This is the first part of a two-part series on two early science fiction writers: C.S. Lewis and H.G. Wells. While they were both British novelists in the early 20th century, they had quite different worldviews. Part 1 discusses C.S. Lewis’ reading of Wells and the basic plotline of The War of the Worlds, Wells’ first science fiction novel. Part 2 presents some of Wells’ themes and Lewis’ critique of “Wellsianity.”

Our Eschatological Age

We live in an apocalyptic age, filled with post-9/11 politics, economic catastrophes, great droughts, deadly storms, genocidal earthquakes, and nuclear threats. We live in an age when a wave from the sea can wipe out a generation of technological imperialism, and when the cryptic astronomical observations of an ancient Mesoamerican culture can move people to look to the skies again. Then there is Israel, and Tim Lahaye, and the evident death of popular music. It might not actually be the Last Days, but it sure feels like it.

Taking advantage of our culture’s eschatological leanings, I teach a class on the End of the World most every year. One of the reading options is H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. This summer’s discussion was particularly good, as students drew from the deep waters of Wells’ social critique. His stories are not just stories for art’s sake—they do something, they tell truth from his perspective.

So it was in rereading The War of the Worlds this year as I was reading through Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy (also called the Space or Cosmic Trilogy) that I saw how clearly Lewis was responding to Wells. As a fan of H.G. Wells’ literature, C.S. Lewis was taking the classic Martian tale and inverting it. Lewis turned The War of the Worlds upside down, providing his own interplanetary romances that subvert Wells’ perspective on truth.

Becoming a Fan

While the victim of a maniacal bullying schoolmaster who had the impressive inability to broaden pupils’ minds—at a school C.S. Lewis called “Belsen” after the concentration camp—the young Lewis found solace in the scant reading material that was available. Among his discoveries that stuck for life was H.G. Wells. In his autobiography he reflects on the experience:

“What has worn better, and what I took to at the same time, is the … the ‘scientifiction’ of H. G. Wells. The idea of other planets exercised upon me then a peculiar, heady attraction, which was quite different from any other of my literary interests” (Surprised by Joy 38).

At eleven, Lewis devoured Wells’ First Men in the Moon, a gift from his father. When he was sixteen, his best friend Arthur sent him a copy of The Country of the Blind and Other Stories. We see in this prep school teenager the beginnings of both literary friendship and literary criticism:

“I have only just discovered that you put my name in that book. If I had seen it earlier I shd. have sent it back. You have no right to be so foolishly generous! However–many, many thanks. When one has set aside the rubbish that H. G. Wells always puts in, there remains a great deal of original, thoughtful and suggestive work in it. The ‘Door in the Wall’, for instance, moved me in a way ‘Door in the Wall’, for instance, moved me in a way I can hardly describe! How true it all is: the SEEING ONE walks out into joy and happiness unthinkable, where the dull, senseless eyes of the world see only destruction & death. ‘The Plattner Story’ & ‘Under the Knife’ are the next best: they have given me a great deal of pleasure” (Letter to Arthur Greeves c. Sept 26, 1914).

As an established writer on the heels of writing his Cosmic Trilogy and The Screwtape Letters, Lewis describes his debt to H.G. Wells in a letter to Ruth Pitter (Jan 4, 1947). And in a letter to Arthur in 1931, Lewis admits that H.G. Wells’ romances were “almost his first love.” Lewis didn’t always love Wells’ stories, but he always found they engaged his attention and helped him in his intellectual search, as we see here:

“You will be surprised when you hear how I employed the return journey–by reading an H. G. Wells novel called ‘Marriage’, and perhaps more surprised when I say that I thoroughly enjoyed it; one thing you can say for the man is that he really is interested in all the big, outside questions–and the characters are intensely real, especially a Mr Pope who reminds me of Excellenz [a derogative term for his father]. It opens new landscapes to me–how one felt that on finding that a new kind of book was waiting for one, in the old days–and I have decided to read some more of his serious books” (Letter to Arthur Greeves c. Feb 3, 1920).

Christian Disagreement with Wells

As a Christian, Lewis found great disagreement with H.G. Wells, a Darwinian atheist. While they had once shared intellectual quarters, Lewis found that the greatest authors in his world were this strange breed of intellectual called “Christian.” In a sense, Lewis’ relationship with Wells is part of his conversion:

“On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete—Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire—all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called ‘tinny.’ It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books” (Surprised by Joy 202).

Lewis’ developing disagreement with Wells was profound. He adopted the Inklings term, “Wellsianity,” to describe in his essays “Is Theology Poetry” and “The Funeral of a Great Myth” the scientific myths of progress in his age as betrayed by Wells’ literary social Darwinism. Lewis disbelieved in progress, argued that things were not actually progressing (WWII would later become evidence), and was incredulous that people thought that technological progress could bring about human improvement. He was very much an anti-Wells writer.

At a deeper level, though, Lewis engages in Wells in his fiction, and quite clearly does so in the Ransom Trilogy, turning The War of the Worlds inside out to retell the story of what it means to be human.

H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds

Wells’ own understanding of humanity is clear throughout his work, and especially in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. Wells’ contemporaries viewed their Western culture as the pinnacle of human society. But, in Wells’ narrative, that view is put into a new context:

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water…. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter” (7).

These Watchers are also Actors, and vastly superior to us:

“Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us” (8).

The stage is well set, and the plotline is fairly simple. Martians invade with such vastly superior weaponry and armor that the British militia is almost entirely useless against them. The Martians—rotund fleshly bodies that telepathically operate terrifying, giant tripod—roam through the English countryside toward London planting Martian vegetation, wasting entire villages, and capturing humans to feed upon as a spider feeds on the insects in her web.  “This isn’t a war,” one character exclaims. “It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants” (173).

See part 2 here.

This is the second part of a two-part series on two early science fiction writers: C.S. Lewis and H.G. Wells. You can read part 1 here, which discusses C.S. Lewis’ reading of Wells and the basic plotline of The War of the Worlds, Wells’ first science fiction novel.  While they were both British novelists in the early 20th century, they had quite different worldviews. This second part presents some of Wells’ themes and Lewis’ critique of “Wellsianity.”

Themes in The War of the Worlds

Although it is short, and tells a popular storyline in simple language, the philosophy of The War of the Worlds is complex. In one sense it is an early Modern exploration of personal psychology. The unnamed protagonist, a philosopher, moves through traumatic experiences while escaping, against the odds, the careless wrath of the Martians. Like Goethe’s young Werther, we see the Philosopher’s inner mind throughout his experiences:

After the first human deaths: “With wine and food, confidence of my own table, and necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure” (50).

Near the end of the Martian’s destruction: “I’m obsessed by the thought that I’m the last man on earth” (from the 1938 radio broadcast, but echoed twice in the book).

We see, in utmost need, the ethical conversation of the Philosopher as he must kill a man—a country church pastor who has gone man—in order to save himself. And we see through the cool lens of scientific philosophy not just the details of the Martian invasion, but the necessary social reevaluation that must take place in times like these.

The War of the Worlds is also a critique of colonialism, a feature of his work that stands against his contemporary, Rudyard Kipling (if I read him correctly), who wrote the poem “White Man’s Burden.” It isn’t hard to see the parallels: the Martians are to Earthlings as the British are to any indigenous culture captured in the sweeping presence of the Empire across the globe. Wells’ works stand as a warning to colonialists—not just in the human damage caused by these imperial invasions, but also in the damage to the invaders. In the end, the Martian invasion fails—not because of the strength of Men, or the British army, or the collection of cooperating revolutionaries. The Martians fail because they are an invasive species, because they are not indigenous to Earth:

“By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain” (191).

The Death of God

Specifically, The War of the Worlds plots the Darwinian recalculation of humanity for a post-theistic world. No longer are humans valuable because they are made in the image of God. It is their developed sentience, the climbing of the evolutionary ladder, the biological imperative that makes Man great. And humans are certainly not great because we have been renewed by the shed blood of self-sacrificing god, as in the Christian myth. No, humans are great because of the shed blood of the countless millions. And this thinned, naturally selected bloodline, gives humanity pride of place.

It is no literary accident or mere plot device that has the scientist putting to death the religious man. It is this death that Wells predicts. Religion is no longer evolutionarily necessary, and is only helpful in the book under extreme psychological need. And even then, God remains silent as the greatest city on Earth is laid bare. Adopted by Hollywood, there is a rapprochement between the clergyman and the philosopher, between science and religion. The narrator closes the film with an American re-writing of Wells’ iconic lines

“From the moment the invaders arrived, breathed our air, ate and drank, they were doomed. They were undone, destroyed, after all of man’s weapons and devices had failed, by the tiniest creatures that God in his wisdom put upon this earth. By the toll of a billion deaths, man had earned his immunity, his right to survive among this planet’s infinite organisms. And that right is ours against all challenges. For neither do men live nor die in vain.”

This is not a Wellsian sentiment. For H.G. Wells, the church steeples are on fire, the clergyman goes mad and then lays dead in a cellar, and prayers go unanswered. The idea of God, in fact, is an invasive species (as Richard Dawkins will later inform us), and no longer needed in the technological advancement of the 20^th century that is ahead.

C.S. Lewis’ Response to Wells’ Philosophy

C.S. Lewis’ narrative response to H.G. Wells’ thesis is most overt in the last novel of the Ransom collection. That Hideous Strength is an End-time battle of ideas, where the modern myth of progress is captured by a single disembodied head: a technologically resurrected brain, like Wells’ Martians, without all the superfluous bodily functions of heart and stomach, relationship and desire. The leaders of the group of scientists bidding to take control of England do not actually follow the principles of reason and the scientific method. Instead, they follow the demonic whispers of the disembodied head, where all ethics are sacrificed for the future “good” of society—a world where the intellectual elite have societal control and, ultimately, all are disembodied heads, perfect Enlightenment brains of pure reason. All of That Hideous Strength is a critique of Wellsianity—not a critique of science, per se, but of Wells’ philosophy lain upon a veneer of scientific progress. It is a chilling read, particularly as it was written at the close of the Second World War, where a modern European ideology was given pseudo-scientific language and made a bid to control society.

While That Hideous Strength responds to Wellsianity in earnest, it is Lewis’ first science fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet, that most simply shows his inversion of Wells’ philosophy.

While Wells’ Martians attack Earth in The War of the Worlds, it is Earthlings who attack Mars, called Malacandra, in Out of the Silent Planet. Lewis turns Wells’ narrative on its head: Earthlings are the attackers with technology that allows them to travel the stars and weapons that can “throw death”—rifles, every bit as mysterious to the agrarian Martians as early European weapons were to aboriginals in the New World—but the attackers from Earth are far from superior. Like Wells’ Martians, the Malacandrians are a far older society, but they are technologically simplistic. They put no value in great tools, and, like Lewis, no imagination of progress.

The result is both tragic and comic. The Earthlings think they are superior—Modern European intellectuals tend to that belief in Lewis’ caricatures—and kill at will, including some Martians-Malacandrians that the reader has come to love. But there are caretakers of Malacandria: Eldil, great interplanetary, perhaps even trans-dimensional beings who seem invisible to the Earthling conquerors who are willfully blind to their presence. When the Earthling scientists who have made their way to Mars to plunder its wealth and enslave its people make their final stand, their logic of superiority rings hollow. Their condescending arguments are comical to the reader, as the Malacandrians and their Eldil hold all the cards and betray “technology”—if defined as an efficient a control of the elements—that is not more progressive than human technology, but vastly superior on an entirely different plane. The great conquerors look like children with toy guns and magnifying glasses boasting about their great scientific and military knowledge to Nobel laureates. These great Earthlings utterly fail to conquer the Martians, and are banished from the planet forever.

The role reversal in Lewis’ anti-Wellsian science fiction is obvious. Of all the planets, we discover, it is only on Earth where humans are fallen—it is only in our world where people hurt for pleasure, or kill for desire, or serve the progress of the few to the detriment of the many (or even the opposite). In Wells’ worldview, humans have the bloodline of the gods and are evolving into an unlimited future; in Lewis’ worldview humans are the problem and are set off from the great drama of the Universe because of their colonial desire. While both authors launch a colonial critique told in Martian romances, Wells would argue that the colonial experiment is a step of human social evolution that we can move past, while Lewis thinks that colonialism is the end result of the human problem, the natural result of the loss of Eden.

Conclusion

Lewis was never against the idea of evolution as a scientific principle; he was against the way the fact of evolution worked itself into the myth of cultural progress, the way it wormed itself into the human mind as an essential story of who we are, not just how we came to be. A human, Lewis believed, was not just a biological accident—and certainly not a biological imperative. On this point, Lewis and Wells forever divide.

This brief analysis does not, of course, capture the layered ideas within each author’s work, or cover all of Lewis’ substantive inversion of Wells’ philosophy during his WWII writing. What I find intriguing, however, is how instinctively both authors knew that worldviews—and the power to challenge and perhaps change the worldviews of others—does not lie in the mere acceptance or rejection of propositional truth. Both of these pioneers of science fiction understood that story, myth, was an essential part of the social story. Each author in turn told a story that launched a social critique from his perspective. Each author was subversive, with Wells subverting a narrative that long held sway, and Lewis subverting a Wellsian narrative that had overtaken the English world. Neither book is, in this sense, about the End of the World—they aren’t about eschatology. Instead, they are about the End, and in the end result, of culture. They are about the intentional shaping of belief. Despite all the differences of worldviews, these two early Martian stories share this key feature.

