THE DARK TOWER and A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS

So, I've been reading (or more accurately re-reading) a number of books by  David Lindsay, whose first and most famous book, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, celebrates its centenary this year. And I was struck by something I had previously passed over without its drawing my attention: a striking parallel between  Lindsay's book and Lewis's THE DARK TOWER. Lewis openly confessed his debt to Lindsay, particularly to OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, but I don't think I've seen anyone extend the influence to include the final, unfinished fourth book of the Ransom series. 

I'm all tied up with other projects right now, but if I were going to write this up I'd focus on one of the most striking things in A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS. Lindsay's work is famous for the way his protagonist grows new organs and appendages once he enters the alien world, the first of which is a breve, described as "something hard on his forehead . . . a fleshy protuberance, the size of a small plum, having a cavity in the middle, of which he could not feel the bottom" (VtA.44) 

This is strongly paralleled by what happens to Lewis's hero:  when Scudamour jumps through the chronoscope, switches places with his double, and arrives in the Otherworld, he acquires a sting growing out of his forehead: "It was broad at the base and narrowed quickly to its point, so that its total shape was rather like that of a thorn on a rose-branch . . . It was hard and horny, but not like bone . . . and . . . [d]ripping with poison" (DT.33). But where Maskull's breve granted him telepathy, The Stingerman's sting converts those he attacks with it into automatons. 

In addition to this major point of the appearance of otherworldly organs on the forehead, three other paralleled elements between Lewis's unfinished work and Lindsay's odd masterpiece might be worth exploring.

First,  the seance that opens Lindsay's book, along with the materialization of a being from the other world into our own, parallels the projection of images from another world that opens Lewis's. MacPhee even has an exchange with Orfieu about the validity or otherwise of psychical research.  

Second, there's the image of the Tower that so dominates Lewis's story, while a similar tower frames Lindsay's work, appearing first as the Observatory early in the book, then reappearing as Krag's tower at the story's climax, containing the long sought for route into the true world, Muspel. 

Third, it might be worthwhile to do something with the theme of doubles: Maskull and Nightspore in Lindsay's book (so that one cannot appear until the other is gone) and Scudamour/the Stingerman in Lewis's.

As I said, I'm too absorbed in something else to write this up and develop the argument. And besides, I've already had my say about THE DARK TOWER in my essay on the interrelations between Lewis's Ransom books, esp the first and fourth one) and Tolkien's two time travel stories.* And I've also already said pretty much what I had to say about A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS.**

On the other hand, if anybody has explored / developed the DARK TOWER / VOYAGE  TO ARCTURUS parallels and I just missed teir piece,*** I'd be happy if someone points me to it.

--John R.

*this appeared in TOLKIEN'S LEGENDARIUM, an unofficial festschrift for Christopher Tolkien (2000)

**in my online monthly column CLASSICS OF FANTASY: Lindsay's strange masterpiece was the focus of the sixth essay (January 2003). It's no longer up on the Wizard's site but can still be found online with a bit of internet searching

***I think I've read all the scholarship on DARK TOWER, but you never know

E. M. Forster and C. S. Lewis (SCREWTAPE)

So, a few weeks back (W.4/10) I came across an interesting conjunction between two figures we usually think of as inhabiting different worlds: C. S. Lewis and E. M. Forster. Today Morgan Forster is remembered for his associations with the Bloomsbury Group (as a welcome visitor rather than a core member) and for his epic writer's block -- he wrote four novels between 1905 and 1910, then emerged from silence in 1924 with a fifth; his sixth appeared posthumously almost half a century later, in 1970. But despite his scanty output he was one of the great novelist of his time and cast a long shadow over the early twentieth century --for example, his influence is obvious on Barfield's ENGLISH PEOPLE [1930] and Tolkien's LOST ROAD [circa 1936].

Although Forster ceased writing fiction, he continued to write essays. And he made many radio broadcasts, some have now been transcribed, collected, and published, in THE BBC TALKS OF E. M. FORSTER 1929-1960: A Selected Edition, ed. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth Macleod Walls [2008]. And, in one particular talk ("Some Books": W. Feb. 3rd 1943; pp.222-226), he discussed C. S. Lewis's new book, THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS:

"What's wrong with the world? Three out of four books I'm mentioning try to answer this question. Something is wrong with a war every twenty-five years, national and communal and racial hatred, frightened individuals, people starving in one place while food is being destroyed in another. If we listen to the past we can, as it were, hear that same ugly tune of human failure played quietly. Today it is being played fortissimo, and it is often difficult to listen to anything else. So it is natural that three out of these four books should deal with the question.

