From the beginning of his academic career Lewis specialized – if he, who was so omnivorous, specialized in anything – in English literature, drama apart, from Middle English to Milton. The Allegory of Love (1936), his most famous and enduring work of scholarship, which won him the Israel Gollancz Award, set him on the path that he was to follow most successfully, and made natural and obvious the series of lectures, the ‘Prolegomena to Medieval and Renaissance Literature’, distilled at the end of his life into The Discarded Image.
Although he wrote most of his fiction almost straight off with scarcely a correction and only occasional rewriting, Lewis worked over his academic books in several versions. Most were given first as lectures, and then, after they had been polished and refined by repetition, they were rewritten as books. Even published lectures were often tried out at Oxford before being given to a wider audience, as in the case of ‘Hamlet, the Prince or the Poem?’ which was delivered in the Schools at Oxford on 14 October 1938, before becoming the Annual Shakespeare Lecture to the British Academy on 22 April 1942 and being published in August of that year. (The original lecture was one of a weekly series on various aspects of Shakespeare given throughout the Michaelmas Term 1938, the other lecturers being Hugo Dyson, Ethel Seaton, Nevill Coghill, L. Rice-Oxley and J.N. Bryson: Lascelles Abercrombie, due to lecture on 28 October, died suddenly the previous night.)
A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ also originated in a series of eleven lectures given at Oxford during Michaelmas Term 1939, before being delivered as the Ballard Matthews Lectures at the University College of North Wales in Bangor in 1941 and published, revised and enlarged, in 1942. The earlier part of this book, dealing with Primary and Secondary Epic in general, and giving Lewis’s own theory and conception of poetry, is one of his finest achievements as a literary critic. The high place which the book as a whole will always hold in Milton studies has often been acknowledged; but a hitherto unpublished estimate from one of the greater Georgian poets, twenty-five years Lewis’s senior, will set the book more clearly in its literary, as contrasted with its scholarly, place. Deeply impressed on first reading – as on numerous subsequent readings – Green sent a copy to Gordon Bottomley, who replied on 2 March 1944:
This book of C.S. Lewis on Paradise Lost has given me more and deeper pleasure than any book I have read for a very long time. Partly on account of his true vision of Milton; but not all. Greatly also for his luminous exposition of the nature of poetry: nothing has been written since Shelley (at least) which so exhibits the nature of poetry as the first half of this book does, and so disentangles the errors in the contemporary confusion about it. If the book could be bound up with Bridges’ Milton’s Prosody, the whole would be the best handbook to put into the hands of young poets that anyone could conceive …
And perhaps most of all I admire Lewis’s diagnosis of the disease of originality, and the way in which he shows that all our generations have the same fundamentals and need to recognize them. O, a joy and a jewel of a book.
Bottomley goes on to put his finger on one of Lewis’s few outstanding critical blind spots: his inability to appreciate spoken poetry (dramatic or otherwise):
Throughout the book I only disagreed once – about the distinction he draws between the poetry that is to be seen, and the poetry that is to be heard – i.e. that which is read in the study, and that which is spoken. I believe this to be an unreal distinction; for (as I have often said) the sound of poetry is part of its meaning. This was borne out, and made clear to everyone present, at Masefield’s ‘Oxford Recitations’, where we explored the possibilities thoroughly, and were surprised when the speaking of pieces by Donne in his most corrugated moments suddenly clarified both meaning and intention, and turned to beauty. Another astonishment was the beauty of sound in Hopkins’ ‘Golden and Leaden Echo’.
When Lewis began to write fiction, much of the inspiration was set moving by the academic studies on which he was engaged or which were still fresh in his mind. Perelandra was obviously the result of his concentration on Paradise Lost between 1939 and 1942; the spark that set Out of the Silent Planet on its course into the ‘Field of Arbol’ we know to have been due in part to the ‘joint project’ conceived with J.R.R. Tolkien and mentioned in the preceding chapter. But another clue is to be found in The Allegory of Love, published in 1936 and followed by a second edition ‘with corrections’ in 1938, the year in which Out of the Silent Planet was published.
The original edition of The Allegory of Love contains an appendix entitled ‘Genius and Genius’ which begins: ‘The significance of the being called Genius in ancient, medieval, and renaissance literature escapes a modern reader.’1 His first example comes from The City of God (VII: 13) of St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) where he distinguishes between the two meanings given to the conception of a ‘Genius’ in medieval thought. Lewis calls them Genius A, which means ‘the universal god of generation’, and Genius B, which means the ‘tutelary spirit, or “external soul”, of an individual man’. He goes on to point out that, while there are as many Genii B as there are men, it is Genius A – the universal god of generation – ‘who dominated medieval poetry’. As an illustration of Genius A, Lewis quotes De Mundi Universitate of Bernardus Sylvestris2 (c. 1140 AD), the relevant part of which runs:
Illic Oyarses quidem erat et genius in artem et officium pictoris et figurantis addictus. In subteriacente enim mundo rerum facies universa caelum sequitur sumptisque de caelo proprietatibus ad imaginem quam conversio contulit figuratur. Namque impossibile est formam unam quamque alteri simillimam nasci horarum et climatum distantibus punctis. Oyarses igitur circuli quem pantomorphon Graecia, Latinitas nominat omniformem, formas rebus omnes omnibus et associat et ascribit.3
In The ‘Cosmographia’ of Bernardus Silvestris, translated by Winthrop Wetherbee (1973), this passage is translated:
For the Usiarch here was that Genius devoted to the art and office of delineating and giving shape to the forms of things. For the whole appearance of things in the subordinate universe conforms to the heavens, whence it assumes its characteristics, and it is shaped to whatever image the motion of the heavens imparts. For it is impossible that one form should be born identical with another at points separate in time and place. And so the Usiarch of that sphere which is called in Greek Pantomorphos, and in Latin Omniformis, composes and assigns the forms of all creatures.4
Lewis goes on in this appendix to say: ‘This is the fullest description I have yet quoted of Genius A … The name Oyarses, as Professor C.C.J. Webb has pointed out to me, must be a corruption of oυσιaρχηs;* and he has kindly drawn my attention to Pseudo Apuleius Asclepius (XIX) where the Ousiarch of the fixed stars is certainly Genius A.’5
This passage is echoed in chapter 22 of Out of the Silent Planet: ‘I asked C.J. about it and he says it ought to be Ousiarches …’ Remarkably, the actual letter from C.C.J. Webb (1865–1954) – Professor of Philosophy of Christian Religion at Oxford from 1920 to 1930 – was tucked into Lewis’s copy of De Mundi Universitate. It is dated 31 October 1931, so we know Lewis’s interest goes back a long way.
The point is that in the background of Out of the Silent Planet is the medieval conception of the planets as containing or embodying some reflection of the classical deities – Intelligences or tutelary spirits – the mythological-cum-astrological personifications of Saturn and Jupiter, of Mars and Venus and Mercury about which Lewis was lecturing in his ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Literature’. Bernardus Sylvestris provided Lewis with something ideal for his purpose. The Oyarses (plural Oyéresu) was transformed from a ‘ruling essence’ and a ‘Genius devoted to the art and office of delineating and giving shape to the forms of things’ to something like an archangel presiding over a planet. ‘The Oyéresu’, Lewis said in That Hideous Strength, ‘aren’t exactly angels in the same sense as our guardian angels are. Technically they are Intelligences.’6 The Oyéresu or Intelligences were to appear with particularly magnificent effect in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, but before that we were to meet the first of them in Out of the Silent Planet.
Apart from the fact that Tolkien and Lewis were planning a joint project in which each would write a myth disguised as a thriller, there is no further record of how Lewis came to write Out of the Silent Planet. He had always been interested in science fiction, had enjoyed Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as a boy, had sampled Edgar Rice Burroughs, but apparently been bored by what he read and not ventured far into Barsoom, and more recently had turned back to the ancient and medieval journeys into other worlds. He, of course, knew his Lucian, but was more influenced by the Somnium Scipionis and by the celestial journeys of Kepler and Kircher, and in certain ways by the more numinous travels of Dante and even the merely marvellous in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.
