Steve Hayes
2013-11-20 12:14:33 UTC
CS Lewis's literary legacy: 'dodgy and unpleasant' or 'exceptionally good'?
It's 50 years since CS Lewis died. His legacy encompasses far more than just
Narnia – Rowan Williams, AS Byatt, Philip Pullman and others give their
thoughts on his body of work
Sam Leith
The Guardian, Tuesday 19 November 2013 18.48 GMT
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/19/cs-lewis-literary-legacy
"Aslan is on the move." That phrase, three decades after I first read The
Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, still has the power to tickle the hairs on
my neck. It testifies to the enduring power of CS Lewis's recasting of the
Christian myth that I'm far from alone. If this were all there were to him, it
would still be pretty remarkable that, 50 years after his death, this tweedy
old Oxford don should occupy such an exalted place in our cultural life.
All this week on Radio 4, Simon Russell Beale has been reading The Screwtape
Letters – Lewis's perceptive inquiry into temptation cast as a series of witty
letters between a demon and his apprentice. This Friday, his reputation will
be crowned with a plaque in his honour, between John Betjeman and William
Blake, in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
The tribute might have pleased him, but it's an odd one: as a poet, Lewis is
usually regarded as pretty useless. "He hated all poets because he was a
failed poet," says his biographer AN Wilson. "He hated TS Eliot. He hated
Louis MacNeice. There's a very bad 'poem' by Lewis about reading The Love Song
of J Alfred Prufrock, and it just shows how stupid he was about modern
poetry."
Lewis has much more than poetry to offer, though. Almost too much: his
posthumous reputation is disconcertingly various. As well as a children's
writer, he was novelist, memoirist, essayist, critic, broadcaster and
apologist. But the two Lewises that command the biggest followings are the
author of the Narnia stories, and (in something of an overlap) the writer of
Christian apologetics.
In the latter department, Lewis's work teams a direct, companionable style
with sinewy reasoning: an appeal to the heart by way of the head. Mere
Christianity – a book based on a series of BBC radio talks Lewis gave during
the second world war – sells in vast quantities in the US and is regarded as
"almost a sort of summa theologica of the Protestant world", says Wilson.
"Wheaton College in Illinois [a Christian arts college] bought his wardrobe
and, even though it's a non-smoking campus, they bought his pipes, to be kept
in a sort of reliquary."
According to Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lewis "is
coming up the agenda again". He says the last five years have seen Lewis given
"serious academic attention – and attention from people who are not just in
the evangelical camp".
Lewis's great gift as a writer about Christianity was not as an academic
theologian, says Williams, but "in what you might call pastoral theology: as
an interpreter of people's moral and spiritual crises; as somebody who is a
brilliant diagnostician of self-deception; and somebody who, in his own book
on bereavement after his wife's death, really pushes the envelope – giving
permission, I suppose, to people to articulate their anger and resentment
about a God who apparently takes your loved ones away from you."
Opinion varies starkly on the value of the Narnia stories. Many, including
Lewis's friend JRR Tolkien, found them incoherent, sentimental and
unsatisfactory. The twin taints of racism and sexism attach to them – as they
do to other Lewis works. Notoriously, at the end of the Narnia stories, Susan
appears to be punished for entering adolescence and developing an interest in
lipstick by exclusion from what in the Narnia mythos passes for heaven.
And the Calormenes are, says Williams, described as "dark skinned and a bit
peculiar. I think the racism is very difficult to acquit Lewis on. It's part
of an unthinking cultural set of attitudes which pretty well every writer of
the period would have affected: a pseudo-medieval crusaders-and-saracens sort
of thing. The Others have scimitars and pointy helmets and talk peculiarly in
an Arabian Nights style. There's no way round that."
Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials trilogy presents as a sort of
anti-Narnia, regards Lewis's religious writings as "bullying, hectoring and
dishonest in all kinds of ways", and the Narnia books as actually "wicked". He
says: "I find them very dodgy and unpleasant – dodgy in the dishonest rhetoric
way – and unpleasant because they seem to embody a world view that takes for
granted things like racism, misogyny and a profound cultural conservatism that
is utterly unexamined."
Among Pullman's charges ("other little things that just occur in passing") is
that "he pours scorn on little girls with fat legs. And, as one commentator
said, among Lewis's readers will be some little girls with fat legs who find
themselves utterly bewildered by this slur on something they can't help and
are embarrassed and upset by already. It's the position, as this commentator
said, of the teacher who curries favour with the bullies in the class by
bullying the weak children with them."
