by A. N. Wilson
Another woman who fell under his spell, spiritually speaking, was Dorothy L. Sayers. So impressed was she by the Dante book that she undertook herself to produce a Penguin translation of the great poet; it is inaccurate and ‘dated’ in literary manner, but full of gusto. Lewis was a great admirer of her work, particularly of her series of radio plays Man Born to Be King. Tolkien liked the radio plays, too, which is in some ways surprising. Less surprising is the view which he confided to his son: ‘I could not stand Gaudy Night. I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatrix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet. The honeymoon one (Busman’s H?) was worse. I was sick.’14
A clash of sympathies of a more serious kind had occurred one noon at the Eagle and Child pub, at one of the Inklings’ regular Tuesday meetings. The poet Roy Campbell, a Catholic who had fought on the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, turned up to meet the famous group of friends. Lewis, who had consumed a lot of port before Campbell’s arrival, insisted on belligerently reading aloud a lampoon which he had written of Campbell in the Oxford Magazine. Campbell, whose idea of fun was a pub brawl, took this in good part, but the conversation then turned to the awkward question of Spanish Fascism. At that period the Dominican Order was almost alone among English Catholics in decrying Spanish Fascism. In Catholic churches all over England, Novenas of Prayer and Masses had been offered for Franco’s victory over the Communists, for the very simple reason that the Communists were committed to the violent overthrow of the Church and the Fascists, in Spain, to its maintenance.
Lewis always took the line that Communism and Fascism were equally evil, and this was something which Tolkien and Campbell could not understand. ‘Nothing is a greater tribute to Red Propaganda’, Tolkien wrote, ‘than the fact that Lewis (who knows they are in all other subjects liars and traducers) believes all that is said against Franco, and nothing that is said for him … But Hatred of our Church is after all the only real foundation of the C of E.’
This religious divide was to grow wider and harder to cross when the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis had cooled. During the war years, however, it was only an aggravation to what remained a harmonious and loving friendship. Tolkien, who as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon was obliged to be a Fellow of Pembroke (the college to which the Professorship was attached), dreamed of becoming the Merton Professor of English Language, and of Lewis being freed from his disagreeable colleagues at Magdalen and becoming the Merton Professor of English Literature. ‘It would be marvellous to be both in the same college and shake off the dust of miserable Pembroke.’
Unquestionably, the bond which united them most deeply at this period was Lewis’s spontaneously generous and passionate admiration for The Lord of the Rings, the ‘sequel’ that Tolkien was writing to The Hobbit. It was, of course, infinitely more than a sequel. It was nothing less than a description of the war which brought an end to the ‘Third Age’. What began as a small adventure story to amuse children broadened out into a book so vast in its imaginative scope that no genre-word – such as ‘epic’ or ‘romance’ – really covers it. In the journey of the Ring-bearers to the Cracks of Doom in the Land of Mordor, the reader is presented not only with one of the most exciting narratives in the English language, but also, by allusion, quotation, inference and episode, with a glimpse of Tolkien’s entire imaginative world, the whole mythology of the Elves, with their ancient memories recorded in half-forgotten language and old songs; of the Dark Lords; even, in half-memory, of times stretching far back to the First and Second Ages, to the making of the Silmarils, and the Fall of Numenor. Although Tolkien always denied that his world was meant to be an echo, still less an allegory, of what was happening in the mid-twentieth century in Europe, there can be no doubt that the high seriousness and urgency of the Ring-bearers’ mission against the forces of darkness were quickened by his sense that ‘there will be a “millennium”, the prophesied thousand year rule of the Saints, i.e. those who have for all their imperfections never finally bowed heart and will to the world or the evil spirit (in modern but not universal terms: mechanism, “scientific” materialism, Socialism … ).’15
Out of this highly distinctive blend of preoccupations grew one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century. It may seem paradoxical to describe a man who composed so much as an indolent writer, but this, temperamentally, Tolkien was. That is not to say, in the days of his active creativity, that he was lazy, but mat he could not stir himself to get on with the narrative. A whole year went by, for example, between his bringing the travellers to the Mines of Moria (where Gandalf apparently plunges to his doom) and getting them to resume their journey.