But what seems to have moved Lewis to embark into the realms of interplanetary fiction is best described in a card he wrote to Green (then unknown to him except as the undergraduate who lent him his watch at lectures) on 28 December 1938 in answer to a ‘fan’ letter following a first delighted reading of Out of the Silent Planet:
What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men [1931] and an essay in J.B.S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds [1927], both of which seemed to take the idea of such travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook which I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary idea as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) point of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side. I think Wells’s First Men in the Moon the best of the sort I have read. I once tried a Burroughs in a magazine and disliked it … I guessed who you were as soon as you mentioned the lecture. I did mention in it, I think, Kircher’s Iter Celeste, but there is no translation, and it is not very interesting. There is also Voltaire’s Micromégas but purely satiric.7
As he explained in the prefatory note to Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis spoke slightingly of Wells only ‘for dramatic purposes’ and was indeed always ready to defend The First Men in the Moon. When thanking Green on 17 November 1957 for a copy of his Into Other Worlds: Space-Flight in Fiction from Lucian to Lewis (1957), he wrote:
What a lot there is in it, and how much I didn’t know! The Lunar Hoax interested me especially, not primarily as a hoax, though that is good fun too, but because some of it is really the best invention and description of extra-terrestrial landscape (the animals are less good), before The First Men in the Moon. I think you are hard on Wells. Obviously he touches off something in you which he didn’t in me. I still think that a very good book indeed and don’t dislike the Selenites themselves as much as you do.8
After which it is almost unnecessary to deny the completely unfounded statement that Wells ‘served as a model’9 for Jules in That Hideous Strength: Lewis never met Wells, nor corresponded with him, nor knew him in any way except by his books – and he only cared for the early scientific romances written before Wells ‘sold his birthright for a pot of message’.
‘The real father of my planet books is David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus,’ he wrote to Charles A. Brady on 29 October 1944. ‘I had grown up on Wells’s stories of that kind; it was Lindsay who first gave me the idea that the “scientifiction” appeal could be combined with the “supernatural” appeal.’10 And of Lindsay’s masterpiece he wrote in the essay ‘On Stories’:
His Tormance is a region of the spirit. He is the first writer to discover what ‘other planets’ are really good for in fiction. No merely physical strangeness or merely spatial distance will realize that idea of otherness which is what we are always trying to grasp in a story about voyaging through space: you must go into another dimension. To construct plausible and moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw on the only real ‘other world’ we know, that of the spirit.11
And to another correspondent, Sister Penelope of the Community of St Mary the Virgin,* he wrote on 9 August 1939:
The danger of ‘Westonism’ I meant to be real. What set me about writing the book was the discovery that a pupil of mine took all that dream of interplanetary colonization quite seriously, and the realization that thousands of people in one way and another depend on some hope of perpetuating and improving the human race for the whole meaning of the universe – that a ‘scientific’ hope of defeating death is a real rival to Christianity … You will be both grieved and amused to hear that out of about 60 reviews only 2 showed any knowledge that my idea of the fall of the Bent One was anything but an invention of my own! … any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.12
‘I like the whole interplanetary idea as a mythology,’ Lewis had said, ‘and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) point of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side.’ What did he mean by myth and mythology? In the chapter on ‘Conversion’ it will be remembered that Lewis described Christianity as ‘a true myth’. Now, in Out of the Silent Planet, he intended to create his own. But as it was a work of fiction, a ‘thriller’, in what sense was it myth? The word is so variously used that we must find out what he meant by it.
When Jack told Arthur Greeves in 1916 that ‘All religions, that is all mythologies’ – pagan and Christian – ‘are merely man’s own invention’ (see Chapter 1) he meant that ‘myth’ was another name for a lie. By the time, however, that Lewis, Tolkien and Hugo Dyson concluded their momentous talk about myth on the evening of Lewis’s conversion, he recognized two kinds of myth, pagan and Christian. Many pagan myths which he had once thought beautiful but untrue were now seen to be, as he said in The Pilgrim’s Regress, ‘pictures’ that contained the ‘divine call’. And Christianity, as Tolkien and Dyson helped him to see, was the story of myth becoming fact. Nowhere is this made clearer than in a valuable footnote Lewis added to Chapter 15 of Miracles:
Just as, on the factual side, a long preparation culminates in God’s becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate as History. This involves the belief that Myth in general is … a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination. The Hebrews, like other people, had mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen mythology – the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical.13
In his essay ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ Lewis emphasizes that the difference between pagan and Christian mythology is not a difference between falsehood and truth. ‘It is the difference between a real event on the one hand and dim dreams or premonitions of that same event on the other. It is like watching something come gradually into focus.’14
As ‘The Silent Planet Myth’ is neither pagan myth nor true myth, in what sense is it myth? In the chapter ‘On Myth’ in Experiment in Criticism, Lewis gives a third definition that incorporates some of the qualities of both pagan and Christian mythology. Here he defines myth as ‘a particular kind of story which has a value in itself – a value independent of its embodiment in any literary work’:
It is true that such a story can hardly reach us except in words. But … if some perfected art of mime or silent film or serial pictures could make it clear with no words at all, it would still affect us in the same way … Human sympathy is at a minimum. We do not project ourselves at all strongly into the characters. They are like shapes moving in another world. We feel indeed that the pattern of their movements has a profound relevance to our own life … The experience may be sad or joyful but it is always grave … The experience is not only grave but awe-inspiring … It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us.15
There is no firm evidence that Lewis read The Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) by the leader of an earlier ‘Oxford Movement’, John Henry Newman. However, Lewis praises many of Newman’s works, and the two certainly had much in common. In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine Newman points out that, although the truths of the Gospel are ‘communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers’, those truths are not ‘comprehended all at once by the recipients’ and that ‘longer time and deeper thought’ are necessary for their ‘full comprehension and development’.16 He means by this that the Apostles received the fullness of revealed knowledge, such as the historical fact of original sin. However, a full and accurate understanding of the doctrine of Adam’s fall was not completed until the time of Augustine and Pelagius in the fourth century. This is an instance of a doctrine ‘held implicitly’ at the beginning of the Church, then ‘asserting itself’ and becoming ‘fully developed’.17 If St Augustine’s treatment is a true ‘development’ of the faith revealed ‘once for all’ to the Apostles, then it follows that if St Augustine had been able to ask the Apostles about it, they would have said, ‘Yes, this is what we meant.’
Lewis is perhaps unique in applying a similar ‘development’ to his science fiction. Most of those who write interplanetary stories pay little or no attention to the world they leave behind when they venture into outer space. Some have imagined planets with a different morality, or no morality, and even a different creator, from that of the Earth. Lewis clearly had something like Newman’s theory of ‘development’ in mind when he created the first of his ‘Supposals’ about the Silent Planet Myth and the Chronicles of Narnia.
Suppose there are planets that contain creatures other than man? Suppose they are, unlike us, unfallen? In his essay ‘The Seeing Eye’ Lewis considers what would happen if Man visited other worlds and found other species of rational creatures:
I observe how the white man has hitherto treated the black, and how, even among civilized men, the stronger have treated the weaker. If we encounter in the depth of space a race, however innocent and amiable, which is technologically weaker than ourselves, I do not doubt that the same revolting story will be repeated … It was in part these reflections that first moved me to make my own small contributions to science fiction.18
Instead of making his science fiction stand totally independent of this world, he makes it an imaginary ‘development’ of what has already happened here. It is not inconceivable that if he had shown the Apostles Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra and asked, ‘Is this what you meant?’ they would have said ‘Yes.’
Tolkien would certainly have agreed that what Lewis was doing in his science fiction was a good illustration of Newman’s theory of ‘development’: when recommending Out of the Silent Planet to his publisher on 4 March 1938, he said: ‘The myth is of course that of the Fall of the Angels (and the fall of man on this our silent planet); and the central point is the sculpture of the planets revealing the erasure of the sign of the Angel of this world.’19 Tolkien was referring to that great passage in the Revelation of St John the Divine which says:
War arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world – he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.20
Lewis’s titanic imagination was let loose and he saw how this ‘war in heaven’ could become a setting for his interplanetary novels and a ‘development’ of the Revelation we already have. He combined the biblical account of the Fall of Satan with that medieval cosmography he knew so well. According to the medievals, as we move from the Heavens inward towards the Earth, we come to the Moon. With the Moon we cross the ‘great frontier’ from aether to air, from ‘heaven’ to ‘nature’, from the realm of gods (or angels) to that of daemons, from the realm of necessity to that of contingency, from the incorruptible to the corruptible. This ‘great divide’ has hitherto not affected the angels, but on being thrown out of Heaven, Satan is confined to Earth, the Moon acting as the frontier to the ‘quarantine area’ beyond which he is not allowed to venture. Thereafter the Earth is known as Thulcandra – the ‘silent planet’ – because it is cut off from the heavens and the other planets.
