No. It’s not.

While tempted to leave it at that and produce the shortest blog of history, I think it is important to let the Narnian himself address the question. C.S. Lewis was, after all, a literary scholar who had written an entire academic book about the development of medieval allegory (The Allegory of Love). He knows what allegory is, when it works well, and how to use it when it is the best genre to use. He liked Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and George Orwell‘s Animal Farm. He himself wrote an allegory, The Pilgrim’s Regress, and never chose to do so again.

When Lewis turned to writing for children and his earlier science fiction books, he could have easily chosen allegory. Instead, he wrote fairy tale and space romances. J.R.R. Tolkien hated allegory “in all its manifestations” (see his 2nd edition foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring).  Lewis did not dislike allegory, but he saw greater potential elsewhere. Here is a paraphrase of a note in a letter to Fr. Peter Milward on Sep 22nd, 1956:

Into an allegory a writer can put only what he already knows: in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and could not come to know in any other way.

This is the adventure of fantasy writing. There was far too much unknown in Narnia and in the Ransom books for Lewis to leave them in allegory.

Yet, again and again, from the letters he answered, through published reviews, to academic conversations today, people talk about the allegorical elements in Narnia, and sometimes even call them allegories. Lewis and Tolkien protested similar treatments of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, publishing responses to critics who went astray. But if theses stories really aren’t allegories, how come so many think they are?

This is partly answered in Lewis’ rhetorical question to Wayland Hilton Young on Jan 31st, 1952: “is it possible for any man to write a fantastic story which another man can’t read as an allegory?” Readers experience a kind of gestalt effect: distinctions blur and new images emerge in our reading. It is part of what makes reading a dynamic, adventurous undertaking. It is why we reread books, over and over again.

The other part of the answer is probably equally hopeless to combat.

Clearly, we have no idea what we mean by the word “allegory.” If asked, doubtless educated readers would say something like, “stories where the characters or objects in the story have a one-to-one relationship with some idea or thing in the real world.” When we are pushed to say what this relationship is, it falls apart. The Ring of Power that Frodo must carry is what? Nuclear weaponry? Our dark tendency to dictatorship? Original sin? If we disregard what the author was doing and what his contextual conversations were like, then I suppose the ring could be anything.

Of course, then, we aren’t really saying anything about the text we are reading anyway.

Both Lewis and Tolkien denied this one-to-one relationship existed in their work. It isn’t that there isn’t symbollic value in saying, for example, that Frodo’s journey to Mount Doom is like Christ’s Passion. Or that the undragoning of Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a good image of conversion. And it doesn’t mean that mythopoeic writers are speaking to real life conversations about power and faith and culture.

But calling them “allegory” tells us more about the reader than it does about the books themselves.

I thought it would be helpful to let Lewis himself explain. To Lucy Matthews on Sep 11th, 1958, he wrote:

You’ve got it exactly right. A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can’t quite place.

His most extensive response in letters, though, was to a Mrs. Hook on Dec 29th, 1958. It is such a helpful reading of Lewis’ own writing project that it is worth quoting at length:

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
29 Dec 1958
Dear Mrs Hook
By an allegory I mean a composition (whether pictorial or literary) in wh. immaterial realities are represented by feigned physical objects e.g. a pictured Cupid allegorically represents erotic love (which in reality is an experience, not an object occupying a given area of space) or, in Bunyan, a giant represents Despair.
If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not an allegory at all. 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.’)
Allegory and such supposals differ because they mix the real and the unreal in different ways. Bunyan’s picture of Giant Despair does not start from supposal at all. It is not a supposition but a fact that despair can capture and imprison a human soul. What is unreal (fictional) is the giant, the castle, and the dungeon. The Incarnation of Christ in another world is mere supposal: but granted the supposition, He would really have been a physical object in that world as He was in Palestine and His death on the Stone Table would have been a physical event no less than his death on Calvary.
Similarly, if the angels (who I believe to be real beings in the actual universe) have that relation to the Pagan gods which they are assumed to have in Perelandra, they might really manifest themselves in real form as they did to Ransom.
Again, Ransom (to some extent) plays the role of Christ not because he allegorically represents him (as Cupid represents falling in love) but because in reality every real Christian is really called upon in some measure to enact Christ. Of course Ransom does this rather more spectacularly than most. But that does not mean that he does it allegorically. It only means that fiction (at any rate my kind of fiction) chooses extreme cases….
Thank you for the kind things you say about my other works.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis

Let me tell you a story.