Anyone who has heard a lecture from the characteristic voice of Peter Kreeft—and there are a number available free on iTunesU—will hear his humour behind the words of his dozens of books. His books are typically serious. Kreeft is a Catholic philosopher at Boston College, and writes as a Christian apologist and speculative thinker in four key areas: basic philosophy, arguments for God’s existence, C.S. Lewis, and the topic of Heaven and Hell.

While he works seriously as a philosopher, his humour comes through in some of his projects. He has written a Screwtape copycat book, The Snakebite Letters, laced with satire as he explores the upside-down perspective of Screwtapian anti-spirituality. And he is well known for his Between Heaven and Hell, a creative thought exercise where John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley—all famous men who died on Nov 22, 1963—meet in the afterlife and have an extensive conversation. With this background, and in the rolling humour of his lectures, I have a tendency to read lightness even in Kreeft’s weighty works.

Picking up Kreeft’s first book on C.S. Lewis, then, I was surprised at the boring title: C.S. Lewis: A Critical Essay. The title is deceptive in its lacklustre—it is quite a good read, accessible yet substantial. This brilliant start to the book reveals Kreeft’s style:

“Once upon a dreary era, when the world of Functional Specialization had nearly made obsolete all universal geniuses, romantic poets, Platonic idealists, rhetorical craftsmen, and even orthodox Christians, there appeared a man (almost as if from another world, one of the worlds of his own fiction: was he a man or something more like an elf or an angel?) who was all of these things an amateur, as well as probably the world’s foremost authority in his professional province, medieval and Renaissance English literature. Before his death in 1963 he found time to produce some sixty first-quality works of literary history, literary criticism, theology, philosophy, autobiography, Biblical studies, historical philology, fantasy, science fiction, letters, poems, sermons, formal and informal essays, a historical novel, a spiritual diary, religious allegory, short stories, and children’s novels. Clive Staples Lewis was not a man: he was a world” (4).

The title is also deceptive because it is not a critical essay, really. It is more of a series of essays with light interpretation around substantial quotation from Lewis himself. There are very few references to other sources, but really Kreeft’s presentation of Lewis’ ideas in his fiction and apologetics filtered through Kreeft’s vision of Lewis the man.

Kreeft’s biographical understanding of Lewis, then, is key to the entire book. Kreeft frames Lewis’ character around around the subtitle of his book, Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism. His thesis is that Lewis’ romanticism and reason were separate and combative factors in his world—the North and South of the road in Pilgrim’s Regress—as Lewis himself says, “the two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast” (Surprised by Joy, 162). While this battle raged through youth and into adulthood, his Christianity brought the two worlds together:

“The romantic-rational blend was far from automatic. A catalyst was needed, powerful enough to make peace between two very diverse powers” (Kreeft, 9).

That catalyst was his faith, which lit up both his imagination (as we see in his fiction) and his rational intellect (as we see in Lewis’ religious philosophy).

In this way, Peter Kreeft’s book is an essential read for Lewis students. He has a way of capturing the potentially overwhelming depth and breadth of this 20^th century thinker in simple terms. For example, here is a poignant summary of Lewis’ career:

“The three main strings to Lewis’ bow, rationalism, romanticism and Christianity, correspond to the three main genres of his writing, literary criticism, imaginative fiction and apologetics. All three genres carry the common theme of a ‘lover’s quarrel with the world’ of modernity” (13).

The presentation, while simple, is not simplistic. We are left wondering what that lover’s quarrel is about, and how Lewis’ anti-modern stance formed his work—ideas that Kreeft works out through the five short chapters. Kreeft’s Critical Essay, then, is an accessible read that adds much to early Lewis scholarship (written in 1969).

There are aspects of this book that I found, apart from the main thesis, either helpful or unhelpful. I found his response to the argument that Lewis was a conservative—really a cluster of accusations—quite helpful. I found his understanding of the “mythic cosmos”—what I call elsewhere the “fictional universe” behind fantasy stories—particularly exciting, including his consideration of the Ransom Trilogy and Narnia in this light:

“Narnia’s cosmos is true in the same mythic sense as that of the trilogy: it holds together as a world in itself, integral, consistent, and ‘astonishingly underivative.’ There is so much reality in it that the question of the reality outside it and of its relations to that latter reality need not even arise” (37)

While Kreeft is a philosopher, some of his literary criticism yields great results.

By contrast, I found aspects of this short book unhelpful. I truly missed accurate footnotes with page numbers–an editorial choice. Kreeft puts Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce in the category of “allegory” with The Piglrim’s Regress—a designation that is bound to skew the reading of those books. I am not sure that the comparison of Lewis with Søren Kierkegaard in the final chapter is a very helpful one. And occasionally I found Kreeft’s positive assessments bordered on gushing. His reference to Lewis being an angel or an elf has a nice literary symmetry later in the book; throughout, however, there are comments like “the remarkable lack of egotism” (4) and “few men (and fewer Christians) have had as frank, as fresh, and as pagan a love of the world” (13). Over all, I feel like it is a balanced book—a “critical” essay. At points, though, it hints at the Lewis hagiography that is to emerge from American lovers of Lewis.

I wonder, though, how accurate Kreeft’s central thesis is: namely, that Lewis’ Christianity brought together the hemispheres of his intellectual heart. In the end, he argues that “Lewis never fully resolved his basic dualism of rationalism and romanticism: his philosophy is better put in his philosophical works and his fiction is best when the philosophy is so implicit in the simple beauty of the story or setting that extraction is impossible” (40). Perhaps Lewis was settled psychologically about the bridge, but Kreeft argues that his work still shows a bifurcated nature.

Regardless of the outcome on this precise point, Peter Kreeft’s C.S. Lewis: A Critical Essay is well worth a read. I don’t know if more recent editions are updates or just reprints, but I would recommend it to anyone looking for an intelligent introduction to Lewis’ literary influence.

I know, I know: there is no such thing as a pre-review. But I’m stuck between two pressing realities. Facing me is the fact that Michael Ward’s argument in Planet Narnia and The Narnia Code is absolutely key to how people are thinking about reading Narnia these days. His basic thesis is that the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia are created with a guiding principle, and that C.S. Lewis kept this principle hidden from his friends and readers. This guiding principle is the medieval view of the cosmos with seven personalized planets; each of these planets, with its meanings and mythologies, have informed each of Chronicles.

His work has been called a “masterpiece in its own right” (Times Literary Supplement) and “Brilliantly conceived. Intellectually provocative. Rhetorically convincing” (Christianity and Literature)–that’s a lot of full-stop compliments. Not only acclaimed, this work has its detractors. In polite company I have heard it called “an idea stretched thin” and a neatly made “Procrustean bed.” Anything that splits readers into such impressively different camps is bound to be worth a read.

Beyond the excitement of a new, divisive thesis, Ward’s analysis truly begins a new era of reading Narnia. Whether we disagree with Ward’s thesis or take it up full force, we must reckon with. And for me, personally, his work may inform my research on the Ransom Trilogy–books that are certainly guided by the medieval cosmology that Ward claims shapes the entire Narniad.

The second reality–if you haven’t forgotten that I am in a kind of dilemma–is that I don’t have Ward’s books on the schedule to read until next May. My bedside reading pile threatens to collapse on me as it is, so I do not think I can slip in two more books. This Christmas I may get a chance to read the popular level version of the thesis, The Narnia Code. I know that I won’t be satisfied on the thesis, though, until I have seen the detailed work in the Oxford academic publication, Planet Narnia. So May 2013 it is.

However, I am not left entirely in the threshold between time and space. Michael Ward has discussed each chapter of his work in detail on William O’Flaherty’s podcast. O’Flaherty teams up with poet and professor Dr. Holly Ordway to interview Ward about his ideas. It is a discussion of allies–Ordway in particular is a hard-won convert to the Ward thesis–but the interviewers give Ward space to demonstrate his argument with evidence from the books. In 13 short podcasts (15-20) minutes each, Ward lays out his thesis, chapter by chapter, and responds to listener questions.

In the months until I can full assess Ward’s thesis on my own, I am content with this discussion–which I’ve gone through twice on my mp3 player while in the garden or on the treadmill.  True, it is a kind of a tease, but I think this discussion will satisfy Lewis critics and fans, and hopefully whet their appetites to dig in deeper.

It might be a first, but I managed to keep one of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2012. In January, I resolved to read 50 books or articles related to my research and writing on C.S. Lewis, and I hit #50 near the end of November. I did other reading: Jane Austen, the Hunger Games Trilogy, Holly Black, Alan Bradley, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Frederick Buechner, Shel Silverstein, Anne Lamott, E.L. Konigsberg, Charles Dickens, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Paulo Coelho, Lois Lowry, a number of Terry Pratchett’s books as well as some indie fiction. The Hobbit should also be on the list, below, but I’ve forgotten it, and some of those may be connected to Lewis. The books I’ve listed below, though, are most central to what I’m working on. I’ve also read about 600 pages of C.S. Lewis’ letters (up to summer 1922) and his journal entries up to the same time period. I’ve read parts of Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, Studies in Words, and Miracles, but finished none of them this year. Perhaps next year!

If you would like to track some of my thoughts on the reading, I’ve linked the pertinent blogs. I haven’t blogged on everything, and much of what I read on the Ransom books remains un-blogged (dis-blogged? not-yet-blogged?). “CSL” refers to C.S. Lewis, and I’ve kept the titles as short as possible.

What will I do for 2013? The 2012 list was light on essays and articles (about 1/4), and I know I’ll be reading more essays in 2013. I’ve decided to set my goal at 100 books and articles related to Lewis and the Inklings. We’ll see. Perhaps New Year’s Resolutions, with some exceptions, are made to be broken!

It does not take long for a serious reader of C.S. Lewis to realize that he was in love with cosmology—the planets and the stars as they sit within the vast expanse of space. His first popular fiction was science fiction, with characters visiting the planets of Mars and Venus. References to the cosmos fill his poetry, and all the characters in Narnia look up to the heavens at one time or another.

Intriguingly, Lewis doesn’t draw our attention to the scientific understanding of the universe–the chemical composition of Neptune or the distance to the nearest star or the gravitational symmetry of planetary orbits. He would not be very interested in the debate about whether Pluto is a real planet or how to colonize Mars. Lewis’ interest was not in the real science of the skies, but in medieval cosmology—how medieval Europeans understood the “seven heavens.”

Michael Ward has suggested a way of reading The Chronicle of Narnia that argues that each of the Narniad matches on of the seven “planets” of the medieval world. Here is how he describes the cosmology:

“The seven planets of the old cosmology included the Sun (Sol) and the Moon (Luna), which we now don’t regard as planets at all. The other five were Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter [Jove], and Saturn.”

Lewis knew that the Earth wasn’t the centre of the universe and that the moon and the sun were not really “planets.” But he thought the seven planets had important symbolic value. Our seven days of the week are named after the seven planets (e.g., Sunday, Monday, Saturday), and some of our English words still remember the spiritual or symbolic value of the planets as heavenly personalities. Jove (Jupiter) pops up as the word, “jovial,” and captures the nature of Jupiter as a character. Mars in mythology and art is properly “martial” (warlike), and Venus still retains elements of being the goddess of love in our poetry and literature.

It is certainly true that this medieval cosmology informed so much of Lewis’ work. His book, The Discarded Image, is a series of lectures introducing the old cosmology and how the medieval worldview influences literature. His Ransom books, in particular, play with the heavenly characters of the seven heavens, though taking them up in particular ways. In Out of the Silent Planet, it is Earth that is the martial planet, while Mars is the peaceful world. And in Perelandra, Venus is characterized as an Ave-Eva figure, a combination of the Virgin Mary and Eve, birthed in a watery world of beauty and love.

I still have not contested with Ward’s Narnian thesis (despite promising to do so by now!). But as I was reading through Lewis work, I came across his 1935 poem, “The Planets.” It was this poem that first suggested Ward’s Narnia Code. He describes this process in his podcast with William O’Flaherty and Holly Ordway:

“I was lying in bed in 2003, I think it was, when I was halfway through my PhD on Lewis’ theological imagination. And I was reading a long poem that Lewis wrote about the seven heavens—it’s simply called “The Planets”—and when I got to the lines about Jupiter in this poem, I did a double take because the seven heavens, according to medieval thought, had a set of qualities and influences that were felt on Earth. And one of Jupiter’s influences was this, according to the poem, that Jupiter brought about “Winter past and guilt forgiven.” … That was the loose thread, you might say, that I tugged on, and which, when tugged upon, unravelled and revealed the whole tapestry, I believe, that Lewis was weaving in his construction of the Narnian chronicles.”

Whether or not Ward is correct about how specifically Lewis shaped the Narniad according to this system, the old cosmology certainly informed all of his work. I thought it would be helpful to post the entire poem that first stuck in Ward’s brain. It appears in several collections, but in the first publication Lewis is trying to create a renaissance of a certain approach to writing poetry, namely the Alliterative Metre. The poem, which itself has no stanzas as other online editions suggest, and has each the seven planets capitalized, illustrates the power of the seven heavens in Lewis’ imagination. But his introduction to the poem may also be helpful to us:

“In order to avoid misunderstanding I must say that the subject of the following poem was not chosen under the influence of any antiquarian fancy that a medieval metre demanded medieval matter, but because the characters of the planets, as conceived by medieval astrology, seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols…” (“The Alliterative Metre,” in Selected Literary Essays (ed. Walter Hooper. Cambridge University Press, 1969), 23-24).

