The Dark Tower

by C. S. Lewis

  While The Dark Tower tells us a great deal about C. S. Lewis’s reflections on time, I think it would be a mistake to suppose that fact and fiction, so finely blended in his story, were not clearly distinguished in his mind. Indomitable Christian supernaturalist though he was, the truth is that, while he saw the interesting possibilities psychic phenomena offered for fiction, he distrusted Spiritualism and believed that the dead had far more worthwhile things to do than send ‘messages’. ‘Will anyone deny,’ he wrote in ‘Religion Without Dogma?’, ‘that the vast majority of spirit messages sink pitiably below the best that has been thought and said even in this world?—that in most of them we find a banality and provincialism, a paradoxical union of the prim with the enthusiastic, of flatness and gush, which would suggest that the souls of the moderately respectable are in the keeping of Annie Besant and Martin Tupper?’

  Indeed, most of the statements in The Dark Tower which touch on the occult come from Orfieu, rather than from Ransom and Lewis who are the only Christians in the story. Lewis had drunk deeply of G. K. Chesterton’s works, and when Ransom rejects the notion of reincarnation on the grounds that he is a Christian (p. 22), he is very likely echoing a passage from Lewis’s favourite of Chesterton’s books, The Everlasting Man, which comes as close as anything to explaining why Lewis could not believe in something he found so at variance with Christianity. ‘Reincarnation is not really a mystical idea,’ said Chesterton. ‘It is not really a transcendental idea, or in that sense a religious idea. Mysticism conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of a better good or a worse evil than experience can give. Reincarnation need only extend experiences in the sense of repeating them. It is no more transcendental for a man to remember what he did in Babylon before he was born than to remember what he did in Brixton before he had a knock on the head. His successive lives need not be any more than human lives, under whatever limitations burden human life. It has nothing to do with seeing God or even conjuring up the devil’ (ch. vi).

  There are, doubtless, others besides myself who were puzzled not to find in the fragment a high theological theme such as that which runs through the other interplanetary books. I think the answer is—indeed Lewis says so himself—that he never began any story with a moral in mind, and that wherever there is one it has pushed its own way in unbidden. Perhaps if he had gone on with The Dark Tower such a theme would have emerged, but we cannot be sure. Certainly Lewis does not seem to have known exactly what to do with Ransom who, as far as the story goes, has little of the intellectual and heroic qualities he is abundantly endowed with in Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, and, to a lesser extent, Out of the Silent Planet. All we learn is that he is a kind of ‘resident’ Christian who has travelled in Deep Heaven. In his ‘Reply to Professor Haldane’ Lewis says that the Ransom of That Hideous Strength (and presumably of Perelandra as well) is ‘to some extent a fancy portrait of a man I know, but not of me’, and Gervase Mathew believes that ‘man’ is almost certainly Charles Williams, whom Lewis was only just getting to know when he was writing The Dark Tower. Gervase Mathew was close to both men, and being in a position to observe Williams’s profound influence on Lewis, sees the Ransom of the last two romances as having grown into a kind of idealised Williams—but a Williams, I should venture to guess, underpinned by the steady brilliance and philological genius of Lewis’s other great friends, Owen Barfield and J. R. R. Tolkien.

  Another point to arise at the Inklings meeting concerned the Stingingman’s ‘unicorn horn’ or ‘sting’, which Lewis’s friends thought suggested unpleasant sexual implications. I do not think Lewis, consciously or unconsciously, intended any such implication. But he took the objection seriously, and I believe this explains why, in chapter V, when Scudamour begins to grow a ‘sting’, he bothered to say, ‘Of course Scudamour has read his psychoanalysis. He is perfectly well aware that under abnormal conditions a much more natural desire might disguise itself in this grotesque form. But he is pretty sure that this was not what was happening.’

