C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  Lewis was later to give his fuller and more reasoned thoughts on interplanetary travel, should such a thing ever come to pass, under the title ‘Religion and Rocketry’, an essay in which he said: ‘We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag-heaps. There are individuals who don’t. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers in space.’61

  In December 1943 Arthur C. Clarke, who himself later became chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, wrote a long letter condemning Lewis’s views on science fiction and interplanetary flight (which he was sure would come in the foreseeable future) and on the high ideals of serious scientists in the field.62 Lewis replied on 7 December 1943:

  I quite agree that most scientifiction is on the level of cowboy boys’ stories. But I think the fundamental moral assumptions in popular fiction are a very important symptom. If you found that the most popular stories were those in which the cowboy always betrayed his pals to the crooks and deserted his girl for the vamp, I don’t think it would be unimportant. I don’t of course think that at the moment many scientists are budding Westons: but I do think (hang it all, I live among scientists!) that a point of view not unlike Weston’s is on the way. Look at Stapledon (Star Gazer ends in sheer devil worship), Haldane’s Possible Worlds and Waddington’s Science and Ethics. I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the universe. Certainly if he goes on his present course much further man can not be trusted with knowledge.63

  (Lewis might also have added that Stapledon’s future inhabitants of Earth, when colonizing Venus in Last and First Men, begin by exterminating the aboriginal inhabitants of that planet.)

  Lewis was taking the future of ‘civilized’ man very seriously at this time, as The Abolition of Man shows. These lectures were delivered in 1943 at the University of Durham, and both they and to some extent Durham itself supplied the background for his next story, That Hideous Strength, which concludes the Ransom trilogy.

  Since the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939, when Charles Williams came to Oxford with the evacuated London branch of the University Press, the Thursday evening meetings of the Inklings had, with the addition of Williams, entered upon their most vital period. In November 1939 Tolkien was reading early chapters of The Lord of the Rings, Williams a nativity play, and Lewis The Problem of Pain. Perelandra was also read chapter by chapter as written, to the accompaniment of Williams’s All Hallows’ Eve; and by the time Ransom’s last adventure was under way, Lewis was being very strongly influenced by Williams, and in particular by his prose romances or ‘spiritual thrillers’, as they have been most aptly called, which are set in the world of everyday and masquerade as novels, with a greater or lesser admixture of the supernatural.

  That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups has been described as a Charles Williams novel written by C.S. Lewis. This is, of course, an exaggeration: but it bears the seeds of critical truth. Tolkien greatly regretted Williams’s part in it. Writing to his son Michael in 1963, Tolkien complained: ‘Williams’ influence … I think spoiled it.’64 Perelandra obviously led up to an attack of some sort by the Bent Oyarsa through his servants, such as Devine who had not accompanied Weston to his fate on Perelandra, against what Ransom might be able to do after his return to the Silent Planet. The idea of the N.I.C.E. – the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments – and its ruthless appropriation and partial destruction of Edgestow (a little university town resembling Durham, though Lewis disclaimed any definite connection), was suggested by the controversy over the founding of the atomic factory of Harwell near Blewbury (‘Belbury’ via ‘bluebell’) fifteen miles from Oxford; and with this was combined what Lewis conceived to be the logical outcome of the materialist and anti-religious indoctrination creeping into education, which he had tried to expose in The Abolition of Man.

  Any idea of a Ransom story on this earth, the planet Thulcandra in Lewis’s solar system, the ‘Field of Arbol’, must of necessity turn to the Bible for some of its inspiration. The end of the world was too vast a theme, but some such judgement of Heaven as the confusion of tongues in the Tower of Babel, or the destruction of the Cities of the Plain from which Lot and his family escaped (though his wife looked back), would be the obvious denouement. Lewis combined both, admitting his debt to Gordon Bottomley’s poem ‘Babel’ for the inspiration of the banquet at Belbury, and to a chance reading in the newspaper of a German experiment in keeping a dog’s head alive by artificial means, which suggested ‘The Head’ through which the devils could speak to their worshippers. Doubtless, too, the late-medieval stories of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay with their ‘Brazen Head’ were not forgotten. But there was also a background ‘picture’, namely a dream recorded in his diary of 12 September 1923:

