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

Clyde Kilby's Collected Essays

So, just before Christmas arrived the new book by the late Clyde Kilby, A WELL OF WONDER: ESSAYS ON C. S. LEWIS,  J. R. R. TOLKIEN, AND THE INKLINGS (ed. Loren Wilkinson & Keith Call; Mount Tabor Books/Paraclete Press 2016). I'd been asked to provide a blurb and had been happy to submit one,* which I'm glad to see they used. Here's  what I said in the blurb:

As the first decades of Inklings scholarship 

recede from living memory, it's good to see 

the papers of an influential critic from that 

period made available again. Kilby is now 

mainly remembered for founding the Wade

Collection, but he was also among the first

to see the Inklings as a coherent writers' group,

and the pieces collected herein make the case

for considering these authors in context

with each other's work. Perhaps the out-

standing piece is his short account of

meeting C. S. Lewis at Oxford in 1953;

published in 1954, this is one of the earliest

memoirs of Lewis to see print, and it's good

for it to see the light of day again after

more than a half-century.

In the current book, this piece appears as Chapter 2: "My First (and Only) Visit with Mr. Lewis", p. 16-19.  The two men met for about half an hour, by appointment, in Lewis's office at Magdalen. Lewis was fifty-four at the time and engaged in compiling the bibliography for his O.H.E.L. volume; he talked about all the exercise he got from lugging folios about and disparaged the idea of naming 'periods' of literature, like "the Renaissance" ("an imaginary entity responsible for everything the modern reader likes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries"). They spoke of Palestine, and Lewis expressed a curiosity over whether the re-establishment of Israel (it having been created as a new nation only six or seven years before) wd mean a rebuilding of the Temple and a restoration of sacrifice.

Questioned about art and Xianity, Lewis pooh-poohed the idea of Christian literature: "He said the same relation existed between Christianity and art as between Christianity and carpentry" -- that is, that a carpenter might be a Xian but this didn't mean that he produced 'Xian carpentry'. Told of Wheaton College's founder's description of a novel as "a well-told lie", he dissented strongly, saying that "one is far more likely to find the truth in a novel than in a newspaper".   They talked a little about the then recently deceased C. E. M. Joad**

Asked when he might come to America, he was emphatic that this cdn't take place before his retirement. As for a specific invitation to come that very summer, he replied "he had to get some vacation then, and a trip to this country [i.e., the US] would be anything but a vacation." He autographed a book for Kilby, somewhat reluctantly (Kilby does not say which one of CSL's bks it was, only that he had brought it with him). When Kilby expressed a wish to hear Lewis lecture, Lewis first said there were no lectures scheduled (presumably the visit took place during one of the breaks between terms) and teased Kilby for being a "professor [who wanted] to hear a lecture while on vacation". They talked a little about metaphor and then Kilby, fearing to overstay his welcome, departed.

In addition to the Lewis piece, the volume also gathers together pretty much all the account of Kilby's meetings with Tolkien that had been originally published in Kilby's little book TOLKIEN AND THE SILMARILLION.*** I haven't gone through and compared to see if all that material is now here, but certainly most of it is, making this essay collection a good place to read an account by someone who had the chance to read virtually all of THE SILMARILLION during Tolkien's lifetime.

There are also a number of essays on Lewis and on Tolkien, largely focusing on Xian aspects or interpretations of their work, as well as an essay apiece on Williams and on Sayers, and at least two on CSL, JRRT, et al being considered together as 'the Oxford Group'

All in all, well worth having on the shelf.  As an extra added bonus, the dust jacket has a nice picture of four Inklings together: Dundas-Grant, Hardie, Havard, and Lewis. It's a well-known piece, but this is the best reproduction of it I've seen, and its presence here is appropriate, given that Kilby was co-author of the book IMAGES OF HIS WORLD, the first to gather together photos of Lewis and his friends.

--John R.



*after all, with the exception of Deborah Sabo I think Kilby and I are the only Tolkien scholars to have been at Fayetteville, Arkansas -- albeit decades apart.

**whom Tolkien once described as 'Joad of Joad Hall', suggesting that his personality bore more than a little resemblance to Kenneth Grahame's Mr. Toad

***herein  titled Chapter 15: "The Evolution of a Friendship and the Writing of The Silmarillion
At thirty-three pages I think this is the most substantial memoir of Tolkien yet published, aside from the FAMILY ALBUM.

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

Larkin's Game of 'Spot the Inkling'

So, it's not particularly well known that Philip Larkin, before he became the great English poet of his generation, had begun his career as a novelist, and only abandoned writing fiction when writer's block made it impossible for him to continue. And it's even less know that, in addition to his two published novels, he left several early unpublished and/or unfinished novels, two of them dating from his time at Oxford. Having just read his 'Oxford novel', WINTER TERM AT ST. BRIDE'S, I was amused to see several Inklings references in it, and thought I'd share.