It is that “permanent value as spiritual symbols” that interests me most. It drives us back to Lewis’ WWII-era Ransom Cycle to see how he used the old cosmology. But it also means that we must consider Ward’s thesis. It is certainly true that Lewis was guided by a planetary understanding that science has long since rejected, but which we still feel even into our own age.

“The Planets”

Lady LUNA, in light canoe,
By friths and shallows of fretted cloudland
Cruises monthly; with chrism of dews
And drench of dream, a drizzling glamour,
Enchants us–the cheat! changing sometime
A mind to madness, melancholy pale,
Bleached with gazing on her blank count’nance
Orb’d and ageless. In earth’s bosom
The shower of her rays, sharp-feathered light
Reaching downward, ripens silver,
Forming and fashioning female brightness,
–Metal maidenlike. Her moist circle
Is nearest earth. Next beyond her
MERCURY marches;–madcap rover,
Patron of pilf’rers. Pert quicksilver
His gaze begets, goblin mineral,
Merry multitude of meeting selves,
Same but sundered. From the soul’s darkness,
With wreathed wand, words he marshals,
Guides and gathers them–gay bellwether
Of flocking fancies. His flint has struck
The spark of speech from spirit’s tinder,
Lord of language! He leads forever
The spangle and splendour, sport that mingles
Sound with senses, in subtle pattern,
Words in wedlock, and wedding also
Of thing with thought. In the third region
VENUS voyages…but my voice falters;
Rude rime-making wrongs her beauty,
Whose breasts and brow, and her breath’s sweetness
Bewitch the worlds. Wide-spread the reign
Of her secret sceptre, in the sea’s caverns,
In grass growing, and grain bursting,
Flower unfolding, and flesh longing,
And shower falling sharp in April.
The metal copper in the mine reddens
With muffled brightness, like muted gold,
By her fingers form’d. Far beyond her
The heaven’s highway hums and trembles,
Drums and dindles, to the driv’n thunder
Of SOL’s chariot, whose sword of light
Hurts and humbles; beheld only
Of eagle’s eye. When his arrow glances
Through mortal mind, mists are parted
And mild as morning the mellow wisdom
Breathes o’er the breast, broadening eastward
Clear and cloudless. In a clos’d garden
(Unbound her burden) his beams foster
Soul in secret, where the soil puts forth
Paradisal palm, and pure fountains
Turn and re-temper, touching coolly
The uncomely common to cordial gold;
Whose ore also, in earth’s matrix,
Is print and pressure of his proud signet
On the wax of the world. He is the worshipp’d male,
The earth’s husband, all-beholding,
Arch-chemic eye. But other country
Dark with discord dins beyond him,
With noise of nakers, neighing of horses,
Hammering of harness. A haughty god
MARS mercenary, makes there his camp
And flies his flag; flaunts laughingly
The graceless beauty, grey-eyed and keen,
Blond insolence – of his blithe visage
Which is hard and happy. He hews the act,
The indifferent deed with dint of his mallet
And his chisel of choice; achievement comes not
Unhelped by him – hired gladiator
Of evil and good. All’s one to Mars,
The wrong righted, rescued meekness,
Or trouble in trenches, with trees splintered
And birds banished, banks fill’d with gold
And the liar made lord. Like handiwork
He offers to all – earns his wages
And whistles the while. White-feathered dread
Mars has mastered. His metal’s iron
That was hammered through hands into holy cross,
Cruel carpentry. He is cold and strong,
Necessity’s song. Soft breathes the air
Mild, and meadowy, as we mount further
Where rippled radiance rolls about us
Moved with music – measureless the waves’
Joy and jubilee. It is JOVE’s orbit,
Filled and festal, faster turning
With arc ampler. From the Isles of Tin
Tyrian traders, in trouble steering
Came with his cargoes; the Cornish treasure
That his ray ripens. Of wrath ended
And woes mended, of winter passed
And guilt forgiven, and good fortune
Jove is master; and of jocund revel,
Laughter of ladies. The lion-hearted,
The myriad-minded, men like the gods,
Helps and heroes, helms of nations
Just and gentle, are Jove’s children,
Work his wonders. On his white forehead
Calm and kingly, no care darkens
Nor wrath wrinkles: but righteous power
And leisure and largess their loose splendours
Have wrapped around him – a rich mantle
Of ease and empire. Up far beyond
Goes SATURN silent in the seventh region,
The skirts of the sky. Scant grows the light,
Sickly, uncertain (the Sun’s finger
Daunted with darkness). Distance hurts us,
And the vault severe of vast silence;
Where fancy fails us, and fair language,
And love leaves us, and light fails us
And Mars fails us, and the mirth of Jove
Is as tin tinkling. In tattered garment,
Weak with winters, he walks forever
A weary way, wide round the heav’n,
Stoop’d and stumbling, with staff groping,
The lord of lead. He is the last planet
Old and ugly. His eye fathers
Pale pestilence, pain of envy,
Remorse and murder. Melancholy drink
(For bane or blessing) of bitter wisdom
He pours out for his people, a perilous draught
That the lip loves not. We leave all things
To reach the rim of the round welkin,
Heaven’s heritage, high and lonely.

C.S. Lewis, “The Planets”, in the essay “The Alliterative Metre,” Lysistrata 2 (May 1935). Reprinted in Poems and Literary Essays, both edited by Walter Hooper, and C. S. Lewis Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, edited by Lesley Walmsley and available in non-American settings. The original has metrical notes and no stanzas, and capitalizes the planets as we first meet them (e.g., Lady LUNA, VENUS voyages, etc.).

Here I sit, on the edge of 1937.

Not literally, of course. This is not a blog from the 30s, waiting until now to see digital light. But in my reading of C.S. Lewis’ work, this is where I am, just about to jump into 1937. It is the time when he takes a key shift in his work, and a good time to describe my project.

I had already read many of Lewis’ fiction and Christian books, but when I decided to settle in on a 5-year project in Lewis’ writing, I decided to read through his work chronologically. It isn’t a perfectly coordinated project. There are chronological lists by Joel Heck and Arend Smilde, but a lot of material is in archives and not published. I read his childhood fiction (Boxen) in fits and starts, and I did not get all of his early poetry at the exact right times. But, for the most part, I have done pretty well in reading along with Lewis’ life, going through his letters and reading his written works at about the same time. And I think that has paid off in key ways, as I talk about when considering the date of his conversion here.

However, part of my success is that Lewis has not written all that much up to the end of 1936. Relatively speaking, that is. By 1936 we have about 1200 pages of letters that have survived. He published two books of poetry, Spirits in Bondage (1919) and Dymer (1926), wrote three other narrative poems (one a fragment) in the early 1930s, and perhaps 40 or 50 other poems. He published eight or nine essays that survive, his allegorical conversion narrative, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), and an academic book, The Allegory of Love (1936).

That’s about it.

Well, I suppose that is even a lot, and it has taken me a year and a half to wade through this much, though I moved from 1929-1936 just this spring.

The water is about to get deeper, though.

In 1937 Lewis begins writing Out of the Silent Planet, which will become a trilogy by the end of WWII and the beginning of his work as popular fiction author. During that period he will also write The Screwtape Letters (1941) and The Great Divorce (1944-45), both as serials in a magazine. He will publish dozens of essays, prefaces, lectures, articles, letters to the editor, op-ed pieces, and sermons in this same period. He speaks on the BBC throughout the war, which becomes Mere Christianity (1952), and publishes other apologetic books: The Problem of Pain (1940), The Abolition of Man (1943), and Miracles (1947). And then there are his academic works of the period, and his anthologies, and his letters….

He was truly a busy guy.

And all of this is in the 1940s, before he ever puts Narnian pen to paper.

So I sit at the edge of this great pool that is Lewis’ WWII-era work. I am excited to jump in. Even though I’ve read much of that period of work already, the experience as a whole is one of swimming in new waters. And so, with feet dangling tentatively over the edge, I dive in.

I’d love to hear other experiences of reading Lewis or trying to grab the whole life of another author. Upcoming posts include: “In My World, Everyone’s a Pony,” thoughts about Lewis’ The Personal Heresy, a review of Wildwood, and a reconsideration of Out of the Silent Planet.

One of the reasons I like reading C.S. Lewis’ letters is that I get to see hints of ideas that will one day become books. Except for some time in his 20s, we don’t have Lewis’ diaries, and most of his notebooks aren’t published. So what we have most to go on are the little ideas that pop up in his letters to friends, colleagues, and fans.

One of the friends is Leo Baker, a teacher and Anthroposophist that Lewis had gone to Oxford with.  In a letter talking about Lewis’ The Allegory of Love, Jun 24th, 1936, after a hilarious self-deprecating slice at his own work, Lewis wrote to his friend:

I am greatly distressed to hear that you are still suffering….

I must confess I have not myself yet got beyond the stage of feeling physical pain as the worst of evils. I am the worst person in the world to help anyone else to support it. I don’t mean that it presents quite the intellectual difficulties it used to, but that my nerves even in imagination refuse to move with my philosophy. In my own limited experience the sufferer himself nearly always towers above those around him: in fact, nothing confirms the Christian view of this world so much as the treasures of patience and unselfishness one sees elicited from quite commonplace people when the trial really comes. Age, too–nearly everyone improves as he gets old, if this is a ‘vale of soul making’, it seems to, by round and by large, to be working pretty well. Of course I can’t hazard a guess why you should be picked out for this prolonged suffering.

I am told that the great thing is to surrender to physical pain–I mean not to do what’s commonly called ‘standing’ it, above all not to brace the soul (which usually braces the muscles as well) not to try to ignore it: to be like earth being ploughed not like marble being cut. But I have no right to discuss such things on the basis of my very limited experience.

In these words, we see the beginnings of Lewis first apologetics book, The Problem of Pain (1940). It has the elements of Christian thinking about pain with Lewis’ own admission that thinking about pain as a philosophical problem is a lot different than actually living through it.

“when pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all” ( Preface to The Problem of Pain).

The germ of some of Lewis’ characters also appear in his letters. In a June 1937 letter to Dom Bede Griffiths–a student of Lewis’ who became a monk–we see the character of Weston from Out of the Silent Planet: a megalomaniacal genius who would sacrifice the environment or humans or the people of other worlds in order to extend the idea of the human race.

I was talking the other day to an intelligent infidel who said that he pinned all his hopes for any significance in the universe on the chance that the human race by adapting itself to changed conditions and first planet jumping, then star jumping, finally nebula jumping, could really last forever and subject matter wholly to mind.

When I said that it was overwhelmingly improbable, he said Yes, but one had to believe even in the 1000th chance or life was mockery. I of course asked why, feeling like that, he did not prefer to believe in the other and traditional ‘chance’ of a spiritual immortality. To that he replied–obviously not for effect but producing something that had long been in his mind–‘Oh I never can believe that: for if that were true our having a physical existence wd. be so pointless.’

A study could be made of all the idea-seeds that appear in Lewis’ letters. He was a percolator, someone who would have an idea and let in roll around his brain for awhile. He would jot notes down, make false starts on stories and lectures, and write poems in the margins. And, of course, he would test his ideas out on others.

Which, of course, leaves a trail for all of us.

I have received two fan letters in my writing life thus far. I know! Impressive, isn’t it?

I had published a little piece called “On Being Fat and Running” in Geez, a socially-engaged Christian magazine in the tradition of Adbusters. Within a few months, the article got picked up by the Utne Reader, so that my awkward reflections were no longer in the niche Geez market, but were now available to the hundreds of thousands Utne readers. I hit the big time, though I wish it had happened with a less personal, more impressive piece.

The piece caught people’s attention, which was great. I often get personal notes on my writing–the “good job!” kind of digital pat on the back. But this time I got two letters from complete strangers. I’ve got fans! Two of them.

The first fan effused over my work, how personal and well-written and courageous it was. Then she asked me how I got my start in writing and what she might do to further her own writing career. I read the email, and then laughed out loud. What was I supposed to say to her? It was a fluke! I wrote this piece, sent it out on a whim, and then it spun out. What could I tell her?

I told her the truth, and we began a great email discussion about writing resources. She taught me more than I taught here, I am sure.

That was fan #1. Fan #2 told me how great my work was, how courageous I was, and then told me about an absolutely free program on how I can lose weight in only three months.

Well, that’s it, isn’t it?

The fan letters took me by surprise (moreso the first one than the second). I wasn’t expecting any real response, and have come to hate email so much that I certainly didn’t expect anything good to pop out of that inbox. But fan letters can lead to great things. C.S. Lewis wrote one to Charles Williams over his book, The Place of the Lion, just as Williams was writing to Lewis to congratulate him for his Allegory of Love. The mutual fan letters nearly crossed in the mail and began a lifelong friendship of ideas and stories.

In 1938, Lewis shifted dramatically in his career track. He published a short Science Fiction book, Out of the Silent Planet. As I argue elsewhere, this simple, creative space fantasy is quite a complex theological fiction–a philosophical novel that became widely read and widely reviewed.

As it turns out, most of the reviewers missed the theological or philosophical elements. In response to a fan letter by Sr. Penelope–an Anglican nun who becomes important to Lewis’ career and spiritual life–Lewis jokes that out of sixty reviews, only two picked up some of the key elements which he laced within the pages.

The fan letters from Sr. Penelope and Charles Williams were not the only influential ones. Quickly after he published Out of the Silent Planet, he received two important fan letters.