In the summer of 1772, 245 years ago, a young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took a position articling in Wetzlar, Germany. He wasn’t a very good lawyer, however, and spent most of his time “lying in the grass beneath a tree, philosophizing with his friends” (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 5)–a job usually more suited to city workers than lawyers. Often, he would walk to the quaint village of Garbenheim and sit in the village square enjoying the quaintness of the scene, reading his Homer or the Bible, and talking to the villagers. He often sat in the shade of the linden tree, sketching the scene or reading or writing notes, and occasionally indulging the neighbourhood children with some money for a treat.

Not too long after he went to Wetzlar, in early June he went to a ball and a young woman caught his eye. Her name was Charlotte Buff. She was a simple country girl, beneath his social stature, but he was captivated. He was haunted by her beauty and lively charm, so he pursued her, not knowing that she was engaged to be married already to a personable young man named Christian Kestner.

Charlotte Buff was the second oldest of eleven children, the daughter of a widowed military officer. After her mother’s death, she gave herself lovingly to her family, caring for the children in her energetic, witty and unassuming way. Goethe fell in love with Charlotte’s domestic bliss and her inspiring ability to bring lightheartedness to any occasion. He was taken with the children, and was kind to Charlotte’s brothers and sisters, helping out as the occasion arose.

Interestingly, he became close friends with her betrothed, Christian Kestner, who had a “calm and even behaviour, clarity of opinions, and firmness in action and speech” (Werther, 6). As the character of Werther says in Goethe’s novel, “No doubt about it, [he] is the best fellow on the earth” (54). They had a mutual respect for each other, and Kestner called Goethe a talented genius, a man of character with a vivid imagination. He noted in letters to friends that Goethe was prone to “violent emotion,” but worked hard at a self-control that worked well with his independent spirit.

For Goethe, the summer was idyllic, with the friendship between he, Charlotte, and Kestner blossoming into full bloom in the joyous beauty of the countryside. They were inseparable, and Goethe felt that the friendship was smooth and painless.

Reading Kestner’s diaries, though, we see that that was not his impression. He trusted Goethe, and knew that they were friends, but as he was at work, Goethe would spend his days with Charlotte. When Kestner returned home, he felt the annoyance of Goethe. Goethe was frustrated, to be sure, but felt like being with Charlotte was a kind of reward, a great happening in the longing he had for her (recalling the words of Peter Abelard, who had fallen in love with the forbidden Heloïse).

How long could this love triangle withstand tension? Goethe felt like it was completely innocent—and it seems that according to social convention, it was innocent. But the tension must have been unbearable. Goethe’s echo in the voice of Werther is intriguing: “we should treat children as God treats us; He makes us happiest when He leaves us our pleasant delusions” (42). It seems he would prefer to remain in his delusions about their relationship than face the truth.

Finally, in mid-August, Charlotte told Goethe not to expect her to return his love. He became quite depressed, and within a month Goethe returned to the city, leaving without warning, simply leaving a note that said, “I am alone now, and may shed my tears. I leave you both to your happiness and will not be gone from your hearts.”

For those who have read The Sorrows of Young Werther, this will seem vaguely familiar. More than “vaguely,” actually. The parallel with Werther is pretty remarkable–and a little frightening, considering how the novel ends. In the second half of the novel, the main character—Werther, in love with “Charlotte” who is betrothed to another—descends quite dramatically to the point of suicide. Does this too parallel Goethe’s experience? Did Goethe commit suicide?

Well, like Werther, Goethe moved to the city to work, away from Charlotte and Kestner. And, like Werther, he fell in love again and was again disappointed, for he loved a young woman of a higher class who was, again, wedded to another person.

Historical sources suggest that Goethe was in some sort of depression. He heard a rumour—untrue, but shocking to him—that his good friend von Goué had committed suicide. He wrote to Kestner—yes, they are still on writing terms—that “I honour the deed,” but “I hope I shall never trouble my friends with news of such a kind” (Werther, 8-9). Then, three weeks later, a young gentleman named Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem shot himself.

