C. S.
Lewis's Crackpot Friend (Bernard Acworth)
So, one thing that does not emerge in reading the
Acworth/Lewis letters or Frengren's and Numbers' account is that, to put it
bluntly, Acworth was far more wacky than he therein appears.
For one thing, he believed that birds didn't
migrate. Instead, he argued, they were blown south by prevailing winds in
autumn and then blown back north again when the winds switched direction in
spring (THIS PROGRESS, Chapter VI). He
further claims that birds cannot feel the air any more than fish are
aware of water, and that thus birds cannot feel wind and are completely unaware
of, and thus at the mercy of, air currents. And he believed that cuckoos were
not parasitic but philanderers -- that the male cuckoo visited the nesting
female bird of another species, made out, and flew away, leaving her to hatch a
half-cuckoo/half-host bird hybrid. This theory bears no resemblance to observed
reality. Despite his own field being that of submarine warfare, he confidently
expounded upon topics such as biology ("the prostitute of the
sciences") and theology (a merciful god ensured that the damned enjoy
their damnation).
He also argued that animals are incapable of
thought. Know no fear. Feel no pain. (Chapter XVII).* This is his solution to
the problem of animal suffering that Lewis later wrestled with, unsatisfactorily,
in THE PROBLEM OF PAIN. Unfortunately, it defies the personal experience of
anyone who's ever had anything to do with animals, whether as a pet, a working
animal, farm animals, wildlife observed, etc. Certainly the little bird that I
saw today get flushed from its
shrub by a nearby leaf-blower, clipped by a passing car, and drop into the
street where it fluttered desperately knew fear and knew pain. I managed to
rescue it from the street and held it in my hands while my friend Richard and I
tried to find someplace to take it to (like the Sarvey wildlife rescue people
back in Renton). But to no avail; we’d just gotten a reference to the local
humane society (which seemed a long shot) when it gave a few sudden twists and
died -- whether from its original injuries or sheer terror was not apparent. It
would be very hard for me to convince myself that despite what little I could
do it didn't feel pain and didn't know fear during that last five minutes of
its shortened life.
Acworth also held a number of quirky opinions that
don't directly concern us but tell us a lot about how seriously we shd take him,
like his belief that men had definite Jekyll and Hyde aspects but that women
were both at once, or his mockery of Einstein, whom he refused to consider a
real scientist -- 'real' scientist, it turns out, make things or discover
immutable laws of nature; faux-scientist like Einstein just come up with
unprovable theories. Or his argument that trains and electric lights were the
right kind of invention (being perfectible), whereas airplanes were the wrong kind (being completely at the
mercy of wind and weather). Or his attack on "feminists of both
sexes", or his belief that pacifist were hypocrites because they favor
bombing campaigns against civilian targets rather than support combat by just
and merciful Xian sailors and soldiers. (p. 320)** As is so often the case with
Acworth's more bizarre statements, there's really no telling where he got this
from; certainly I'm not aware of any pacifists who support bombing people, or
who could call themselves pacifists if they did.
But then Acworth complicates things for his readers
by his heavy use of straw men for his arguments, and his fondness for slipping
into a bizarre parody of what he imagines is the point of view of people he
disparages; these passages are often only revealed to be the opposite of what
Acworth thinks a few paragraphs later. Reading Acworth's THIS PROGRESS made me
realize why in CALL OF CTHULHU it takes weeks if not months to read a Mythos
tome -- it's the difficulty in following the chain of thought, so that by the
end of a paragraph what seem perfectly straight-forward sentences early in the
paragraph must not have meant what they seemed to mean back then, and the whole
thing has to be re-read and sorted out. Over and over, for more than three
hundred pages. In fact, so tangled is Acworth's presentation of his thought
that Ronald Numbers, briefly noting Acworth's theory of bird migration,
confesses that he has no idea why Acworth thought the whole thing in any way
relevant to the main topic of his books: the evils of Darwinism (THE
CREATIONISTS, p. 166)
Although Acworth looks like a lone nut from our
perspective, he had ambitions to win converts for his ideas. He was a
co-founder of the Evolution Protest Movement [circa 1932 & 1935],*** which
gathering up the moribund remnants of The Victorian Institute, a group of
first-generation Darwin deniers, and relaunched them with a different (more
'scientific', less overtly religious) focus. As such, he merits an entry in
Ronald Numbers' THE CREATIONISTS: FROM SCIENTIFIC CREATIONISM TO INTELLIGENT
DESIGN (rev. ed. 2006), with a section titled "The Acworth Circle"
(166-170; cf also 171-172 & 175, the latter being a brief account of his
encounter with Lewis). And he had a brief moment of notoriety on the national
stage when he ran for parliament during World War II with a plan to end the war
(immediately make peace with Japan so as to focus all efforts on fighting the
Germans) that so incensed Churchill that the prime minister personally urged constituents
not to vote for Acworth (they didn't).
