in Westminster Abbey...Reflections on C.S.Lewis

I don’t often get invited to great national occasions, and was touched to be asked (by the Dean of Westminster) to attend the unveiling of C.S.Lewis’s memorial in Poets’ Corner  last Friday. I was given a rather privileged seat, a cushioned stall behind the choir on the North side. My seat was even labelled, though any delusions of grandeur were swiftly deflated by the fact that they had mis-spelled my name.  

 

Suitably put in my place, as one of course should be in church,  I instead paid close attention to events as we waited for proceedings to begin. I find Westminster Abbey a bit chilly in mood, compared with some of the other great mediaeval churches.  Salisbury Cathedral has much the same effect on me, whereas Exeter, Wells, Winchester, Chichester Canterbury, Lincoln, York and Durham don’t. Have the tourists and the state occasions somehow sucked out the spirit?   Everything in the actual ceremony was more or less right in itself, and the music was of the expected high standard, though I do wish we could have sung John Bunyan’s  original ‘Who would true valour see’, with its giants and lions , hobgoblins and foul fiends, which I was raised on, instead of Percy Dearmer’s milksop revised version. I can’t help thinking that Lewis, who like all Protestant English-speakers of his age would have been brought up to know Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, and indeed wrote his own ‘Pilgrim’s Regress’,  would have preferred the hobgoblin version. He wasn’t averse to the mention of foul fiends himself.  In fact, what may turn out to have been his best work, The Screwtape Letters, is an exchange between a senior and a junior foul fiend.

 

Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop who is now Lord Williams of Oystermouth, managed to preach a rather good sermon, sweetly self-mocking about his own often fuzzy use of language.  (Oystermouth, amusingly, turns out to be a piece of South Wales more or less indistinguishable from The Mumbles). He made a comparison,  which I have often felt was justified, between Lewis and George Orwell, because both of them saw clarity of language as an outward sign of inward virtue. The opposite is of course just as true. There’s quite a lot about the importance of language in the ‘Narnia’ books (of which more later) in which speech is the thing which separates fully-aware creatures from the others (readers will remember the crucial difference between talking beasts and dumb ones). And Ransom, the hero of the ‘Science Fiction Trilogy’ is a philologist.  But – as Lord Williams said - the point is most crucially made at the ‘Banquet at Belbury’ in ‘That Hideous Strength’ (the third in the Trilogy), in which the enemies of goodness, having rejected the Word of God, become unable to speak coherently at all. But because they and their listeners are so used to lying language, it takes quite a while for either speakers or listeners to realise the curse that has fallen upon them. The story of the Tower Of Babel – one of the most memorable in the Bible, springs to life much more, once one has read this passage.

 

We heard an extract from what turns out to be the only surviving recording of Lewis’s voice, fortunately a  powerful wartime meditation on the dangers of self-seeking ( a transcript and recording can be found here http://www.awesomestories.com/assets/cs-lewis-only-surviving-episode-of-broadcast-talks) , eventually incorporated in ‘Mere Christianity’.

 

The final passage ‘Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Look for Christ and you will get Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. Look for yourself and you will get only hatred, loneliness despair and ruin’, probably couldn’t be broadcast on the BBC now without some sort of post-modern ironic bracketing, or a warning that difficult material was about to follow.

 

This was followed by a goodly chunk of Isaiah (read by Dr Francis Warner, Lewis’s last pupil), the most poetic and mysterious of all the prophets, whose words often seem to be accompanied by the distant sound of golden trumpets,  from the Authorised Version of the Bible.

 

I hate to think what the  modernisers have done to : ‘Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing.’

 

The Nineteenth Psalm (which Lewis rightly said was the greatest of all of them, though this is a very difficult contest) was sung. What a pity it is that the Psalms, which Lewis heard every evening in Magdalen Chapel,  have been subjected to Beeching-style cuts and relegated in C of E services. They are crammed with mystery, beauty and savagery, and are a terrific challenge to the sort of Bible literalists who idiotically proclaim ‘This is the Word  of the Lord’ after some clearly man-made account of bloodthirsty vengeance. I especially enjoy the merciless and wholly unChristian, but also beautifully written,  109th, which almost no choir will dare to sing in full any more. Its whole point is that it expresses the true feelings of the oppressed and cheated against those who have wronged them.

