It is an interesting and rather grim enquiry – how much of our present selves we could hope to take with us if there were another life. I take it that whatever is merely intellectual, mere theory, must go, since we probably hold it only by memory habit, which may depend on the matter of the brain. Only what has gone far deeper, what has been incorporated into the unconscious depths, can hope to survive. This often comes over me when I think of religion: and it is a shock to realize that the mere thinking it may be nothing, and that only the tiny bit which we really practise is likely to be ours in any sense of which death cannot make hay.23
It is interesting to note how, more and more, Lewis saw problems from a Christian perspective. After a friend in Belfast discouraged Arthur Greeves from going on with a novel he was writing and hoping to publish, Arthur turned to Lewis for advice, trusting that the author of Spirits in Bondage and Dymer could show him how he, too, could break into the publishing world. It is not clear whether Lewis had read Arthur’s manuscript – though he had long been after him to write – but his answer was intended, not as help in getting a manuscript accepted, but as a warning against staking one’s happiness on literary success. He wrote on 18 August 1930:
I am still as disappointed an author as you. From the age of sixteen onwards I had one single ambition, from which I never wavered, in the prosecution of which I spent every ounce I could, on which I really and deliberately staked my whole contentment: and I recognize myself as having unmistakably failed in it … The side of me which longs, not to write, for no one can stop us doing that, but to be approved as a writer, is not the side of us that is really worth much. And depend upon it, unless God has abandoned us, he will find means to cauterize that side somehow or other. If we can take the pain well and truly now and by it forever get over the wish to be distinguished beyond our fellows, well: if not we shall get it again in some other form. And honestly, the being cured, with all the pain, has pleasure too: one creeps home, tired and bruised, into a state of mind that is really restful, when all one’s ambitions have been given up. Then one can really for the first time say ‘Thy Kingdom come’: for in that Kingdom there will be no pre-eminences and a man must have reached the stage of not caring two straws about his own status before he can enter it. Think how difficult that would be if one succeeded as a writer: how bitter this necessary purgation, at the age of sixty, when literary success had made your whole life and you had then got to begin to go through the stage of seeing it all as dust and ashes … Better take it now: better learn the trick that makes you free for the future.24
Though Lewis had no desire to publish anything at this point, he still felt he must write. On 1 June 1930 he sent Arthur the first instalment of a novel entitled The Moving Image. He hoped that by writing four pages each week he would eventually finish it. His heavy schedule of tutorials, lectures and college business appears to have forestalled him for he abandoned it soon afterwards. Not one page of the novel has been found, and he last mentioned it to Greeves on 22 June of the same year: ‘By the way, about the “Moving Image” I should warn you that there is going to be a great deal of conversation: in fact it is to be almost a Platonic dialogue in a fantastic setting with story intermixed. If you take The Symposium, Phantastes, Tristram Shandy and stir them all up together you will about have the recipe.’25
One of the main reasons why The Moving Image was never completed may have been because, though Lewis had given up hopes of being a successful poet, he was nevertheless far more interested in writing verse than prose. Two of the long poems published after his death in the collection Narrative Poems (1969) were, quite clearly, being written and/or revised at this time: The Nameless Isle, which bears the date ‘Aug. 1930’, and The Queen of Drum, which he began years previously but was still rewriting.
Lewis seems, however, to have been far more pleased with some short religious lyrics he was composing in his spare time. Writing to Arthur about them on 28 August 1930, he said: ‘I have found myself impelled to take infinitely more pains, less ready to be contented with the fairly good and more determined to reach the best attainable, than ever I was in the days when I never wrote without the ardent hope of successful publication.’26
The religious lyrics to which he is referring are those that eventually found their way into The Pilgrim’s Regress and were later reprinted in Poems (1964) and Collected Poems (1994). It was not, however, to Arthur that Lewis turned for criticism of his verse, but to Owen Barfield who was himself writing a good deal of poetry at this time. Indeed, there are probably very few of Lewis’s poems that were not offered to him for criticism. The manuscript of The Nameless Isle contains numerous marginal notes in Barfield’s hand and the short religious poems were sent to him, one by one, as they were written, with the question, ‘Is this any good?’