Jerusalem was a law student with Goethe and was also a sharp writer and thinker. He took a job as a secretary to the ambassador of Braunschweig, just as Werther took clerk position in the novel. As a secretary he worked in his free time on painting and poetry and philosophy, occasionally attending the social functions.

Jerusalem struggled in Wetzlar, however. He had been rejected by high society and even though he was reasonably fashionable and polite, he did not make friends easily—he called Goethe, one of our most enduring authors, a “fop” and a “scribbler.” Unfortunately, his rejection by the aristocracy was personally troubling, and he fell in love with another man’s wife. He began to brood in Wetzlar, taking long, lonely moonlit walks.

As his passion for the married woman hit its peak, he wrote a popular article in defense of suicide; it is quite similar to Werther’s defense of suicide in the novel. In the novel, Charlotte’s fiancé is going on about his scruples over keeping guns, and Werther places a gun to his head in mock suicide. He reacts strongly. “it isn’t loaded,” Werther counters. “Even if it isn’t, I cannot imagine how a man can be so foolish as to shoot himself; I find the mere thought repellent.” (55)

They then have a discussion of morality where Werther suggests suicide is a great thing done by great men, suggesting that, “it would be as misconceived to call a man cowardly for taking his own life, as it would be to say a man who dies of malignant fever was a coward” (58). There is no agreement around the table on this question.

Returning to Goethe’s real life friend, Jerusalem, we find that Jerusalem wrote of the woman he loved, “I do not believe she cares for gallant amours, and in any case her husband is extremely jealous; so his love finally put paid to his heart’s ease and peace of mind” (9). One night, Jerusalem borrowed some pistols from a friend, saying that he was going to go on a trip. He dismissed his servants, wrote a note—which we still have—and shot himself at his desk. He bled throughout the night and died not long after being discovered in a pool of blood on the floor. Werther’s fate was precisely the same. And just as Werther does in the novel, Jerusalem left a copy of Lessing’s play Emilia Galotti on his desk.

Goethe was clearly thrown off by the suicide, writing to Kestner, “The poor fellow! … he is in love. It was loneliness, God knows, that ate away at his heart” (9). In the end, though, Goethe does not follow the fate of his friend Jerusalem and his character Werther.

The Sorrows of Young Werther is an intriguing “what if?” story. The first half of the novel is really a semi-autobiographical story of his falling for Charlotte–cleverly disguised as Lotte in the novel–and loving her even when it is impossible that she might return his love. The second half, after he is unsuccessful in love once again, is not Goethe’s story, precisely. It is the story of Jerusalem, who surrendered to his passions—or had the courage to surrender, if you believe the argument. The second half of Werther is the path that Goethe could have taken, but didn’t.

What if Goethe had lost himself to his passion like Werther had? Jerusalem was, for Goethe, the path not taken, the road not travelled. And there are other cautionary tales in the novel, warnings of paths that Goethe could have taken—madness and murder—but did not.

Instead, Goethe moves on. For his part, he retained a healthy correspondence with Kestner, but did not pursue Charlotte again. He wrote the novel we read in about a month in 1777, 240 years ago, and it became an international best seller. There was a kind of “Werther Fever” that erupted when Napoleon took a copy on his campaign in Egypt (as American Presidents are often photographed with books that become bestsellers). Young men all over Europe read the book and started dressing like Werther. Pilgrimages to Germany became a regular feature of the literary world, and the Romantic period saw Werther as a kind of ideal story, one lost in unrequited love and living only for love. There was even reputed to be a rash of copycat suicides, each one leaving the copy of their favourite play covered in blood.

Goethe, however, came to hate the book. Although it created a new literary movement, he wished he had chosen not to be so dangerously autobiographical. He also exposed the real Charlotte to public scrutiny—something he never intended. He recognized the book’s power to move young lovers, but he hated being famous for it. Really, he was the world’s first international celebrity. But he did better work than this, he thought. His creation of the character Faust is probably his most important literary work, but his scientific work is important—he is the first to theorize that colours appeared in a spectrum, a play of darkness and light. Clever fellow.