WINTER TERM AT ST. BRIDE'S (written 1943; published posthumously in 2002) is a sequel to Larkin's TROUBLE AT WILLOW GABLES (ibid.), which had been a deliberate attempt to write a 'girls' school' novel (he even wrote an accompanying essay analyzing the genre). This second attempt follows the adventures of some of the same girls as they arrive at Oxford for their first university experiences. One goes all-in for sports, another spends all her time studying, one blows off all lectures for social events, and so forth (which only goes to show how thoroughly women had become acclimatized to Oxford a mere twenty-odd years since first being admitted as full students).

What's amusing from my point of view is a running motif about a new detective story set in Oxford, Edmund Crispin's THE CASE OF THE GILDED FLY [1944]. Crispin is famous today for another novel in the same series (the fourth, SWAN SONG [1947]) including the line "There goes C. S. Lewis . . .  It must be Tuesday" [p.60] as his detective et al. sit in the front room of the Bird and Baby (so called by Crispin, rather than Eagle and Child). In real life, "Crispin" was a friend of Larkin's named Bruce Montgomery, but  THE CASE OF THE GILDED FLY (the first in the series) had appeared pseudonymously, and Larkin gets a good deal of fun out of the fact that in his novel everyone is speculating about who wrote it and assigning various absurdly inappropriate Oxford luminaries to the role of being hidden behind the pseudonym: Nevill Coghill, Lord David Cecil, and C. S. Lewis prominent among them.


[first excerpt, page 198-199]

"Three coffees," said Margaret to the waitress.

   Marie, Margaret, and Mary were in Elliston's next morning at eleven o'clock. Marie had just come from Blackwell's, where she had bought her daily book; Margaret had been pursuing her own private affairs since breakfast-time; while Mary, strange to say, had only just got up. She felt rather hungry.

   "And buns," she added. "Buns for one — or two," she added, catching Marie's eye. "What's the book, Marie? Looks rather a shocker."

   "It's a detective story," said Marie guiltily, displaying the yellow wrapper. "A new one."

   "The Case of the Gilded Fly?  I don't like Oriental things. I suppose it's full of Chinamen and sliding panels."

   "It may be," Marie answered. "I believe it's rather good," she added dubiously. "By Nevill Coghill, you know."

   "Who's he?"

   "Look here, what's the latest but Hilary?" interposed Margaret . . .   

[second excerpt, pages 215-216; Hilary meets 'Diana's Set'] 

   "Now, let's have a little bright intellectual conversation!" commanded Diana, clapping her hands. "Come on, Pam. Say something intelligent."
   "Are you reading an interesting book?" Hilary asked, looking at the beige-and-grey volume* lying face downwards on the thick carpet. "Who's it by?"
   "Oh, it's Lord David Cecil's book," said Diana carelessly, snatching it up. "The Case of the Gilded Fly, you know. I'm half way through it."
   "Diana dear, I'm sure it's not Lord David," said Pam. "Someone was telling me it was C. S. Lewis."
   "Oh no, dear, not C. S. Lewis. It's obvious that 'Fen' is a caricature of Lewis. Fits him to a T. Horribly malicious."**
   "Surely if it were by Lewis it would be about God," suggested Hilary, cautiously exhaling smoke.
   "If it were about God it would have been in the Daily Mirror first," said Pam. "Anyway, there's no place for God in a detective story."
   "Oh, it's a detective story, is it?" said Diana, frowning at the book with renewed interest.
   "As a matter of fact, I think you're all wrong," said Miriam. "Someone told me yesterday, straight from the horse's mouth, that it was by Lord Berners. But do keep it quiet."
   "Well, that would account for the music bits," agreed Diana. "But do you think it's good enough for Berners?"
   "Heavens, I haven't read it," said Miriam, shrugging her shoulders. "Haven't the ghost of an idea."
   "I expect in the end you'll find it was by Stanley Parker," said Pam . . . 

[*note: we're meant to assume Diana is so incredibly swanky that she even has cheap novels recovered in her favorite colors]

[**i.e., Gervase Fen, Crispin's eccentric-professor detective]

[third excerpt, page 219; one of the characters develops an obsession with belts]

   "I've tried everything. I've been long walks. I've been to the theatre and cinema. I've even read detective stories." Here she waved a despairing hand towards a copy of The Case of the Gilded Fly which lay on the mantelpiece. "But nothing does any good. I'm lost. Nothing can save me now."

[fourth excerpt, page 230]

[Here, things begin to get really weird. One character gets so drunk that she wanders out of the story and briefly encounters characters from the previous story ("Willow Gables"), who explain to her that she's in the current story but they're not; then she strays into real-life, where those present include Montgomery himself:]

. . . near the door, a pale girl with distant eyes and pale-rimmed spectacles laid one hand on the arm of her companion, a severe young man with a walking-stick, and said:

   "But what are you going to call it, Bruce dear?"

   "I shall call it," said the young man in the voice of one who has no doubt, "The Case of the Gilded Fly". The pale girl looked uncertain. "It's from King Lear," he added crossly.