As Lewis rarely dated even letters before 1930, it is impossible to say in what order the poems were written; nevertheless, they quite clearly represent a kind of spiritual odyssey and are, perhaps, the richest and best of all his religious poems. A good many versions of them have survived in Lewis’s notebooks. That he put not only considerable effort, but a large part of himself into them is perhaps illustrated by the fact that in the summer of 1930 he copied nine of them into a little booklet which he sent to Barfield. The cover of the booklet bears the title Half Hours with Hamilton, or Quiet Moments and beneath the title – for Barfield’s amusement – there is the following note: ‘It is hoped that this little selection from my works, from which all objectionable matter has been carefully excluded, will be found specially suitable for Sunday and family reading, and also to the higher forms of secondary schools.’ Of this selection, the following – which is exactly as it appears in Half Hours – seems to have gone through the most revisions and best illustrates how Lewis felt about God’s invasion of his life.
You rest upon me all my days
One never changing eye
Dreadful and undivided as the blaze
Of some Arabian sky,
Where dead still in the stifling tent
Pale travellers crouch, and bright
About them noon’s long drawn astonishment
Hammers the hills with light.
Oh for but one cool breath in seven,
One wind from northern climes,
The shifting and the castle-clouded heaven
Of my old Pagan times!
But you have seized all in your rage
Of Oneness. Round about,
Beating my wings, all ways, within your cage,
I flutter, but not out.27
Lewis had another project in hand which probably no one knew about until it was discovered after his death. Shortly after his conversion to theism, he wrote what might be described as an early version of Surprised by Joy except that it is even less ‘personal’ than Surprised by Joy. Though he had not been converted to Christianity when he finished it, his purpose was very nearly the same in both books: to explain how the experience of Joy led him to become a theist. This early manuscript28 fills sixty-two pages of a notebook and ten loose sheets and begins with a statement of what it is about:
In this book I propose to describe the process by which I came back, like so many of my generation, from materialism to a belief in God. If that process had been a purely intellectual one, and if I were therefore simply giving a narrative form to a work of apologetic, there would be no place for my book. The defence of Theism lies in abler hands than mine. What makes me bold to contribute my own story is the fact that I arrived where now I am, not by reflection alone, but by reflection on a particular recurrent experience. I am an empirical Theist. I have arrived at God by induction.
The most likely explanation why Lewis did not try publishing his ‘autobiography’ is that he still could not understand what part Christ played in Christianity. Till he grasped that, he no doubt felt it best to keep quiet and continue searching for the answer. Meanwhile he found a fellow pilgrim in Warnie, who was home from the Army and living at The
Kilns.
Warnie had not mentioned it in his letters to Jack from China, but he too had been returning to the faith. On his way home from China he stopped in Japan. A few days after he arrived there, on 4 March 1930, he visited the Buddhist shrine at Kamakura. Standing there before a statue of the Great Buddha he became convinced of the truth of Christianity. On 10 January 1931 Lewis told Arthur Greeves that Warnie
has been with us all the month here … He and I even went together to Church twice: and – will you believe it – he said to me in conversation that he was beginning to think the religious view of things was after all true. Mind you (like me, at first), he didn’t want it to be, nor like it: but his intellect is beginning to revolt from the semi-scientific assumptions we all grew up in, and the other explanation of the world seems to him daily more probable.29
Shortly after this, on 14 May 1931, while stationed at the Army base at Bulford, Warnie wrote in his diary: ‘On Saturday last, 9th, I started to say my prayers again after having discontinued doing so for more years than I care to remember: this was no sudden impulse but the result of a conviction of the truth of Christianity which has been growing on me for a considerable time … The wheel has now made the full revolution – indifference, scepticism, atheism, agnosticism, and back again to Christianity.’30
In January 1931 Lewis was writing to Arthur Greeves about his most recent MacDonald acquisition, What’s Mine’s Mine (1886). Before he became interested in Christianity, Lewis’s criticism of Morris, MacDonald and other favourites had been primarily about literary values. Now that he was examining his own heart with unmerciful frankness, his letters were characterized by what Barfield wryly referred to as the ‘expository demon’ in him: his penetrating observations about moral values in, or suggested by, the books he was reading. In a letter to Arthur of 17 January 1931 he says about What’s Mine’s Mine and other novels by MacDonald:
I wonder did he indulge (day-dreamily) an otherwise repressed fund of indignation by putting up in his novels bogeys to whom his heroes could make the stunning retorts and deliver the stunning blows which he himself neither could nor would deliver in real life. I am certain that this is morally as well as artistically dangerous and I’ll tell you why. The pleasure of anger – the gnawing attraction which makes one return again and again to its theme – lies, I believe, in the fact that one feels entirely righteous oneself only when one is angry. Then the other person is pure black, and you are pure white. But in real life sanity always returns to break the dream. In fiction you can put absolutely all the right, with no snags or reservations, on the side of the hero (with whom you identify yourself) and all the wrong on the side of the villain. You thus revel in unearned self-righteousness which would be vicious even if it were earned. Haven’t you noticed how people with a fixed hatred, say, of Germans or Bolshevists, resent anything which is pleaded in extenuation, however small, of their supposed crimes. The enemy must be unredeemed black. While all the time one does nothing and enjoys the feeling of perfect superiority over the faults one is never tempted to commit.31
Lewis appears to have got the kind of spiritual sustenance he most needed from writers such as Morris and MacDonald, but he felt he ought to be reading some specifically theological works as well. On clearing out Little Lea, he came across a copy of The Practice of the Presence of God by the seventeenth-century Carmelite mystic, Brother Lawrence. He found it very disappointing. ‘It is full of truth,’ he wrote to Arthur on 1 June 1930, ‘but somehow I didn’t like it: it seemed to me a little unctuous. That sort of stuff, when it is not splendid beyond words, is terribly repulsive.’32 Some weeks later, on 8 July, he wrote to Greeves about Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation: it suffered, he complained, from the author’s shirking the problem of evil. In June 1931 he came across William Inge’s Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion (1924), which he considered one of the best books of its kind that he had struck.