  It is teasing to think how Lewis might have continued his story. Weak in mathematics, he may have been unable to imagine a convincing method of extricating Scudamour from the tight place we find him in at the conclusion of the fragment. I am afraid we shall never know what end, or ends (if any), Lewis had in mind for his story before he abandoned it to write a number of other works: The Problem of Pain (1940), The Screwtape Letters (1942), and A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), which last book possibly gave him the idea for Perelandra, which he was working on as early as 1941. It is, besides this, possible, and even likely, that Lewis began other stories the manuscripts of which have not survived. Still, though it was typical of Lewis to be for ever sweeping his manuscripts into his waste paper basket, it was unlike him to forget anything.

  We have seen how Othertime found its way into other books. There are other elements from The Dark Tower which appear, albeit considerably altered, in That Hideous Strength. One character who was transferred quite recognisably into the more congenial atmosphere of That Hideous Strength is the Scotsman, MacPhee. And it is here that we touch on one of the weak spots in The Dark Tower: MacPhee’s persistent scepticism about the chronoscope in the face of a month-long daily experience of its actual working. Owen Barfield has said to me about this: ‘It’s as if Lewis was saying to himself: “I’ve decided to have an amusing canny Scot as one of my characters and, whatever happens to him, an amusing canny Scot he will jolly well go on being—and like it!”’

  There are, perhaps, traces of the two Camillas in Jane Studdock of That Hideous Strength. Before Lewis changed Camilla’s surname to ‘Bembridge’, which first appears on page 44, she was called Camilla ‘Ammeret’. This suggests that the relationship between Scudamour and the two Camillas might have been based on the characters Sir Scudamour and Amoret in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (book III), where the story is told of how the noble and virtuous Amoret, immediately after her marriage to Sir Scudamour, was carried off by the enchanter Busirane and imprisoned until she was released by Britomart. Lewis may have begun with the idea of a love affair between his Scudamour and a nice Camilla from Earth, found he needed some reason for transporting Scudamour to Othertime, and then hit on the idea of sending him there to rescue the girl he really loves. Left, then, with an extra Camilla, Lewis seems to have decided to make her so ‘modern’ that she would have been wrong for Scudamour in any case. The character of the Othertime Camilla is never properly developed, but the one on Earth tells us a great deal about Lewis’s view of the ‘liberated’ woman and furnishes us with what is possibly the finest little character study in the book: ‘The real Camilla Bembridge . . . was so free to talk about the things her grandmother could not mention that Ransom once said he wondered if she were free to talk about anything else’ (p. 92). I think it likely that, by whatever means Scudamour is returned to Earth, Lewis would have managed to switch the two women so that the nice one goes home with Scudamour and the ‘modern’ one ends up in Othertime. One of the books Scudamour is left pondering in Othertime describes how Othertime children had been ‘exchanged’ for ones from the Earth, and it is not perhaps too fanciful to suppose that Lewis may have thought of having Scudamour discover that the two Camillas had been ‘exchanged’ when they were children. And perhaps a good many other people as well?

  II

  THE MAN BORN BLIND

  ‘Bless us!’ said Mary. ‘There’s eleven o’clock. And you’re nearly asleep, Robin.’

  She rose with a bustle of familiar noises, bundling her spools and her little cardboard boxes into the workbasket. ‘Come on, lazy-bones!’ she said. ‘You want to be nice and fresh for your first walk tomorrow.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ said Robin, and then stopped. His heart was beating so loudly that he was afraid it would make his voice sound odd. He had to wait before he went on. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘there . . . there’ll be light out there—when I go for that walk?’

  ‘What do you mean
, dear?’ said Mary. ‘You mean it will be lighter out of doors? Well, yes, I suppose it will. But I must say I always think this is a very light house. This room, now. We’ve had the sun on it all day.’

  ‘The sun makes it . . . hot?’ said Robin tentatively.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Mary, suddenly turning round. She spoke sharply, in what Robin called her ‘governess’ voice.