Yet, bolstered by successful Hollywood films, they retain a colossal popular
appeal. As Williams says, "In a peculiar way, Philip Pullman's His Dark
Materials is quite a tribute to Lewis – because, although Philip loathes the
Narnia stories, he clearly recognises that there is enough imaginative bounce
and energy in them to demand a serious response."
But Lewis also speaks profoundly to grown-ups as a memoirist. Surprised By
Joy, which appeared in 1955 and described his early life and conversion to
Christianity as an adult, has an enduring constituency, even among those who
do not share his faith. Zadie Smith has talked of recognising the
"inexplicable feeling of gratitude" to which Lewis's title alludes: "It comes
over you sometimes. And particularly if you are unreligious, you don't know
what to do with it." A Grief Observed, written near the end of his life about
the death of his wife and originally published pseudonymously, continues to
reach a wide public with its tenderness and the candour of its anguish.
The picture is complicated by Lewis's personal life having itself entered into
myth. For a long time, his relationship with Tolkien – an intense friendship
that played a large part in his conversion to Christianity – attracted
fascination, alongside stories of their literary group the Inklings meeting,
in a fug of tobacco and warm beer, in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford. Then
the 1993 film Shadowlands told a romanticised version of the story of Lewis's
marriage late in life to an American fan, Joy Davidson (the title of Surprised
By Joy, published much earlier, started to look prescient). It both increased,
and somewhat distorted, his reputation.
The problem, says Wilson, is that "almost none of it is true. There's only one
stepson, not two stepsons, and so on. Anthony Hopkins, a brilliant actor, is
immaculately clad in a dark suit, while Lewis was a filthy old man dripping
beer and tobacco everywhere. But apart from all that, it makes out that this
big thing in Lewis's life was the marriage – and in fact it was just a little
thing that happened at the end. For 33 years, he shared his life with the
woman he called Minto, Jane Moore [the mother of one of Lewis's boyhood
friends]. She was the love of his life – she was the main thing. I want to
write a screenplay for Helen Mirren to play Minto."
Finally – at the end of this rather long list of Lewises – there was the day
job. Lewis was a Professor of English literature – the author inter alia of a
thunderously argumentative Preface to Paradise Lost; transformative works on
medieval literature, The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image; and a
compendious introduction to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. He
was, says Williams, "an exceptionally good literary critic, and I think that
will be a very widely shared judgment". Pullman, too, has respect for Lewis
the critic. Just as in his religious writings he spoke to ordinary churchgoers
more than theologians, Lewis's literary work was concerned with sympathetic
leaps of the imagination.
AS Byatt – who hated the Narnia books even as a child, regarding them as
"Christian armtwisting" – has the highest regard for Lewis's work as a critic,
particularly The Allegory of Love. She recalls approaching him after a lecture
and offering to continue its work. "He was quite keen. He said, 'You will of
course have to learn Greek.' And I went to graduate school in America and I
tried to learn Greek, but the central heating was so hot that I just leaned my
face on the desk all the time and didn't hear the Greek.
"I did have the feeling that he was a very clever schoolboy who had never
grown up. He was sheltered. I didn't feel he knew anything about the world I
was in, with babies and nappies and money problems. I think he didn't like
women. There was a terrifying moment in The Screwtape Letters where the devil
is trying to tempt somebody into thinking milk is disgusting because it comes
from somewhere in the cow quite close to excrement. I think that was a
personal thing of Lewis's. I think he didn't like milk because he didn't like
females."
According to AN Wilson, "he was very well read, but he was not a scholar. The
thing that all the other English dons didn't like is that he never corrected
anything. He never read a scholarly text; he just read old Everyman versions.
Many of the texts he cites in his 16th-century book are bad texts, and
therefore the things he says when he's close-reading a poem are all wrong."
Nevertheless, adds Wilson, in a book such as The Discarded Image, Lewis used
the texts as a way to try to understand "what a medieval person saw when they
looked at the world, when they looked at the sky, what they thought about
nature, what they thought about faith. It's a brilliant book."
That ability to help a reader to inhabit a world, or a worldview, could be
said to be what unites all those different Lewises. The fact that so many are
still inhabiting Lewis's own worldview – for better and for worse – speaks
strongly of his success.