The first is from Evelyn Underhill, an important British religious writer, whose 1911 book, Mysticism, was phenomenally popular. She read Out of the Silent Planet and sent Lewis a note of thanks, part of which Walter Hooper records in The Collected Letters, vol. 2:

‘May I thank you for the very great pleasure which your remarkable book “Out of the Silent Planet” has given me? It is so seldom that one comes across a writer of sufficient imaginative power to give one a new slant on reality: & this is just what you seem to me to have achieved. And what is more, you have not done it in a solemn & oppressive way but with a delightful combination of beauty, humour & deep seriousness. I enjoyed every bit of it, in spite of starting with a decided prejudice against “voyages to Mars”. I wish you had felt able to report the conversation in which Ransom explained the Christian mysteries to the eldil, but I suppose that would be too much to ask. We should be content with the fact that you have turned “empty space” into heaven!’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fol. 68)

Lewis was evidently pleased by the letter:

Oct 29th 1938
Dear Madam
Your letter is one of the most surprising and, in a way, alarming honours I have ever had. I have not been for very long a believer and have hitherto regarded the great mystical writers as a man in the foothills regards the glaciers and precipices: to find myself noticed from regions which I scarcely feel qualified to notice is really quite overwhelming. In trying to thank you, I find myself regretting that we have given such an ugly meaning to the word ‘Condescension’ which ought to have remained a beautiful name for a beautiful action.
I am glad you mentioned the substitution of heaven for space as that is my favourite idea in the book. Unhappily I have since learned that it is also the idea which most betrays my scientific ignorance: I have since learned that the rays in interplanetary space, so far from being beneficial, would be mortal to us. However, that, no doubt, is true of Heaven in other senses as well!
Again thanking you very much,
Yours very truly,
C.S. Lewis

This correspondence would be long remembered by Lewis. In response to a later letter by Underhill (Jan 16th, 1941), Lewis wrote:

“Your kind letter about the Silent Planet has not been forgotten and is not likely to be. It was one of the high lights of my literary life.”

Another lifelong friend was made through a fan letter, though the writer was a student at Oxford and sat in Lewis’ lectures. The letter-writer, Roger Lancelyn Green, had some good knowledge about SciFi lit, and sent Lewis a note looking for more background to Out of the Silent Planet. I do not have the young student’s letter, but Lewis’ response makes it easy to read the basics of what Green was asking:

Dec. 28th 1938
Thanks for kind letter. I don’t think letters to authors in praise of their works really require apology for they always give pleasure.
You are obviously much better informed than I about this type of literature and the only one I can add to your list is Voyage to Arcturus by David Lyndsay (Methuen) wh. is out of print but a good bookseller will prob. get you a copy for about 5 to 6 shillings. It is entirely on the imaginative and not at all on the scientific wing.
What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (Penguin Libr.) and an essay in J. B. S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds both of wh. seemed to take the idea of such travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook wh. I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary idea as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) pt. of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side. I think Wells’ 1st Men in the Moon the best of the sort I have read. I once tried a Burroughs in a magazine and disliked it. The more astronomy we know the less likely it seems that other planets are inhabited: even Mars has practically no oxygen.
I guessed who you were as soon as you mentioned the lecture. I did mention in it, I think, Kircher’s Iter Celestre, but there is no translation, and it is not v. interesting. There’s also Voltaire’s Micromégas but purely satiric.
Yrs.
C. S. Lewis

We see in these letters Lewis’ increasing humility on the real physics of astronomy. But this letter was important to Lewis for deeper reasons, both literary and personal. Roger Lancelyn Green went on to be an important writer, both as a biographer of important authors–I just found on a friend’s reading table a copy of his Teller of Tales–and as a reteller of great legends like Robin Hood and King Arthur. Green did two biographies of C.S. Lewis, and was part of the Inklings gathering at Oxford.

This letter not only initiated this literary relationship, but began a personal friendship that grew throughout the years. Green was with Lewis near the end of his life. Green and his wife vacationed in Greece with Lewis and Joy Davidman, who had married Lewis as she was dying of cancer. It is a fan letter begun well, and ended in a journey no one could have expected.

It is hard to know what I am recommending to the reader–if anything! But it is, perhaps, a hint of what a fan letter can do in an author’s life. Meanwhile, I have to send my credit card number to that free weight loss program. He is a discerning reader, after all.

This summer I posted a quick write up of my project of reading Lewis chronologically thus far, called “Taking a Breath Before a Second Dive.” In the comments a great discussion broke out, and one of the dialogue partners, Beth Oliver, said something that sent me reeling with its implications. I will likely co-opt her phrase and use it to my own nefarious purposes. But, before I do, I thought I would ask her to explain the idea more fully. I love this post by Beth, where she responds to the Pilgrim’s (my) questioning. I hope you enjoy!

The Pilgrim’s devotion to all things Clive Staples has been a wonderful reminder of the many “What? You too?” moments kindled by Mr Lewis. How has this writer, so remote from myself in culture, education, gender and era, managed to lead me into so many well-lit rooms? As we tend to do, I tried to understand through comparison, and obviously chose as Mr Lewis’ counterweight, J.R.R. Tolkien, the architect of my other, slightly glossier, childhood palace. My first thought:

“In Tolkien, I want to get into Middle Earth. In Lewis’ fantasy, I’m there already – the real world is Narnia/Perelandra/Screwtape’s office.”

The Pilgrim has justifiably asked me to explain myself.

I grew up the second of a family of four kids – boy, girl, boy, girl. Obviously of the pre-iPad era, we were raised on Narnian broth. In our hours of Narnia-based play my older brother was of course Peter Pevensie and frequently reminded us of his situation as the High King. My younger brother was obliged to take on Edmund (he was wedged in his sullen stage at the height of our play), and the youngest, my sister, acquired the envied role of Lucy. I resented my place as fussy Susan, as well as the implication that I was the type to abandon the wonder and thrill of Narnia for boys and lipstick. It was some consolation to run around with a makeshift bow and quiver of arrows while my sister brandished a butter knife.

We were equally enamoured of Middle Earth. Strangely, we never identified closely enough with any characters from Middle Earth to “be” Boromir or Frodo or Legolas – we usually discussed what “race” we would be, (and often, what weapons we would carry). Everyone was always adamant I would be a hobbit, I imagine something to do with height, curly hair and appetite. I’ve come to terms with this – even though if you were to combine the roles, and devise a hobbity Susan, you would probably come out with Lobelia Sackville-Baggins.

The point of all this narcissistic reminiscence is that it reminds me that Narnia constructs an allegory with which we as children could identify, squabbling siblings visiting another world. The fantasy exists as an illustration of the truth Lewis pursues in his non-fiction; of faith, courage, lust, deception, flawed humanity.  Even Narnians acknowledge that they inhabit “another” world, whereas Middle Earth is the only world (excepting possibilities hinted at in The Silmarilion). Visitors are wearing school uniforms when they re-enter

“The Wood Between the Worlds”
by RiONX (http://rionx.deviantart.com/)

Narnia, until someone finds them a suitable tunic. And they are put back in their school uniforms to go home. Narnia is self-conscious. It knows it is one of many possible roads chanced upon by Polly and Diggory in the Wood between the Worlds. Middle Earth is blissfully egocentric*.

The Heater and I are currently re-reading The Lord of the Rings aloud. At this juncture I’d like to highly recommend hearing The Ride of the Rohirrim and The Battle of the Pelennor Fields aloud at least once in your life. If ever one wanted to saddle up for righteous war… We see the white horse tail streaming from Eomer’s helmet and hear the fierce, joyful singing of the Rohirrim as they cheerfully slay the foes of Gondor. Middle Earth exists for the sake of itself and for the sheer fun of it – you can feel Tolkien’s love for the details of armour, dragons, golden trees, herbs with magical properties and horses that never seem to tire. Tolkien dedicated his life to the fearsome task of constructing another world, history and language, while Lewis sought to understand this one.

Of course we want to get into Middle Earth, a place where the right thing to do is clear-cut. Deeds of valour are straightforward. Keep walking until you get to Mount Doom. Keep fighting orcs. Sing a song, build a kingdom, eat some lembas. Who wouldn’t want an ancient, blessed sword from the Barrow Downs that will prove itself a game day player? Middle Earth is glorious escapism, a place to be a hero.

In Narnia and other Lewis worlds, complexities of a less black and white reality are present – jealousy, faithlessness, vanity, gluttony, sibling rivalry, the aching marital breakdown in That Hideous Strength. Can you imagine Aragorn paying an extortionate price for a couple of beers because he is too proud to appear cheap by questioning the bill?

When I read Narnia, I can tell I am reading the same person who, as the senior devil Screwtape, wrote this frighteningly accurate description of us on our bad days:

“Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing “I simply ask what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper” (The Screwtape Letters, Ch 3)

and this, from Ransom’s discussion with the sorns of Malacandra, which makes me smile. How must our drive to nest, to build, to organize and create appear to those friendly, bemused aliens?

“Two things about our world particularly stuck in their minds. One was the extraordinary degree to which problems of lifting and carrying things absorbed our energy. The other was the fact that we had only one kind of hnau:” (rational animal) “they thought this must have far-reaching effects in the narrowing of sympathies and even of thought” (Out of the Silent Planet, Ch 16).

To put my original thought another way, Tolkien’s world makes me want to be a hero, but Lewis’ worlds show me who I already am. It remains to be seen whether I am Susan.

———————————————————————————————————-

*The terms in which I describe Middle Earth and Tolkien could be considered negative, but that’s unintentional. I love, admire and frequently re-read his tales, because of course there is great truth in his writing also. I’m also not saying Tolkien isn’t a moralist. Total rejection of evil is required by those tempted by the Ring – you can’t borrow it, you can’t hide it, you can’t use it for your own ends, you have to destroy it. I am reminded of the George MacDonald quote that opens Lewis’ The Great Divorce:

“No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it – no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.”

Recently I was tagged in a blog hop on Writing Processes by theology blogger David Russell Mosley. Check out his blog, Letters from the Edge of Elfland. The Writing Process Blog hop invites bloggers to answer four questions about what, how, and why they write. The bloggers are then encouraged to recommend three other bloggers to do the same. So… here we go!

1. What are you currently working on?

Like David who invited me, and his inviter, I work both in academics and in creative writing. When it comes to creative writing:

1. 2014 is, for me, the year of getting my short stories on the screen and into print. So far, I’ve had mostly rejections! But the writing bit is going well.
2. I am pitching Hildamay Humphrey’s Incredibly Boring Life right now. Again, rejections galore, but I have gotten some requests for manuscripts.
3. I am editing The Curse of Téarian, a dark faërie tale.
4. I am preparing notes on a writing project this fall, either for 3 Day Novel or as an extended NaNoWriMo. I haven’t chosen which story to write yet, and am wavering between a dark psychological thriller and a group of unusually gifted children who band together in the wake of nuclear holocaust.

In the academic world, I am working on four projects this year:

1. I am finishing up the last edits on a paper on the heart of C.S. Lewis’ spirituality. I’ve blogged about it here, and the paper is called, “‘Die Before You Die’: St. Paul’s Cruciformity in C.S. Lewis’ Narrative Spirituality.” It is being published with other papers from the C.S. Lewis Symposium at Atlantic School of Theology in 2013.
2. Following up on a discovery I made in an archive visit to the Marion E. Wade Center in Wheaton, IL, I am asking the question, “How would we read the Ransom Trilogy of science fiction books differently if we included The Screwtape Letters in that fictional universe?” The paper is called, “A Cosmic Shift in The Screwtape Letters.” I’m presenting the paper at Mythcon 45 in Norton, MA in August, and then will be looking for a publication for it. I’m pretty excited about this.
3. I am working on a chapter in editor Sørina Higgins’ forthcoming essay collection, The Inklings and King Arthur. I am looking at intertextuality in C.S. Lewis’ work, how he brings other texts into his writing. For example, Merlin the Arthurian magician suddenly appears in That Hideous Strength,the third volume of the Ransom Cycle, a space travel trilogy. It’s worth asking why. That same book is called a “A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups”—much like George MacDonald’s subtitle for Phantastes, “A Faerie Romance for Men and Women.” That Hideous Strength has been called a Charles Williams Novel by C.S. Lewis, and the main character calls upon Númenor, the Avalon world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth universe. That’s a lot of connections in just one book. I’m testing to see if the way Lewis uses texts from history and the worlds and ideas of his friends tells us something about the way he approaches texts in general. We’ll see.
   I’m presenting the ideas for these researches at Mythcon in a panel hosted by Sørina, and will write the chapter this fall.
4. Finally, I am applying an approach from my master’s degree to reading The Screwtape Letters. In my master’s thesis, the eighth most boring document on planet earth (and available for sale), I argued that when St. Paul wrote letters, he created a “world”—he retold the story of the relationship between him and the people he is writing to. Fictional writers do this too, selecting out material from a broader possible world to focus the plot and character development. I looked at how Paul developed the plot and characters of 1 Thessalonians to discover what some of his emphases were.
   Now I’m going to try this approach with The Screwtape Letters. This is the most risky of my projects because it may fail to produce any fruit. But every experimenter faces that risk, I think. I will be presenting my findings at the International Society for Religion, Language, and Culture conference (http://isrlc.org/) in Leuven in September. It is a big conference, and the one I’m most nervous about.

2. How does your work differ from others in its genre?

• My short stories cross a variety of genres, and a number of them are exploring various kinds of post-apocalyptic worlds. What they might have in common is “incongruity.” My story, “The Grand Romance of Earl” at Hobo Pancakes is a humorous example. Even that urban love story is “apocalyptic” in the sense that behind it is the death of rural culture. It is funny, but even my tragic or dramatic stories have that upside down quality.
• Hildamay Humphrey’s Incredibly Boring Life is really about joy and voice. Most coming of age tales are about growing older. This quirky urban adventure is about growing younger.
• My academic work is in pretty early stages, but what I’m good at (I think) is crashing together ideas that don’t normally fit. Worlds collide in my imagination. Although I don’t think I’ll produce anything completely new, I do think I will help people think about things in new ways. An example is #2 above, where I am combining two fictional worlds that many presume are naturally separate. Really, I write academically and creatively from the same source: I look at the world with my head tilted sideways.

