edge of Lewis’s tongue. ‘As to yesterday morning, I was a bit “short”. If you take into account the fact that I have been up till after midnight every night since Monday, that I have a cold, and that that morning I had been talking on a sore throat from 9.30 to 1 o’clock, perhaps you will understand.’ Quite as remarkable as the original display of ill temper was the graciousness which prompted him to apologize for it. ‘The truth is,’ he admitted to Alan Griffiths, ‘I have a constant temptation to over asperity … even when there is no subjective anger to prompt me: it comes, I think, from the pleasure of using the English language forcibly – i.e. it is not a species of Ira but of Superbia.’32
Some pupils came in time to like it; not simply because the outbursts were part of the Lewis ‘act’, but because he was a conscientious teacher, who was concerned, as the Great Knock had been, to wage war on sloppy language and sloppy thinking. John Lawlor, a pupil from 1936 onwards, said of himself that he ‘passed from dislike and hostility to stubborn affection, and then to gratitude for the weekly bout in which no quarter was asked or given’.33 In this he almost certainly spoke for the majority of Lewis’s pupils. As a pupil of slightly later vintage, Derek Brewer, remarked, ‘Many of his pupils became teachers of one sort or another and all, or most of them, became his friends.’34 That is pretty high praise; and though there are some obvious exceptions, they were fewer as the years went by. A tutor who could command the unhesitating affection and intellectual respect of so miscellaneous a collection of men as Derek Brewer (later Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge), the drama critic Kenneth Tynan, the publisher Charles Monteith and the poet John Wain was clearly doing his job.
One aspect of the Lewis regime about which the majority of his pupils had some misgivings, however, was the termly dinner he gave for them. He called it the ‘English binge’. It was a dinner held at his own expense in a private room at Magdalen, and it was a symptom of his great generosity. But it was also a throwback to a form of behaviour which, however natural it might have seemed to officer cadets in the First World War, was excruciatingly embarrassing to succeeding generations of Magdalen men. The idea of the evening was primarily to get drunk, and this was a matter about which Lewis was exuberantly insistent. The conversation had to be what he called ‘bawdry’. ‘Nothing above the belly or below the knee tonight!’ he exclaimed on one of these evenings, savouring the rowdy songs and bawdy rhymes which resulted. One of his pupils, Roger Lancelyn Green, has commented on a letter which Lewis wrote to Warnie describing the ‘English binge’ at Christmas 1931. ‘Bawdy ought to be outrageous and extravagant,’ Lewis had written; and Green tells us, ‘he proceeds to give a very mild example.’35 It is a remnant which ‘dates’ Green and reveals our later generation as less innocent and more acquiescent. Green does not quote the example, which is a song about an angry father who suspects that his daughter has been ravished by the protagonist of the ballad. What Lewis calls ‘the good part’ goes as follows:
Hark! I hear a step on the stair!
Sounds to me like an angry father,
With a pistol in either hand,
Looking for the man that screwed his daughter
(Rum ti-iddle-ey etc).
I have seized him by the hair of his head
And shoved it into a bucket of water
And I screwed his pistols up his arse
A dam sight harder than I screwed his daughter
(Rum ti-iddle-ey etc).
Lewis spent Christmas Day 1931 transcribing this ditty for Warnie, who had returned for his last spell of service in Shanghai. With the role of the heavy father properly cast – stumping up the stairs with a desperate expression and his two pistols, he wrote, ‘this anticlimax, this adding of injury to insult, seems to me irresistible’. He regretted that bawdry of this kind was the ‘only living folk-art left to us. If our English binge had been held in a medieval university we should have had, mixed with the bawdy songs, tragical and even devotional pieces, equally authorless and handed on from mouth to mouth in the same way, with the same individual variations.’36 One somehow thinks that only Lewis could have stepped, with a few vigorous steps, from a defence of drunken all-male ‘stag’ evenings to a vivid illustration of the life and literature of the Middle Ages.
–ELEVEN–
REGRESS
1931–1936
Lewis was by now thirty-three years old. By the age of thirty-three Keats and Shelley were dead; Byron had finished two-thirds of his major work. Even a figure more comparable with Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, had at this age published five of his most distinguished books, and discovered his own voice. With Lewis this was not so, and it is probably vain to look for reasons. We can account for what he was doing with his time, but this is not the same thing as explaining how or why the tone of voice – that vigour, that distinctively Lewisian freshness and vitality – was so long in coming.