I think he is probably a jerk for writing a best-selling novel at 24 years old, and then snubbing superstardom. But he really captures some key things about the shifting cultural understandings of love. It is also a book I make my students read, knowing some will loathe it and others fall in love. It is a novel that defined a generation–actually, one that changed every romance story after it. Yet it is still, for a lover of books, simply a light summer read.

As the cobblestone streets and hallowed halls of Oxford are beginning to fill for Michaelmas term, University students and faculty have been back to work here in North America. As I have a busy semester of teaching, I had a number of “first days.” No doubt, students are already concerned about how much they can actually accomplish as the work begins to pile up. As they hustle between classes, jobs, volunteering, and time with friends and family, the hours for doing actual classwork seem to shrink. Almost anyone at the end of the first month of college or university will be certain that they cannot possibly accomplish everything this term. Little do they know, most professors feel the same.

Has it always been this way? My mother went back to university when I was in elementary school, so I remember the late nights and her desk filled with books and papers. Almost everyone I know remembers university this way, but when I read about historical figures, they tend to speak of their time at “uni” in such glowing terms.

Turning to the figure of my own study, what was university time like for C.S. Lewis? As a student at Oxford, Lewis wouldn’t have had the normal experience of students at redbrick schools in the UK or at North American universities. The rituals and supports for an Oxford scholar are complex, so that dining at high table in college is not the same as getting the meal plan at the cafeteria. Oxford is not merely a place of learning–in a sense, it isn’t really a university in the way non-Oxbridge universities think of as an institution of learning. Oxford is more like a city of idea spaces, and navigating that takes some getting used to.

But Lewis also had servants to help him do his work, giving the scholars time and space to do the most important things to them. Moreover, most of the work that Lewis and his colleagues would do was independent. Voluntary lectures were the support to mandatory one-on-one or two-on-one tutorials–the opposite of what many would experience today outside of Oxford or Cambridge and a handful of universities based on that model. The work in Oxford was also at a higher level, so Lewis’ first degrees were in many ways already at graduate level–certainly when we consider where education is today.

So there are are key differences in the way that an Oxford scholar in the 1920s and, say, a student at Penn State, McGill, or the University of Chester would approach school. What, then, did C.S. Lewis’ academic day look like?

Perhaps it is an odd fascination, but I do love reading people’s diaries. Dead people of course. I don’t really want the inner thoughts of real people in my everyday life. Though the voyeuristic instinct most researchers have might kick in when thinking about a friend’s diary, actually reading it would run the spectrum from awkward to horrifying.

Diaries and letters of dead people, though, are two different explorations of the self that give us a unique sense of the writer in ways that can adjust the picture of the man or woman in the mind of the reader. In the study of history, they are invaluable, and Lewis’ letters have formed a key part of my research, helping me slowly collate all the important information, quotes, and significant moments of Lewis’ life. Lewis’ letters, collected by Walter Hooper, set the pace for my reading of all of Lewis’ works, and helped me discover Lewis’ thinking patterns outside of formal teaching and writing.

While all those are lovely details are essential to my overall project, beyond this there is something beautiful about the mundane.Though a prolific letter-writer, Lewis only kept a journal through his last years as a student and his first years of teaching. So I thought I would pick Lewis’ entry as a student at the beginning of fall term in 1923.

While much of the diary is pretty boring, there is an interesting entry on Oct 21st, 1923. You can find a pretty good example of boring and mispelled entry a year earlier, Oct 21st, 1922:

Saturday 21 October: Up rather late and started Vergil with Maureen after breakfast, going on till eleven o’clock. Then I set to on my O.E. [Old English] Riddles: did not progress very quickly but solved a problem which has been holding me up. [Henry] Sweet is certainly an infuriating author…

D [Mrs. Moore] was much more cheerful than she has been for some time and for an hour or so we were quite merry. After tea I went to the drawing room and continued the [Canterbury] Tales. Then supper: D’s work, which has all my maledictions, had her worried again by that time, or perhaps it was depression. A delightfully small wash up, thanks to the absence of Mrs Hankin and other visitors. Afterwards I got as far as the end of the Reeve’s Tale, which is pretty poor: but the Miller’s capital.