---I admit to not knowing Lord Berners, or what the joke as concerning the Daily Mirror, and the editor himself confesses ignorance as to "Stanley Parker"

---Still, I was fascinated by this little spoof. After all, one of the Inklings DID write detective stories, though under his own name: Charles Williams. And both Coghill and Lewis contributed poetry to Oxford magazines pseudonymously. Lord David Cecil never wrote any fiction at all that I know of, but he was someone Larkins and Kingsley Amis never tired of mocking for his aristocratic speech patterns.

---Larkin, by the way, knew Charles Williams slightly and rather liked him as a drinking companion, though he had a v. low opinion of C.W.'s poetry and found him rather a figure of fun for frequently quoting poetry and always getting it wrong (though, as with Rev. Spooner, the degree to which Williams misquoted may have been exaggerated for effect).

---one more element of the joke: everyone in Larkin's novel (written 1943) is reading Crispin's book, whereas the real book came out in '44 and was probably still being written at the time Larkin's characters were making their speculations about its author.

---I suppose we shd count ourselves lucky that Larkin didn't fix on another of his professors who annoyed him, JRRT, for inclusion in this dubious gallery of faux-detective story writers.

--in any case, an amusing glimpse into Oxford personalities when the Inklings were in full flight.

--John R.

New Lewis Fiction

So, Friday the new issue of VII arrived, containing as its lead article the first publication ever of some early (circa 1927?) fiction by C. S. Lewis, here given the title the "EASLEY FRAGMENT" (THE EASLEY FRAGMENTS wd have been more apt, given that it consists of two disconnected pieces). This is something Lewis scholars have known about for a long time -- three sentences were quoted from it as far back as 1973 -- but it's only now seeing the light of day. It's quite brief: nine pages in Warnie's original transcription in THE LEWIS PAPERS and taking up pages 5-12 & 12-15 in this edition* -- and thus less substantial than, say, THE DARK TOWER (sixty-four Ms pages); more along the lines of AFTER TEN YEARS (fifteen Ms pages and similarly consisting of two disconnected pieces). Even so, I'm impressed with the generosity of the Lewis Estate in allowing this new Lewis story to appear in a scholarly journal rather than, say, in some new edition of complete short fiction by CSL.

As for the piece itself, the first chapter is a first-person account of a Bristol doctor visiting his late father's family in Ulster for the first time not long after the Great War (in which he served in the trenches, while they stayed safe at home wrapped up in their own concerns). Having always taken them at their own evaluation, he learns that they are not at all as they presented themselves in their own guilelessly self-serving accounts in the letters he has occasionally received from them. The fragment breaks off, however, before we actually get to meet them; all we get is a bit of the narrator's background and his long conversation with a self-satisfied cadger of drinks he runs into on the ferry over. So Lewis's "Irish novel" doesn't actually get as far as actually landing in Ireland itself -- though, to be fair, he opens by claiming that 'Belfast' begins at the Liverpool ferry terminal. Lewis's goal is clearly to let unlikeable characters reveal their character flaws through their speech, completely unaware of what a bad light they show themselves in, while the narrator forebears to make comment. Jane Austen cd pull this off; unsurprisingly it turns out the young C. S. Lewis had not mastered the art.

The second fragment is sometime later in the internal chronology of the story and consists of an argument between the doctor and a minister. The doctor's aunt is suffering from a terror of damnation, and the doctor accuses the minister of driving her mad with such nonsense. The minister responds that he considers a concern over salvation or damnation as a sign of mental health, not madness. The scene is not v. interesting as a piece of fiction (too talky; a thin fictional frame for a philosophical debate), but as documentation of Lewis's views it's fascinating. We know that at the time he wrote this,** Lewis was, from all accounts, in agreement with what he presents here as the doctor's point of view (the doctor also resembles young CSL in other ways we need not go into here). And yet we know that within a few years, Lewis had swung around 180 degrees and was fully in agreement with the minister's view. So can this passage be taken as a prefigurement of his shift? Or an example of how totally he switched his deepest held convictions? Or can it be read as occupying some middle ground, a way-station on the path?

The other interesting thing about this fragment is how it fits into the biographical narrative of Lewis as a failed author, which I discuss in my piece on his famous bargain with JRR Tolkien that resulted in THE LOST ROAD, OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, PERELANDRA, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS, and THE DARK TOWER.*** It was through his discovery of A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS and THE PLACE OF THE LION, and through that bargain, that Lewis concluded that genre fiction was the right medium for him, while Tolkien though he made a good-faith effort discovered the opposite was true for him: he had to follow his own, sui generis course. So it's interesting to see CSL here try his hand at a sort of local-color fiction, another genre outside the mainstream of his day.

And with this publication, I think we have pretty much all CSL's significant work now in print, except for his unfinished Morris-ian Arthurian romance THE QUEST OF BLEHERIS (about sixty pages) and his philosophical papers (which really shd be published in conjunction with Barfield's interlocking responses.

--John R.

*between brief headnote, notes, bibliography, and commentary by the editiors (David C. Downing and Bruce R. Johnson), it takes up pages 5-26 of this issue (VII. vol. 28).