3. Why do you do what you do?

I think most writers are going to answer this about the same way. We love to write. Even when it’s hard—even when it is impossible to do and we hate it—we love to write. Even when we fail, we write.

I am essentially a lazy person, so I could easily put off writing. I have to really discipline myself then. But it is such great pleasure to carve of 3 or 4 hours to work on a story or outline a book. To sit down daily and pick up a longer project somewhere in the middle… that’s the sort of thing that keeps me awake at night. Even my academic and work writing, the challenge of bending a solar system of words and ideas into new orbits is a genuine thrill.

4. How does your writing process work?

I am a “wait … wait … go” writer. Is that a real thing? I don’t know.

But for me a story begins by the bubbling up in my imagination of two things crashing together. For example, I think of an interrogation room with a person looking at a woman through a one-way mirror. But what if the person watching the woman is actually the writer, and the character is developing before the writer’s eyes? There’s my story.

In the case of Hildamay, it was the idea of a little girl living in an apartment by herself making liver and onions as her favourite lunch. There are lots of orphan tales, but what if this little orphan did not know she was an orphan—and, more than that, that she was still a child.

With The Curse of Téarian, it began while I was holding a communion cup. You know those little glass ones that are like celestial shot glasses? I was holding an empty one, looking at the light refract on the heavy glass at the base. Then I imagined an eye in the glass, and then the glass was a kind of seeing stone. But the seeing was not just activity, but the soul of an individual. The idea of a Soul Keeper was born, and the curse followed.

So I have the idea and jot the idea down. It knocks about my brain for a few weeks, and if it is still interesting to me, I begin with characters. I match names with personalities, so I sketch the characters.

If that works, I try the first scene. Sometimes this becomes a short story; other times it is the prelude or first chapter of a novel. If more scenes come, and the dim sense of a narrative arc, I do an outline.

Even with a premise or device, a character sketch, and an outline, I still am not ready to sit down. I research the world to create a world “encyclopedia.” I draw maps, build imaginary houses and living spaces, play with the social or physical rules of the world—I do whatever I can in research before sitting down to write the book.

So, most of my writing is prewriting. The next stage is to sit down and write. Most years I do a short novel or novella with the labour day 3 Day Novel contest. I’m having trouble finding a market for them, so this year I might just do NaNoWriMo: produce a 50,000 word novel in November. If it is a full novel, I’ll do 85,000-100,000 words in 6-8 weeks.

The last stage is editing. I hate editing, and am stuck here.

Believe it or not, my academic world is very similar. It emerges out of my research in the same why my stories emerge out of everyday life and my reading.

Tag, You’re It!

I now tap in three bloggers to enlighten the digital universe. I follow a lot of bloggers, so here are three from different approaches.

1. Orthodox Mom is a prolific and relatively new blogger. She blogs on family food health, education, her Orthodox faith, and general momish things. But she is also in the query faze on a picture book.

2. Cate Fricke is a published and award-winning writer. Where I first found her was on her lovely fairy tale blog, “Something to Read for the Train.”

3. Melanie Rio of the Ink Out Loud blog is a tour de force. Her good books blog has exploded into a great resource for readers and writers. I’d love to hear what she says about writing.

Tag! You’re now it.

I am certain that within long I will be accused of being obsessed with Prefaces. I have posted great prefaces to C.S. Lewis’ The Allegory of Love and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and I have even published the earliest manuscript of Lewis’ preface to The Screwtape Letters.  Now I’m at it again.

In my defense, a preface, foreword, or introduction to a book often has some of the best stuff in the most condensed form. It is what an author says when she is tired of saying things, and mostly wants to find a way to get a reader connected to her material. I always encourage students to look at prefatory material before they dive in to the meat of the book.

Well, I’m at it again. I am reading That Hideous Strength, the conclusion of the Ransom Cycle that began with Out of the Silent Planet. It is an intriguing book, one part Arthuriana, one part science fiction, and one part dystopian farce. It is rich in references to other authors, from the Bible and Aristotle to H.G. Wells and Jules Verne to J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. And it explores in most detail the inner psychology of human characters in all his books, with the exception of Till We Have Faces. It is a peculiar ending to the Ransom Cycle, longer than all the other Ransom books put together and concluded with the aid of an awoken Merlin. But it is an excellent book, and worth digging into.

It is probably surprising, then, that this psychologically complex, dark, contemporary science fiction novel is actually called That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups. Even in the title there are intertextual hints. The subtitle is very much like George MacDonald’s, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women–a book that had incalculable influence on Lewis.  The title, That Hideous Strength, is drawn from a 16th century David Lindsay poem about the Tower of Babel:

“The shadow of that hyddeous strength
Sax myle and more it is of length”
A Dialog, Sir David Lindsay

I knew of the Lindsay reference when picking up the book, and was surprised that it was not an epigraph to my copy. I was certain that it was. I did some digging and discovered that my ePub version had the Lindsay reference, but my paper copies do not. Both versions dedicate the book to J. McNeill, a longtime of Lewis’ that he called “Janie” (pronounced Tchainie). But only the digital copy has the epigraph.

Then I began reading the preface and noticed another difference. It was different than the one I remembered. As I dug around a bit, I discovered that there are two different prefaces to That Hideous Strength. One was published with the book and is signed “Christmas Eve, 1943″–according to his custom of dating prefaces–and one appears later. The first edition preface is longer, and mostly involved in setting the context to the story. The later preface is much shorter, and has a strange concluding paragraph that pokes fun at the length.

I thought it would be fun to post both prefaces. This has the very serious reason of allowing readers to compare the two different prefaces side by side. It will also allow readers the chance to school me on where this second, shorter preface came from. Lewis would sometimes rewrite prefaces when new editions came out, as he did for The Pilgrim’s Regress in 1958. His fame increased with the publication of Narnia, so a number of his older books were re-released in the following decade.

These are good, serious reasons to post these prefaces. But there is also an entirely indulgent reason. It gives me a chance to show some of the varieties of cover art for That Hideous Strength. Although none of them border on realism, some of the imaginative scope of old SciFi art is dominant in these older book covers.

Enjoy the crazy cover designs as well as the side-by-side comparison of the prefaces. And do let me know if you have information on the provenance of the second preface.

That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups

Original 1943 Preface

I have called this a ‘fairy tale’ in the hope that no one who dislikes fantasy may be misled first two chapters into reading further, and then complain of his disappointment. If you ask why—intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals, and planetary angels, I nevertheless begin with such humdrum scenes and persons—reply that I am following the traditional fairy-tale. We do not always notice its method because the cottages, castles, woodcutters, and petty kings with which a fairy-tale opens have become to us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories. They were indeed more realistic or common place than Bracton College is to me: for many German peasants had actually met cruel stepmothers, whereas I have never, in any university, come across a college like Bracton.

This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my ‘Abolition of Man.’ In the story the outer rim of that devilry had to be shown touching the life of some ordinary and respectable profession. I selected my own profession, not, of course, because I think Fellows of Colleges more likely to be thus corrupted than anyone else, but because my own profession I know well enough to write about. A very small university is imagined because that has certain conveniences for fiction. Edgestow has no resemblance, save for its smallness, to Durham—a university with which the only connection I have ever had was entirely pleasant.

I believe that one of the central ideas of this tale came into my head from conversations I had with a scientific colleague, some time before I met a rather similar suggestion in the works of Mr. Olaf Stapledon. If I am mistaken in this, Mr. Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can well afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow.

Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The period of this story is vaguely “after the war.” It concludes the trilogy of which Out of the Silent Planet was the first part, and Perelandra the second, but can be read on its own.

C.S. Lewis, Madgalen College, Oxford, Christmas Eve, 1943.

Later Shortened Preface

This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man. In the story the outer rim of that devilry had to be shown touching the life of some ordinary and respectable profession. I selected my own profession, not, of course, because I think Fellows of Colleges more likely to be thus corrupted than anyone else, but because my own profession is naturally that which I know best. A very small university is imagined because that has certain conveniences for fiction. Edgestow has no resemblance, save for its smallness, to Durham – a university with which the only connection I have ever had was entirely pleasant.

In reducing the original story to a length suitable for this edition, I believe I have altered nothing but the tempo and the manner. I myself prefer the more leisurely pace-I would not wish even War and Peace or The Faerie Qyeene any shorter-but some critics may well think this abridgment is also an improvement.

I was at my extended family’s house yesterday and saw Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy on a side table. It is a bookish home, and I’m a bookish person, so I’m often flipping over books and picking up where people leave off. It has been 15 years since I’ve looked at The Divine Conspiracy–I’m no longer certain that I’ve ever actually read it–but I was curious because my brother-in-law is reading it with energy. I didn’t have time to read the whole thing, so I just read the footnotes (see the bookish comment above; it’s a geek thing). He uses a C.S. Lewis quote in a way not unlike my “There is No Such Thing as Space.” While my use had to do with the War of Worldviews that Lewis was engaged in, Willard moves it to the realm of the human experience of God. I thought it would be interesting to see the quote in the context Willard gives it, considering Willard’s growing influence among searching evangelicals.

God Wants to Be Seen

Similarly, God is, without special theophanies [special God appearances], seen everywhere by those who long have lived for him. No doubt God wants us to see him. That is a part of his nature as outpouring love. Love always wants to be known. Thus he seeks for those who could safely and rightly worship him.God wants to be present to our minds with all the force of objects given clearly to ordinary perception.

In a beautiful passage Julian of Norwich tells of how once her “understanding was let down into the bottom of the sea,” where she saw “green hills and valleys.” The meaning she derived was this:

If a man or woman were there under the wide waters, if he could see God, as God is continually with man, he would be safe in soul and body, and come to no harm. And furthermore, he would have more consolation and strength than all this world can tell. For it is God’s will that we believe that we see him continually, though it seems to us that the sight be only partial; and through this belief he makes us always to gain more grace, for God wishes to be seen, and he wishes to be sought, and he wishes to be expected, and he wishes to be trusted.

Seeing is no simple thing, of course. Often a great deal of knowledge, experience, imagination, patience, and receptivity are required. Some people, it seems, are never able to see bacteria or cell structure through the microscope. But seeing is all the more difficult in spiritual things, where the objects, unlike bacteria or cells, must be willing to be seen.

Persons rarely become present where they are not heartily wanted. Certainly that is true for you and me. We prefer to be wanted, warmly wanted, before we reveal our souls—or even come to a party. The ability to see and the practice of seeing God and God’s world comes through a process of seeking and growing in intimacy with him.

But as we can expect to make progress in the seeing of any subject matter, so also it is with God. Toward the end of his life Brother Lawrence remarked, “I must, in a little time, go to God. What comforts me in this life is that I now see Him by faith; and I see Him in such a
manner as might make me say sometimes, I believe no more, but I see.” The heavens progressively open to us as our character and understanding are increasingly attuned to the realities of God’s rule from the heavens.

The Myth of Empty Space

So we should assume that space is anything but empty. This is central to the understanding of Jesus because it is central to the understanding of the rule of God from the heavens, which is his kingdom among us. Traveling through space and not finding God does not mean that space is empty any more than traveling through my body and not
finding me means that I am not here.

In Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis gives an imaginative description of how one of his main characters, Ransom, experiences a “progressive lightening and exultation of heart” as the airship carrying him moves away from the earth:

A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science was falling off him. He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam…. He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes—and here, with how many more!

Some may object that this is only literature. Yes, but it is nonetheless helpful in loosening the baseless images that, without scientific validation of any sort, flood in from the culture of pseudoscience to paralyze faith. Sometimes important things can be presented in literature or art that cannot be effectively conveyed in any other way.

Certainly mere space travel is not the way to discover the divine richness that fills all creation. That discovery comes through personal seeking and spiritual reorientation, as well as God’s responsive act of making himself present to those ready to receive. Only then we cry with the Seraphim, “Holy! Holy! Holy!” as we find “the whole earth full of his glory.”

In a striking comparison, Ole Hallesby points out that the air our body requires envelops us on every hand. To receive it we need only breathe. Likewise, “The ‘air’ which our souls need also envelops all of us at all times and on all sides. God is round about us in Christ on every hand, with his many-sided and all-sufficient grace. All we need to do is to open our hearts.”

I am editing a paper Mythcon in August in Norton, MA. I am quite excited to be presenting some of my work on The Screwtape Letters and the Ransom Cycle. It is an unusual audience, a mix of scholars and fans of fantasy literature. It may be the only academic conference where the ladies are asked to remove their wimples and the men are asked to leave their weapons (whether traditional or magical) in the umbrella rack outside. It is also quite likely that the avid fans in the audience will know more about the topics than the academics presenting–certainly that will be the case with me.

I am participating in a panel on Arthur and the Inklings, but I am also presenting my paper, “A Cosmic Shift in The Screwtape Letters.” It is where I suggest that the fictional world–what we call “the speculative universe”–of Screwtape is also that of Ransom. By contrast, it seems that Lewis most well-known world, Narnia, has no connection at all.  As part of the original paper, I wrote a short section that tests the Narnian speculative world a little bit. It was a section I quite liked, but it has to be cut from the paper. During my presentation it will be only 30 seconds long.