In Out of the Silent Planet Lewis’s hero, Dr Elwin Ransom, a philologist of Cambridge University, is kidnapped by two men, Dick Devine and Dr Weston, a mad physicist who wants to extend the reach of humanity to other planets. They force him aboard their spaceship and fly to the planet Malacandra (Mars) where they hope to find gold.
During the voyage Ransom discovers that he has been brought along as a sacrifice to creatures called sorns. On arrival on this beautiful planet some sorns are spotted and, terrified, Ransom escapes his captors. In hiding, he is befriended by one of the other species of creatures on Malacandra – the hrossa. From Hyoi, a hross, whose body is similar to that of a seal or an otter, Ransom learns Old Solar, the language spoken before the Fall of Man. He is delighted with the simple agricultural life of the hrossa and their love of poetry, and he discovers that there are two other rational species on Malacandra: along with the sorns or séroni, tall, lean creatures like elongated men, who are devoted to scientific research, there are the pfifltriggi, frog-like creatures who work as miners and artisans.
The Malacandrians are not fallen, and Ransom discovers that the closest word in Old Solar for ‘evil’ is ‘bent’. When the hrossa learn that Ransom’s ‘bent companions’ are trying to kill him he is ordered to go to Oyarsa, who lives at Meldilorn. They are surprised when he asks if Oyarsa made the world. ‘Did people in Thulcandra,’ they ask, ‘not know that Maleldil the Young had made and still ruled the world?’21 Ransom is shown the way to Meldilorn by the other spiritual beings of the planet, the eldila who are visible to Ransom only as a faint movement of light. Along the way he visits the sorn Augray, who acts as his host. From him Ransom learns that Oyarsa is the eldil who, at the creation of Malacandra, was put in charge of the planet. When Augray hears from Ransom about man’s wars, slavery and prostitution he thinks it must be ‘because every one of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself’.22 He is surprised that there is only one rational species on Earth and supposes ‘this must have far-reaching effects in the narrowing of sympathies and even of thought’.23
When presented to Oyarsa, Ransom cannot see him but he feels ‘a tingling of his blood and a pricking on his fingers as if lightning were near’.24 He learns from him the story of his planet as it is known throughout the solar system. Oyarsa explains that the Earth itself once had an Oyarsa. After he became ‘bent’ it was in his mind to spoil other worlds, and to prevent this Maleldil drove him out of the heavens and bound him in the air of his own planet. Oyarsa goes on to speak of what Ransom recognizes as the Incarnation. ‘There are stories among us’, Oyarsa says, that Maleldil ‘dared terrible things, wrestling with the Bent One in Thulcandra’.25
Soon Weston and Devine are brought before Oyarsa, but not before they have managed to kill one of the hrossa. Weston imagines Oyarsa to be the most primitive of creatures and dangles beads before his eyes, saying ‘Pretty! pretty! See! See!’ The Malacandrians have never seen anything so comical and all Meldilorn shakes with laughter. ‘I may fall,’ says Weston. ‘But while I live I will not, with such a key in my hand, consent to close the gates of the future on my race. What lies in that future, beyond our present ken, passes imagination to conceive: it is enough for me that there is a Beyond.’26 When Weston protests his love of mankind, Oyarsa says, ‘What you really love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all that is left.’27 Weston and Devine are so ‘bent’ it is beyond Oyarsa’s ability to help them. As a penalty he orders their ship back to Thulcandra. Ransom, who is protected by the eldila, goes with them. Oyarsa gives orders that their ship will explode in ninety days, and they barely make it back to Earth in time. In Chapter 22 Lewis himself enters the story. Ransom tells him what happened on Malacandra, and he asks Lewis to write the story, passing it off as a work of fiction lest Weston sue for libel.
After Out of the Silent Planet was published on 2 September 1938 some readers enjoyed it in spite of its Christian background, some because of it – and many without realizing it at all. But perhaps those who enjoyed it most did so in a way described by Dorothy L. Sayers* writing to Lewis on 21 December 1953 about a young friend of hers, Edmund Crispin. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Crispin was the author of the detective novel Swan Song in which Lewis is noticed going into the ‘Bird and Baby’ on Tuesdays. Said Miss Sayers:
He told me how, in his undergraduate days, he read Out of the Silent Planet with great enjoyment, accepting it quite simply as a space-travel story … until quite suddenly near the end (not, I think, until Ransom had got to Meldilorn) some phrase clicked in his mind and he exclaimed: ‘Why, this is a story about Christianity. Maleldil is Christ, and the Eldila are the angels!’ He said it was a most wonderful experience, as though two entirely different worlds had suddenly come into focus together, like a stereoscope, and it’s a thing he can never forget.28
Another undergraduate reader who had precisely the same experience was Roger Lancelyn Green, who remembered vividly the thrill of excitement – the sudden moment of Joy – when Oyarsa was telling Ransom of Thulcandra, the silent planet – ‘We think that Maleldil would not give it up utterly to the Bent One, and there are stories among us that He has taken strange counsel and dared terrible things, wrestling with the Bent One in Thulcandra’ – and he realized in a blinding flash to what Oyarsa was referring. Until then it seemed no more than one of the best stories of its kind he had read, and one of the most exciting and convincing: thereafter it was like stepping into a new dimension – one that he was to find again more fully explored in Perelandra, but which could never again come with the thrill of revelation of that first reading.
Lewis’s choice of ‘Maleldil’ as the Old Solar name for God has continued to puzzle readers. Because the prefix ‘mal’ is often used to mean ‘ill’ or ‘wrong’ as in ‘malpractice’, it seems a curious syllable to use. In a letter to Victor Hamm of 11 August 1945 Lewis explained what it means: ‘MAL- is really equivalent of the definite article in some of the definite article’s uses. ELDIL means a lord or ruler, Maleldil “The Lord”: i.e. it is, strictly speaking, the Old Solar not for DEUS but for DOMINUS.’29 Marjorie Nicolson wrote, at the end of her great study of ancient Voyages to the Moon,
Out of the Silent Planet is to me the most beautiful of all cosmic voyages and in some ways the most moving … As C.S. Lewis, the Christian apologist, has added something to the long tradition, so C.S. Lewis, the scholar-poet, has achieved an effect in Out of the Silent Planet different from anything in the past. Earlier writers have created new worlds from legend, from mythology, from fairy tale. Mr Lewis has created myth itself, myth woven of desires and aspirations deep-seated in some, at least, of the human race … As I journey with him into worlds at once familiar and strange, I experience, as did Ransom, ‘a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth’.30
The book was well received by reviewers but did not have spectacular sales until the publication of The Screwtape Letters in 1942 and his broadcast talks on the radio during that and the following year made Lewis suddenly famous. But he seems to have had ideas of a sequel even before the publication of the book.
The last chapter of Out of the Silent Planet hints at the ‘force or forces’ behind Weston which ‘will play a very important part in the events of the next few centuries, and, unless we can prevent them, a very disastrous one’; and ‘the dangers to be feared are not planetary but cosmic, or at least solar, and they are not temporal but eternal’.31 This might well seem a prelude to Perelandra; but what about the final words of the book? ‘Now that Weston has shut the door, the way to the planets lies through the past; if there is to be any more space-travelling, it will have to be time-travelling as well … !’32
Apparently Lewis had a tale of time-travel in his mind as the sequel and, before discarding it, even wrote at least sixty-four pages – all that survives of it: a tantalizing fragment found among his papers. Lewis does not seem to have written to anyone about it at the time of composition. However, Fr Gervase Mathew, the Inkling, on reading the manuscript recognized it at once. He remembered hearing Lewis read the first four chapters at a meeting of the Inklings in 1939 or 1940.