What we do know is that his full conversion to Christianity released in him a literary flow which only ceased with death. From then on, works of scholarship, fantasy, literary appreciation, and apologetics poured from his ever-fertile brain. The poetry got much better too. The angel’s song at the end of The Pilgrim’s Regress is in a different league from the unhappier patches of Spirits in Bondage or Dymer. Terse, poignant, and well made, it says what could only be said in poetry. The thought, perhaps, is borrowed from Tolkien, whose immortals cannot see why men dread death. (‘We who bear the ever-mounting burden of the years do not clearly understand this.’)1 But the perspective is very distinctly that of Lewis, who was to spend nearly all his literary energies imagining what the world would look like if seen from heaven.
Lewis began to write The Pilgrim’s Regress, appropriately enough, on a return visit to Northern Ireland to stay with Arthur Greeves in the spring of 1932. ‘We have come to Puritania,’ he said, ‘and that was my father’s house. I see that my father and mother are gone already beyond the brook. I had much I would have said to them. But it is no matter.’2
The book owes its title and framework to Bunyan, but it is much more satirical in tone and purpose than The Pilgrim’s Progress. Read today, its contemporary references seem crude and dead as mutton. Anyone can work out who the ‘subspecies’ Marxomanni, Mussolimini and Swastici are meant to represent, but they do not really play an important part in the story, since we can feel that John, the Pilgrim, is not really tempted or overwhelmed by them, any more than Lewis ever felt the slightest inclination to become a Marxist or a Fascist. Similarly, the pre-First World War diction now creates moments of unintentional comedy, as when the figure of Christ says to John, ‘You must play fair,’3 or when John’s plunge into the pool of faith is described as ‘he took a header’.4 (Lewis, incidentally, had been taught to dive only very lately, by Owen Barfield, an event which he considered full of religious significance.)
Any fair-minded critic of The Pilgrim’s Regress must also admit that some of its conceits are unfortunate. The identification of lust with ‘brown girls’ probably had no racial connotations in that innocently discriminatory age; but the scenes towards the end where the Witch tries to capture John with her wiles do leave the disconcerting impression that Lewis thought of Christianity as little more than a good ‘cure’ for lust.
All that must be conceded, and yet the book’s virtues greatly outweigh its faults. Some of the contemporary satire – John Betjeman as ‘Victoriana’, Edith Sitwell as ‘Glu
gly’ – is still quite funny. (‘She was very tall and lean as a post … She waddled to and fro with her toes pointing in … Finally she made some grunts and said: “Globol obol ookle ogle globol gloogle gloo.’”) The assaults on the neo-Thomist revival of the period are also well made. There are sentences in ‘Neo-Angular’s’ speeches which are echoed almost word for word in the essays of T. S. Eliot and the letters of Evelyn Waugh.
So you have met Mother Kirk? No wonder that you are confused. You had no business to talk to her except through a qualified Steward … Reason is divine. But how should you understand her? You are a beginner. For you, the only safe commerce with reason is to learn from your superiors the dogmata in which her deliverances have been codified for general use.5
The book has the unmistakable stamp of Lewis upon it. There is the tremendous narrative verve; there are the flights of true sublimity side by side with the knockabout of comedy and debate; there is, above all, the sense which informs nearly all his religious writing, that a human being’s relationship with God is the great Romance of life. The subtitle is An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, and it is important to remember that for Lewis the three things went together. Tolkien had taught him that the inability to believe in Christianity was primarily a failure of the imagination. This insight had enabled Lewis to recover all the things in art and in life which he had been enjoying since imaginative awareness dawned. In Puritania, religion had been the stuff of cant, of laws, of promised punishments for behaviour which the Pilgrim’s inner conscience could not condemn. But there had also been this other vision – of the ‘green wood full of primroses’ – which he had glimpsed through a hole in the wall, and which promised all the things which Lewis and Greeves had come to label ‘It’ or ‘Joy’. These were the pleasures he got from the beauties of nature, from the music of Wagner, from the watercolours of Beatrix Potter, from the books of William Morris, George MacDonald and Wordsworth. What he discovered in his ‘regress’ was that all these things were echoes of the heavenly places. In the allegory, it is not easy to work out the extent to which the regress is a return to Puritanian values. The double values of the stewards, and the ethics based on fear of punishment are rejected. But Mother Kirk – a sort of Anglican version of Langland’s Mother Church – is certainly John’s guide in the final stages of his journey.