But I thought it was still good, so I’m sharing it here. It also gives readers an opportunity to share some of our favourite parts of the Narnian world.

The Fictional Universe of Narnia

As a world-builder, C.S. Lewis is perhaps most famous for his creation of Narnia. By the close of the seventh Chronicle, the imaginative construct goes far beyond the country of Narnia to include a myriad of possible universes linked by the Wood between the Worlds. Of these universes we are invited into three: a geocentric land of Narnia, the unsung world of Charn, and the Earth. Of Earth, we have referential events in history like WWII and the wartime exodus of children out of London. According to the beginning of The Magician’s Nephew (1955), the readers’ grandfathers were children and little boys were made to wear stiff collars at the same time the first Narnia story took place.

But we also have a hint that the Chronicles are not set in historical England, but in the England where “Mr Sherlock Holmes” was a real person “living in Baker Street,” and we may be liable to bump into the Bastable children when they were “looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.” Perhaps, as Lewis believed fantasy reading made every wood enchanted (“Three Ways of Writing for Children“), so he believed good fiction infiltrates the life of every city, weaving its fictional and referential histories together.

The result is that the speculative worlds of Edith Nesbitt and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are aligned in some imaginative way with Narnia. This sort of literary intertextuality is nothing new to Lewis. Neither are the literary echoes limited to the Earth-bound stories in Narnia. From the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to The Last Battle (1955), Narnia slowly fills with talking beasts, Marsh-wiggles, giants, satyrs, naiads and dryads, gnomes, centaurs, Dufflepuds, and various races of men and witches, dwarfs and gods. Narnia is a mythologically rich world, and the Chronicles of Narnia are a veritable legendarium of European and West Asian traditions mixed with beings of Lewis’ own invention.

Within the Chronicles, we have an imprecise but relatively full timeline of Narnian history.[1] We have a Narnian creation story—not the creation of the Narnian universe itself, but the Aslanic filling of the world with verdant song—and some of the streams of anthropological and biological development. We have the stories of Charnian and Narnian apocalypse, but the future of the (fictional or factual) Earth is unknown to us. The physics of the Narnian universe seem relatively clear. As on Earth, boats float in water, swords shed blood, humans can breathe the air, gold is hard and snowflakes are not. But it becomes increasingly evident that the operational physics of Narnia do not tell the entire story. Within the sweet water and cool earth of Narnia there are inhabited worlds, and there are places along the edges of the world where shed blood has a different meaning. Humans can breathe, but so can humanoid stars. In Narnia, water may turn a man to gold, and snowflakes may not melt even in July. Readers of Narnia will know that the metaphysics and magic are more layered there than they first thought.

Can the architecture of Narnia bear this complexity? Humphrey Carpenter, for example, said that Lewis borrowed “indiscriminately from other mythologies and narratives,” throwing in “any incident or colouring that struck his fancy” (Inklings, 224–227; cf. Sayer, Jack, 312-313).[2] Certainly, the Chronicles of Narnia are stylistically different than Tolkien’s mainstream Middle Earth books. And, as far as we know, there is no legendarium or world-building Bible behind Narnia as there was behind Middle Earth. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote heroic epics out of an unprecedented mythology while Lewis wrote imagistic stories whose speculative framework grew as the stories developed.

Ultimately, the critical reader can decide about the cohesiveness of Narnia. It could be that what Carpenter calls unevenness in Lewis is what people find most charming and inventive. It is doubtful that Lewis imagined unicorns in Narnia when he sat down to write the first book, but it is not incongruous when one appears in the last book.

Yet, the breadth of possibility is not endless. Lewis’ mythological borrowing in Narnia is limited to sources within his own civilizational sphere. Moreover, there are some things that would be inauthentic to Narnia. While the appearance of the god of wine to lead the bacchanalia in Prince Caspian raises eyebrows, something about the world would break with the introduction of a vampire or Wellsian alien.[3] For all Arthur Conan Doyle is referenced in the telling of a Narnian tale, the summoning of Sherlock Holmes (or his next generation equivalent, Lord Peter Whimsey) to investigate the messianic claims of the purported Aslan in The Last Battle would be a step too far. The intertextual layering has its limits.

Regardless of whatever framework may be behind the creation of Narnia,[4] in a very real sense the books are meant to be a slow unveiling of Lewis’ imaginative cosmos. We see this in the way the reader is introduced to Narnia in the first book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. We watch as Lucy, the kind of girl who knows better than to lock herself in a wardrobe, begins to wonder if her improvised hiding place is not bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Her experience is extremely sensual. She revels in the feeling of the fur coats against her cheek until they become scratchy tree branches. She hears the crunch of mothballs beneath her feet only to feel the surprising texture and temperature of snow in the dark. Then there is light ahead in the darkness, and snow falling in a wood.

As Lucy enters Narnia she encounters significant incongruity. She is in a wood instead of an abandoned room. It is dark where she is standing, but she can see the daylight of her room through the wardrobe doorway. It is snowing here and raining in the world she has left behind. Lucy follows the light and finds, of all things, a city lamppost burning brightly in the middle of the lonely wood. As she contemplates the little flame, a fawn comes into view—doubtless the first half-goat/half-man Lucy has ever encountered.

As we watch Lucy coming to terms with her new world, we are surprised once again. It is the mythological creature and not the human that is startled and disoriented by the sight of the other. The fawn is carrying what look like Christmas parcels in a land where it is always winter and never Christmas (so we discover). Quite apart from not talking to strangers as a girl who knows better than to lock herself in a wardrobe should know, Lucy engages with this very strange stranger and actually goes to his home. The angelic mediator we might expect in this dreamlike tale is actually a traitor, and a rather ridiculous one at that. He sells Lucy to the dictatorial leader of the land, and then promptly sets Lucy off to safety. In a pool of tears, the traitor forfeits his own life for his victim’s. Either Tumnus the fawn is very bad at treachery, or there are other principles at work, ideas that slowly unfold as the reader uncovers the secrets of the land of Narnia.

In any case, as Lucy discovers the land of Narnia, so does the reader. The Narnian speculative universe in its entirety is revealed slowly over the length of the seven chronicles. Lewis as a world creator of Narnia is nimble and creative, so that it is very much a pay-as-you-go universe. And yet it is not complete chaos or indiscriminate pastiche. There is a coherence to Narnia, and the reader is gradually introduced to that world just as the children: a little surprise, the sense of something foreign, and a bit of adventure ahead.

[1] See Walter Hooper, Past Watchful Dragons, ch. 5.

[2] Note that Joe Christopher offers some critical questions about how far these are Tolkien’s critiques rather than Carpenters, “Tolkien: Narnian Exile” Mythlore 55 (Autumn 1988): 37-45. Green and Hooper note the inconsistencies in Narnia, Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (Glasgow: Fount, 1974).

[3] Though, indeed, there are some parallels between the aliens of H.G. Wells’ First Men In the Moon and the earthmen of Prince Caspian. It could be that the Lefay Fragment was abandoned because its Digory and Polly story of fairy godmothers and trees that talk was beyond the scope of the Narnian framework.

[4] I.e., see Michael Ward, Planet Narnia.

For some time I have suspected that David Downing was on to something here. Part of what I’m doing in researching C.S. Lewis is to see what is at the core of who he was as a Christian—not just what believed, but the thoroughgoing centre of his faith and life. I have a paper coming out this year that argues that the idea of self-surrender in Galatians 2:20 is at the centre of Lewis’ spiritual theology:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (NIV).

So I am interested when people write directly about C.S. Lewis’ spirituality. John Bowen’s The Spirituality of Narnia: The Deeper Magic of C.S. Lewis (2007) is one. David Downing’s Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C.S. Lewis (2005) is another, and I’ve finally had time to sit down and read it.

David Downing is a well-respected C.S. Lewis scholar and an American English Professor. I’ve reviewed some of his fiction here before, and have worked through his essential study on Lewis’s science fiction, called Planets in Peril (1992), and his biographies of Lewis. Into the Region of Awe is a focus on both Lewis’ biography and his writing, narrowing the lens on a particular aspect of C.S. Lewis’ spirituality.

It is probably important to wipe from people’s mind the idea that Lewis was himself a full-blown mystic. That isn’t the case. Instead, Lewis studied mystical writers as well as historians of mysticism, and drew from that tradition. While some people devote their entire lives to mystical ecstasy and visions, what we mean here is something more rooted. It is about being relationally connected with the Divine, being aware of the Other, the Holy in everyday life. Lewis experienced what he called “Joy,” a numenous longing that led him into his faith. It is a practice of faith that includes the awakening and then emptying of self, the enlightening of the soul and spiritual struggle, and finally union with Christ.

The outline of the book is a bit peculiar. Downing begins with a wide look at mysticism (as expected), then narrows in to the mystical elements in Lewis’ faith. The following chapter then gives a survey of Christian mysticism using the authors Lewis knew well as the focus point for the history. I loved this chapter—it is a great introduction to the topic—but I think it could have better prepared the reader for Lewis’ own experience.

Unsurprisingly, Downing includes a chapter on Narnia. Again, I think the order is strange—this chapter should occur before his fifth chapter on expressing mystical experiences in words—but within the chapter he goes through various examples of mystical elements in the Chronicles of Narnia. It is a good study, especially in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Last Battle.

Although the Narnia chapter is good, and the history of mysticism very useful and readable, the real strength is Downing’s study on The Space Trilogy—the science fiction books featuring Dr. Ransom, written in the WWII-era. His exploration of the themes is superb, going into detailed analysis of Ransom’s journey. One phrase captures Ransom’s conversion best: “For Ransom it is a revelation to discover that what he thought of as his ‘religion’ is simply reality” (88). This is the strongest point of Downing’s work: showing that a mystical faith is one that is integrated into the soul. What look like external practices—reflection, prayer, fasting, meditation, service—is really the expression of God’s working in a whole life. The unit on the Ransom Cycle was superb.

Lewis was not without critiques of mysticism. While many would be concerned with “otherworldliness,” Lewis was concerned about “inner-worldliness”—an opposite concept that can have the same result of disengaging with all of life. Moreover, Lewis was critical of the mysticism movement in general.

“Ultimately, the contemporary trend in world mysticism must be found wanting, both for its logical inconsistencies and for its empty promises of gnōsis without kenōsis, the gaining of knowledge without the losing of self” (148).

Neither did Lewis think everyone was to walk the mystical path.

“Unlike scholars such as William Inge and Evelyn Underhill, Lewis did not see mysticism as the norm for Christian spirituality but rather as a special calling. He considered mystical sensibility to be a natural gift the Spirit could use in one person the way he might use physical strength in another. But Lewis felt it would be as much a mistake for every Christian to seek to be a mystic as it would to take up fishing for a living because that is what so many of the disciples did” (160).

Still, Downing is convincing in arguing that even for those who do not walk down this very narrow path, there is much to learn from those who have. I must agree.

Since I was looking for a particular kind of conversation going into this book, I was pleased to see that the idea of self-surrender was on Downing’s radar.

“Evelyn Underhill wrote that the great goal of every mystic is complete self-surrender. Ransom achieves that goal, but only by undergoing a kind of mystical death and resurrection.” (105)

I will have more to say about that paragraph as I go on in my work, but it was thrilling to see someone teasing out these threads without unraveling the whole garment.

This is not a highly academic work of impenetrable theology by any means. It is learned, evenly paced, and clear, and certainly accessible to anyone who has an interest in C.S. Lewis or Christian spirituality. It is also very short. Downing has a gift for saying a lot of things in few words, and, in this case, taking a very big, potentially complex topic and explaining in a way that capture’s the reader’s imagination. This was definitely a good purchase.

Or a trip–choose your double entendre. I have been impeccably busy these last few weeks, so that family meals have been like Gatorade cups in a marathon, and my garden has started to engulf the neighbour’s Buick. The wood is not in yet for the Winter, and will not be for a few weeks. Here are the awesome reasons why:

1. It’s All Greek to Me!

Yep, I’m teaching Greek again. This is a course that comes up every 3-4 years at the local Bible College, and I love it. No, it isn’t sheer linguistic masochism that make me want to make these poor students suffer. Well, not just that. Instead, there are three great reasons teaching Greek these days is awesome:

• It gets me into the structures of the language. I can read most any day, or create reading courses for myself to stay fresh. But must of us who enjoy language don’t spend a lot of time in the basics. Teaching Greek allows me to get up close and see the trees for the forest.
• The resources today are awesome. Granted, the Koine/Biblical Greek training materials by Bill Mounce are three steps above anything in the Classic Greek worlds. His system is so clear and approachable, that most students are highly successful. Beyond Mounce, though, we are in the days of great apps, solid exercises, textbook diversity, and audio aids. Much better than those old school suffering programs.
• The students are awesome. Seriously, students today are part of a revival of the value of classical languages, core philosophical or scientific approaches, a recovery of history, and the reading of old books. Sure, not all students. But there are enough students excited about more classically styled education using contemporary technology that it is fun to leave the office door open.

2. Is There Any Such Thing as Christianity?

Through sadder circumstances–I am pinch-hitting for a sick colleague–I am teaching a course at UPEI called RS 202: Christianity. That’s right, Christianity. Talk about a super broad topic!

If I were bright, I would teach it historically, going through history and looking for diversifying and unifying moments. But I am not bright. Plus, I am traveling, interrupting that great historical flow.

Instead, I am setting the historical stage, and then talking about different movements, spiritualities, Christian expressions, and core questions in the Church globally. In the biblical roots I’m focusing on Worldview and Story. I’m also doing two or three Vlogs that I will post that cover some pretty cool topics.