A domestic day: slept in, read Vergil (i.e., Virgil) with breakfast, homework, a chat, tea, reading Chaucer, dinner and dishes before bedtime reading–really a typical day for C.S. Lewis when he is in his mid-20s (except he usually has also has a cold and is worried about money). The more synchronic date, in 1923, is less quotidian. Oct 21, 1923 is the record of one of Lewis’ walks with his good friend Cecil Harwood–he loved hiking through English towns and countrysides–which he calls “a luminous dream.” His delight is such that he begins the process of tucking it into his permanent memory. The entry is also interesting because he doesn’t finish. He breaks off mid-sentence, leaving us to imagine the rest of the walk on our own.

Sunday 21 October: Began reading Butler’s Erewhon in bed this morning. After breakfast wh. we had v. late, we set out for a walk. We took the Metropolitan to Richmond, in the streets of which we were held up by rain for ten minutes. How delightful all expeditions are with people who don’t mind rain! We then went into Richmond Park. I was quite unprepared for it. There was hardly anyone to be seen. In a few minutes we were in an absolutely deserted open rolling country full of bracken, standing pools and all kinds of woods and groves under a splendid grey autumn sky. We had as good a walk as ever I have had, coming down at about 2 o’clock into Kingston on Thames. Here we were overtaken by sharp rain and finding all the hotels shut were reduced to a very hasty lunch for ten pence each in “a low eating house”—a phrase I never really understood before.

After lunch we walked into Hampton Court Park. This was at first less beautiful than the other: then gradually we came to the end of a very long sheet of water with huge trees in autumn colouring on each side and Wren’s “back” of Hampton Court just visible at the end. At the same moment the sun broke out: the grass (very level) and the dead leaves on it, the trees, the swans, and one little stag that did not run away, took on glorious colours. We were alone: the silence was intense. It was all just like one of those luminous dreams I have so seldom dreamed. We walked up the whole length of the water to the fine old ironwork gates—still not a soul about and into the Palace gardens. This approach will be a great memory to me…

And that’s it. The diary ends here, and actually ends Lewis’ diary-writing until the next year–New Year’s resolutions work sometimes, and Lewis began again strongly on Jan 1st, 1924.  Since we have very few letters in this period, I thought it might be helpful to post a “note” Lewis added after the Oct 21st entry, perhaps at the end of 1923 or before writing on New Years Day 1924. This note shows essential friendships, Lewis’ early view of animals, his poetry (Dymer, published 1925), his reading list, and the power of his Oxford bachelor perspective in this his atheistic period.

NOTE: My last diary, after fluttering for some time on a broken wing, came to an end on 21 October 1923 when I was with Harwood at his flat in Pimlico. On that Sunday evening he read and condemned in no measured terms the two new cantos of “Dymer” (VI and VII) which I had brought to show him. After discussion I largely agreed with him and decided to cut them out: in spite of the work I had put into them I felt surprisingly little disappointment at giving them up. I suppose that in the expulsion of anything bad from the mental system there is always pleasure.

Sometime after my visit to Harwood I cycled to Long Crendon to spend a night at Barfield‘s cottage there, thus meeting his wife and mother in law for the first time. His wife is plain, and undistinguished in manner—which I take for a good sign in a marriage so unequal in age. She is very quiet, a little shy, I think: “homely” both in the good and the bad sense of the word. I like her, and I think I should like her more, the more I saw of her. His mother in law, Mrs Dewey [Douie], is a “character part”: a very caustic old Scotch lady.

Barfield has, if anything, improved by marriage. I enjoyed my little stay greatly. We talked a great deal, about [Rudolph] Steiner, the Douglas Scheme, and the changes we had gone through even in the short time we had known each other.

He made one excellent remark. “I am not bored,” he said. “I still have always a waiting list of things to do, even if it’s only walking to the bottom of the garden to see how a bud is coming on.” He saw me as far as Stanton St John on the way back. While I was with him I saw several of his new poems, some of which are very fine. He approved of “Dymer” V and tolerated my new version of VI.

I saw little of Jenkin this term. D began to be very poorly about this time and started a course of medicines for indigestion at the advice of Dr McCay. The latter was often here doctoring Maureen’s mysteriously damaged ankle: he soon proved himself a fool, promising her that it would be all right next week and changing his promises often.

