The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (52 page)

This Paradise roofed by a golden sky is indeed a world to be sensed and tasted—a swooning landscape of islands floating on a sweet-water green-gold ocean, lush vegetation, bubble-trees that drench body and soul, and great clusters of fruit that fall into the hand, so delicious that “for one draught of this on earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed.” Remembering what he learned on Malacandra
,
Ransom resists the temptation to reach for more of this ecstatic refreshment. The “itch to have things over again … was it possibly the root of all evil?” After a reassuringly comical first encounter with a sentient being, a small dragon that likes to have its belly stroked, Ransom meets the Green Lady, who is queen of the realm, newly created by Maleldil and green in every sense of the word. She is naked, innocent, as spontaneous as the floating islands on which she dwells; they undulate freely to every wave Maleldil sends, while she absorbs whatever He desires her to know. Ransom and the Green Lady converse in Old Solar, and the dialogue prospers—until interrupted by the arrival of Weston, armed with gun and provisions.

No longer the positivistic scientist with imperialistic designs on other planets, Weston has embraced the philosophy of the Life Force, worshipped as a “blind, inarticulate purposiveness thrusting its way upward and ever upward.” This new, spiritual Weston is a great deal worse than the old materialist Weston; he is so committed to serving the Life Force that he invites that most spiritual of beings, the Devil, to take up residence within him, to the ruin of his personality and selfhood. His transformation into the “Unman” is, one reviewer wrote, “the most terrifying and convincing instance of diabolical possession in English letters since Benson’s
The Necromancers.
” Foregoing sleep, the Unman makes a relentless verbal assault on the innocence of the Green Lady, interrupted only by vacant interludes spent eviscerating small frogs, urging her to disobey a seemingly arbitrary divine command against sleeping on the Fixed Land.

Ransom counters with the case for obedience, speaking of the joy of surrendering one’s own will; the Unman presses the paradox that to disobey will be to give up her
deepest
will. The debate continues until Ransom realizes that the contest will not be won with words; he must fight the Unman physically, to the death, just as “far away on Earth … men were at war, and whitefaced subalterns and freckled corporals who had but lately begun to shave, stood in horrible gaps or crawled forward in deadly darkness, awaking, like him, to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions.” Battle ensues, Perelandra is saved, and the Oyarsas of Malacandra and Perelandra descend in an operatic finale to crown the queen and her king (largely absent from the narrative) in a scene whose bridal mysticism owes much to Charles Williams’s Way of Affirmation.

To some readers, the conclusion of
Perelandra
was over the top; others felt that Lewis had produced “an inspired litany of love and homage” on the level of Dante. The poet Ruth Pitter (whose friendship with Lewis is discussed below) was so taken with the ending that she transcribed it into “irregular Spenserian stanzas” in order to memorize it. Alistair Cooke, by contrast, found the reverence for chastity so galling that he could only assume that Lewis’s “secret fear that unchastity is the best pleasure” was its real subtext: “It is at this point that an earthly book-reviewer must uncross his gross legs and tiptoe out, leaving Mr. Lewis to the absorbed serenity of his dreams.” This seems an eccentric—or deliberately provocative—reading of a book so full of delight in unfallen sensuality that one feels at times that one is bathing nude along with Lewis in Parson’s Pleasure.

Lewis justly regarded
Perelandra
as his best book to date and was overjoyed to hear from readers who understood it. In this novel, more completely than in any of his other works, all the Lewises—the literary scholar, the philosopher, the moral psychologist, the satirist, the critic, the fantasist, the evangelist—are present and working in harmony. On the cover of
The Saturday Review of Literature
for April 8, 1944, a wood engraving by the well-known portraitist Frances O’Brien Garfield shows a dreamy, contemplative Lewis set against a backdrop of stars, planets, and a hieratic dragon, with the caption “C. S. Lewis has gone down again into his bottomless well of imagination for a captivating myth.” The portrait is a poor likeness, but the caption is correct.