  ‘I mean,’ said Robin, ‘. . . well, look here, Mary. There’s a thing I’ve been meaning to ask you ever since I came back from the nursing home. I know it’ll sound silly to you. But then it’s different for me. As soon as I knew I had a chance of getting my sight, of course I looked forward. The last thing I thought before the operation was “light”. Then all those days afterwards, waiting till they took the bandages off—’

  ‘Of course, darling. That was only natural.’

  ‘Then, then, why don’t I . . . I mean, where is the light?’

  She laid her hand on his arm. Three weeks of sight had not yet taught him to read the expression of a face, but he knew by her touch the great warm wave of stupid, frightened affection that had welled up in her.

  ‘Why not come to bed, Robin dear?’ she said. ‘If it’s anything important, can’t we talk about it in the morning? You know you’re tired now.’

  ‘No. I’ve got to have this out. You’ve got to tell me about light. Great Scot—don’t you want me to know?’

  She sat down suddenly with a formal calmness that alarmed him.

  ‘Very well, Robin,’ she said. ‘Just ask me anything you like. There’s nothing to be worried about—is there?’

  ‘Well then, first of all, there’s light in this room at present?’

  ‘Of course there is.’

  ‘Then where is it?’

  ‘Why, all round us.’

  ‘Can you see it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why can’t I?’

  ‘But, Robin, you can. Dear, do be sensible. You can see me, can’t you, and the mantelpiece, and the table and everything?’

  ‘Are those light? Is that all it means? Are you light? Is the mantelpiece light? Is the table light?’

  ‘Oh! I see. No. Of course not. That’s the light,’ and she pointed to the bulb, roofed with its broad pink shade, that hung from the ceiling.

  ‘If that’s light, why did you tell me the light was all round us?’

  ‘I mean, that’s what gives the light. The light comes from there.’

  ‘Then where is the light itself? You see, you won’t say. Nobody will say. You tell me the light is here and the light is there, and this is in the light and that is in the light, and yesterday you told me I was in your light, and now you say that light is a bit of yellow wire in a glass bulb hanging from the ceiling. Call that light? Is that what Milton was talking about? What are you crying about? If you don’t know what light is, why can’t you say so? If the operation has been a failure and I can’t see properly after all, tell me. If there’s no such thing—if it was all a fairy tale from the beginning—tell me. But for God’s sake—’

  ‘Robin! Robin! Don’t. Don’t go on like that.’

  ‘Go on like what?’ Then he gave it up and apologised and comforted her, and they went to bed.

  A blind man has few friends; a blind man who has recently received his sight has, in a sense, none. He belongs neither to the world of the blind nor to that of the seeing, and no one can share his experience. After that night’s conversation Robin never mentioned to anyone his problem about light. He knew that he would only be suspected of madness. When Mary took him out next day for his first walk he replied to everything she said, ‘It’s lovely—all lovely. Just let me drink it in,’ and she was satisfied. She interpreted his quick glances as glances of delight. In reality, of course, he was searching, searching with a hunger that had already something of desperation in it. Even had he dared, he knew it would be useless to ask her of any of the objects he saw, ‘Is that light?’ He could see for himself that she would only answer, ‘No. That’s green’ (or ‘blue’, or ‘yellow’, or ‘a field’, or ‘a tree’, or ‘a car’). Nothing could be done until he had learned to go for walks by himself.

  About five weeks later Mary had a headache and took breakfast in bed. As Robin came downstairs he was for a moment shocked to notice the sweet feeling of escape that came with her absence. Then, with a long shameless sigh of comfort, he deliberately closed his eyes and groped across the dining-room to his bookcase—for this one morning he would give up the tedious business of guiding himself by his eyes and judging distances and would enjoy the old, easy methods of the blind. Without effort his fingers ran down the row of faithful Braille books and picked out the worn volume he wanted. He slipped his hand between the leaves and shuffled across to the table, reading as he went. Still with his eyes shut, he cut up his food, laid down the knife, took the fork in his left hand, and began reading with his right. He realised at once that this was the first meal he had really enjoyed since the recovery of his sight. It was also the first book he had enjoyed. He had been very quick, everyone told him, in learning to read by sight, but it would never be the real thing. ‘W-A-T-E-R’ could be spelled out; but never, never would those black marks be wedded to their meaning as in Braille, where the very shape of the characters communicated an instantaneous sense of liquidity through his fingertips. He took a long time over breakfast. Then he went out.