It's 50 years since CS Lewis died. His legacy encompasses far more than just
Narnia – Rowan Williams, AS Byatt, Philip Pullman and others give their
thoughts on his body of work
Sam Leith
The Guardian, Tuesday 19 November 2013 18.48 GMT
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/19/cs-lewis-literary-legacy
"Aslan is on the move." That phrase, three decades after I first read The
Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, still has the power to tickle the hairs on
my neck. It testifies to the enduring power of CS Lewis's recasting of the
Christian myth that I'm far from alone. If this were all there were to him, it
would still be pretty remarkable that, 50 years after his death, this tweedy
old Oxford don should occupy such an exalted place in our cultural life.
All this week on Radio 4, Simon Russell Beale has been reading The Screwtape
Letters – Lewis's perceptive inquiry into temptation cast as a series of witty
letters between a demon and his apprentice. This Friday, his reputation will
be crowned with a plaque in his honour, between John Betjeman and William
Blake, in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
The tribute might have pleased him, but it's an odd one: as a poet, Lewis is
usually regarded as pretty useless. "He hated all poets because he was a
failed poet," says his biographer AN Wilson. "He hated TS Eliot. He hated
Louis MacNeice. There's a very bad 'poem' by Lewis about reading The Love Song
of J Alfred Prufrock, and it just shows how stupid he was about modern
poetry."
Lewis has much more than poetry to offer, though. Almost too much: his
posthumous reputation is disconcertingly various. As well as a children's
writer, he was novelist, memoirist, essayist, critic, broadcaster and
apologist. But the two Lewises that command the biggest followings are the
author of the Narnia stories, and (in something of an overlap) the writer of
Christian apologetics.
In the latter department, Lewis's work teams a direct, companionable style
with sinewy reasoning: an appeal to the heart by way of the head. Mere
Christianity – a book based on a series of BBC radio talks Lewis gave during
the second world war – sells in vast quantities in the US and is regarded as
"almost a sort of summa theologica of the Protestant world", says Wilson.
"Wheaton College in Illinois [a Christian arts college] bought his wardrobe
and, even though it's a non-smoking campus, they bought his pipes, to be kept
in a sort of reliquary."
According to Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lewis "is
coming up the agenda again". He says the last five years have seen Lewis given
"serious academic attention – and attention from people who are not just in
the evangelical camp".
Lewis's great gift as a writer about Christianity was not as an academic
theologian, says Williams, but "in what you might call pastoral theology: as
an interpreter of people's moral and spiritual crises; as somebody who is a
brilliant diagnostician of self-deception; and somebody who, in his own book
on bereavement after his wife's death, really pushes the envelope – giving
permission, I suppose, to people to articulate their anger and resentment
about a God who apparently takes your loved ones away from you."
Opinion varies starkly on the value of the Narnia stories. Many, including
Lewis's friend JRR Tolkien, found them incoherent, sentimental and
unsatisfactory. The twin taints of racism and sexism attach to them – as they
do to other Lewis works. Notoriously, at the end of the Narnia stories, Susan
appears to be punished for entering adolescence and developing an interest in
lipstick by exclusion from what in the Narnia mythos passes for heaven.
And the Calormenes are, says Williams, described as "dark skinned and a bit
peculiar. I think the racism is very difficult to acquit Lewis on. It's part
of an unthinking cultural set of attitudes which pretty well every writer of
the period would have affected: a pseudo-medieval crusaders-and-saracens sort
of thing. The Others have scimitars and pointy helmets and talk peculiarly in
an Arabian Nights style. There's no way round that."
Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials trilogy presents as a sort of
anti-Narnia, regards Lewis's religious writings as "bullying, hectoring and
dishonest in all kinds of ways", and the Narnia books as actually "wicked". He
says: "I find them very dodgy and unpleasant – dodgy in the dishonest rhetoric
way – and unpleasant because they seem to embody a world view that takes for
granted things like racism, misogyny and a profound cultural conservatism that
is utterly unexamined."
Among Pullman's charges ("other little things that just occur in passing") is
that "he pours scorn on little girls with fat legs. And, as one commentator
said, among Lewis's readers will be some little girls with fat legs who find
themselves utterly bewildered by this slur on something they can't help and
are embarrassed and upset by already. It's the position, as this commentator
said, of the teacher who curries favour with the bullies in the class by
bullying the weak children with them."