The Dark Tower, as it has been named, is set in Cambridge, and it begins as a direct sequel to the last sentence just quoted of Out of the Silent Planet: ‘“Of course,” said Orfieu, “the sort of time-travelling you read about in books – time-travelling in the body – is absolutely impossible.”’33 The story continues:
There were four of us in Orfieu’s study. Scudamour, the youngest of the party, was there because he was Orfieu’s assistant. MacPhee had been asked down from Manchester because he was known to us all as an inveterate sceptic, and Orfieu thought that if once he were convinced the learned world in general would have no excuse for incredulity. Ransom, the pale man with the green shade over his distressed-looking eyes, was there for the opposite reason – because he had been the hero, or victim, of one of the strangest adventures that had ever befallen a mortal man. I had been mixed up with that affair – the story is told in another book – and it was to Ransom I owed my presence in Orfieu’s party … 34
After discussing the possibilities of time-travel, and deciding that it is impossible in the Wellsian sense of a bodily movement through time, Orfieu introduces his guests to the ‘Chronoscope’ – an instrument like a cinema projector which catches an apparently arbitrary time-sequence either past or future – we are not told which – and reflects it on a screen where it seems absolutely real and three-dimensional as if on a stage or through a window in time – but quite silent. (Subconsciously, Lewis may have got the idea from chapter 16 of Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook [1919], where Yva is able to catch light-rays and reflect them back from remote space to show Arbuthnot a similarly vivid picture of events happening 250,000 years ago.)
The picture which Orfieu and Scudamour show Ransom, Lewis and MacPhee is of a Dark Tower of which they are presently able to see the interior; there a man sits like a graven image, filling them with horror partly by his very unhumanness, but mainly by a poisoned sting like a miniature unicorn’s horn which sticks out from his forehead and with which he stabs or inoculates in the spine a series of normal human victims who come in one by one as into the presence of a god and submit themselves to this agonizing process, which apparently dehumanizes them: ‘they entered the room as men, or (more rarely) women; they left it automata’.35
For a long time the watchers do not know whether they are looking into the past or the future; but at length they decide that it is the future, and that the Dark Tower is in fact a copy of the Cambridge University Library (opened in 1934) made by a later civilization – as we might model a modern building on the Parthenon. But presently they recognize Scudamour’s exact double among the people whom they see most constantly through the Chronoscope; they see him become a Stinging-man with the unicorn horn – and then in a dramatic moment he and they see his fiancée Camilla, or her exact double, brought to be stabbed and made an automaton by him – and in a sudden unreasoning moment of passion Scudamour flings himself at the Chronoscope and breaks it.
But in doing so he breaks the time barrier and his soul and that of his double in the Othertime change bodies (rather as the Professor and his pupil do in Conan Doyle’s story ‘The Great Keinplatz Experiment’). ‘You remember what Orfieu said the first evening about time-travel being impossible because you’d have no body in the other time when you got there?’ says Ransom.
‘Well, isn’t it obvious that if you got two times that had replicas that difficulty would be overcome. In other words, I think that the Double we saw on the screen had a body not merely like poor Scudamour’s but the same: I mean, that the very same matter which made up Scudamour’s body in 1938 made up the brute’s body in Othertime. Now if that were so – and if you then, by any contrivance, brought the two times into contact, so to speak – you see?’
‘You mean they might – might jump across?’
‘Yes, in a sense. Scudamour, under the influence of a strong emotion, makes what you might call a psychological leap or lunge at the Othertime … The Othertime occupant of that body is caught off his guard – simply pushed out of his body – but since that identical body is waiting for him in 1938, he inevitably slips into it and finds himself in Cambridge.’36
The Othertime man occupying Scudamour’s 1938 body escapes from the college and we last see him walking on the ridge of the roof. But it is obvious that in the end the metempsychosis is reversed, for the last quarter of what has survived of the book consists of a third-person account of Scudamour’s adventures in the Othertime as he narrated it after his return. The adventures so far as they go show him in the Othertime Stinging-man’s body discovering that Camilla’s double in the Dark Tower does not contain the 1938 Camilla’s soul, but is in love with him; passing himself off as the Othertimer whose body he is inhabiting; and giving an overlong and laboured account of Othertime scientific experiments leading up to the making of Chronoscopes of their own. But before this is fully achieved the manuscript breaks off suddenly in mid-sentence at the bottom of a page. How much more was written there is no way of knowing, for no more has survived beyond these first 32,000 words or so.
The story, published as ‘The Dark Tower’ (Lewis gave it no name) in 1977, remains a tantalizing fragment, particularly as it leaves no clue to the real content of the book: there is a suggestion that the Othertimers may be infiltrating into this world, but even that is vague. Yet it is the only possible link with Out of the Silent Planet, and even so it reduces Ransom to a fairly minor character. MacPhee turns up again in That Hideous Strength, but there is not enough to show whether Camilla bears any resemblance to her namesake in the same book: from the few remarks about the earthly Camilla she seems more like a precursor of Jane Studdock.
‘All my seven Narnian books, and my three science fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head,’ said Lewis in 1960.37 There is no record of what pictures grew into Out of the Silent Planet; but it seems probable that pictures, or even actual nightmares (to which Lewis was prone throughout his life) were very much in evidence when he started to write ‘The Dark Tower’. The scenes witnessed in the Othertime through the Chronoscope are particularly vivid – indeed it is possible that the slowness of the connecting links and the sheer lifelessness of Scudamour’s investigations in the Othertime explain why Lewis discarded the book: he was carried away by the pictures and did not know what was to happen next.
Indeed, it is difficult to understand why Ransom’s successful visit to Mars did not immediately suggest sending him to Venus, instead of endeavouring to let him conquer time as well as space. ‘The Dark Tower’ was probably abandoned well before the end of 1939 when Lewis began work on The Problem of Pain, which occupied most of his available time until the following April. On 9 May 1940 he was writing to Arthur Greeves about Out of the Silent Planet, but making no mention of any possible sequel; and the rest of the year was taken up with various lectures and broadcast talks – both in person to Army camps, and on the wireless. On 9 November 1941 he wrote to Sister Penelope: ‘I’ve got Ransom to Venus and through his first conversation with the “Eve” of that world; a difficult chapter … I may have embarked on the impossible. This woman has got to combine characteristics which the Fall has put poles apart – she’s got to be in some ways like a Pagan goddess and in other ways like the Blessed Virgin. But, if one can get even a fraction of it into words, it is worth doing.’38
On 23 December 1941 he was writing to Arthur Greeves about the story: ‘I’m engaged on a sequel to The Silent Planet in which the same man goes to Venus. The idea is that Venus is at the Adam-and-Eve stage: i.e. the first two rational creatures have just appeared and are still innocent. My hero arrives in time to prevent their “falling” as our first pair did.’39 To another friend he wrote on 20 January 1942, ‘Ransom is having a grand time on Venus at the moment’; and finally to Sister Penelope again, on 11 May, ‘The Venus book is now finished except that I find the first two chapters need re-writing.’40
Apart from the Paradise Lost inspiration, the book grew out of vivid pictures of the floating islands, the golden sky, the towering rocks on the fixed land, and recollections of childhood fears and dreams of gigantic insects in endless caves. Probably the floating islands grew and developed subconsciously from a passage in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (Chapter 13, Section I): ‘In early days on Venus men had gathered foodstuff from the great floating islands of vegetable matter …’; and he may have got the violent rainstorms from the same source. But the world of Perelandra owes little to any previous suggestion: it is Lewis’s supreme imaginative triumph in the creation of another world so vivid that any other picture of Venus becomes preposterous. The undulating islands, the golden sky, the fixed land, the curiously unearthly weather – we can see them so vividly that it is hard to believe that we have not seen them with our actual eyes.
As with Out of the Silent Planet, this sequel is based on a supposal. In a letter to Mrs Hook of 29 December 1958, Lewis explained that whereas Aslan was ‘an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia” … So in “Perelandra”. This also works out a supposition. (“Suppose, even now, in some other planet there were a first couple undergoing the same that Adam and Eve underwent here, but successfully”.)’41
Perelandra, which was published on 20 April 1943, opens with Lewis being summoned to Ransom’s cottage near Worcester. Ransom explains that he has been ordered to Perelandra (Venus) because it is rumoured that the Black Oyarsa of Thulcandra (Satan) is planning an attack. ‘But is he at large like that in the Solar System?’42 asks Lewis, who understood that Satan could not venture beyond the Moon. ‘He can’t get there’, answers Ransom, ‘in his own person … As you know he was driven back within these bounds centuries before any human life existed on our planet. If he ventured to show himself outside the Moon’s orbit he’d be driven back again – by main force … No. He must be attempting Perelandra in some different way.’43
This time, instead of a spaceship, Ransom is transported to Perelandra by the Oyarsa of Malacandra. It is a young world of floating islands; Ransom climbs on to one of the islands and finds himself in a world of such exquisite colours and other sensuous delights that, speaking of it later, he complains of it being ‘too definite for language’.44 The next day he finds himself in the company of a small and friendly dragon. This leads him to wonder if all the things that appeared as mythology on Earth are scattered through other worlds as realities. He next meets the ‘Eve’ of that world, a naked woman he calls the Green Lady because she looks like a goddess carved from green stone. Despite the fact that Ransom can speak with her in Old Solar, it is very difficult to understand her. ‘Never had Ransom seen a face so calm, and so unearthly … a calm which no storm had ever preceded.’45 The Lady, for her part, is puzzled by Ransom’s self-consciousness. ‘I have never done it before,’ she says, ‘stepping out of life into the Alongside and looking at oneself living as if one were not alive.’46 Ransom learns that there is a King, her husband, but he does not appear until the end of the book. This ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ of Perelandra are in unbroken communion with Maleldil, who speaks directly to them.