  I had a most horrible dream. By a certain poetic justice it turned on the idea Jenkin and I were going to use in our shocker play: namely that of a scientist discovering how to keep consciousness and some motor nerves alive in a corpse, at the same time arresting decay, so that you really had an immortal dead man. I dreamed that the horrible thing was sent to us – in a coffin of course – to take care of … It was perfectly ordinary and as vivid as life. Finally the thing escaped and I fancy ran amok. It pursued me into a lift in the Tube in London … I am not sure that the idea of the play did not originate in another dream I had some years ago – unless the whole thing comes from Edgar Allan Poe.65

  The reference to Poe is to ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, the story of a dead man kept alive by mesmerism for seven months. In an earlier reference to the plot of the play Lewis makes it clear that consciousness was kept alive in the brain of the dead man – but the rest of the scheme bears too close a resemblance to the behaviour of Frankenstein’s monster to be of much interest.

  The influence of Charles Williams, altogether to the book’s advantage, is shown in Lewis’s decision to set the spiritual and apocalyptic adventures among ordinary people in the everyday setting of a conventional novel. Only in The Screwtape Letters does he show the same depth of psychological understanding and the ability to make the problems and temptations of ordinary men and women of absorbing interest.

  When the story opens Jane and Mark Studdock have been married six months. Jane has found marriage ‘the door out of a world of work and comradeship and laughter and innumerable things to do, into something like solitary confinement’.66 She picks up that morning’s paper and sees a picture of the French scientist, Alcasan, who has just been guillotined for poisoning his wife. She remembers a dream she had earlier in which she saw someone twist Alcasan’s head off and take it away. In that same dream she sees people digging up ‘a sort of ancient British, druidical kind of man’,67 who comes to life before they reach him.

  Her husband, Mark, is a Fellow of Sociology at Bracton College in Edgestow University in the Midlands town of Edgestow. In his mind ‘hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical – merely “Modern”. The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by … He was … a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge.’68

  Lewis has often been accused of attacking women through Jane, but this is to misunderstand wildly the character he was portraying. An earlier manuscript shows that Lewis had originally made her a biochemist. However, knowing too little of that subject to make her character convincing, he made her a student of English Literature instead. When his friends Cecil and Daphne Harwood complained about Jane not being ‘a very original thinker’,69 Lewis replied on 11 September 1945: ‘Re Jane, she wasn’t meant to illustrate the problem of the married woman and her own career in general: rather the problem of everyone who fol
lows an imagined vocation at the expense of a real one.’70

  Mark is an enthusiastic member of the ‘progressive element’ of Bracton College, and on the day his wife has her nightmare about Alcasan he is invited to meet Lord Feverstone, who turns out to be the same Dick Devine who went with Dr Weston to Malacandra in Out of the Silent Planet. That evening the progressive element forces the college to sell Bragdon Wood, which lies in the centre of the college. The wood contains ‘Merlin’s Well’, and the purchaser is the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments – ‘the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world’.71 Lord Feverstone is a member of the N.I.C.E. and he invites Mark to Belbury to meet John Wither, who is Deputy Director.

  From this point on the story switches back and forth from the doings of Jane to those of Mark. Jane, frightened by her dream, calls Mrs Dimble, whose husband had been her tutor and who is an authority on the Arthurian legend. The Dimbles urge Jane to seek help from Miss Ironwood, a doctor, who lives at St Anne’s on the Hill. Mark accepts a job with the N.I.C.E., and while he is getting to know the people at Belbury, Jane visits St Anne’s to consult Miss Ironwood about her dreams. She is horrified to discover that she has the hereditary power of dreaming realities. Miss Ironwood and the Dimbles urge her to join their ‘side’ in the coming battle.