Yet, bolstered by successful Hollywood films, they retain a colossal popular
appeal. As Williams says, "In a peculiar way, Philip Pullman's His Dark
Materials is quite a tribute to Lewis – because, although Philip loathes the
Narnia stories, he clearly recognises that there is enough imaginative bounce
and energy in them to demand a serious response."
But Lewis also speaks profoundly to grown-ups as a memoirist. Surprised By
Joy, which appeared in 1955 and described his early life and conversion to
Christianity as an adult, has an enduring constituency, even among those who
do not share his faith. Zadie Smith has talked of recognising the
"inexplicable feeling of gratitude" to which Lewis's title alludes: "It comes
over you sometimes. And particularly if you are unreligious, you don't know
what to do with it." A Grief Observed, written near the end of his life about
the death of his wife and originally published pseudonymously, continues to
reach a wide public with its tenderness and the candour of its anguish.
The picture is complicated by Lewis's personal life having itself entered into
myth. For a long time, his relationship with Tolkien – an intense friendship
that played a large part in his conversion to Christianity – attracted
fascination, alongside stories of their literary group the Inklings meeting,
in a fug of tobacco and warm beer, in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford. Then
the 1993 film Shadowlands told a romanticised version of the story of Lewis's
marriage late in life to an American fan, Joy Davidson (the title of Surprised
By Joy, published much earlier, started to look prescient). It both increased,
and somewhat distorted, his reputation.
The problem, says Wilson, is that "almost none of it is true. There's only one
stepson, not two stepsons, and so on. Anthony Hopkins, a brilliant actor, is
immaculately clad in a dark suit, while Lewis was a filthy old man dripping
beer and tobacco everywhere. But apart from all that, it makes out that this
big thing in Lewis's life was the marriage – and in fact it was just a little
thing that happened at the end. For 33 years, he shared his life with the
woman he called Minto, Jane Moore [the mother of one of Lewis's boyhood
friends]. She was the love of his life – she was the main thing. I want to
write a screenplay for Helen Mirren to play Minto."
Finally – at the end of this rather long list of Lewises – there was the day
job. Lewis was a Professor of English literature – the author inter alia of a
thunderously argumentative Preface to Paradise Lost; transformative works on
medieval literature, The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image; and a
compendious introduction to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. He
was, says Williams, "an exceptionally good literary critic, and I think that
will be a very widely shared judgment". Pullman, too, has respect for Lewis
the critic. Just as in his religious writings he spoke to ordinary churchgoers
more than theologians, Lewis's literary work was concerned with sympathetic
leaps of the imagination.
AS Byatt – who hated the Narnia books even as a child, regarding them as
"Christian armtwisting" – has the highest regard for Lewis's work as a critic,
particularly The Allegory of Love. She recalls approaching him after a lecture
and offering to continue its work. "He was quite keen. He said, 'You will of
course have to learn Greek.' And I went to graduate school in America and I
tried to learn Greek, but the central heating was so hot that I just leaned my
face on the desk all the time and didn't hear the Greek.
"I did have the feeling that he was a very clever schoolboy who had never
grown up. He was sheltered. I didn't feel he knew anything about the world I
was in, with babies and nappies and money problems. I think he didn't like
women. There was a terrifying moment in The Screwtape Letters where the devil
is trying to tempt somebody into thinking milk is disgusting because it comes
from somewhere in the cow quite close to excrement. I think that was a
personal thing of Lewis's. I think he didn't like milk because he didn't like
females."
According to AN Wilson, "he was very well read, but he was not a scholar. The
thing that all the other English dons didn't like is that he never corrected
anything. He never read a scholarly text; he just read old Everyman versions.
Many of the texts he cites in his 16th-century book are bad texts, and
therefore the things he says when he's close-reading a poem are all wrong."
Nevertheless, adds Wilson, in a book such as The Discarded Image, Lewis used
the texts as a way to try to understand "what a medieval person saw when they
looked at the world, when they looked at the sky, what they thought about
nature, what they thought about faith. It's a brilliant book."
That ability to help a reader to inhabit a world, or a worldview, could be
said to be what unites all those different Lewises. The fact that so many are
still inhabiting Lewis's own worldview – for better and for worse – speaks
strongly of his success.
--
Steve Hayes
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://www.goodreads.com/hayesstw
http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/Methodius
Steve Hayes
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://www.goodreads.com/hayesstw
http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/Methodius