The Lady allows Ransom to accompany her to the ‘Fixed Land’ – the one part of Perelandra that does not float. There he learns that while Maleldil allows the Lady and the King to go there he has forbidden them to spend the night on it. As they speak they see something fall on the Fixed Land, and Ransom is heartsick to discover that Dr Weston has arrived in a spaceship. Weston, as always, is obsessed with finding new territory for man to spread himself. ‘Man in himself’, says Weston, ‘is nothing. The forward movement of Life – its growing spirituality – is everything … To spread spirituality … is henceforward my mission.’47 When Ransom mentions that the Devil is a spirit, Weston says, ‘Your Devil and your God are both pictures of the same Force … The next stage of emergent evolution beckoning us forward, is God; the transcended stage behind, ejecting us, is the Devil.’48 In the course of Ransom’s arguing with him Weston shouts, ‘The world leaps forward through great men and greatness always transcends mere moralism.’49 Moments later he says, ‘I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil. I call that Force into me completely.’50 The next instant he is seized by a convulsion that leaves the Devil in possession of his body. From this point onwards Ransom is unsure whether the man he knew as Weston still exists, and he calls this new creature the ‘Un-man’. Lewis thus gives an important new ‘development’ to his ‘Silent Planet Myth’. By himself Satan was unable to venture beyond the Moon’s orbit, but as Ransom explains in Chapter 9: ‘Weston’s body, travelling in a space-ship, had been the bridge by which something else had invaded Perelandra – whether that supreme and original evil whom in Mars they call The Bent One, or one of his lesser followers.’51
It soon becomes evident that the Un-man is there to tempt the Lady to spend the night on the Fixed Land. When she reminds him that Maleldil has forbidden them from dwelling on the Fixed Land, he counters that Maleldil hasn’t forbidden her from thinking about it.52 The Temptation of the Lady of Perelandra is at the heart of the book, and it is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing in the whole Lewis oeuvre. Ransom does his best to counter the Un-man’s arguments but his task is complicated by the Un-man’s use of the Church’s own theology.
The whole of the ninth chapter is based on one of the great theological issues. In the fourth century St Augustine gave classical formulation to the Church’s belief that Adam’s Fall brought more good than evil. His expression, Felix peccatum Adae, is rendered ‘O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam’ in the Easter liturgy of the Catholic Church. The Un-man tries to convince the Lady that only by disobeying Maleldil will she emerge from her present ‘smallness’ into ‘Deep Life, with all its joy and splendour and hardness’.53 Finally, Ransom turns on the Un-man and, addressing him as the Devil, says: ‘Tell her all. What good came to you? Do you rejoice that Maleldil became a man?’54 The remembrance of what the Incarnation still means to him causes the Un-man to howl like a dog, and he abandons the temptation. Ransom is so exhausted that he can hardly remain awake. Wondering when Maleleldil will send his ‘representative’55 to stop the temptation, he realizes with a shock that he is that representative.
Although he expects to fail, Ransom chases the Un-man to the Fixed Land with the hope of killing the body being used by the Devil. There follows a battle in which the Un-man’s body is destroyed. When he is well enough to travel, Ransom finds a bleeding wound in his heel where he was bitten by the Un-man. This is a reference to Genesis 3:15 where God says to the Serpent, ‘I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.’
The last two chapters of Perelandra are stunningly beautiful. In a valley of the Fixed Land Ransom is greeted by the Oyarsa of Malacandra and the Oyarsa of Perelandra. There he also meets the King and the Lady, ‘Paradise itself in its two Persons’,56 and he sees Perelandra hand over the governance of the planet to the King. Lewis then incorporates his Silent Planet Myth into the prediction of the Second Coming in Matthew 24:29–31. Echoing the biblical ‘the moon shall not give her light’, the King explains the part he and other unfallen creatures will take in this: ‘We will fall upon your moon, wherein there is a secret evil, and which is as the shield of the Dark Lord of Thulcandra … We shall break her.’57 Ransom is then returned to Earth.
Lewis must have seen Perelandra more clearly than any of his readers can, and probably more clearly than he saw any of the mind-pictures out of which his stories grew: for he liked Perelandra best of all his works of fiction, though he considered Till We Have Faces his masterpiece in this kind. Green remembered walking round Addison’s Walk at Magdalen in the middle of an idyllic summer night when the trees and spires stood out against a skyline lit by a low, unseen moon, and the dome of the sky was bright with stars. Brightest of all shone a superb planet: ‘Perelandra!’ said Lewis with such a passionate longing in his voice that he seemed for a moment to be Ransom himself looking back with infinite desire to an actual memory.*
Presently Green quoted some lines from Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, and Lewis took them up and completed the passage, surely the epitome of the whole conception of the ‘Field of Arbol’, of Malacandra, Thulcandra and Perelandra:
Venus near her! smiling downward at this earthlier earth of ours,
Closer to the Sun, perhaps a world of never fading flowers.
Hesper, whom the poet called the Bringer home of all good things.
All good things may move in Hesper, perfect peoples, perfect kings.
Hesper – Venus – were we native to that splendour or in Mars,
We should see the Globe we groan in, fairest of their evening stars.
Could we dream of wars and carnage, craft and madness, lust and spite,
Roaring London, raving Paris, in that point of peaceful light?
Might we not in glancing heavenward on a Star so silver-fair
Yearn, and clasp the hands and murmur, ‘Would to God that we were there’?58
This was perhaps a unique moment, for Lewis seldom revealed his deeper feelings. A more typical reaction to the heavenly bodies came when Warnie asked him one night why stars twinkled while planets did not. ‘Well, obviously,’ said Jack, ‘because the stars are lit by gas and the planets by electricity.’59
Lewis would seldom explain how he came to invent names in his stories: often, indeed, they came to him in more or less the same way as the pictures out of which the stories grew. His advice on finding new names was to spell old ones backwards and see what the result suggested: but few of his names can be traced in this way. He did admit that Thulcandra, the Silent Planet, might have been reached by a ‘portmanteau word’ method: ‘thick’, ‘dull’ and ‘sulk’ giving Thulk; on this analogy Malacandra for Mars might derive from the Latin malo – ‘I would rather be’ – ‘would to God that we were there’, as in Tennyson’s couplet, but in this case a straightforward desire to be in an unfallen world. Perelandra has no obvious original, unless we equate it with ‘Peri-landra’, i.e. ‘fairyland’: however, it is worth noting that in the first edition of Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 15) Venus appears as ‘Parelandra’, possibly from ‘parallax’, Lewis having ‘Paradise’ in mind – Tennyson’s ‘world of never fading flowers’. But all this is guesswork.
Perelandra repeats the fears which Lewis had voiced in Out of the Silent Planet about the way in which Weston and scientists like him would carry out a ruthless extermination of any possible inhabitants of other planets so as to preserve earth’s human race at all costs:
Professor Weston … was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over the planet in obscure works of ‘scientifiction,’ in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines … It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond that lies the sweet poison of the false infinite – the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species – a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality.60
Lewis was later to give his fuller and more reasoned thoughts on interplanetary travel, should such a thing ever come to pass, under the title ‘Religion and Rocketry’, an essay in which he said: ‘We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag-heaps. There are individuals who don’t. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers in space.’61
In December 1943 Arthur C. Clarke, who himself later became chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, wrote a long letter condemning Lewis’s views on science fiction and interplanetary flight (which he was sure would come in the foreseeable future) and on the high ideals of serious scientists in the field.62 Lewis replied on 7 December 1943:
I quite agree that most scientifiction is on the level of cowboy boys’ stories. But I think the fundamental moral assumptions in popular fiction are a very important symptom. If you found that the most popular stories were those in which the cowboy always betrayed his pals to the crooks and deserted his girl for the vamp, I don’t think it would be unimportant. I don’t of course think that at the moment many scientists are budding Westons: but I do think (hang it all, I live among scientists!) that a point of view not unlike Weston’s is on the way. Look at Stapledon (Star Gazer ends in sheer devil worship), Haldane’s Possible Worlds and Waddington’s Science and Ethics. I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the universe. Certainly if he goes on his present course much further man can not be trusted with knowledge.63
(Lewis might also have added that Stapledon’s future inhabitants of Earth, when colonizing Venus in Last and First Men, begin by exterminating the aboriginal inhabitants of that planet.)