**assuming Warnie got the date right, which seems a reasonable enough assumption -- esp. since he was compiling THE LEWIS PAPERS while living w. CSL (as I understand it, they were actually typed in a side-room in Lewis's office at Magdalen), and he cd easily have asked his brother when the work dated from. Were it not for that, I'd have thought it from the early twenties rather than towards the end of the decade.

***cf. my essay appearing in TOLKIEN'S LEGENDARIUM [2000]

Charles Williams' Example for Lewis?

So, despite my not being able to make it to Diana Pavlac-Glyer's talk at the Wade this week

( http://www.wheaton.edu/wadecenter/news/news.html ),

her ongoing work to assert mutual influences between the Inklings came to mind last week while I was working with the Williams papers. I knew Wms was prolific: he usually came out with several books at year he either edited or wrote, along with a slew of articles and reviews and poems. But the checklists and bibliographies I'd seen don't really convey an idea of the sheer mass of material he produced, or just how quickly he worked. The particular piece I was looking at -- preserved in the form of a seven-page typescript -- his personal archivist Raymond Hunt referred to as a 'weekend job', and believed he cd assign to a specific two-day period in which it was written.* The Wade's Wms holdings includes drafts of novels, multiple drafts of many plays, essays, poems, lecture notes, &c. &c. Here's their listing of over four hundred separate Mss and Tss in their collection:

http://www.wheaton.edu/wadecenter/collection/Manuscripts/WilliamsMS.pdf

Now, this got me to thinking. Lewis is also remembered as an epically prolific author, but it's often been remarked as curious that he was very slow in getting started. In the first ten years after he became a don, he published only one significant article and one major book. Plus, of course, he researched and wrote his famous lecture series published posthumously as THE DISCARDED IMAGE. It's sometimes been said that at an American university he probably wd have been denied tenure for such a sparse publication record. But that all changed in the late 30s/early 40s (being away from home I can't consult the bibliographies to narrow down the date), after which he became famously productive, issuing a steady stream of articles and books and letters.

Why the change? Well, in as far as anyone has offered an explanation, it's been that somehow his conversion was responsible -- that converting to Xianity lit a fire under him that never went out, and the speed at which he wrote and published was one aspect of this. How do we know, though, that this isn't a case of post hoc prompter hoc? I'd like to suggest another possible stimulus that I think is equally plausible: what if the example of Charles Williams played a role? One of the strongest influences on a writer is the example of other writers. Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, and Greeves -- the circle of writers the young CSL was most familiar with -- were not particularly productive so far as their publication record went, and often worked on projects for years without getting them published. But Williams, who transferred to Oxford in late 1939 and was in close contact with CSL for the remainder of the war years, wrote quickly and published immediately, exactly as the latter CSL did. I don't think this is the sort of thing that's susceptible to proof, but I'd be interested to see the evidence laid out and see if an interesting pattern may emerge.

--JDR

*Hunt's twenty-volume set of typed transcriptions of Wms' collected works ran to well over three thousand pages -- apparently all in chronological order, as near as he cd get it. Didn't have time this visit, but I'm looking forward to seeing the originals of these next visit.

Two Thoughts from Kalamazoo

So, while at Kalamazoo I got to go to a lot of good talks, and listen to a lot of good discussions -- like Stuart Lee's piece on THE BATTLE OF MALDON, which quoted from unpublished Tolkien material explaining JRRT's intriguing ideas about the OE poem, or Deborah Sabo's, which revealed some fascinating new information about Lake Villages as they were understood and portrayed in Tolkien's time (a subject I wrote on in MR. BAGGINS, but she knows a lot more about it than I do). But oddly enough, looking back on it afterwards, I think the two most striking things that stand out in my memory from all the presentations I went to were two comments made almost in passing.

The first came not in a paper but in the discussion afterwards. I think the comment was made by Amelia Rutledge, following the 'Tolkien & The Bible' session. Trying to distinguish between Tolkien's and Lewis's approach, she said "Tolkien was a Creative Theologian; Lewis was an Apologist". That is, in retrospect Tolkien appears much bolder in proposing new ideas about God and his creation. Lewis, by contrast, was defending current dogma and so devoted much less time and energy into speculation. It's not that his mind was any less creative than Tolkien's, but that he was trying to find new ways for folks to believe in established ideas. I'm not sure the distinction holds, but it's an interesting idea I'm going to be mulling over for a long time to come.

The second came not so much from what the person said as in the juxtaposition that made in my mind with something else I'd been thinking on. Here I think the speaker was Peter Grybauskas who, apropos of something else, observed that in the disasters of 1916 Tolkien was "Left Solitary & Alone -- was that what made him the Writer he became?" (or at least that's how I set it down in my notes; his phrasing may have been somewhat different). I've been thinking about Diana Pavlac's theories of the Inklings as a demonstration of the importance of the impact a writer's group has on an author. But here's a major example of the exact opposite phenomenon: here's it's the writer suddenly being shorn of his writer's group (through the death of two of the other three core members) that provided the impetus for an explosion of creative energy. I think this can be reconciled with Diana's theories fairly easily, but I look forward to hearing her views on this come July.