 

And 2nd Corinthians, Chapter 4, verse 5 to the end,  was intelligently read by Helen Cooper, current holder of the Cambridge Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature, which Lewis once occupied.

 

Then Douglas Gresham (Lewis’s younger stepson, whom we now know was rather touchingly offered a home by J.R.R.Tolkien when Lewis was dying) read an extract from ‘The Last Battle’ , which is of course the most explicitly Christian (and in my view the least effective) of the Narnia books,  

 

He read it very well. But as he did so I felt a conviction growing, one that I have had for some time, that the Narnia books will not last much longer. They’re completely accessible to me, as a child of the English middle classes of the 1950s who actually read the Boy’s Own Paper and the Children’s Encyclopaedia, bought treats at Tuck Shops, understands and recognises the appalling, Edwardian jargon  of boarding schools, the spite, bullying,  gangs, sport obsessions and other elements of these places, and also remembers the various sorts of ‘grown-ups’ who moved about on the edge of our savage little society, occasionally intervening.

 

But all that stuff about the term being over and the holidays beginning, and much of the rest of the attitudes and tone of voice in the books, must now be baffling and off-putting to anyone under the age of about 60.  In fact the books now slow down and stumble, for me, whenever the Pevensie children feature at any length.  I keep feeling embarrassed for them.  They are rather more incredible to a modern child, I should have thought, than the White Witch, a pair of talking Beavers, or a Faun. Is it possible that children ever talked and acted like this? (It is, in fact. I saw it with my own eyes. But even I find it increasingly hard to credit). I am surprised that the films have done so well, given this problem and the difficulty of conveying the Pevensies’ transformation, once in Narnia, into almost completely different beings.

 

It’s odd that Lewis should have trapped his principal characters in such specific bonds of class and time (and in the ludicrous school uniforms of that date), since he himself was spared quite lot of the miseries of boarding school, leaving Malvern College early and being taught privately by William Kirkpatrick, probably the original of Professor Kirke in the Narnia books.

 

This used not to trouble me. Until I became a parent I didn’t really grasp just how much of a revolution had taken place in childhood since my own ( does anybody?). It became even more intense in the mid 1990s, when the atmosphere of the whole country changed so fast and so completely. Having spent much of the years 1990-95 abroad, I was struck by this even more fiercely than most people were.

 

Now it really troubles me. ‘The Horse and His Boy’, which hardly features the Pevensies at all, and never strays into English private schools or suburbs, now seems to me to be the best of the books *as a whole* (the others all have fine moments).  ‘The Magician’s Nephew’ , which brings the terrifying enchantress Jadis from the dead world of Charn to late-Victorian London, is a close second. It also has no scenes in mid-20th-cnetury Britain. Modern CGI techniques could do wonders with both. The dead city of Charn, the Wood between the Worlds, the wild rampage of Jadis through the London streets would all now be filmable, as would the great imagined city of Tashbaan, with the terrifying old tombs and the chase across the desert, and easily solve the problem of talking horses.    

 

‘That Hideous Strength’,  however, grows in power and force all the time. It is set in a recognisable era, but not among schoolchildren.  Its depiction of a gruesome totalitarianism growing up unchecked in a free society is extraordinarily accurate. Its portrayal of the corruption of individuals in such times is disturbingly right.  The way in which it locks on to the modern woman’s dilemma about childbearing is prophetic. Its love of weather (all weather) is a joy. And its grasp of the essential principles of a free society (and its furious revulsion against vivisection) is deadly to modern complacency. I’m not so sure about the two previous volumes in the Trilogy . They do contain a lot of powerful narrative and concentrated thought. And they do leave lasting pictures in the mind. But ‘That Hideous Strength’ is far more potent, because it all actually takes place in and around a recognisable English university town, with recognisable earthbound (though not too earthbound) characters.

