* Courtenay Edward ‘Tom Brown’ Stevens (1905–76), a distinguished ancient historian, was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He took a First in Literae Humaniores in 1928, and published his B.Litt. thesis as Sidonius Apollinaris and his Age (1933). Stevens was elected a Fellow of Magdalen in 1933, but left in 1940 to work in the Foreign Office. During the war he worked as an intelligence officer with Radio Atlantic. He was Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Magdalen, 1946–72. Besides being a great Oxford character, he was one of the best tutors in the University.
† Ernest William Barnes (1874–1953), Bishop of Birmingham, 1924–53, who in his Rise of Christianity (1947) scandalized orthodox Christians by his denial of miracles.
‡ The Marquis Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707) was a French military engineer who revolutionized fortification strategies during the reign of Louis XIV.
* Dr Warfield M. Firor (1896–1988) was born in Baltimore. He received his BA in 1917 from the Johns Hopkins University and his MD in 1921 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He remained at Johns Hopkins for residencies in both neurosurgery and surgery and became a faculty member and surgeon at Johns Hopkins. He played a major role in the effort to raise the level of training in surgery throughout the United States. He conducted research on the effects of tetanus toxin on the spinal cord and investigated the treatment of diseased adrenal glands with hormone implants. Among his surgical contributions was the introduction of intestinal antisepsis in preparation for colon surgery. There is a collection of his papers and interviews in the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives at Johns Hopkins. The originals of his letters from Lewis are in the Bodleian Library.
* Psalm 94:20: ‘Wilt thou have any thing to do against the stool of wickedness: which imagineth mischief as a law.’
† Ronald Buchanan McCallum (1898–1973) matriculated at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1919 and read Modern History. He was elected Fellow and Tutor of History at Pembroke College in 1925. He took great interest in The Oxford Magazine. After holding a number of positions in the college, he was elected Master of Pembroke in 1955. He retired in 1967 to become principal of St Catharine’s, Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Great Park, a position he held until 1971.
‡ Sir David Keir (1895–1973), first mentioned on page 74, was President and Vice-Chancellor of the Queen’s University, Belfast, 1939–49.
* The Lord of the Rings.
NOTES
1 Rudyard Kipling, ‘If –’ (1910), 5–6.
2 Derek Brewer’s reminiscences were given in a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green.
3 Lawlor, C.S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections, p. 6.
4 Ibid., pp. 7–8.
5 SBJ, ch. 9, p. 105.
6 Ibid., ch. 14, p. 168.
7 FL, pp. 767–8.
8 Adam Fox, ‘At the Breakfast Table’, in C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences, ed. James T. Como (1979; 2nd edn, 1992), pp. 92–3.
9 Ibid., pp. 93–4.
10 Ibid., p. 92.
11 C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939), p. 85.
12 Ibid., p. 82.
13 Ibid., p. 83.
14 Helen Gardner, ‘Clive Staples Lewis 1898–1963’, Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. LI, pp. 422–3. Reprinted in Critical Thought Series I, Critical Essays on C.S. Lewis, ed. George Watson (1992).
15 Rehabilitations and Other Essays, pp. 92–3.
16 Gardner, ‘Clive Staples Lewis 1898–1963’, p. 423.
17 Coghill, ‘The Approach to English’, p. 55.
18 FL, letter of 17 June 1918, pp. 381, 382.
19 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 861, fol. 35.
20 In Selected Literary Essays, ed Walter Hooper (1969).
21 Whistler’s account of the second meeting on 9 May 1947. Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 862.
22 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 862, fol. 5.
23 Ibid., fol. 8.
24 Ibid., fol. 6.
25 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (1981), letter to William Luther White of 11 September 1967, p. 388.
26 Ibid.
27 The Oxford Magazine, LII, No. 5 (9 November 1933).
28 TST, p. 449.
29 Published in The Lost Road and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Tolkien (1987).
30 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 29.