--JDR

Sound Familiar?

So, not surprisingly, re-acquainting myself with THE FAERIE QUEENE after all these years*, this time as an audiobook, has made me want to go back and read some more about the work as well. I wd have started with C. S. Lewis's SPENSER'S IMAGES OF LIFE, although this posthumous book (put together from Lewis's lecture notes after his death by a friend) didn't do much for me when I first read it. But then that was a decade or so after I'd read the Spenser, so re-reading it immediately after experiencing the poem again might have a different effect. In any case, finding out will have to wait until I have a chance to run up to Suzzallo-Allen library again for another day's work in their wonderful Reading Room, probably sometime next week.

But then I realized I had a better piece of Lewis criticism on Spenser close at hand: the half-a-chapter he devotes to THE FAERIE QUEENE and Spenser's other works in THE OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE: ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, EXCLUDING DRAMA** (surely one of the least appealing titles any major critical work ever struggled under). And I no sooner started looking through it than the following passage struck me.

Lewis here is talking of Spenser's struggles to bring a long, complex, interconnected work to completion, but almost everything he says could, I think, just as easily be applied to Tolkien's epic struggles with The Silmarillion. Since the paragraph quoted (from pages 379-380) is so long, I've broken it up into shorter paragraphs for easier reading:

Spenser did not live to complete the great poem which was his life's work. It would be salutary if instead of talking about the Faerie Queene we sometimes talked of Fragment A ([Books] I-III), Fragment B ([Books] IV-VI) and Fragment C ([The Cantos of] Mutabilitie). This would help to remind us that the inconsistencies we find in it are those of a partially written work. The letter to Raleigh***prefixed to Fragment A gives us, no doubt, the design that was uppermost in Spenser's mind when he wrote that letter. It had not, in its entirety, been in his mind at all stages during the composition of that Fragment. It had been in some degree abandoned when he wrote Fragment C.

There is nothing surprising about this. There is a stage in the invention of any long story at which the outsider would see nothing but chaos. Numerous alternatives, written, half-written, and unwritten (the latter possibly the most influential of all) ferment together. Passages which no longer fit the main scheme are retained because they seem too good to lose; they will be harmonized somehow later on if the author lives to complete his work. Even a final revision often leaves ragged edges; unnoticed by generations of readers but pointed out in the end by professional scholars.

There is a psychological law which makes it harder for the author to detect them than for the scholar. To the scholar an event in fiction is as firm a datum as an event in real life: he did not choose and cannot change it. The author has chosen it and changed it and seen it in its molten condition passing from one shape to another. It has as many rivals for its place in his memory as it had for its place in the final text.

This cause of error is of course aggravated if the story is labyrinthine, as Spenser's was. And it is aggravated still further if his professional duties permit him to work on his story only at rare intervals. Returning to work on an interrupted story is not like returning to work on a scholarly article. Facts, however long the scholar has left them untouched in his notebook, will still prove the same conclusions; he has only to start the engine running again.

But the story is an organism: it goes on surreptitiously growing or decaying while your back is turned. If it decays, the resumption of work is like trying to coax back to life an almost extinguished fire, or to recapture the confidence of a shy animal which you had only partially tamed at your last visit. But if (as is far more probable) it grows, proliferates, 'wantons in its prime', then you will come back to find it

Changed like a garden in the heat of spring

After an eight-days' absence.

Fertile chaos has obliterated the paths . . .

Particularly telling, I think, is the observation about "professional duties permit[ting] him to work on his story only at rare intervals", which was certainly the case for Tolkien. I find Lewis's experience apparently differs greatly from mine on one point in that he asserts it's easy to pick up the thread of an essay that's been set aside for a while; I find it otherwise. Though that might explain Lewis's prolificacy.

In any case, an interesting comment on one author's dilemma that I thought applied equally well to another's.

--John R.

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

*I originally read it in the Variorium Edition, checked out of the college library volume-by-volume, in snatches while working at the Rocket Drive-In. And though I've re-read parts since (Bk I, Bk III, the Cantos of Mutability) I've never re-read the whole.

**the O.H.E.L., or 'O HELL', as Lewis called it.

***think: Letter to Waldman?

C. S. Lewis College

So, thanks to a posting on the MythSoc list today, I learned about plans to launch "C. S. Lewis College" on the campus of what is currently the Northfield Mount Hermon school in Northfield, Massachusetts* -- a place with no CSL connection (but then Wheaton, home of the Wade Center, had no Lewis connection before Kilby started the Center there, and that's worked out really well for everyone concerned). The campus was originally founded back in the 1870s by Dwight Moody (of Moody Bible Institute fame) as a seminary for young women --ironic, given Lewis's contempt for women's higher education. This new venture is a curious joint venture between the C. S. Lewis Institute, run by Stanley Mattson,** and Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma City based arts & crafts store, who are bankrolling the purchase. The college will be non-denominational Xian ("Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants of all kinds") and focus on a 'Great Books' approach (a la Bloom or Adler); they hope to have the college up and running for the Fall 2012 semester.