3. Reading The Screwtape Letters as Epistolary Fiction (ISRLC)

I am presenting a paper in Leuven, Belgium, in just a few days. I am very excited, and a little bit nervous. For those who are interested, here is another abstract in my ongoing campaign to have the world re-read The Screwtape Letters as Literature:

From Epistles to Epistolary Fiction: Expanding Norman R. Petersen’s New Testament Sociology of Narrative Worlds

In approaching the apostle Paul’s letter to Philemon, Norman Petersen has attempted a “socio-literary” reading. In Rediscovering Paul: Philemon and the Sociology of Paul’s Narrative World (1985) he explores the sociology of the narrative worlds that Paul constructs in his letters. With the goal of noting Paul’s rhetorical emphases, Petersen suggests that we treat the reality of the text as a “world,” and then examine it from social and cultural standpoints. As such, we are examining a constructed world even when it is presented within a letter of historically referential parties. Petersen explores the narrative world Paul constructs in Philemon, and considers what ways the particular construction of this world reflects Paul’s rhetorical emphases. The result is a sociology of narrative worlds.

This paper explores the question of whether this fruitful approach can be generalized into other letter forms. In his project of spiritual theology, C.S. Lewis used the letter form to frame The Screwtape Letters—the project that launched Lewis into the public sphere and began a veritable genre of demonic epistolary (anti-)spiritual theology. If the author of epistolary fiction has created a consistent fictional world, and if Petersen’s project is plausible, then we can attempt a socio-literary reading along Petersen’s lines in more contemporary—and even fictional—letter forms. Based upon the recent discovery that The Screwtape Letters is plausibly connected to the broader speculative universe of Lewis’ Ransom Cycle, this paper will focus on character typification and narratology in The Screwtape Letters with the goal of understanding “Structure and Anti-Structure” and spiritual resocialization in Screwtape’s universe. Finally, in considering the sociological features of a contemporary narrative world in letter form, we can augment and refine Petersen’s New Testament project, extending the project to more sophisticated early Christian letters.

4. I am Going to King Arthur’s Court! (University of Chester and Gladstone’s in Wales)

Well, less his court, and more the general area we think the Arthur legends emerged. And even that is a stretch. But I am going to the University of Chester–you remember the Cheshire cat, I hope–so I can meet with my PhD supervisors and get to know the campus. I am taking a bullet train through France from Brussels to London, then a train up North. Chester is on the trainline from London, and I will be staying at a downtown hostel while I do some research and get some context for further work.

Of my time in Chester, I am taking a couple of days to study at Gladstone’s Library. This is the Prime Minister’s library, situated in Wales near the border with England. This amazing, historical library will be my study session for part of my time in the Northwest of England. These days will be filled with long hours reading and great long walks in old countryside.

Perfect.

5. Oxford

That’s all there is to say, really. Oxford.

I am spending four days in Oxford before I fly back to Canada. The weekend will (hopefully) be filled with walking through this grand historic University town, giving context to the things I have been reading these last years. I have a dear friend as a guide, and hope to see all there is. Well, at least a quarter of what there is. I hope the feel of cobblestones through my old boots will help me as I study the Inklings–that strange Oxford School of great writers and thinkers.

I will also be spending a couple of days at the Bodleian library. There is no place like “the Bod.” One of the oldest libraries in England, as a deposit library, it has almost every book every produced in England.

However, it is more than that. It is both the place that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien did their work–Lewis complained he couldn’t smoke there–and it is where their papers are held in England. Or at least many of them. My goal is to do some fact checking, and then spend some time reading out of C.S. Lewis’s handwritten notebooks. They contain some of our favourite stories and essays, and some that we’ve never read.

We’ll see what comes to Light!

6. Spiritual Theology from the Master (Eugene Peterson)

I’m thrilled, on top of these things, to be the instructor for two of Eugene Peterson’s spiritual theology courses at Regent College. The first course, “Soulcraft,” is a reflection on Ephesians from the perspective of spiritual practice. Here’s the description:

In this series, Eugene Peterson uses the letter to the Ephesians as the primary text in developing the craft of spiritual formation (soulcraft). The letter is explored in the actual conditions in which this formation takes place in us, such as the home, workplace, congregation, institutions and culture. As God does his formational work in us and with those with whom we live, we will develop skills in recognizing what he is doing, and look for the appropriate ways to respond, participate, and guide.

I get to help students work through the material, engage in online discussions, and then mark their papers. I am doing the same for his longer course, “Praying with Jesus.” These graduate-level courses are challenging, but they are most challenging not in academic content, but in personal investment. I love these world-class courses.

Is That All?

No, that’s never all! I am editing a book in October, and writing a chapter on Arthur and the Inklings. I have a couple of short stories spinning, and I am, as always, working on the larger project of rereading the Ransom Cycle.

It will be a busy fall, but some amazing experiences. Take care dear reader!

300 posts. Wow.

When I began this project, I had little sense of an end in sight. It really began as a way of reading C.S. Lewis out loud. Over time, as my roots have deepened, the tree has branched out in brilliant new ways:

• I have, I hope, added some unique conversations to C.S. Lewis’ biography. Sometimes this has meant looking at Lewis’ books and publications in new ways.
• I have been able to bring in my love of reading Tolkien, just in time for Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films.
• I have taken the chance to explore Fantasy literature more broadly, with regular features on writers like Terry Pratchett, Ursula Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, Madeleine L’Engle, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and Guy Gavriel Kay.  You will see I called one of the above a jerk and got away with it.
• I have dug deeper into genres that I had only scratched the surface on, including Faërie, Gothic, Horror, Dark Fantasy, High Fantasy, and Arthurian lore. 2014 could really be the Year of Arthur.
• I have stretched my reading into more difficult foundational books, like Morte D’Arthur, The Worm Ouroboros, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, which I was so exhausted by I didn’t even blog it. I also read some things I was unnecessarily avoiding, like Beowulf and Charles Williams, whom I’ve come to love.
• I took some risks in exploring the relationship between faith, culture, and literature. These are not usually the most widely read pieces, but they often have the most comments.
• I began tickling the theories of fantasy writing, including ideas like speculative cosmography, fictional world-building, and how far we can stretch the Ransom universe.
• I have featured some great resources on writing, including the Writing Wednesdays feature. I even got to write about Sesame Street on that one.
• And I have included a number of digital friends through guest blogs, reblogs, and the occasional Feature Friday post. This winter will feature of number of guests for a series on C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.

Not all things have gone well. On April 1st this year, I thought it would be loads of fun to make a pseudo-serious Lewis exposé spoof. My blog, “The Obscure Writings of C.S. Lewis, Jr.,” did not do well. Nobody got it, I think. Well, some got it. There are always some who connect. But sometimes that “some” is very few, as it was with my Kirk Cameron posts. Apparently 80s heart-throbs are off limits. And there are the forgotten blogs.

But mostly it has gone well. More than well. Here were my goals in beginning, and how I’ve met them:

1. I wanted to deepen and extend my reading. I really have exceeded my own goals in this. Though I still struggle to read quickly, I’ve grown tremendously. A Pilgrim in Narnia became a place to test out the ideas that came out of that reading experience.
2. I aimed at getting to the centre of C.S. Lewis’ life and thought. Though I am still learning, I have a sense of who Lewis was, and much of what he was on about. My chronological project for reading Lewis was a great way to get a sense of the man; I’ll spend the next decade understanding his ideas and influences.
3. I planned on extending my digital and academic networks. This happened far beyond my expectations. Conferences have helped, but I’ve been constantly amazed at the ability of social media and blogging to extend one’s digital friendships. Besides Google, Facebook and Twitter are my biggest portals to new readers.
4. I intended to move my work toward a PhD program. This was the biggest gamble, and my work paid off. In summer 2011, I began pretending that I was in a PhD program. I set out work programs, reading goals, and blogging schedules. Two years later my plan paid off, and I am doing a PhD in Christianity and Literature from the University of Chester.
5. I shaped my blogging so I would get better at writing. This is harder to judge, but I think I have grown as a writer. Forgetting about audience response, I have worked on voice, poignancy, and vivid phrasing. I have dug for the narrative arc in an idea and used it to write good essays. Not all are winners, I am sure, but it was a great way to become a stronger writer.
6. I hoped to increase my readership. Very few writers are content writing to no one. I had been hammering away at the keyboard for five years without any real sense of how the world might respond. Since launching A Pilgrim in Narnia, I have grown to an audience of 6000 online readers a month and more than 3000 followers. Considering the make-up of this blog, that is pretty huge.

These six goals were my master plan. I had other ideas in mind, like a book that might emerge from my posts. That may still come. I also realized as I went on how baffling and discouraging the publishing world was. I had hoped by now to have a fiction deal for Hildamay Humphrey’s Incredibly Boring Life or for The Curse of Téarian. Nothing has come. That world seems to grow farther away rather than closer to my trembling hands.

Even then, I have found blogging a comfort as I spoke openly about my frustrations from time to time. I am not alone, I realize. And there is something in the not-aloneness that spurs me forward as a writer and researcher.

So, the question in the title will make sense to anyone who has blogged for any extended period of time: Is all this work just digital dust? 300 posts, 2 months of hours that could have been paid work, 400,000 words, 11,000 tweets… what does it all add up to?

I cannot speak for the readers, who have their own reasons for exploring the worlds I inhabit on A Pilgrim in Narnia.

But for me, it has been a tremendous project. And one worth continuing, I hope. As I throw these goals forward, as my research deepens and my writing becomes more diverse, as I continue to play in the realms made by marvelous minds, I hope you will continue to join me.

Thanks for sharing!

I seldom do well at New Year’s Resolutions. I’ve failed at almost every well-intentioned goal.  One that I have managed to keep is my reading resolution. As I’ve begun working on a PhD in Theology and Literature (focussing on C.S. Lewis’ fictional world-building), I knew that I would have to increase my reading level. A couple of years ago I began recording my reading to keep me motivated. I don’t count individual poems, most short stories, editorials, blogs, or one-off documentaries. I also don’t count essays that I read quickly or books that I scan.

In 2012 and 2013 I met and exceeded my goals (50 and 100 books/essays respectively). I set a goal for 2014 of 150 books, essays, or lecture series. Because of a strong first half of the year, I hit that goal on June 30th!

Actually, I hit 225 in total. It was a cool year, with rich reading from beginning to end.

In the world of fiction, I finished Roger Zelazny’s brilliant 10-part Amber series and Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. I re-read Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry with new depth of meaning, and slipped in some Stephen King. I’m slowly working my way through Terry Pratchett (Discworld) and C.S. Lewis chronologically. I’m in 1945 for Lewis and 1991 for Pratchett. Another thread that links the novels is “epistolary fiction”–books that are written in diary and letter form.

In my nonfiction reading, I am exploring some intriguing Christian thinkers–Barth, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Hauerwas–and some writers who write about writers and writing. I’ve read dozens of Lewis essays and a few writers whose work sits on the edge between fiction and nonfiction, like the philosophical stories of George Orwell and Ayn Rand, or a memoir like Frank McCourt’s. I was also reading for three papers I worked on through the year. I read a few duds, but I was constantly amazed in my nonfiction how relevant the great essayist are, even now, years later.

What of 2015? I am working full time for much of 2015, so I don’t know what I can achieve. Last year I wanted to do one iTunesU class a month, but I only got through 3. I think 5 is a good goal. Last year I read 108 books and would love to reach 100 again. I am ambitiously setting my goal for 200 books, essays, and classes, with some considerable doubt that it is possible. I like lofty goals: I’d rather fail later–by not reaching them–than fail now by giving up!

“CSL” below means “C.S. Lewis.” I’ve linked some of the blogs that connect with the things I’ve read. I hope you enjoy, and if you have your own year-end list or best-of blog, make sure you list it!

            I am writing a paper on C.S. Lewis and the Arthurian tradition for Sørina Higgins’ collection, The Inklings and King Arthur. As I trawl through the materials one common theme keeps coming back: How do we explain the sudden appearance of Merlin in That Hideous Strength (1945)?

Part of the ultimate answer is this: “Charles Williams and J.R.R. Tolkien.” Williams and Tolkien, both writers struggling with Arthurian stories and both close friends of Lewis—they are the reason that Merlin appears. They influence the way that Lewis shaped his science fiction writing during WWII.

This claim won’t shock readers of the Inklings or C.S. Lewis scholars; it was from Sørina that I first heard That Hideous Strength (THS) called “The Charles Williams novel by C.S. Lewis.” While the first Ransom book, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), was an H.G. Wells space fantasy—what he and Tolkien called a Romance—and Perelandra (1943) became a new myth like what Milton did in Paradise Lost. THS really sets itself apart from the other books as a supernatural thriller. It is dark, eerie, peculiar, a clear precursor to Orwell’s 1984 (1948), and for some reason includes the great wizard Merlin. It is certainly in the stream of Charles William’s work. Read Williams’ Descent Into Hell (1937) and some of his Arthuriana, then read That Hideous Strength. You’ll see what I mean. My chapter in the book is going to work out that link (if I am successful!).

But Williams and Tolkien are not Lewis’ only influence. One hint that is often missed is the subtitle to That Hideous Strength: “A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups.” That Lewis has to include a preface defending the subtitle makes the reader wonder why he even bothered. THS doesn’t feel like a fairy tale; it’s missing all the things we would expect, including evil stepmothers, wrinkled crones, knights in shining armour, breadcrumb pathways, woodcutter cottages, and, well…, it’s missing fairies. There are no fairies in That Hideous Strength.