31 Preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C.S. Lewis (1947), pp. viii–ix.
32 Letters, pp. 326–7.
33 Ibid., p. 328.
34 Essays Presented to Charles Williams, p. xiii.
35 Robert E. Havard, ‘Philia: Jack at Ease’, C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, p. 216.
36 Letters, p. 363.
37 Wain, Sprightly Running, ch. 5, p. 184.
38 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 73.
39 Ibid., p. 83.
40 Ibid., p. 95.
41 Collected Poems, p. 80.
42 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 103.
43 Essays Presented to Charles Williams, p. xiv.
44 Letters, pp. 377–8.
45 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pp. 361–2.
46 BF, p. 188.
47 Ibid., p. 193.
48 Ibid., pp. 196–7.
49 Ibid., p. 197.
50 Ibid., p. 198.
51 Ibid., p. 200.
52 Ibid., p. 209.
53 Ibid., p. 216.
54 Ibid., p. 217.
55 Ibid., p. 219.
56 Ibid., p. 225.
57 Ibid., p. 230.
58 Walsh, C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, pp. 16–17.
7
INTO THE FIELD OF ARBOL
From the beginning of his academic career Lewis specialized – if he, who was so omnivorous, specialized in anything – in English literature, drama apart, from Middle English to Milton. The Allegory of Love (1936), his most famous and enduring work of scholarship, which won him the Israel Gollancz Award, set him on the path that he was to follow most successfully, and made natural and obvious the series of lectures, the ‘Prolegomena to Medieval and Renaissance Literature’, distilled at the end of his life into The Discarded Image.
Although he wrote most of his fiction almost straight off with scarcely a correction and only occasional rewriting, Lewis worked over his academic books in several versions. Most were given first as lectures, and then, after they had been polished and refined by repetition, they were rewritten as books. Even published lectures were often tried out at Oxford before being given to a wider audience, as in the case of ‘Hamlet, the Prince or the Poem?’ which was delivered in the Schools at Oxford on 14 October 1938, before becoming the Annual Shakespeare Lecture to the British Academy on 22 April 1942 and being published in August of that year. (The original lecture was one of a weekly series on various aspects of Shakespeare given throughout the Michaelmas Term 1938, the other lecturers being Hugo Dyson, Ethel Seaton, Nevill Coghill, L. Rice-Oxley and J.N. Bryson: Lascelles Abercrombie, due to lecture on 28 October, died suddenly the previous night.)
A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ also originated in a series of eleven lectures given at Oxford during Michaelmas Term 1939, before being delivered as the Ballard Matthews Lectures at the University College of North Wales in Bangor in 1941 and published, revised and enlarged, in 1942. The earlier part of this book, dealing with Primary and Secondary Epic in general, and giving Lewis’s own theory and conception of poetry, is one of his finest achievements as a literary critic. The high place which the book as a whole will always hold in Milton studies has often been acknowledged; but a hitherto unpublished estimate from one of the greater Georgian poets, twenty-five years Lewis’s senior, will set the book more clearly in its literary, as contrasted with its scholarly, place. Deeply impressed on first reading – as on numerous subsequent readings – Green sent a copy to Gordon Bottomley, who replied on 2 March 1944:
This book of C.S. Lewis on Paradise Lost has given me more and deeper
pleasure than any book I have read for a very long time. Partly on account of his true vision of Milton; but not all. Greatly also for his luminous exposition of the nature of poetry: nothing has been written since Shelley (at least) which so exhibits the nature of poetry as the first half of this book does, and so disentangles the errors in the contemporary confusion about it. If the book could be bound up with Bridges’ Milton’s Prosody, the whole would be the best handbook to put into the hands of young poets that anyone could conceive …
And perhaps most of all I admire Lewis’s diagnosis of the disease of originality, and the way in which he shows that all our generations have the same fundamentals and need to recognize them. O, a joy and a jewel of a book.