The main announcement is here (the gravestones you see at the start of the little film turn out to belong to Dwight Moody and his wife):

http://www.cslewiscollege.org/

For more details about their plans for the college, check here:

http://www.cslewiscollege.org/site/documents/CSLewis_12109_FAQ.pdf

And for a nice set of photos of what turns out to be a v. pleasant campus, set alongside the Connecticut River, see here:

http://www.cslewiscollege.org/site/gallery/clsc/gallerycslc1.html

--John R.

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

*Northfield is in north-central Massachusetts, not far from the fictional Dunwich.

**the same people who own the Kilns, CSL's old home outside of Oxford, which they run as a sort of Xian boarding house; for more on the C. S. Lewis Institute & their work, see http://www.cslewis.org/

A Fragment, Detached

So, last month I mused over some comments C. S. Lewis made about THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS in a 1958 letter, during the course of which he said

[CSL:] "THE HOBBIT is merely a fragment of his myth, detached, and adapted for children, and losing much by the adaptation."

The significance of this, I argued, was its revealing that CSL felt that

[JDR:] "THE HOBBIT originated as part of the legendarium, not as an independent work later incorporated within it. And this from the point of view of someone who read Silmarillion texts before reading THE HOBBIT as well as the first person outside the immediate family to read THE HOBBIT as soon as Tolkien finished it. A good witness to have on the side of those of us who emphasize THE HOBBIT's connections to the legendarium versus those who stress the stand-alone nature of the work."

The next day, I got a comment which asked

['Ardamir':] "Of course THE HOBBIT, as it stands today, is 'merely a fragment of his myth, detached'. But I am not sure if the statement tells us anything about the thoughts C. S. Lewis would have had about it when it was in the early stages of composition. Would you care to elaborate a bit why you think this is a comment 'that THE HOBBIT originated as part of the legendarium, not as an independent work later incorporated within it?"

In the hurry of getting ready for my Wheaton trip, I didn't have time to revisit this, but would like to do so now.

It essentially comes down to Lewis's word choice. A 'fragment' might just be an unfinished work, like Tolkien's LOST ROAD or Lewis's own DARK TOWER. But a work would only be described as 'detached' if it was once part of a whole and has now been removed from its original context, like a leaf torn out of a book. Taken together with 'adapted . . . and losing much by the adaptation', it's clear that Lewis felt THE HOBBIT was essentially part of the legendarium in inception, rather than an add-on or later addition.

This is borne out by another piece by Lewis, the TIMES obituary,* one passage from which reads

"Thus the private language and its offshoot, the private mythology, were directly connected with some of the most highly practical results he achieved [in scholarship and in academia], while they continued in private to burgeon into tales and poems which seldom reached print, though they might have won him fame in almost any period but the twentieth century.

"THE HOBBIT (1937) was in origin a fragment from this cycle adapted for juvenile tastes but with one all important novelty, the Hobbits themselves . . .

"They soon demanded to be united with his heroic myth on a far deeper level than THE HOBBIT had allowed, and by 1936 he was at work on his great romance THE LORD OF THE RINGS, published in three volumes . . . "

If anything, the use of 'from' rather than 'of' strengthens the case. So, from both these statements, I put Lewis down firmly in the Hobbit-originated-as-part-of-the-legendarium school. A well-informed witness to help bolster that case, though of course not the last word.

--John R.

*I have taken my text here from that reprinted as the first item in Salu & Farrell's memorial festschrift, TOLKIEN: SCHOLAR AND STORYTELLER [1979], page 14; emphasis mine.

More Revealing Than He Realized?

So, this may be a case of 'too much information'.

This morning I had to look something up in C. S. Lewis's autobiography, SURPRISED BY JOY, which I haven't read all the way through in a while. I was struck, and not in a good way, by the following passage:

". . . in the hive and the anthill we see fully realized the two things that some of us most dread for our own species -- the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective" (CSL, SURPRISED BY JOY: THE SHAPE OF MY EARLY LIFE, pages 8-9; emphasis mine).

That Lewis includes himself ("us") and uses the present tense, I have to conclude that this was still his position in his late fifties, after he'd written TILL WE HAVE FACES and less than a decade before his death --either just before or more likely between his two marriages to Joy Gresham. I know I've seen several attempt to defend Lewis against charges of misogyny, but this particular example seems particularly egregious to me.*


One other passage, a little earlier in the same paragraph, is of interest for another reason. Here's how Lewis describes the nightmares brought on by his childhood fear of ghost and phobia about insects:

"My bad dreams were of two kinds, those about spectres and those about insects. The second were, beyond comparison, the worse; to this day I would rather meet a ghost than a tarantula. And to this day I could almost find it in my heart to rationalize and justify my phobia" (SURPRISED BY JOY, page 8; emphasis mine).