  Mark is soon miserable at Belbury for he never knows whether he is in or out of the ‘inner ring’. His companions include the lesbian, ‘Fairy’ Hardcastle, who is in charge of the Institutional Police, and an Italian physiologist, Professor Filostrato, who keeps Alcasan’s head alive by infusions of blood. They believe they are receiving, through the Head, the assistance of higher beings called ‘macrobes’ who, unknown to them, are really the dark eldila, or devils, of Earth. When Mark tries to leave, a murder charge is devised to keep him there. Eventually Filostrato introduces Mark to the Head, but his initial excitement turns to horror.

  Jane comes to love the people at St Anne’s and she is introduced to their own ‘Head’. This is Ransom who, though in pain from the wound in his heel, has not aged since he returned from Perelandra. He is now the new Pendragon of Logres. Jane becomes their ‘seer’ and is able to tell them what the N.I.C.E. is doing. She now realizes that the old man she had ‘seen’ being dug up from Bragdon Wood is Merlin, whose magic the N.I.C.E. needs.

  Merlin, however, wakes before anyone can get to him and, finding a tramp nearby, takes his clothes and joins the society of St Anne’s. He recognizes Ransom at once as the rightful Pendragon. Meanwhile, the people from N.I.C.E. come across the tramp, where Merlin should have been, and assume he is Merlin. After discovering that Mark has been trying to leave their side, they confine him to Belbury and leave him to look after ‘Merlin’. Finding that they can get nothing from the man they imagine to be Merlin, the N.I.C.E. advertise for a Celtic scholar.

  Even though he knows it will end with his death, Merlin is willing to accept into his body the Oyéresu of the Planets. Ransom then sends him to Belbury as a specialist in Celtic. He attends the great banquet as the tramp’s ‘interpreter’ and in a spectacular scene, which echoes the fall of the Tower of Babel, with its confusion of language, Wither and the others find themselves babbling nonsense. Merlin liberates the numerous animals, intended for vivisection, and while he and the animals destroy the N.I.C.E. Merlin arranges for Mark and the tramp to escape. As he makes his way to St Anne’s, Mark turns to see Belbury destroyed by an earthquake.

  With this danger to Britain averted, Ransom’s work as the Pendragon is complete. Mark and Jane are reunited, and after saying a final goodbye to his friends, Ransom is taken by the eldil to Perelandra where he will be healed of his wound.

  Mark’s experiences with the ‘inner ring’ at Bracton, and his attempts to get into and keep in the ‘inner ring’ at Belbury, are an understandable extension of Lewis’s disillusionment with college politics at Magdalen and perhaps exaggerated recollections of the ‘Bloods’ at Malvern: a theme which comes out in a number of his essays both ethical and literary – and became indeed rather a King Charles’s head with him. Much more surprising is his deep and delicate understanding of Jane’s pilgrimage to grace from the self-centred superficiality and synthetic agnosticism of typical modernity. The Jane of the early chapters may owe a lot to the insight gained from a study of his female pupils and some members of the Socratic Club; but there is much that seems almost uncannily accurate coming from a man with no experience of the married state. Perhaps the dedication of the book to Jane McNeill,* the ‘Chaney’ of his early Belfast days, has some significance as far as this deeply understood character is concerned; and Mark probably owes a great deal to Lewis’s own unregenerate days – ‘there, but for the grace of God …’

  The introduction of Merlin, with the tantalizing hints about the Circle of Logres, Numinor and ‘the last vestiges of Atlantean magic’, must strike many readers as the least successfully achieved strand in the whole web. This, apart from the inherent modern difficulty in accepting the marvellous, is partly Lewis’s fault for expecting too much knowledge in his readers. They are too easily left, for example, wondering why the Companies of Good and Evil both want his help, both think that he will be of their party, not realizing the implication of Merlin’s mysterious birth: he was ‘the child who had no father’, who was begotten by an incubus – we might almost say an eldil – who might be either good or bad, but who was described simply as a devil by writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth. Moreover, like King Arthur himself, Merlin did not die, but was imprisoned in a tomb, in a magic sleep, by an enchantress: and from that sleep he would awake at some future date no older than when he fell into it. It is the ancient legend still believed in the case of Epimenides of Crete and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, used most memorably as conscious literary background in Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1820) and Edwin Lester Arnold’s Lepidus the Centurion (1901), and in the imaginative science fiction of Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook (1919). Indeed, Lewis may have had all these at the back of his mind – Jane’s dream of the vault and the sleeper under Bragdon Wood seems too close to Louis Allenby’s discovery of Lepidus to be mere coincidence.