  There was a mist that morning, but he had encountered mists before and this did not trouble him. He walked through it, out of the little town and up the steep hill, and then along the field path that ran round the lip of the quarry. Mary had taken him there a few days ago to show him what she called the ‘view’. And while they had sat looking at it she had said, ‘What a lovely light that is on the hills over there.’ It was a wretched clue, for he was now convinced that she knew no more about light than he did, that she used the word but meant nothing by it. He was even beginning to suspect that most of the un-blind were in the same position. What one heard among them was merely the parrot-like repetition of a rumour—the rumour of something which perhaps (it was his last hope) great poets and prophets of old had really known and seen. It was on their testimony alone that he still hoped. It was still just possible that somewhere in the world, not everywhere as fools had tried to make him believe, guarded in deep woods or divided by distant seas, the thing Light might actually exist, springing up like a fountain or growing like a flower.

  The mist was thinning when he came to the lip of the quarry. To left and right more and more trees were visible and their colours grew brighter every moment. His own shadow lay before him; he noticed that it became blacker and firmer-edged while he looked at it. The birds were singing too and he was quite hot. ‘But still no Light,’ he muttered. The Sun was visible behind him but the pit of the quarry was still full of mist—a shapeless whiteness, now almost blindingly white.

  Suddenly he heard a man singing. Someone whom he had not noticed before was standing near the cliff edge with his legs wide apart dabbing at an object which Robin could not recognise. If he had been more experienced he would have recognised it as a canvas on an easel. As it was, his eyes met the eyes of this wild-looking stranger so unexpectedly that he had blurted out ‘What are you doing?’ before he realised it.

  ‘Doing?’ said the stranger with a certain savagery. ‘Doing? I’m trying to catch light, if you want to know, damn it.’

  A smile came over Robin’s face. ‘So am I,’ he said, and came a step nearer.

  ‘Oh—you know too, do you?’ said the other. Then, almost vindictively, ‘They’re all fools. How many of them come out to paint on a day like this, eh? How many of them will recognise it if you show ’em? And yet if they could open their eyes, it’s the only sort of day in the whole year when you can really see light, solid light, that you could drink in a cup or bathe in! Look at it!’

  He caught Robin roughly by the arm and pointed into the depths at their feet. The fog was at death
-grips with the sun, but not a stone on the quarry floor was yet visible. The bath of vapour shone like white metal and unfolded itself continually in ever-widening spirals towards them. ‘Do you see that?’ shouted the violent stranger. ‘There’s light for you if you like it!’

  A second later the expression on the painter’s face changed. ‘Here!’ he cried. ‘Are you mad?’ He made a grab at Robin. But he was too late. Already he was alone on the path. From beneath a new-made and rapidly vanishing rift in the fog there came up no cry but only a sound so sharp and definite that you would hardly expect it to have been made by the fall of anything so soft as a human body; that, and some rattling of loosened stones.

  III

  THE SHODDY LANDS

  Being, as I believe, of sound mind and in normal health, I am sitting down at 11 p.m. to record, while the memory of it is still fresh, the curious experience I had this morning.

  It happened in my rooms in college, where I am now writing, and began in the most ordinary way with a call on the telephone. ‘This is Durward,’ the voice said. ‘I’m speaking from the porter’s lodge. I’m in Oxford for a few hours. Can I come across and see you?’ I said yes, of course. Durward is a former pupil and a decent enough fellow; I would be glad to see him again. When he turned up at my door a few moments later I was rather annoyed to find that he had a young woman in tow. I loathe either men or women who speak as if they were coming to see you alone and then spring a husband or a wife, a fiancé or a fiancée on you. One ought to be warned.