Lewis was taking the future of ‘civilized’ man very seriously at this time, as The Abolition of Man shows. These lectures were delivered in 1943 at the University of Durham, and both they and to some extent Durham itself supplied the background for his next story, That Hideous Strength, which concludes the Ransom trilogy.
Since the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939, when Charles Williams came to Oxford with the evacuated London branch of the University Press, the Thursday evening meetings of the Inklings had, with the addition of Williams, entered upon their most vital period. In November 1939 Tolkien was reading early chapters of The Lord of the Rings, Williams a nativity play, and Lewis The Problem of Pain. Perelandra was also read chapter by chapter as written, to the accompaniment of Williams’s All Hallows’ Eve; and by the time Ransom’s last adventure was under way, Lewis was being very strongly influenced by Williams, and in particular by his prose romances or ‘spiritual thrillers’, as they have been most aptly called, which are set in the world of everyday and masquerade as novels, with a greater or lesser admixture of the supernatural.
That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups has been described as a Charles Williams novel written by C.S. Lewis. This is, of course, an exaggeration: but it bears the seeds of critical truth. Tolkien greatly regretted Williams’s part in it. Writing to his son Michael in 1963, Tolkien complained: ‘Williams’ influence … I think spoiled it.’64 Perelandra obviously led up to an attack of some sort by the Bent Oyarsa through his servants, such as Devine who had not accompanied Weston to his fate on Perelandra, against what Ransom might be able to do after his return to the Silent Planet. The idea of the N.I.C.E. – the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments – and its ruthless appropriation and partial destruction of Edgestow (a little university town resembling Durham, though Lewis disclaimed any definite connection), was suggested by the controversy over the founding of the atomic factory of Harwell near Blewbury (‘Belbury’ via ‘bluebell’) fifteen miles from Oxford; and with this was combined what Lewis conceived to be the logical outcome of the materialist and anti-religious indoctrination creeping into education, which he had tried to expose in The Abolition of Man.
Any idea of a Ransom story on this earth, the planet Thulcandra in Lewis’s solar system, the ‘Field of Arbol’, must of necessity turn to the Bible for some of its inspiration. The end of the world was too vast a theme, but some such judgement of Heaven as the confusion of tongues in the Tower of Babel, or the destruction of the Cities of the Plain from which Lot and his family escaped (though his wife looked back), would be the obvious denouement. Lewis combined both, admitting his debt to Gordon Bottomley’s poem ‘Babel’ for the inspiration of the banquet at Belbury, and to a chance reading in the newspaper of a German experiment in keeping a dog’s head alive by artificial means, which suggested ‘The Head’ through which the devils could speak to their worshippers. Doubtless, too, the late-medieval stories of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay with their ‘Brazen Head’ were not forgotten. But there was also a background ‘picture’, namely a dream recorded in his diary of 12 September 1923:
I had a most horrible dream. By a certain poetic justice it turned on the idea Jenkin and I were going to use in our shocker play: namely that of a scientist discovering how to keep consciousness and some motor nerves alive in a corpse, at the same time arresting decay, so that you really had an immortal dead man. I dreamed that the horrible thing was sent to us – in a coffin of course – to take care of … It was perfectly ordinary and as vivid as life. Finally the thing escaped and I fancy ran amok. It pursued me into a lift in the Tube in London … I am not sure that the idea of the play did not originate in another dream I had some years ago – unless the whole thing comes from Edgar Allan Poe.65
The reference to Poe is to ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, the story of a dead man kept alive by mesmerism for seven months. In an earlier reference to the plot of the play Lewis makes it clear that consciousness was kept alive in the brain of the dead man – but the rest of the scheme bears too close a resemblance to the behaviour of Frankenstein’s monster to be of much interest.
The influence of Charles Williams, altogether to the book’s advantage, is shown in Lewis’s decision to set the spiritual and apocalyptic adventures among ordinary people in the everyday setting of a conventional novel. Only in The Screwtape Letters does he show the same depth of psychological understanding and the ability to make the problems and temptations of ordinary men and women of absorbing interest.
When the story opens Jane and Mark Studdock have been married six months. Jane has found marriage ‘the door out of a world of work and comradeship and laughter and innumerable things to do, into something like solitary confinement’.66 She picks up that morning’s paper and sees a picture of the French scientist, Alcasan, who has just been guillotined for poisoning his wife. She remembers a dream she had earlier in which she saw someone twist Alcasan’s head off and take it away. In that same dream she sees people digging up ‘a sort of ancient British, druidical kind of man’,67 who comes to life before they reach him.
Her husband, Mark, is a Fellow of Sociology at Bracton College in Edgestow University in the Midlands town of Edgestow. In his mind ‘hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical – merely “Modern”. The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by … He was … a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge.’68
Lewis has often been accused of attacking women through Jane, but this is to misunderstand wildly the character he was portraying. An earlier manuscript shows that Lewis had originally made her a biochemist. However, knowing too little of that subject to make her character convincing, he made her a student of English Literature instead. When his friends Cecil and Daphne Harwood complained about Jane not being ‘a very original thinker’,69 Lewis replied on 11 September 1945: ‘Re Jane, she wasn’t meant to illustrate the problem of the married woman and her own career in general: rather the problem of everyone who follows an imagined vocation at the expense of a real one.’70
Mark is an enthusiastic member of the ‘progressive element’ of Bracton College, and on the day his wife has her nightmare about Alcasan he is invited to meet Lord Feverstone, who turns out to be the same Dick Devine who went with Dr Weston to Malacandra in Out of the Silent Planet. That evening the progressive element forces the college to sell Bragdon Wood, which lies in the centre of the college. The wood contains ‘Merlin’s Well’, and the purchaser is the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments – ‘the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world’.71 Lord Feverstone is a member of the N.I.C.E. and he invites Mark to Belbury to meet John Wither, who is Deputy Director.
From this point on the story switches back and forth from the doings of Jane to those of Mark. Jane, frightened by her dream, calls Mrs Dimble, whose husband had been her tutor and who is an authority on the Arthurian legend. The Dimbles urge Jane to seek help from Miss Ironwood, a doctor, who lives at St Anne’s on the Hill. Mark accepts a job with the N.I.C.E., and while he is getting to know the people at Belbury, Jane visits St Anne’s to consult Miss Ironwood about her dreams. She is horrified to discover that she has the hereditary power of dreaming realities. Miss Ironwood and the Dimbles urge her to join their ‘side’ in the coming battle.
Mark is soon miserable at Belbury for he never knows whether he is in or out of the ‘inner ring’. His companions include the lesbian, ‘Fairy’ Hardcastle, who is in charge of the Institutional Police, and an Italian physiologist, Professor Filostrato, who keeps Alcasan’s head alive by infusions of blood. They believe they are receiving, through the Head, the assistance of higher beings called ‘macrobes’ who, unknown to them, are really the dark eldila, or devils, of Earth. When Mark tries to leave, a murder charge is devised to keep him there. Eventually Filostrato introduces Mark to the Head, but his initial excitement turns to horror.
Jane comes to love the people at St Anne’s and she is introduced to their own ‘Head’. This is Ransom who, though in pain from the wound in his heel, has not aged since he returned from Perelandra. He is now the new Pendragon of Logres. Jane becomes their ‘seer’ and is able to tell them what the N.I.C.E. is doing. She now realizes that the old man she had ‘seen’ being dug up from Bragdon Wood is Merlin, whose magic the N.I.C.E. needs.
Merlin, however, wakes before anyone can get to him and, finding a tramp nearby, takes his clothes and joins the society of St Anne’s. He recognizes Ransom at once as the rightful Pendragon. Meanwhile, the people from N.I.C.E. come across the tramp, where Merlin should have been, and assume he is Merlin. After discovering that Mark has been trying to leave their side, they confine him to Belbury and leave him to look after ‘Merlin’. Finding that they can get nothing from the man they imagine to be Merlin, the N.I.C.E. advertise for a Celtic scholar.