Lewis seems to have been well aware of all this. He is blunt in his refusal to Acworth's
request that CSL write a preface to his new anti-evolution book, stating that for him to be associated with Acworth's
cause would diminish his standing as an apologist and hinder his ability to
carry out the good work (COLLECTED LETTERS II.140-141; letter of Oct. 4th
1951). Even more importantly,
Lewis himself describes Acworth in letters as anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic,
anti-communist, and prone to conspiracy theories -- or, as CSL put it, with
bees in his bonnet. Here's how CSL described Acworth to his American friend Dr.
Warfield Firor:
"Have you ever heard of
Captain Bernard
Acworth R.N., a distinguished
submarine
commander in World War I and v.
good
Christian of the Evangelical type
-- but
his head absolutely buzzing with
Bees?
He was with me the other day
explaining
that the whole
American-English-[U.N.]
set up is absolutely fatal and
part of a
plot engineered (so far as I cd.
make out)
by the Kremlin, the Vatican, and
Jews,
the Freemasons and -- subtlest
foe of all
-- the Darwinians . . . But there
was a
core of rationality in it. He
thinks our
strategy ought to be purely
naval, that
we can ruin ourselves by trying
to
keep up an army in Europe and,
even
so, cannot succeed on those
lines."
(COLLECTED LETTERS III.150;
letter of Dec. 20th 1951).
You would think such a rebuff as Lewis dealt wd
have put Acworth off, but apparently not. And here's the part in the whole
story that really interests me.
We know, from the correspondence, that the two men
actually met at least twice, with Lewis inviting Acworth to come and stay a
night with CSL and his brother Warnie. Our evidence for this comes from the
earliest of the surviving letters (not included in COLLECTED LETTERS), in which
Lewis invites Acworth "to spend a night with me next term" [Sept 23
'44]. That the visit actually took place is proven by a phrase in the second letter:
"When do you think of coming to see us again? [Dec. 9th 1944; CL II. 632-633].
A second visit is indicated by CSL's letter to
Warfield Firor, in which he says of Acworth "he was with me the other
day" (Dec 20 1951; CL III.150). And Acworth's son, on the occasion of
turning over the surviving letters to that college library in Belfast,
reminisced that "his father sometimes stayed overnight with Lewis and his
brother when visiting Oxford"; this is supported by one of Lewis's last
letters to Acworth, in which Lewis says "My brother . . . remembers you
with warmth & would join me in greetings if he were at home" (Sept 18
1959; CL III.1087-1088).
Note that both these documented visits took place
during the fall (Michaelmas) term at Oxford. What I would really like to know, which
seems impossible to establish at this late date, is whether these visits were
just with Lewis and Warnie or whether they included inviting Acworth to the
Inklings. I suspect Acworth was one in a string of interesting characters and
fellow authors Lewis invited to a night at the Inklings,**** but can think of
no way to prove it, unless further evidence shd turn up. John Wain observed (in his
autobiography, SPRIGHTLY RUNNING) that Lewis had a way of making unusual
alliances with fellow Xians on whom he disagreed on many points, such as Roy
Campbell***** If so, Bernard
Acworth would become one of those folks.
--John R.
current reading: THE LORD OF THE RINGS: a
screenplay, by John Boorman; THE BROTHERS CABAL by Jonathan Howard; TOLKIEN IN
PAWNEELAND by Echo-Hawk.
--------------------------------------
*one of his oddest claims is that if you can get
ants to go around in a circle, they'll repeat the circle until they all drop
dead of exhaustion. Given how wrong he is about just about everything else, I
assume he doesn't know what he's talking about here either.
**does he imagine this is what we got in WW I?
***this group is still in existence, though it now
(since 1980) goes under the name Creation Science Movement (CSM)
****although the evening Inklings had ceased by the
time of Acworth's 1951 visit, so only the Tuesday pub meets are a possibility
there.
*****who was Christian but also a pro-fascist,
anti-semite, misogynist, racist, and pathological liar, who liked to hit
people.
2 comments:
Back to the Coal Standard, by Bernard Acworth, is an overlooked masterpiece. He points out the massive subsidisation of the motor industry and highways and the clear economic advantages of railways and trams. The baleful influence of the oil industry was already well entrenched by 1932 and led to the transformation of Los Angeles from a model of urban transportation to a commuter nightmare that set the standard for urban conglomerations globally
Good piece! You might be interested in my own take on the Acworth-Lewis correspondence: https://theotherjournal.com/2013/03/03/the-shift-that-wasnt/
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