A Kingdom Hidden in the Heart of Britain

By the time
Perelandra
appeared in 1943, a sequel,
That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups
, was almost ready for the printers, thus bringing to completion the
commedia
that began on a spaceship headed for Mars. The title came from a verse about the Tower of Babel (“the schaddow of that hidduous strenth”) by one of Lewis’s
OHEL
figures, the sixteenth-century Scottish poet Sir David Lyndsay. During a time “vaguely ‘after the war,’” the Shadow looms over a small university town in the English Midlands, as an academic squabble becomes a full-scale engagement with powers and principalities. Upon this stage, Lewis unfolds a broadly satirical supernatural tale that packs in the multitudinous moral and social concerns he had addressed in
The Abolition of Man
and in his controversial essays of the postwar years: the miseducation of young minds; the evils of eugenics, vivisection, social engineering, “humane” rehabilitation of misfits, and police-state propaganda; the encroachment on the humanities of the fetish for “research” and practical results; the nature of true fellowship; and the value of hierarchy. Barfield’s observation about Lewis that “somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything” is amply confirmed.

At the same time,
That Hideous Strength
is the Lewis novel most clearly indebted to Charles Williams: the Arthurian themes, the esoteric Christianity, and the mundane setting all testify to Lewis’s fascination with his visionary friend. Readers expecting another planetary romance were puzzled and even offended by what seemed an indiscriminate blending of realism with science-fantasy. But Lewis was attempting a third kind of novel altogether, in which, as he explains while writing of Williams’s works, there is a “violation of frontier” and the everyday world finds itself “invaded by the marvellous.”

Ransom has changed; his spiritual transformation complete, he has become director of a small company reminiscent of Williams’s Companions of the Co-inherence and a figure of Arthurian legend. The bleeding heel at the end of
Perelandra
had already signaled his identification with the Fisher King. Now an even greater mystery is revealed: he is none other than the Pendragon, successor to King Arthur and sovereign over all that remains of the Arthurian kingdom of Logres, the true, spiritual England that lies buried in the heart of Britain and haunts its history. Ransom remains offstage for the most part, as the action centers on two parallel tales of temptation and conversion: that of Jane Studdock, a would-be scholar with an unfinished doctoral thesis on Donne’s “triumphant vindication of the body,” and her husband, Mark, a fellow in sociology at venerable Bracton College, founded in 1300 near an ancient walled woodland (Bragdon Wood) at whose center, paved in Roman-British masonry, is “Merlin’s well.” Despite the setting, Bracton College is a modern institution, increasingly in the hands of the “Progressive Element” who hold the key to Mark’s advancement.

In sketching Mark Studdock’s character, Lewis traces the process by which the desire to belong to the “Inner Ring” (as Lewis called it in a 1944 address to undergraduates at King’s College, London) gradually chokes out other interests. The desire for the Inner Ring, Lewis maintained, is “one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action,” a temptation more insidious than ambition or lust, more “skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things,” more liable to take over one’s personality. “Unless you take measures to prevent it,” Lewis warned the students in his audience (who might have hoped to hear a pep talk rather than a jeremiad), “this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care.”

Mark lacks the resources to hold this desire in check. Thrilled to hear himself included in the “we” of the Progressive Element, he allows himself to be manipulated by Lord Feverstone, a fellow of the college, who turns out to be Weston’s former business partner Dick Devine, now come up in the world. Lord Feverstone recruits Mark for the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (NICE), a social-engineering think tank with plans “to make man a really efficient animal.” NICE’s eventual aim, as Mark learns too late—here the novel departs from Orwellian political satire into Lovecraftian fantasy—is to place humanity under the control of hyperintelligent Macrobes (the fallen
eldila
), who communicate by means of the organization’s Head—the severed head of an executed murderer, kept alive in the lab.

The Head in a vat was a macabre joke on Lewis’s part, but he was convinced that scientists were on the point of creating monstrosities no less chilling. “It is commonly done with cats’ heads in Oxford laboratories,” Lewis told the poet Herbert Palmer, “and was really tried (unsuccessfully) on a human head in Germany. One can hardly satirise these people—the reality is always more incredible than what one invents.”