Even though he knows it will end with his death, Merlin is willing to accept into his body the Oyéresu of the Planets. Ransom then sends him to Belbury as a specialist in Celtic. He attends the great banquet as the tramp’s ‘interpreter’ and in a spectacular scene, which echoes the fall of the Tower of Babel, with its confusion of language, Wither and the others find themselves babbling nonsense. Merlin liberates the numerous animals, intended for vivisection, and while he and the animals destroy the N.I.C.E. Merlin arranges for Mark and the tramp to escape. As he makes his way to St Anne’s, Mark turns to see Belbury destroyed by an earthquake.
With this danger to Britain averted, Ransom’s work as the Pendragon is complete. Mark and Jane are reunited, and after saying a final goodbye to his friends, Ransom is taken by the eldil to Perelandra where he will be healed of his wound.
Mark’s experiences with the ‘inner ring’ at Bracton, and his attempts to get into and keep in the ‘inner ring’ at Belbury, are an understandable extension of Lewis’s disillusionment with college politics at Magdalen and perhaps exaggerated recollections of the ‘Bloods’ at Malvern: a theme which comes out in a number of his essays both ethical and literary – and became indeed rather a King Charles’s head with him. Much more surprising is his deep and delicate understanding of Jane’s pilgrimage to grace from the self-centred superficiality and synthetic agnosticism of typical modernity. The Jane of the early chapters may owe a lot to the insight gained from a study of his female pupils and some members of the Socratic Club; but there is much that seems almost uncannily accurate coming from a man with no experience of the married state. Perhaps the dedication of the book to Jane McNeill,* the ‘Chaney’ of his early Belfast days, has some significance as far as this deeply understood character is concerned; and Mark probably owes a great deal to Lewis’s own unregenerate days – ‘there, but for the grace of God …’
The introduction of Merlin, with the tantalizing hints about the Circle of Logres, Numinor and ‘the last vestiges of Atlantean magic’, must strike many readers as the least successfully achieved strand in the whole web. This, apart from the inherent modern difficulty in accepting the marvellous, is partly Lewis’s fault for expecting too much knowledge in his readers. They are too easily left, for example, wondering why the Companies of Good and Evil both want his help, both think that he will be of their party, not realizing the implication of Merlin’s mysterious birth: he was ‘the child who had no father’, who was begotten by an incubus – we might almost say an eldil – who might be either good or bad, but who was described simply as a devil by writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth. Moreover, like King Arthur himself, Merlin did not die, but was imprisoned in a tomb, in a magic sleep, by an enchantress: and from that sleep he would awake at some future date no older than when he fell into it. It is the ancient legend still believed in the case of Epimenides of Crete and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, used most memorably as conscious literary background in Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1820) and Edwin Lester Arnold’s Lepidus the Centurion (1901), and in the imaginative science fiction of Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook (1919). Indeed, Lewis may have had all these at the back of his mind – Jane’s dream of the vault and the sleeper under Bragdon Wood seems too close to Louis Allenby’s discovery of Lepidus to be mere coincidence.
Readers had to await the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (1977) for real understanding of Numinor and the True West, though both had a place in the background of The Lord of the Rings. In the interim Professor Tolkien raised the corner of the veil so far as to write:
With regard to ‘Numinor’. In the early days of our association Jack used to come to my house and I read aloud to him The Silmarillion so far as it had then gone, including a very long poem: Beren and Luthien. Numinor was his version of a name he had never seen written (numenor) and no doubt was influenced by numinous. Other things in other works are also derived from me: for instance Tor and Tinidril are clearly Tor and his elf-wife Idril blended with Tinuviel (the second name of Luthien). The Eldils also owe something to the Eldar in my work.72
Tolkien adds: ‘In full Q-form Númenóre, “West-land”, the furthest west of mortal lands’ – and apparently Lewis equates it with Atlantis.
That Hideous Strength had good sales, though Lewis himself remarked that it was hated by all the critics, and Green was told by an ardent science-fiction enthusiast that Lewis would almost have been lynched had he appeared at one of their meetings. This attitude was to change completely in the next ten years, and as early as 13 February 1953 Arthur C. Clarke was asking Lewis to give a lecture to the British Interplanetary Society – though he added, ‘It would be only fair to point out that your position might be somewhat analogous to that of a Christian martyr in the arena,’ although ‘many of our members admire your writings even if they may not see eye to eye with them’.73 To which Lewis replied on 14 February:
I hope I should not be deterred by the dangers! The fatal objection is that I should be covering ground that I have already covered in print and on which I have nothing to add. I know that is how many lectures are made, but I never do it … But thank your Society very much for the invitation and convey my good wishes to them as regards everything but interplanetary travel … Probably the whole thing is only a plan for kidnapping me and marooning me on an asteroid! I know the sort of thing.74
In spite of their early acrimonious correspondence over space-flight, Lewis was able to appreciate Clarke’s most outstanding book in the genre, Childhood’s End, of which he wrote to Joy Davidman on 22 December 1953: ‘It is quite out of the range of the common space-and-time writers; away up near Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus and Wells’s First Men in the Moon. It is better than any of Stapledon’s. It hasn’t got Ray Bradbury’s delicacy, but then it has ten times his emotional power, and far more mythopoeia … An ABSOLUTE CORKER!’75
Meanwhile, in spite of the professional critics, those at all in tune with That Hideous Strength were absolutely enthralled by it. Green stayed up all night reading it – a unique occurrence – and was more and more profoundly moved and impressed by it on each of half a dozen subsequent readings. And Dorothy Sayers wrote to Lewis on 3 December 1945:
The book is tremendously full of good things – perhaps almost too full – the scheme at the beginning seems almost violently condensed – and I’m afraid I don’t like Ransom quite so well since he took to being golden-haired and interesting on a sofa like the Heir of Redclyffe – but the arrival of the Gods is grand and (in a different manner) the atmosphere of the N.I.C.E. is superb. Wither is a masterpiece; even with some experience of official documents and political speeches, one would not have believed it possible to convey so little meaning in so many words. And the death of Filostrato is first-class – his desperate agitation at feeling that it was so unscientific, and ‘his last thought was that he had underestimated the terror.’ Mr Bultitude [the bear] of course is adorable – oh! and the marvellous confusion of tongues at the dinner. And the painful realism of that college meeting. I enjoyed it all enormously.76
‘An amusing question whether my trilogy is an epic!’ Lewis wrote on 14 January 1951 to William L. Kinter of the USA. ‘Clearly, in virtue of its fantastic elements, it could only be an epic of the Ariosto type. But I should call it a Romance myself: it lacks sufficient roots in legend and tradition to be what I’d call an epic. Isn’t it more the method of Apuleius, Lucian and Rabelais, but diverted from a comic to a serious purpose?’77
Mr Kinter was to correspond at length with Lewis about his fiction. ‘What it is to have a real reader!’ Lewis wrote to him on 27 November 1951. ‘No one else sees that the first book is Ransom’s enfance: if they notice a change at all, they complain that in the latter ones he “loses the warm humanity of the first” etc.’78
‘“By the Furioso out of the Commedia” is not far wrong,’ Lewis wrote to him on 28 March 1953. ‘My real model was David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus which first suggested to me that the form of “science fiction” should be filled by spiritual experiences. And as the Furioso was in some ways the science-fiction of its age, your analogy works. But mind you, there is already a science-fiction element in the Commedia: e.g. Inferno xxxiv 85–114.’79
‘I think That Hideous Strength is about a triple conflict,’ Lewis wrote on 30 July 1954, ‘Grace against Nature and Nature against Anti-Nature (modern industrialism, scientism and totalitarian politics): I should be very surprised if I owe anything to Politian or Ascham. Taking the word Humanist in the old sense in which they are Humanists, I am solidly anti-Humanist: i.e. though I love the Classics I loathe Classicism.’80
With That Hideous Strength Lewis came virtually to the end of his science fiction. The moment it was finished he embarked on The Great Divorce. That book, though cast in narrative form, must be considered with The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Screwtape Letters among Lewis’s theological writings; it would be an even greater effort to include them in science fiction than to include Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Lewis did in fact write three science-fiction short stories towards the end of his life, which have been collected in The Dark Tower and Other Stories. The first two, ‘The Shoddy Lands’ and ‘Ministering Angels’, were published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in February 1956 and January 1958, and conquer no new worlds. ‘The Shoddy Lands’ are those of a rather trivial young woman’s mind explored in visible form by a dreamer for a few minutes; ‘Ministering Angels’, though actually set on Mars (definitely not Malacandra), takes place entirely in a scientific ‘space station’ set up there, and is a light-hearted skit on the serious suggestion that if men were to spend long periods in space or on the planets, concubines should be supplied ‘to relieve tensions and promote morale’.81
The third story, ‘Forms of Things Unknown’, is of much greater interest. Lewis did not publish it, perhaps meaning to revise and simplify it after Green, to whom he read it, had pointed out that few readers would take the point. How few has been shown by two American scholars and students of Lewis’s works, the first of whom asked what the Gorgons were, and the second assumed that Medusa was the only Gorgon and that her head could somehow be floating about on the Moon – actually she, the only mortal Gorgon, could not have lived in space any more than an ordinary man without a space-suit, while her sisters Sthenno and Euryale, being immortal, could perfectly well have done so. But in fact the Gorgons are not mentioned by name or as such, and the reader is left to realize, with a cold thrill, what it is that turns all Selenauts into stone.