  You've probably noticed in books -- and in yourself -- two tendencies. Sometimes when you ask yourself what's wrong with the world, you answer 'It wants reorganising economically. When a basic standard of physical comfort has been achieved, the rest will follow'. And this is the attitude of Mr. Mulk Raj Anand in his "Letters on India", one of the books on my list. At other times you'll answer, 'No it wants a change of heart. When we become different -- and better -- as individuals, then the rest will follow'. That is the attitude of Mr. Gerald Heard, a practising mystic, and a pacifist, in his new book "Man the Master". And a change of heart is also demanded by an orthodox Christian writer, Mr. C. S. Lewis, in his "The Screwtape Letters". Mr. Heard and Mr. Lewis have very little in common. But they both take hold of the psychological end of the stick, as opposed to Mr. Anand who takes hold of the economic end. Which end do you take hold of yourself?

   I will take Mr. C. S. Lewis first. He is an Oxford don, and a layman of the Church of England, and he writes to justify the Christian point of view, and to give the Christian interpretation of what's wrong with the world. Sin is what's wrong, wars and starvation being only a consequence, and although the Creator of mankind is good and omnipotent, men sin because he chose to give them free will, and because they choose to make a wrong use of that will. Mr. Lewis attacks these mysteries in an interesting book called "The Problem of Pain" which I've also been reading, but I won't talk about it here. I will confine myself to a much livelier work, "The Screwtape Letters". But besides being a theologian, Mr. Lewis is as clever as they make 'em, if I may use the expression. He is witty and ingenious, and sometimes recalls the late G. K. Chesterton, though he hasn't Chesterton's robustness. Here is a book of his "The Screwtape Letters" which purport to be written by a devil called Screwtape who has rather a good position in an underground office, and writes weekly to his nephew Wormwood. Wormwood is on earth, in charge of a mortal, and being young and inexperienced is constantly making mistakes, and driving his patient toward righteousness instead of the reverse direction. Screwtape advises him on each occasion, for instance what to do when the patient quarrels with his mother or falls in love or is converted to a religion. Unfortunately the patient dies in an air raid, when he behaves heroically, and is saved. Wormwood loses his prey and returns to Hell where his affectionate uncle eats him up.

   A couple of sentences which will give you the taste of the book. Screwtape is writing about the Future, and says, it is of all things the least like eternity:

   "Hence the encouragements we have given to all those 

schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific 

Humanism, or Communism which fix men's affections 

on the Future. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future.

 Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present: 

fear, avarice, lust, and ambition to the Future".

   I should have thought that Hope looked to the Future too, and that it is a virtue. However I am not here to criticise either Mr. Lewis or Screwtape, but to indicate the provocative little book which they have collaborated to produce. Mr. Lewis does not believe in progress or that the world will be put right by humanism or by planning. It is wrong because men have sinned, and they have sinned because God has left them free to choose between good and evil, and, tempted by the devil, they have chosen evil. The world, indeed, is not a place to put right. It is a place to do right in.

   Compare with this view the view of Mr. Gerald Heard. Mr. Heard also begins with the unseen. Like Mr. Lewis he believes that the world has gone wrong for psychological reasons, but there the resemblance between them ends, for he believes that the miseries with which we are all surrounded -- the war, the starvation, the mutual hatred -- can be averted if we like, and that now is the moment . . . 


---at this point, Forster devotes two paragraphs to Heard's book and then one to Anand's, his most interesting comment in this part being

. . . I always feel when reading Mr. Heard's books --- and I think I've read them all -- that his analysis of our troubles is convincing, but that his remedies are not.

---Surprisingly enough, it turns out that Heard's ideas are very similar to Barfield's, as expressed in works like UNANCESTRAL VOICE (his masterpiece):  

. . . He [Heard] holds on the evidence of anthropology, that men were once in touch with each other instinctively like a herd of animals, that they have lost touch, thought the development of individuality, and that they must re-establish it or perish

---In the end, Forster sets out the differences between these three books thusly: 

re. Mulk Raj Anand's LETTERS ON INDIA: "his general attitude is "Make people comfortable and then they'll be good". Whereas Mr. Heard's attitude is "Make people good and then they'll be comfortable". And Mr. Lewis's is "Make people good and it doesn't much matter whether they're comfortable or not".