Bottomley goes on to put his finger on one of Lewis’s few outstanding critical blind spots: his inability to appreciate spoken poetry (dramatic or otherwise):
Throughout the book I only disagreed once – about the distinction he draws between the poetry that is to be seen, and the poetry that is to be heard – i.e. that which is read in the study, and that which is spoken. I believe this to be an unreal distinction; for (as I have often said) the sound of poetry is part of its meaning. This was borne out, and made clear to everyone present, at Masefield’s ‘Oxford Recitations’, where we explored the possibilities thoroughly, and were surprised when the speaking of pieces by Donne in his most corrugated moments suddenly clarified both meaning and intention, and turned to beauty. Another astonishment was the beauty of sound in Hopkins’ ‘Golden and Leaden Echo’.
When Lewis began to write fiction, much of the inspiration was set moving by the academic studies on which he was engaged or which were still fresh in his mind. Perelandra was obviously the result of his concentration on Paradise Lost between 1939 and 1942; the spark that set Out of the Silent Planet on its course into the ‘Field of Arbol’ we know to have been due in part to the ‘joint project’ conceived with J.R.R. Tolkien and mentioned in the preceding chapter. But another clue is to be found in The Allegory of Love, published in 1936 and followed by a second edition ‘with corrections’ in 1938, the year in which Out of the Silent Planet was published.
The original edition of The Allegory of Love contains an appendix entitled ‘Genius and Genius’ which begins: ‘The significance of the being called Genius in ancient, medieval, and renaissance literature escapes a modern reader.’1 His first example comes from The City of God (VII: 13) of St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) where he distinguishes between the two meanings given to the conception of a ‘Genius’ in medieval thought. Lewis calls them Genius A, which means ‘the universal god of generation’, and Genius B, which means the ‘tutelary spirit, or “external soul”, of an individual man’. He goes on to point out that, while there are as many Genii B as there are men, it is Genius A – the universal god of generation – ‘who dominated medieval poetry’. As an illustration of Genius A, Lewis quotes De Mundi Universitate of Bernardus Sylvestris2 (c. 1140 AD), the relevant part of which runs:
Illic Oyarses quidem erat et genius in artem et officium pictoris et figurantis addictus. In subteriacente enim mundo rerum facies universa caelum sequitur sumptisque de caelo proprietatibus ad imaginem quam conversio contulit figuratur. Namque impossibile est formam unam quamque alteri simillimam nasci horarum et climatum distantibus punctis. Oyarses igitur circuli quem pantomorphon Graecia, Latinitas nominat omniformem, formas rebus omnes omnibus et associat et ascribit.3
In The ‘Cosmographia’ of Bernardus Silvestris, translated by Winthrop Wetherbee (1973), this passage is translated:
For the Usiarch here was that Genius devoted to the art and office of delineating and giving shape to the forms of things. For the whole appearance of things in the subordinate universe conforms to the heavens, whence it assumes its characteristics, and it is shaped to whatever image the motion of the heavens imparts. For it is impossible that one form should be born identical with another at points separate in time and place. And so the Usiarch of that sphere which is called in Greek Pantomorphos, and in Latin Omniformis, composes and assigns the forms of all creatures.4
Lewis goes on in this appendix to say: ‘This is the fullest description I have yet quoted of Genius A … The name Oyarses, as Professor C.C.J. Webb has pointed out to me, must be a corruption of oυσιaρχηs;* and he has kindly drawn my attention to Pseudo Apuleius Asclepius (XIX) where the Ousiarch of the fixed stars is certainly Genius A.’5
This passage is echoed in chapter 22 of Out of the Silent Planet: ‘I asked C.J. about it and he says it ought to be Ousiarches …’ Remarkably, the actual letter from C.C.J. Webb (1865–1954) – Professor of Philosophy of Christian Religion at Oxford from 1920 to 1930 – was tucked into Lewis’s copy of De Mundi Universitate. It is dated 31 October 1931, so we know Lewis’s interest goes back a long way.