The description of the landing on the moon and of the scenery and physical conditions as Jenkin, the Selenaut, explores the area where previous space voyages have disappeared so mysteriously, is brilliantly imagined and described. And this must owe a great deal to a picture, or rather an astral dream, which Lewis described in a letter to his father on 30 March 1927:
I dreamed that I was walking among the valleys of the Moon – a world of pure white rock, all deep chasms and spidery crags, with a perfectly black sky overhead. Of course there was nothing living there, not even a bit of moss: pure mineral solitude. Then I saw, very far off, coming to meet me down a narrow ravine, a straight, tall figure, draped in black, face and all covered. One knew it would be nicer not to meet that person: but one never has any choice in a dream, and for what seemed about an hour I went on till this stranger was right beside me. Then he held out an arm as if to shake hands, and of course I had to give him my hand: when suddenly I saw that instead of a hand he had a sort of metal ring which he closed round my wrist. It was sharp on the inside and hurt abominably. Then, without a word, drawing this thing together till it cut right to the bone, he turned and began to lead me off down the same long valley he had come from. It was the sense of being on the Moon you know, the complete desolateness, which gave the extraordinary effect.82
* ‘ruling essence’.
* Sister Penelope CSMV (1890–1977) was born Ruth Penelope Lawson in Clent, Worcestershire. She attended the Alice Otley School in Worcester, where she developed a devotion to the Blessed Virgin and a love of Greek and Latin. In 1912 she entered the Convent of the (Anglican) Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage, and from this time on was Sister Penelope CSMV. She studied Theology at Oxford, and over the years she published many works of theology and translated various works of the Church Fathers. On 5 August 1939 she wrote to Lewis about Out of the Silent Planet, and thus began a long and fruitful friendship. Her many works include The Wood for the Trees (1935) and a short autobiography, Meditation of a Caterpillar (1962). See her biography in CG.
* Dorothy Leigh Sayers (1893–1957) was educated at Somerville College where she took a First in Modern Languages. She came to fame through her detective nobleman, Lord Peter Wimsey, in Whose Body? (1923) and other novels. It was her theological writings which attracted Lewis, his favourites being The Mind of the Maker (1941) and the radio-drama, The Man Born to be King (1943). When she was about fifty she became passionately interested in Dante and one of her great achievements was a translation of Dante’s Inferno (1949), his Purgatorio (1955) and the Paradiso (1962) which she left unfinished at her death but which was completed by Barbara Reynolds.
* There survives an undated fragment of verse in one of Lewis’s notebooks which runs:
The floating islands, the flat golden sky
At noon, the peacock sunset: tepid waves
With the land sliding over them like a skin:
The alien Eve, green-bodied, stepping forth
To meet my hero from her forest home,
Proud, courteous, unafraid; no thought infirm
Alters her cheek –
At first sight this might suggest that Lewis began with the idea of writing Perelandra as a narrative poem. But a study of the fragment makes it seem much more likely that he is writing about his own creation – perhaps on the very night described above.
* Jane Agnes ‘Janie’ McNeill (1889–1959), whose family lived near the Lewises in Strandtown, was the daughter of James Adams McNeill, headmaster at Campbell College, 1890–1907. She was educated at Victoria College, Belfast, and would have gone to the university except that she felt she should stay and look after her mother. Besides her long friendship with the Lewis family, she was close to the medieval scholar and translator, Helen Waddell. See her biography in CG.
1 The Allegory of Love, p. 361.
2 Lewis was using Bernardus Silvestris, De Mundi Universitate, ed. Carl Sigmund Barach and Johann Wrobel (1876).
3 Ibid., Liber Secundus, III, 91–100, p. 38.
4 The ‘Cosmographia’ of Bernardus Silvestris, trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (Columbia University Press, 1973), ‘Microcosmos’, ch. III, p. 96.
5 The Allegory of Love, p. 361.
6 That Hideous Strength, ch. 13, pt 4, p. 314.
7 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fol. 2.
8 Ibid., fol. 74.
9 Mark R Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (1967), p. 138.
10 Letters, p. 375.
11 Of This and Other Worlds, pp. 35–6.
12 Letters, pp. 321–2.
13 Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947; Fontana edn, 1960), ch. 15, pp. 137–8, n. 1.
14 Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces, p. 42.
15 An Experiment in Criticism, ch. 5, pp. 41–4.
16 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845; University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), Introduction, section 21, pp. 29–30.
17 Ibid., ch. 4, iv, p. 127.
18 Christian Reflections, p. 220.
19 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 33.
20 Revelation 12:7–9, RSV.
21 Out of the Silent Planet (1938; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 11, p. 68.
22 Ibid., ch. 16, p. 105.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., ch. 18, pp. 121–2.
25 Ibid., p. 123.
26 Ibid., ch. 20, pp. 141–2.
27 Ibid., p. 143.
28 The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, Volume Four: 1951–1957: In the Midst of Life, ed. Barbara Reynolds (2000), p. 118.
29 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fol. 83.
30 Marjorie Nicholson, Voyages to the Moon (1948), pp. 251–5.
31 Out of the Silent Planet, ch. 22, pp. 159–60.
32 Ibid., Postscript, p. 167.
33 The Dark Tower and Other Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (1977; Fount, 1998), ch. 1, p. 3.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., ch. 2, p. 22.
36 Ibid., ch. 4, p. 47.
37 ‘It All Began with a Picture …’ Radio Times, ‘Junior Radio Times’ (15 July 1960), p. 2. Reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, p. 79.
38 Letters, p. 361.
39 TST, p. 492.
40 Letters, p. 366.
41 Ibid., p. 475.
42 Perelandra (1943; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 2, p. 18.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., ch. 3, p. 29.
45 Ibid., ch. 4, pp. 53–4.
46 Ibid., ch. 5, p. 58.
47 Ibid., ch. 7, p. 89.
48 Ibid., p. 92.
49 Ibid., p. 94.
50 Ibid., p. 95.
51 Ibid., ch. 9, p. 111.
52 Ibid., ch. 8, p. 102.
53 Ibid., ch. 9, p. 119.
54 Ibid., p. 121.
55 Ibid., ch. 11, p. 141.
56 Ibid., ch. 16, p. 209.
57 Ibid., ch. 17, p. 217.
58 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886), 183–92.
59 ‘C.S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, ch. 8, p. 213.
60 Perelandra, ch. 6, p. 79.
61 Fern-Seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity, ed. Walter Hooper (Fount Paperback, 1998), p. 74.
62 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fols 8–10.
63 Ibid., fol. 11.
64 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 342.
65 AMR, pp. 266–7.
66 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (1945; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 1, pt 1, p. 1.
67 Ibid., p. 4.
68 Ibid., ch. 9, pt 2, p. 199.
69 Ibid., ch. 1, pt 1, p. 2.
70 Letters, p. 379.
71 That Hideous Strength, ch. 1, pt 4, p. 12.
72 Letter to Roger Lancelyn Green of 17 July 1971. Estate of Roger Lancelyn Green.
73 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 16.
74 Ibid., fol. 17.
75 Ibid., fols 19–20.
76 The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, Volume Three: 1944–1950: A Noble Daring, ed. Barbara Reynolds (1998), p. 177.
77 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/1, fol. 167.
78 Ibid., fol. 171.
79 Ibid., fol. 181.
80 Ibid., fol 185.
81 Preface, The Dark Tower and Other Stories, p. xi.
82 FL, pp. 678–9.