If we were to grant Diana Pavlac-Glyer's argument that (1) Tolkien's having Lewis to read aloud chapters of THE LORD OF THE RINGS to as he wrote them (2) must therefore have influenced what Tolkien wrote to take Lewis's likes and dislikes into account, then (3) it could be argued that scenes such as The Paths of the Dead and especially Shelob's Lair must have had quite an impact on CSL. Interesting.


In any case, the 'dominance of the collective' passage in the first quote above works very well as a gloss on THE DARK TOWER, where it finds vivid expression in the sinister world of the Stingermen seen through the chronoscope, where ordinary folk are subjugated to a sort of group mind when they are turned into the Jerkies. And the 'dominance of the female' might tie in to Hooper's guess that the aggressive, assertive Camilla of our world might turn out to have been a changeling for the passive, submissive Camilla that Scudamour meets in the otherworld, both of whom, in the end, might wind up exchanged to their proper worlds. Again, interesting.



--John R.



*though not as bad as his description of one of his students, to whom he owed his discovery of E. R. Eddison's work, as "som poore seely wench that seeketh a B.Litt or a D.Phill, when God knows shad a better bestowed her tyme makynge sport for some goodman in his bed and bearing children for the stablishment of this reaulme or els to be at her beads in a religyous house" (CSL, writing to ERE in pseudo-middle english, letter of November 16th 1942; COLLECTED LETTERS, Vol. II, page 535).

An Unwritten Book

So, we've known for a long time* that Tolkien and Lewis once thought of collaborating on a book about language ("Nature, Origins, Functions"), called at one point LANGUAGE AND HUMAN NATURE. The two men first came up with the idea in late 1944, at the same time that Tolkien was starting up THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS and Lewis began (or at least came up with the idea for) THE DARK TOWER (cf. JRRT's 18 December 1944 letter to Christopher, which discusses all three works; LETTERS p. 105) and abandoned the project around the beginning of 1950 -- or at any rate that is when Lewis gave up on it (see Lewis's letter of January 12th 1950, published in COLLECTED LETTERS Vol. III pages 5-6). Blame for the project's floundering, or rather for its never getting off the ground, has by all commentators been laid entirely at JRRT's door, because Lewis implies in his 1950 letter that it was all Tolkien's fault. I've always had a suspicion, which I now find is widely shared, that Lewis's late book STUDIES IN WORDS, which from what little I've read of it seems thoroughly Barfieldian in approach, was Lewis's attempt to write up the project on his own, just as THE DARK TOWER can be seen as his giving up on Tolkien's writing a time-travel story to match his own space-travel story OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, as per their original bargain back in the spring of 1936. I've also attributed Tolkien's hostility to STUDIES IN WORDS ("ponderous silliness"—cf. JRRT's 12 Sept 1960 letter to CT; LETTERS p. 302) to the same source; nothing aroused his ire so much as something than ran close to something he was interested in writing himself, or actually had written -- witness his distaste for Charles Williams' Arthurian poems, which he did not discover until some time after writing his own Arthurian work (the still-unpublished THE FALL OF ARTHUR).

So, as I said I've always assumed that STUDIES IN WORDS was as close to 'LANGUAGE AND HUMAN NATURE' as we were ever going to get, and not particularly close at that, as Tolkien's criticism of that work shows.

Turns out I was wrong. Because, as I learned this week from reading Jason Fisher's blog, a researcher from Texas is claiming that he's found a draft of a fragment of this work in the Bodleian, in a notebook containing various odds and ends by Lewis. According to the following piece, which I found by following the link on Jason's site (http://www.txstate.edu/news/news_releases/news_archive/2009/07/CSLewis070809.html), Professor Beebe, the Chairman of the Dept. of Communication Studies at Texas State, has an article describing the discovery in the next volume of VII, and negotiations are now underway with the Lewis Estate to publish the fragment itself -- no doubt with added editorial material recounting what little is known about the project, the story of the fragment's re-discovery, and a placing of what Lewis says in it in context with his other works. This is something I very much look forward to, both Beebe's essay and the eventual publication of the original piece.

In any case, here's Jason's original post announcing the discovery:

http://lingwe.blogspot.com/2009/07/tolkien-studies-6-has-arrived.html


and here's his thoughtful follow-up discussion of its possible ramifications:

http://lingwe.blogspot.com/2009/07/lewistolkien-collaboration-that-might.html

--if you follow this link, be sure to read the comments as well, in the first of which Beebe himself elaborates a bit about his forthcoming article in VII. Well done, Jason, for discovering and spreading the news.

--JDR
current audiobook: THE LOST CITY OF Z by David Grann






*I first learned about it in LETTERS OF JRRT in 1981, though apparently first public mention of it had come in Chad Walsh's book on Lewis in 1949.

Scholarship During Wartime

So, the latest issue of BEYOND BREE has a brief mention, in a letter to the editor from Dale Nelson, of a TLS review of a new book called PRINT FOR VICTORY: BOOK PUBLISHING IN ENGLAND, 1939-1945, by Valerie Holman. According to the review, during World War II England and Germany came to an agreement whereby prisoners of war were allowed to take their university exams while in prison camps. In order for them to study, "an international inter-library loan system was organized from the Bodleian Library, using Basil Blackwell's book-dump in Geneva. Two Oxford dons, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, devised -- and marked -- an English Honours degree for 'kriegies' behind the wire".