The final section of his review is quite interesting in itself but completely different from what came before: here his book is a collection of letters by Sir Henry Ponsonby, Private Secretary to the Queen (1870ff) -- the man responsible for managing Queen Victoria's schedule. These provide an odd glimpse into a vanished world where the Queen communicated by note: "the Queen . . . did not like seeing people unless she was sure they were going to agree with her", including her own family; thus a constant stream of message-bearers up and down the chilly halls of Balmoral ("Queen Victoria disapproved of fires") carrying messages back and forth between the queen, her children and the staff. Forster concludes

It was a strange job and a strange age -- though I suppose a philosophic observer, or an economic expert for that matter, can see latent in it the evils which have risen to the surface and occupy Mr. Heard and Mr. Lewis and Mr. Anand today. Even in these days the evil melody of war is already being played -- but softly, a sinister undertone.  We today are much more conscious than the rulers and the people of the Victorian era. We know much better what the human race is up against. And it may be that our successors, fifty years hence, will know much better than we do, and will consequently discover solutions. 

--E. M. Forster

Jack London and The Lost Road

So, I've just finished reading a book I came across on one of the downstairs bookcases while we were staying at Trout Lake (nr Mt Adams, just north of the Columbia River gorge) last week, and which our hostess* v. kindly loaned to me: Jack London's BEFORE ADAM [1907]. It turned out not to be much of a book -- there's a reason that most of what London wrote goes unread these days, aside from a few classics -- but was interesting in several ways.

First off, as a early man/primitive man story, it reminded me both of a story about cavemen by H. G. Wells (the title of which I've forgotten) I came across years ago when leafing through bound volumes of THE IDLER in the Marquette Archives in search of Sidney Sime artwork (one of the ones I found I'd love to have a reproduction of: "The Brother of Ali Baba Lost in the Woods" -- but unfortunately in the years since I've lost the reference)** and THE INHERITORS by Wm Golding -- wh. I've not read and know only through a presentation on it I attended at one of the first WisCons I went to (hence, in the early 80s, since I moved to Milwaukee in August 1981 and first attended WisCon the following February).

London's story is much closer to Golding's in its bleak depiction of one race of early men being systematically exterminated by another, and I wd not be surprised if it were a source. In Golding's case, it's the Neanderthals (who are the point of view characters) being wiped out by Cro-Magnon (i.e., our ancestors). In London's he depicts a time when there were three distinct races of humans living in close proximity:*** The Tree People (who still retain a lot of arboreal features), The Folk ('missing links', who include the narrator), and The Fire People (who are more advanced, with bows and language).

What interested me are two features that v. much remind me of Tolkien's THE LOST ROAD.

First, the narrator is a modern-day man haunted by vivid dreams of a previous life in which he was Big Tooth, one of The Folk. This seems v. like the Errols in LOST ROAD and for that matter Ramer and Arry in THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS. One thing that had puzzled me in Tolkien's time-travel stories was his insistence at one point (I forget where) that the modern day characters were not re-incarnations of their Numenorean selves but inherited memories of those events through being descendents of those distant ancestors.

That didn't make any kind of sense to me -- either they were re-incarnated or they weren't -- but London's book makes much the same claim. His modern-day narrator is not the same person come to life again in a new body, but a descendent of the person who felt and thought and acted long ago. A Lysenko-ist, London believes that memories can be inherited genetically. Thus, for example, he argues that the dream of falling some people have, but always waking up before hitting the ground, is because those people are descended from hominids who fell from trees or other high places but caught themselves before hitting the ground. London claims that no one has the dream of hitting the ground, because those individuals died in the fall and hence had no descendents to passed on the traumatic memory to. Which is no more absurd, I suppose, than the modern claims some make that people are afraid of snakes because of little furry mammals being hunted by the dinosaurs (people are afraid of snakes because they're taught to be afraid of snakes. duh.).

Now, this seems v. like what Tolkien must have been getting at. The Errol father-and-son pair are not literally the two Numenoreans re-incarnated, the way elves can re-incarnate (with the same soul and personality), but ancestors of the modern-day Englishmen who under the right circumstances can re-awaken those inherited memories and re-experience events in their ancestors' lives. Which of course ties in to 'the past alive in the present' (to give one of Jared Lobdell's catchphrases from ENGLAND & ALWAYS a new application) in the NCP, where past events can erupt explosively in the present. In the abstract, described like that, it sounds much more like a David Lindsay novel than anything we associate with Tolkien. Which is perhaps just a good reminder that Tolkien's not as predictable as we sometimes think.

--John R.

.....................

*better known as Marjorie Burns, author of PERILOUS REALMS. Thanks again, Bijee.

**this was back when I was working on my Dunsany dissertation, a section of which is devoted to the wholly remarkable Dunsany-Sime partnership.

***the accompanying introduction (by McKiernan) and afterword (by Eisley) to the edition I read were careful to point out that London was quite wrong in depicting multiple hominids alive at the same time -- which, amusingly enough, is itself quite wrong, as recent discoveries such as the Flores hobbit reveals.