 

Lewis (like Chesterton, whom I like less, finding a lot of his writing too contrived) has become a sort of cult in the USA. This doesn’t seem to me to do him much good. It’s not good for any writer to be revered so much that people stop reading his works critically.  The film ‘Shadowlands’ (notably more sentimental than the much better TV version starring Joss Ackland,  which seems to have disappeared from circulation) has achieved a sort of personal canonisation of a man who, in many ways,  simply cannot have been all that nice. This is not a criticism. No real person is without human faults. And no cause is served by pretending otherwise. Lewis convinced his hearers and readers in his 1940s and 1950s heyday, because it was easy to tell that he had suffered the same doubts about faith as most normal people suffer, had overcome them, yet remained intelligent, informed and fully human. Had he really been a saint, he would have had nothing to say to the suburban backsliders who were (and are) his audience.  

 

Why should he have been saintly? He was devastated by his mother’s horrible death. His poor brother (whom he seems to have looked after without hesitation) drank to excess for much of his adult life, and must often have moved him to fury and grief, and possibly despair -  as self-indulgent drinkers do to those who love them.  

 

He had to fight in the First World War, an experience which undoubtedly coarsened and hardened him in ways that we of this era might find repellent and frightening. Again in ‘That Hideous Strength’, there’s an Ulsterman (not intended to be a bad character, I think) who exults unpleasantly about the grislier aspects of trench warfare, in a fashion I find more shocking each time I read it.  

 

He played college politics, was the object of severe academic jealousy, and wasn’t unmoved by it.  He long resented Oxford’s refusal to give him a professorship. His personal life before his conversion, and indeed after it, was rather, um,  irregular. Nobody has ever really settled for certain what his relationship was with Mrs Moore, the mother of a wartime comrade, to whom he had promised that he would take care of her.  Not all his friends thought his late marriage to Joy Davidman was a good idea, before, during or afterwards.  Its portrayal in both versions of ‘Shadowlands’ may be a bit idealised.

 

I suspect him of being enjoyably impatient for his pleasures. There’s a wonderful drawn-from-the-life moment in (I think) ‘Out of the Silent Planet’ (like some of my books, the volumes in the Trilogy have been confusingly renamed later in life), in which his hero  gets more and more exasperated with a verbose character who takes ages opening a bottle of whisky. This is because he is the sort of person who cannot talk and open a bottle at the same time. Many people suffer from this problem. In general, they should hand over the bottle to someone who can apply his mind fully to the matter ( as Lewis assuredly could have done). Ransom’s exasperation over the needlessly-delayed dram  is expressed so well that it could almost be Kingsley Amis writing. And not many people would put Amis and Lewis in the same category.

 

I have mixed feelings about the mutual loathing that existed between Lewis and the undergraduate John Betjeman, since a part of me can’t stand Betjeman as a person, and is suspicious of quite a lot of his poems as well, while acknowledging that others are good and that Betjeman saved many fine buildings that would otherwise have been destroyed.   I suspect Betjeman was an insufferable striped-blazered twerp in his Oxford days, and Lewis may have been suffering a rather justifiable sense-of-humour failure at the time. In any case, this encounter wasn’t at all saintly or sweet.

 

And, as a non-theologian, as a loather of literary criticism and as one who abandoned the study of philosophy after losing his way in its arid foothills, I can’t say much about many of the things that dominated Lewis’s working and writing life (others, who know better than I,  have persuasively suggested that he was far better writer, and literary academic, than he was a philosopher or a theologian).

 

What I have always liked is the love of language, the steeping of the mind in legend and poetry ( there’s a passage about language in ‘Surprised by Joy’, about Homer’s description of a ship at sea, which must be one of the best passages ever written about the true music of words, and how in their original tongue they mean far more than any translation can possibly convey ). And the sense of a voice, a very powerful, individual voice, in clear, unaffected English, warning us (long before it was too late) of the dangers of the modern world. And ,yes, I did choose the name of ‘The Abolition of Britain’, my first book, after reading ‘The Abolition of Man’. And I wish I could write fiction, for I understand ‘The Abolition of Man’ far better after I had read its fictional counterpart ‘That Hideous Strength’. Lewis knew what his latter-day foe, Philip Pullman,  also knows;  that ‘once upon a time’ is a far more effective way of influencing your readers than ‘thou shalt not’.