We already knew JRRT undertook a huge amount of war-work with cadets on accelerated courses prior to their being deployed, and that he organized Lewis, Coghill, Williams, and others as his deputies to do a lot of the lecturing and paper-marking this involved. But this additional program is news to me.

Can this possibly be true -- that the war powers were able to behave with that level of civilized decency in the middle of wartime (1941, to be specific)? I have to admit I know little about what life was actually like in WWII prisoner of war camps aside from Wodehouse's experience, which was anomalous (since he was a civilian caught up in the fall of Paris, not an enemy combatant). I know there was a work camp near Magnolia Arkansas, at least near the end of the war, where German prisoners of war were kept when not working (in chain gangs, I think) on road projects and the like, but I have no idea what their working conditions were like.

Like Nelson, I hope we'll be finding out more about this.

--JDR

A Proto-Inklings?

So, when I recently mentioned Tolkien and Lewis listening to Wagner together, I was operating off of memory. Going back now and looking it up, I see that I mixed together two separate events, the first of which was Lewis's early interest in Wagner, which included his listening to Wagner on gramophone records (i.e., 78rpms) back in 1912 (Hooper & Green, p.32). The second, and more interesting, is the Lewis-Tolkien-Warnie session of early 1934 which seems to me one of the rare glimpses into the interim steps in what turned out to be the coalescence of the Inklings -- or at least one thread of what came to be The Inklings (Lean's Inklings Club and Tolkien's Coalbiters being two others which played their part).

According to Carpenter's account in THE INKLINGS, as well as the passages from Warnie's diary he based this on, December 1933 found Warnie, who had retired and moved into the Kilns about a year before,* complaining about Tolkien intruding into his quality time with his brother ("Confound Tolkien! I seem to see less and less of J[ack] every day"**). Accordingly, as Carpenter puts it, "Knowing Warnie's feelings, Jack took a great deal of trouble not to leave his brother out of anything and, when Tolkien and he decided to spend an evening reading aloud the libretto of Wagner's Die Walkure, Warnie was asked to join them even though he knew no German and could only take part by using an English translation." (THE INKLINGS pages 55-56).

This is obviously directly based on the March 24th and 26th entries in Warnie's diary, the first of which reads "J and I have been for some time intending to ask Tolkien to dinner with us at the Eastgate and to read the Walkure in J's rooms afterwards."*** The event itself is described in terms which sound v. like Warnie's later write-ups of Inklings evenings: "Tolkien, J, and I met by appointment in College at four o'clock to read the Valkyrie . . . When we had had some tea we started on the play, I reading in English and T and J in German. I think our English version must be the acting version, for it fits the German syllable by syllable -- as a result it was I found very easy to follow the others' parts: I did not need prompting more than a couple times. Coming to it with the idea of an opera libretto in my mind, I got a very agreeable surprise. Even in this rather doggerel version it remains a fine play. We knocked off soon after six and T went home, meeting us again at the Eastgate where we had fried fish and a savoury omlette . . . We then returned to J's rooms and finished our play (and incidentally the best part of a decanter of very inferior whiskey). Arising out of the perplexities of Wotan we had a long and interesting discussion on religion which lasted until about half past eleven when the car called for us. A very enjoyable day."****

I think Carpenter is probably right here, and that by bringing Warnie into what had been their two-man meetings, Tolkien & Lewis essentially had the core of the group established but without the group itself. The timing is key: 'Humphrey' Havard told me that he'd joined the group shortly after his move to Oxford in 1934, and subsequent research bears out the timing of Havard's arrival on the scene and his incorporation into CSL's circle of friends. Among the other early members -- Coghill, Fox, and probably Wrenn -- Havard proved the one who stuck with the group longest, longer than Tolkien himself. More importantly, adding a non-academic like Havard***** would have helped prevent Warnie -- himself a gifted self-taught historian -- from being the odd man out among a gathering of dons.

So, one more piece in the puzzle, to help us get a better glimpse at the overall picture.

--JDR


*Brothers & Friends, p. 95 (entry for Dec. 21st 1932).

**Brothers & Friends, p. 127 (entry for Dec. 4th 1933).

***Brothers & Friends, p. 144 (entry for March 24th 1934). Interestingly enough, this entry reveals that Mrs. Moore had suggested the men meet on a Tuesday ("from her point of view Tuesday would be the best day for us to do it") but that the Tolkiens had other plans, suggesting that the selection of Tuesday as one of the two Inkling meeting days might have been Janie Moore's contribution to the group.

****Brothers & Friends, p. 145-146 (entry for March 26th 1934).

*****Though it's good to remember that Havard, while not an academic, was a learned man, with a background in biochemistry; he was later to spend much of WW II doing medical research to help protect British troops from tropical diseases.