The point is that in the background of Out of the Silent Planet is the medieval conception of the planets as containing or embodying some reflection of the classical deities – Intelligences or tutelary spirits – the mythological-cum-astrological personifications of Saturn and Jupiter, of Mars and Venus and Mercury about which Lewis was lecturing in his ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Literature’. Bernardus Sylvestris provided Lewis with something ideal for his purpose. The Oyarses (plural Oyéresu) was transformed from a ‘ruling essence’ and a ‘Genius devoted to the art and office of delineating and giving shape to the forms of things’ to something like an archangel presiding over a planet. ‘The Oyéresu’, Lewis said in That Hideous Strength, ‘aren’t exactly angels in the same sense as our guardian angels are. Technically they are Intelligences.’6 The Oyéresu or Intelligences were to appear with particularly magnificent effect in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, but before that we were to meet the first of them in Out of the Silent Planet.
Apart from the fact that Tolkien and Lewis were planning a joint project in which each would write a myth disguised as a thriller, there is no further record of how Lewis came to write Out of the Silent Planet. He had always been interested in science fiction, had enjoyed Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as a boy, had sampled Edgar Rice Burroughs, but apparently been bored by what he read and not ventured far into Barsoom, and more recently had turned back to the ancient and medieval journeys into other worlds. He, of course, knew his Lucian, but was more influenced by the Somnium Scipionis and by the celestial journeys of Kepler and Kircher, and in certain ways by the more numinous travels of Dante and even the merely marvellous in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.
But what seems to have moved Lewis to embark into the realms of interplanetary fiction is best described in a card he wrote to Green (then unknown to him except as the undergraduate who lent him his watch at lectures) on 28 December 1938 in answer to a ‘fan’ letter following a first delighted reading of Out of the Silent Planet:
What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men [1931] and an essay in J.B.S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds [1927], both of which seemed to take the idea of such travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook which I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary idea as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) point of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side. I think Wells’s First Men in the Moon the best of the sort I have read. I once tried a Burroughs in a magazine and disliked it … I guessed who you were as soon as you mentioned the lecture. I did mention in it, I think, Kircher’s Iter Celeste, but there is no translation, and it is not very interesting. There is also Voltaire’s Micromégas but purely satiric.7
As he explained in the prefatory note to Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis spoke slightingly of Wells only ‘for dramatic purposes’ and was indeed always ready to defend The First Men in the Moon. When thanking Green on 17 November 1957 for a copy of his Into Other Worlds: Space-Flight in Fiction from Lucian to Lewis (1957), he wrote:
What a lot there is in it, and how much I didn’t know! The Lunar Hoax interested me especially, not primarily as
a hoax, though that is good fun too, but because some of it is really the best invention and description of extra-terrestrial landscape (the animals are less good), before The First Men in the Moon. I think you are hard on Wells. Obviously he touches off something in you which he didn’t in me. I still think that a very good book indeed and don’t dislike the Selenites themselves as much as you do.8
After which it is almost unnecessary to deny the completely unfounded statement that Wells ‘served as a model’9 for Jules in That Hideous Strength: Lewis never met Wells, nor corresponded with him, nor knew him in any way except by his books – and he only cared for the early scientific romances written before Wells ‘sold his birthright for a pot of message’.
‘The real father of my planet books is David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus,’ he wrote to Charles A. Brady on 29 October 1944. ‘I had grown up on Wells’s stories of that kind; it was Lindsay who first gave me the idea that the “scientifiction” appeal could be combined with the “supernatural” appeal.’10 And of Lindsay’s masterpiece he wrote in the essay ‘On Stories’:
His Tormance is a region of the spirit. He is the first writer to discover what ‘other planets’ are really good for in fiction. No merely physical strangeness or merely spatial distance will realize that idea of otherness which is what we are always trying to grasp in a story about voyaging through space: you must go into another dimension. To construct plausible and moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw on the only real ‘other world’ we know, that of the spirit.11
C. S. Lewis Page 25