  Readers had to await the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (1977) for real understanding of Numinor and the True West, though both had a place in the background of The Lord of the Rings. In the interim Professor Tolkien raised the corner of the veil so far as to write:

  With regard to ‘Numinor’. In the early days of our association Jack used to come to my house and I read aloud to him The Silmarillion so far as it had then gone, including a very long poem: Beren and Luthien. Numinor was his version of a name he had never seen written (numenor) and no doubt was influenced by numinous. Other things in other works are also derived from me: for instance Tor and Tinidril are clearly Tor and his elf-wife Idril blended with Tinuviel (the second name of Luthien). The Eldils also owe something to the Eldar in my work.72

  Tolkien adds: ‘In full Q-form Númenóre, “West-land”, the furthest west of mortal lands’ – and apparently Lewis equates it with Atlantis.

  That Hideous Strength had good sales, though Lewis himself remarked that it was hated by all the critics, and Green was told by an ardent science-fiction enthusiast that Lewis would almost have been lynched had he appeared at one of their meetings. This attitude was to change completely in the next ten years, and as early as 13 February 1953 Arthur C. Clarke was asking Lewis to give a lecture to the British Interplanetary Society – though he added, ‘It would be only fair to point out that your position might be somewhat analogous to that of a Christian martyr in the arena,’ although ‘many of our members admire your writings even if they may not see eye to eye with them’.73 To which Lewis replied on 14 February:

  I hope I should not be deterred by the dangers! The fatal objection is that I should be covering ground that I have already covered in print and on which I have
nothing to add. I know that is how many lectures are made, but I never do it … But thank your Society very much for the invitation and convey my good wishes to them as regards everything but interplanetary travel … Probably the whole thing is only a plan for kidnapping me and marooning me on an asteroid! I know the sort of thing.74

  In spite of their early acrimonious correspondence over space-flight, Lewis was able to appreciate Clarke’s most outstanding book in the genre, Childhood’s End, of which he wrote to Joy Davidman on 22 December 1953: ‘It is quite out of the range of the common space-and-time writers; away up near Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus and Wells’s First Men in the Moon. It is better than any of Stapledon’s. It hasn’t got Ray Bradbury’s delicacy, but then it has ten times his emotional power, and far more mythopoeia … An ABSOLUTE CORKER!’75

  Meanwhile, in spite of the professional critics, those at all in tune with That Hideous Strength were absolutely enthralled by it. Green stayed up all night reading it – a unique occurrence – and was more and more profoundly moved and impressed by it on each of half a dozen subsequent readings. And Dorothy Sayers wrote to Lewis on 3 December 1945:

  The book is tremendously full of good things – perhaps almost too full – the scheme at the beginning seems almost violently condensed – and I’m afraid I don’t like Ransom quite so well since he took to being golden-haired and interesting on a sofa like the Heir of Redclyffe – but the arrival of the Gods is grand and (in a different manner) the atmosphere of the N.I.C.E. is superb. Wither is a masterpiece; even with some experience of official documents and political speeches, one would not have believed it possible to convey so little meaning in so many words. And the death of Filostrato is first-class – his desperate agitation at feeling that it was so unscientific, and ‘his last thought was that he had underestimated the terror.’ Mr Bultitude [the bear] of course is adorable – oh! and the marvellous confusion of tongues at the dinner. And the painful realism of that college meeting. I enjoyed it all enormously.76