The truth is that Lewis never got on well with purely devotional books. What he infinitely preferred were solid works of theology that he had to work at to understand. His attitude towards the two kinds of books is summed up in an introduction he wrote some years later for a translation of St Athanasius’s The Incarnation of the Word of God:
For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.33
He must have said as much to Greeves because, when Lewis was on holiday in Ulster during August 1931, Arthur presented him with the works of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglican divines, Richard Hooker and Jeremy Taylor.
Though Shakespeare had never been one of the indispensable poets of his youth, Lewis was now making a serious study of his plays for tutorial purposes. Shortly after his return from Ireland he read The Winter’s Tale and was fired with excitement over Act V, Scene iii, in which Hermione is introduced as a statue and then comes to life. He wrote to Arthur on 5 September 1931 that
Hitherto I had thought it rather silly: this time, seeing that the absurdity of the plot doesn’t matter, and is merely the scaffolding whereby Shakespeare (probably unconsciously) is able to give us an image of resurrection, I was simply overwhelmed. You will say that I am here doing to Shakespeare just what I did to MacDonald over Wilfred Cumbermede. Perhaps I am. I must confess that more and more the value of plays and novels becomes for me dependent on the moments when, by whatever artifice, they succeed in expressing the great myths.34
Lewis was still thinking about myth and resurrection when, on Saturday evening, 19 September 1931, he invited Tolkien and Hugo Dyson to dine at Magdalen. Probably none of them had any idea what a momentous impact this night’s conversation was to have on Lewis, who was finally to see his beliefs about myth, paganism and Christianity cohere. After dinner the three friends strolled up Addison’s Walk discussing myth and metaphor till a wind storm tore through the trees and drove them inside. In Lewis’s rooms they talked about Christianity till 3 a.m. when Tolkien left to go home. After seeing him through the little postern door that opens on to Magdalen Bridge, Lewis and Dyson continued the discussion for another hour, walking up and down the cloister of New Buildings.
On Monday, 28 September, Lewis and Warnie took a picnic lunch to Whipsnade Zoo, Warnie driving his motorcycle and his brother riding in the sidecar. That evening Warnie recorded in his diary that, while watching an enclosure of bears, they were attracted by a ‘delightful brown plethoric one which sat up and saluted for buns. Jack is full of the dream of adding a pet bear to our private menagerie, which he intends to christen “Bultitude”.’35
This, no doubt, is the original ‘Mr Bultitude’ who later found his way into That Hideous Strength. But something of far greater importance happened to Lewis on the way to Whipsnade for, as he says 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. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. “Emotional” is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.’36
A few days later, 1 October, Lewis wound up a long letter to Arthur Greeves with the news: ‘I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ – in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.’37
Arthur was, naturally, elated by this turn of events and begged to know how it happened. Lewis was uncertain whether his belief in Christ was clear enough in his own mind to explain to another. Nevertheless, at Arthur’s insistence, on 18 October he wrote an account of how
it came about:
What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ ‘saved or ‘opened salvation to’ the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary: one could see from ordinary experience how sin (e.g. the case of a drunkard) could get a man to such a point that he was bound to reach Hell (i.e. complete degradation and misery) in this life unless something quite beyond mere natural help or effort stepped in. And I could well imagine a whole world being in the same state and similarly in need of miracle. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now – except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious, expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (‘propitiation’ – ‘sacrifice’ – ‘the blood of the Lamb’) – expressions which I could only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.
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