The greatest single goad to Tolkien’s pen was Lewis. He had long since come to admire Tolkien’s mythology, and had probably heard all or parts of The Silmarillion; he had read much of Tolkien’s poetry and reviewed The Hobbit in generous terms. But he must have seen that The Lord of the Rings represented a quickening of Tolkien’s style. By presenting his matter in so supremely exciting a narrative, Tolkien had transformed it. He had to be made to finish, however tiring the task in the midst of all his many other commitments, domestic and professional. Month after month, throughout the war, Lewis nagged Tolkien for more. Another incentive was that J. R. R. Tolkien’s son Christopher, by now posted to South Africa, was a keen follower of the story and as anxious as Lewis that it should be completed. His father posted it to him in instalments, as it was written. A typical letter to Christopher Tolkien, from May 1944, informs the young man:
I worked very hard at my chapter – it is very exhausting work; especially as the climax approaches and one has to keep the pitch up: no easy level will do; and there are all sorts of minor problems of plot and mechanism. I wrote and tore up and rewrote most of it a good many times; but I was rewarded this morning as both C.S.L. and C.W. thought it an admirable performance and the latest chapters the best so far.16
It could be said with almost complete certainty that we should never have had The Lord of the Rings had not ‘C.S.L.’ been so anxious to read to the end.
If for Lewis reading the book was one of the great pleasures of the war in Oxford, together with ‘laughter and the love of friends’ on Thursday evenings in his Magdalen rooms, and Tuesday lunchtimes at the Eagle and Child, it should not be supposed that all his lecture commitments in other towns were penitential. In February 1943, for example, he had been asked to deliver the Riddell Lectures at the University of Durham, and this gave him and Warnie the excuse for a jaunt in the North of England. The lectures themselves were delivered on three successive evenings in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but in the course of their time in the North they were able to explore York, as well as to stay in Durham. The beauty of the cathedral town and its stupendous setting on the banks of the Wear took both brothers by marvellous surprise.17 (Lewis used the place as a model for his university town in That Hideous Strength.) The lectures themselves were published in 1944 as The Abolition of Man.
This is an important book: nothing less than an analysis of where and how the modern world has gone wrong. This may provoke in many readers the response, ‘As we should expect, here is an affectedly old-fashioned, crusty man with a pipe and a lot of male cronies who is going to complain about any modern developments in thought, knowledge or understanding.’ One has to recognize that Lewis was by temperament in danger of turning into a caricature backwoodsman. But he was also a man with a supremely workable intelligence, and in this book he deserves to command his widest audience. He is not simply addressing – as in his works of literary scholarship – those who might want to read Macrobius or Thomas Usk; nor is he, overtly at least, arguing a case for Christianity. Rather, he is analysing what has happened to society and, indeed, to our whole way of looking at the universe. This is something which affects us all, and we all need to consider the validity or otherwise of Lewis’s argument
s. I consider The Abolition of Man to be quite detached from That Hideous Strength. It is true that many of the fears expressed in The Abolition of Man were translated into fiction in the novel, as was the insight which many readers of the lectures might deem their most fanciful strand: the observation about the close kinship which exists between what we call science and magic – ‘For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.’
But The Abolition of Man is concerned with something much more incontrovertible than this. And it must be remembered that it was written at a period when, abroad, Hitler and Stalin were defying all previously understood notions of decency – indeed inventing value or non-value systems of their own – while at home Lewis was finding himself, at the Socratic Club and elsewhere, with philosophers like A. J. Ayer who absolutely denied the possibility of attaching meaning to sentences which were not either verifiable through sense perception or verifiable as a priori truths. Into the latter category Ayer and the other logical positivists would only admit certain mathematical and logical formulae. Such concepts as right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, were dismissed from their vocabulary.
Lewis’s contention – which cannot, historically, be denied – was that there has been a system of values, discernible in almost all moral and religious centres, from the beginning of literature until the mid-twentieth century. To emphasize that he was not talking just about the Judaeo-Christian tradition but about something both deeper and wider than that, Lewis borrowed the Chinese word and called this the Too. In an appendix quoting from sources as varied as the Old Norse Voluspa, the Ancient Egyptian Confession of a Righteous Soul, the Old Chinese Analects, Cicero and Epictetus, he makes his point. They all point to the existence of something outside individual feelings or the purely utilitarian requirements of a society, something which might be termed a generally accepted standard of right and wrong. All these sources abhor murder, dishonesty, theft, unkindness, disregard of the old, cruelty to children, ruthless ‘justice’ untempered by mercy.
That these should be considered abhorrent, Lewis gently points out, is no longer taken for granted. And his rhetoric is all the more effective for the fact that he does not terrify his audience at the outset with examples which might be deemed monstrous or freakish. He says nothing about Hitler, nothing about Stalin. Instead he starts off with two harmless English schoolmasters who have written a textbook for the use of older children. In this book, which Lewis calls The Green Book, the authors quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. Two tourists approach, one who calls the waterfall sublime and the other who calls it pretty. Coleridge rejects the second judgement with disgust and endorses the word sublime. The Green Book tells its readers, ‘When the man said That is sublime he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall … Actually … he was not making a remark about the waterfall but a remark about his own feelings.’ The Green Book translates the sentence as ‘I have sublime feelings.’