Mark is also wanted because NICE has its eye on his wife, who is troubled by clairvoyant dreams. This is Lewis’s first novel in which the hero is a woman, and in highlighting her flaws as well as her virtues, he offended some feminist readers. Jane “wasn’t meant to illustrate the problem of the married woman and her own career in general,” he assured the Harwoods; “rather the problem of everyone who follows an
imagined
vocation at the expense of a real one.” Like Ransom in the first pages of
Out of the Silent Planet
, like the fictional Lewis in the first pages of
Perelandra
, and like Lewis himself, as he tells us in
Surprised by Joy
, Jane wishes above all else to do her academic work and fears above all else to be “drawn in.”

Jane
is
drawn in, of course, for she has a vital role to play; increasingly disturbed by her dreams, she finds refuge in a manor house where she joins Ransom’s motley company, including an Arthurian scholar, a housemaid, the skeptical Ulster Scot MacPhee (called McPhee in
Perelandra
, modeled on Kirkpatrick), and Mr. Bultitude, last of the seven bears of Logres, who is, according to Tolkien, a good likeness of Lewis himself. The prophet Merlin Ambrosius, who has been sleeping in the barrow beneath Bragdon Wood since the fifth century, awakens and joins their ranks; though a Christian, he is permitted to use magical means to battle evil because he represents—in a Barfieldian note—“the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused.” The reign of Belbury, like that of Babel, collapses in a confusion of tongues; the liberated laboratory animals find love; the Studdock marriage is healed; and the Head and its followers meet their end in a d
é
nouement Orwell found “so preposterous that it does not even succeed in being horrible in spite of much bloodshed.” As in
Perelandra
, there is a festal conclusion; the planetary deities descend in a joyous tumult; “opera-bouffe,” Barfield called it.

That Hideous Strength
bears a dedication to Janie McNeil, an old family friend from Belfast. Unfortunately, she hated the book: “I wish he’d dedicated any book other than this to me!” She was not alone in her disdain. Lewis told Sayers that the book “has got a more unanimous chorus of unfavourable reviews than any book I can remember. Apparently reviewers
will not
tolerate a mixture of the realistic and the supernatural. Which is a pity, because (a) It’s just the mixture I like, and (b) We have to put up with it in real life.” A little later, after more reviews came out, he told Sister Penelope, “
That Hideous Strength
has been unanimously damned by all reviewers.” Lewis himself had had doubts about the book while writing it, telling Eddison in April 1943, “I have just read through what is already written (about 300 sheets) and come to the uncomfortable conclusion that it is all rubbish. Has this ever happened to you?” In May, he was still struggling, telling Barfield that “the novel at present in progress is bosh,” while in an illustrated Christmas 1944 letter to his godson Laurence Harwood, he reported, “I’m writing a story with a Bear in it [a little drawing of the bear is in the margin] and at present the Bear is going to get married in the last chapter. There are also Angels in it. But sometimes I don’t think it is going to be very good.”

We are not obliged to agree. Though each volume of the Space Trilogy is markedly different in style and theme, the whole possesses a mythopoeic unity that lends strength and beauty to each part. The trilogy begins with an invasion of unfallen worlds by wicked men and ends with an invasion of our fallen world by planetary angels. Souls are continually in motion, ascending to ultimate happiness in the beatific vision or descending to ultimate despair: the “miserific vision.” Taken as a whole, the trilogy’s portrait of salvation and damnation was Lewis’s most ambitious attempt before Narnia to write a convincing theological anthropology and recover a sacramental cosmos in which moderns could live.

Critics at War

In the years from 1939 to 1945, Lewis became the leading Christian voice (popes aside) of the twentieth century and did much of his best work in mythopoeic fantasy and moral satire. In addition, he flourished as a historian of medieval and Renaissance poetry and prose and as a defender of the traditional English canon. Was he, then, a literary critic? Not exactly; the very idea of criticism and of “theory” made him uncomfortable. Nonetheless, as in the case of
Paradise Lost
, there were critical controversies that Lewis couldn’t resist, for they had implications for the future not only of university education but of Christian culture.