While that last statement isn’t exactly true, as we’ll see, the average reader who ignored the subtitle would feel about the same as I did: This Merlin thing doesn’t fit. I think, though, that Lewis’ little paratextual clue, “A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups,” sets the reader up in a key way to expect the kind of book that Lewis has written. In this case, the subtitle takes us back—as so many other things in Lewis’ writing do—to George MacDonald.

While George MacDonald is a relatively famous father of the faërie tradition and a well-loved children’s author in the day before children were a market, MacDonald was also tremendously influential to C.S. Lewis. As I explain in my article, “Be Careful What You Read,” it was George MacDonald’s first prose book, Phantastes (1858), that Lewis encountered by accident one day at the train station. It erupted into his mental life, “baptizing his imagination” and preparing the way for his life as both author and Christian.

George MacDonald wrote a whole host of books that explored all aspects of faërie. But here’s the link to That Hideous Strength. Depending on your edition, you may not have noticed the subtitle to Phantastes. It’s easy to miss, especially for those of us using a digital copy. But the subtitle is significant. The full title of this 19^th century classic is Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women. Sounds a lot like Lewis’ subtitle:

Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women
That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups

The echo is pretty clear.

What is the link, then, that Lewis was trying to make? He connects the Ransom world of THS with Tolkien’s and Williams’ fictional worlds with overt references. But he connects THS to George MacDonald’s Fairy Land through this subtle paratextual hint, the subtitle that rhymes with MacDonald’s own subtitle.

           When I first read Phantastes, I was extremely confused by the character of Sir Percivale, the Arthurian knight and seeker of the Holy Grail wandering through George MacDonald’s Fairy Land. What I had missed early in Phantastes was George MacDonald’s preparation for the Arthurian thread in his faërie garment. Early in the book, in a cabin on the threshold at the edge of the fairy wood, the protagonist Anodos reads from a great book. Here is what he reads:

“Here it chanced, that upon their quest, Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale rencountered in the depths of a great forest. Now, Sir Galahad was dight all in harness of silver, clear and shining; the which is a delight to look upon, but full hasty to tarnish, and withouten the labour of a ready squire, uneath to be kept fair and clean. And yet withouten squire or page, Sir Galahad’s armour shone like the moon. And he rode a great white mare, whose bases and other housings were black, but all besprent with fair lilys of silver sheen. Whereas Sir Percivale bestrode a red horse, with a tawny mane and tail; whose trappings were all to-smirched with mud and mire; and his armour was wondrous rosty to behold, ne could he by any art furbish it again; so that as the sun in his going down shone twixt the bare trunks of the trees, full upon the knights twain, the one did seem all shining with light, and the other all to glow with ruddy fire….”

It is a fairly significant clue; if Anodos had kept reading, he would have heard his own tale. Even this I missed when I first read Phantastes, though once you work it out, it has a way of sticking. Given that Lewis is echoing MacDonald, is there something similar at play in That Hideous Strength? I went back to THS to see if I had missed the same kind of hint.

As it turns out, it begins almost immediately.

There is an Arthurian conversation between Jane, the protagonist and wife of Mark, and Dr. Dimble, her professor and a kind of mentor figure. Jane is a scholar of poetry and so knows England’s literary heritage well. Dimble starts exploring whether the Arthurian world sits in the pagan, Druidic side of Britain, or the Roman, Christian side. In Dimble’s view, Arthur draws them both together. But Merlin is an ambivalent character:

“Yes . . . [Merlin]’s the really interesting figure. Did the whole thing fail because he died so soon? Has it ever struck you what an odd creation Merlin is? He’s not evil: yet he’s a magician. He is obviously a druid: yet he knows all about the Grail. He’s ‘the devil’s son’, but then Layamon goes out of his way to tell you that the kind of being who fathered Merlin needn’t have been bad after all. You remember: ‘There dwell in the sky many kinds of wights. Some of them are good, and some work evil.’”

Here Dr. Dimble draws together all the elements of the story: the Christian history, magic, the Grail legend, good and evil as sides, and even faërie (sky-wights). The conversation swiftly moves from this reflective speech to the question of Bragdon Wood, the property behind their Bracton College that has been purchased by a nefarious conspiracy group for development. Merlin still sleeps there, Dr. Dimble reminds them. Who knows what will happens when his grave is dug up?

            If this conversation in ch. 1, section V is not enough to prime readers for the Arthurian incursion, or if they miss the names in the book—Arthur Denniston, Fairy Hardcastle, Mr. Fisher King, the Pendragon—they should have been prepared for Merlin in ch. 1, section III. What makes this section remarkable is the third word: “I”. In Out of the Silent Planet (OSP) and Perelandra, as well as in the Dark Tower fragment of a Ransom story, Lewis is a first person narrator. The first person voice grows throughout OSP to climax in a letter between “Lewis” and Ransom; in Perelandra it does the opposite, beginning with Lewis, who disappears as Ransom tells his tale. It is commonly acknowledged that the first person narrator disappears in That Hideous Strength. Through most of the book, there are no personal notes from the narrator. There is one important exception, however: ch. 1, section III. Here is how it begins:

“The only time I was a guest at Bracton [College] I persuaded my host to let … me into the Wood and leave me there alone for an hour. He apologised for locking me in….
“Very few people were allowed into Bragdon Wood. The gate was by Inigo Jones [17^th century architect] and was the only entry: a high wall enclosed the Wood….

Lewis—presumably Lewis the character in the other Ransom books—is the storyteller here, like Anodos in Phantastes. Anodos transitions from his bedroom to Fairy Land almost seamlessly. You should read the whole of ch. 2, but here is an example of that seamless transition:

My dressing-table was an old-fashioned piece of furniture of black oak, with drawers all down the front. These were elaborately carved in foliage, of which ivy formed the chief part. The nearer end of this table remained just as it had been, but on the further end a singular change had commenced. I happened to fix my eye on a little cluster of ivy-leaves. The first of these was evidently the work of the carver; the next looked curious; the third was unmistakable ivy; and just beyond it a tendril of clematis had twined itself about the gilt handle of one of the drawers.

This happens in THS as well. Lewis also has a slow, incremental transition. The transition, though, is through an Oxford-style quad (you can see these in the Golden Compass film) into Bracton Wood, where Merlin rests. Here is a bit of that slide across the threshold:

“… the sense of gradual penetration into a holy of holies was very strong. First you went through the Newton quadrangle which is dry and gravelly; florid, but beautiful, Georgian buildings look down upon it. Next you must enter a cool tunnel-like passage, nearly dark at midday unless either the door into Hall should be open on your right or the buttery hatch on your left, giving you a glimpse of indoor daylight falling on panels, and a whiff of the smell of fresh bread. When you emerged from this tunnel you would find yourself in the medieval college: in the cloister of the much smaller quadrangle called Republic. The grass here looks very green after the aridity of Newton and the very stone of the buttresses that rise from it gives the impression of being soft and alive. Chapel is not far off: the hoarse, heavy noise of the works of a great and old clock comes to you from somewhere overhead.
You went along this cloister, past slabs and urns and busts that commemorate dead Bractonians, and then down shallow steps into the full daylight of the quadrangle called Lady Alice. The buildings to your left and right were seventeenth-century work: humble, almost domestic in character, with dormer windows, mossy and grey-tiled. You were in a sweet, Protestant world. You found yourself, perhaps, thinking of Bunyan or of Walton’s Lives. There were no buildings straight ahead on the fourth side of Lady Alice: only a row of elms and a wall; and here first one became aware of the sound of running water and the cooing of wood pigeons. The street was so far off by now that there were no other noises.
In the wall there was a door. It led you into a covered gallery pierced with narrow windows on either side. Looking out through these you discovered that you were crossing a bridge and the dark brown dimpled Wynd was flowing under you. Now you were very near your goal. A wicket at the far end of the bridge brought you out on the Fellows’ bowling-green, and across that you saw the high wall of the Wood and through the Inigo Jones gate you caught a glimpse of sunlit green and deep shadows.”

Anodos’ motion is like Lewis’, though Anodos is walking into the faërie forest land where humans are in some danger, and Lewis is moving back through time in an enchanted forest where most of the fay have fled (or otherwise disappeared). Anodos travels on the tracks of space and perspective, Lewis on the tracks of space and time. Both make their way from the “real” world of bedrooms and kitchen tables to the world of fairy land.

            Lewis travels a half mile into the wood, but the pilgrimmage feels much longer. The walled-in nature of the Wood gave it a “peculiar quality,” but his real object was the Well at the centre of the Wood. Merlin’s Well, where legend supported by some archaeology and bulky tradition said Merlin lay until that day. As Lewis thinks about the history of Merlin’s Well, the story of Bracton Wood, and how the Bragdon College fellows were debating with Kings and Queens, he falls asleep, only to be “wakened by my friend hallowing to me from a long way off.”

Who is this Merlin?

In Lewis’ faërie lecture that he used to give at Oxford and that became the chapter “The Longævi” in The Discarded Image, he defines Merlin as almost in the category of “High Fairies”:

The Fairy Damsels are ‘ met in forest wide’. Met is the important word. The encounter is not accidental. They have come to find us, and their intentions are usually (not always) amorous. They are the fées of French romance, the fays of our own, the fate of the Italians. Launfal’s mistress, the lady who carried off Thomas the Rymer, the fairies in Orfeo, Bercilak in Gawain (who is called ‘ an alvish man’ at line 681), are of this kind. Morgan le Fay in Malory has been humanised; her Italian equivalent Fata Morgana is a full Fairy. Merlin—only half human by blood and never shown practising magic as an art—almost belongs to this order. They are usually of at least fully human stature. The exception is Oberon in Huon of Bordeaux who is dwarfish, but in virtue of his beauty, gravity, and almost numinous character, must be classified among (let us call them) the High Fairies (130).

While That Hideous Strength is a very un-fairylike book at first blush, Lewis does not accidentally or carelessly place it within the MacDonald stream. For MacDonald, the inclusion of the Arthurian legend within the speculative Fairy Land is not a significant stretch. The Arthurian legend has always sat on the threshold of faërie with hybrid characters like Merlin and Morgana le Fey (fey=fairy). It is a hybrid world, as Dr. Dimble explains, combining the Druidic and the Christian, the Magic and the Moral. Some texts blend the two, so that Arthurian knights contend not just with giants and dragons, but with the ambivalent world of faërie (such as the “Sir Orfeo” poem translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, or the Welsh tradition). As Anodos wanders through Fairy Land—like Christian wandered through the wide world in Pilgrim’s Progress before him—Sir Percivale is available in the imaginarium (the imagination bank) as a character to encounter.

C.S. Lewis’ fairy tale is more complex in that he intends a contemporary re-imagining of the fairy tale setting. Here is his rationale in the preface to That Hideous Strength:

If you ask why—intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals, and planetary angels, I nevertheless begin with such humdrum scenes and persons—reply that I am following the traditional fairy-tale. We do not always notice its method because the cottages, castles, woodcutters, and petty kings with which a fairy-tale opens have become to us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories.

The contemporary re-imagining of faërie will be familiar to those of us for whom urban fantasy is common fare (Holly Black’s work, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Once Upon a Time, etc.). But Lewis only had Edith Nesbitt’s Bastable Children tramping around London and Charles Williams’ supernatural thrillers for models. Lewis exchanges woodcutter cottages and impenetrable castles for college dining halls and institutional bureaucracies. So we can see how the frameworks of faërie would differ from MacDonald’s in the key symbols of the faërie world.

But the storyline is quite different too. MacDonald’s Anodos is a precursor to new adult fantasy, a young man coming into his heritage who finds that he is discovering self in the midst of self-denying adventure. Although the protagonists Mark and Jane of THS are also new adults on a journey of self-discovery and self-denial, the context is not adventure but apocalypse. Anodos will, like Bunyan’s Christian or Homer’s Odysseus, face temptations, trials, and his own final test of strength. Mark and Jane’s context is totalitarian conspiracy—the threat of a Brave New World. Their own angst, their personal limitations, and their lack of direction is washed over by geopolitical forces that consider them merely cogs in the inevitable machine of progress.

Unlike Anodos, neither Mark nor Jane ever draw a sword—or even the pacifistic version of a sword. They merely remain steadfast in the onslaught before them. Yet they are not weaponless. A dim echo of the Round Table has been re-formed with the re-emergence of the Pendragon, and Merlin stands in the balance between anthropocide, a nation collapsed into the collective mind of a nihilistic totalitarian übermensch, and the restoration of true Britain.

The “why” of Merlin has complex answers, including the influence of Charles Williams and J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as the Arthur reborn myth in England and the apocalyptic mists of WWII. If Tolkien supplied energy for imaginative world-building possibilities, and Williams extended Lewis’ choice in shaping the atmosphere of the novel, MacDonald provided the generic framework. Tolkien and Williams extend Lewis’ mythopoeic vocabulary; MacDonald provides the grammar.

So, why does Merlin appear in That Hideous Strength? One aspect of the full answer is the simple reply, “Because he can.” When Lewis adopted a fairy tale form, Merlin became one of the available characters. It may have worked the other way around for Lewis. When he discovered that Ransom was truly Arthur reborn and the Fisher King, he only had three options for generic framework: Epic Prose (as in Tolkien’s “New Hobbit,” which became Lord of the Rings), Epic Poetry (as in Williams’ Arthuriad), or Fairy Tale. Having tried and failed at both the other two forms, Lewis chose fairy tale. Viewed from this angle, Lewis’ move from WWII-era fiction to Narnia is not that great a leap.