Having dismissed the absurdity of making That is sublime mean I have sublime feelings (by this interpretation it would mean, by contrast, I have humble feelings), Lewis reflects on the implications of this teaching, and in the rest of his short book he sketches these implications out with nightmarish clarity. If all value judgements are really statements about our feelings, and if we no longer believe in the Too, where does that leave us? ‘It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected.’18
He concludes that the two schoolmasters who wrote The Green Book were unconsciously passing on what they had absorbed from the higher reaches of the intelligentsia, a disregard of all value judgements. In answer to the question Where does that leave us?, Lewis predicts that it will leave us in the hands of unscrupulous operators who do not believe in humanity itself. The abolition of man will have occurred because there will be no reason to regard man, as the Tao has always regarded him, as a moral being.
Many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst [i.e. Freud, Shaw and A. J. Ayer] means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as specimens, mere , preparations, begins to affect our very language – once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become ‘integration’ and diligence ‘dynamism’ and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are ‘potential officer material’.
He concludes his lectures by imploring scientists to return to a sense of the Tao. ‘The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself … It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.’19
In his short book Lewis does not elaborate on what remedies there can be which will save the world from the effects of exploitation by a comparatively few unscrupulous people. He does not claim to know the answers. Those who identify Lewis’s fears purely with the Nazi ‘experiments’ might consider that the world has become a better place since 1944 and that he was exaggerating. But the whole growth since that period of ecology, of knowledge about the calamitous consequences of viewing the Earth merely as a thing to be exploited by man its master, gives the lie to this. Lewis’s arguments cover the proliferation of nuclear arsenals; the so-called advance of medical science in the area of experimenting on human embryos; the effect on Third World countries of such fruits of enlightenment as modern baby food and aerosol sprays. His diagnosis of the disease cannot be lightly dismissed. In The Abolition of Man he does not advance the cure, though it is no secret where he thought it lay, if there was one.
The highly serious journey of Dante Alighieri from Hell to Paradise was entitled The Divine Comedy because this was a poem with a happy ending rather than an unhappy or tragic one. It was not ‘a comedy’ in the sense of being intended to make its readers laugh. Lewis’s boldest fiction, The Great Divorce, is a comedy in both senses. It is a conscious echo of Dante, being a journey from Hell to Heaven. But it is also full of human vignettes which are cruelly amusing. The ‘divorce’ of the title is the gulf fixed between Heaven and Hell, a gulf which varies in size depending upon the perspective from which it is viewed. The journey, in a celestial bus from the dingy town of Hell up to the outer borders of the Heavenly Places, is long and steep. Just as the town itself owes much to the dingier parts of Dante’s Inferno – particularly to his sixth circle, home of the heretics ‘whom the wind leads and the rain beats’ (che mena il vento, e che batte la pioggia), so the journeying up through a vast gorge to the heights of Paradise is also modelled on Dantean geography. But viewed from the perspective of Heaven, this vast gorge is just a tiny little crack in the grass. And the infernal ghosts who seem so hellishly substantial on the bus are wraith-like and insubstantial when exposed to the bright beams of reality.
Behind the story is the idea – more generous than anything in Dante – that all may be saved if they so choose. Everyone on the bus from Hell can stay in Heaven if they wish; and they will then look back on their time in the dingy twilit town as a mere period of purgatory. But many of the ghosts on the bus are already lost souls. They prefer their own sinful obsessive selves to the loss of self which is necessary before they can be saved.
Perhaps none of Lewis’s portraits is more cruel than that of the figure of Dante himself, who appears at the end as a figure so besottedly in love with his own unhappiness, and with what he calls his love for his lady, that he cannot let go. He is represented as a dwarf leading the other part of himself, the Tragedian, round on
a chain, rather as a street vendor might lead a pet monkey. Lewis the narrator remonstrates with his Heavenly Guide at the cruelty of this. Surely this lady, who is enjoying the sort of heavenly beatitude of Dante’s Beatrice (though here she is represented as a very ordinary woman who has lived in Golders Green, a suburb of North London), should pity the poor man who has been her husband. No, says Lewis’s Guide through the Heavenly Places, ‘That sounds very merciful; but see what lurks behind it … The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy … ’
Dante’s Guide through the Other World is Virgil, who has to stop short of Heaven. With Lewis’s Commedia it is otherwise. He makes the bus journey on his own, and only meets his Guide – none other than George MacDonald – when he reaches the Bright Land. His conversations with MacDonald include some of the finest religious writing in the whole Lewis œuvre.