Harwood came down for a very jolly week end, during which we played Boy’s Names, walked, talked and laughed, keeping entirely free from shop. D and Maureen both like him very much, and indeed, in many ways, he is an ideal companion. It was during this stay that he met Jenkin again and they became friends—Jenkin having been rather repelled by his manner when they met before.

Later on Barfield came to stay for one night. He and I talked till three o’clock: one of the most satisfying conversations I have ever had. Although the subject of his marriage was naturally never mentioned, a lot was understood and we each saw that the other felt the same way about women and the home life and the unimportance of all the things that are advertised in common literature. He agreed that, as I said, “either women or men are mad”: he said we could see the woman’s point of view absolutely at times—as if we had never had any other—and this was a sort of relief.

He has completely lost his materialism and “the night sky is no longer horrible”. I read to him in my diary the description of the talk I had with him in Wadham gardens when he was still in pessimism, and we enjoyed it. Although he agreed with several Bergsonianisms of mine (specially that “the materiality is the intelligibility”) he has not read Bergson. He was surprised that I shared most of his views on the nature of thought.

It was shortly before this that I read Flecker’s Hassan. It made a great impression on me and I believe it is really a great work. Carritt (whom I met at the Martlets shortly after) thinks that its dwelling on physical pain puts it as much outside literature as is pornography in another: that it works on the nervous system rather than the imagination. I find this hard to answer: but I am almost sure he is wrong. At that same meeting of the Martlets Sadler read an excellent paper on Day, the author of Sandford and Merton.

Soon after this I had to leave—at an unusually early date in order to conform with W’s [his brother, Warren’s] time of leave [from the military]. The usual wretchedness of going away was increased by D’s state of health: and to crown all, Maureen [D’s daughter] had to be sent to Bristol during my absence to have her foot properly seen to by Rob. Poor D, who was thus left alone had a dreadful time, and admits now that she was at times afraid it was going to be a gastric ulcer. Thank heavens she seems better now. My three weeks in Ireland, tho’ improved by W’s presence, were as usual three weeks too long. I had a good deal of toothache.

On the return journey W and I stopped for a night in town. For the first time since we were children we visited the Zoo with great gusto: but the cages are too small, and it is cruel—specially for animals like foxes, wolves, dingoes and jackals. We also went to see a musical comedy called Katherine, wh. was very bad. We had meant to go to Hassan, but after reading it W decided that it would be too harrowing for his feelings.

While I was in Ireland I read Tolstoy‘s Anna Karenina, Masefield’s Daffodil Fields, J. Stephen’s new book Deirdre and Henry James’ Roderick Hudson.

*Of course, the hint of “D” above lets us know Lewis’ school life was both normal and abnormal. “D” is Mrs. Moore, the mother of Lewis’ war friend, Paddy Moore, to whom he had given the promise to take care of his mother should he die. Paddy Moore went missing in WWI and was never found, and Lewis moved in with Mrs. Moore and her daughter, Maureen. It is likely Lewis and Mrs. Moore were lovers about this time–something that would have led to Lewis’ expulsion from Oxford–but gradually she became just another member of the extended Lewis household. A.N. Wilson sets this up nicely, exaggerating slightly in the style of his biography writing:

Lewis appeared to be enjoying an archetypal undergraduate career in ancient and beautiful surroundings. But in fact his routines were completely different from those of his fellow-collegians. True, he rose at six-thirty, bathed, attended chapel (which was still compulsory for undergraduates) and had his breakfast in hall. Then he went to lectures and libraries and tutorials, and had lunch (bread, cheese and beer) brought over to his room by a college servant. But at 1 p.m. without fail, he got on his bicyle and pedalled over Magdalen Bridge, up Headington Hill and into the dingy little suburban toroughfare near the mental hospital. There at Number 28 Warneford Road, in the house of a lady of High Church persuasion by the name of Featherstone, Mrs Moore and her daughter Maureen had taken up their abode. ‘They are installed in our ‘own hired house’ (like St. Paul only not daily preaching and teaching). The owner of the house has not yet cleared out and we pay a little less than the whole for her still having a room” (A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, 64, quoting a letter to Arthur Greeves).

See C.S. Lewis, All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis (ed. Walter Hooper; New York: Harvest, 1991), 123-124, 276-279. See also volume 1 of the Collected Letters and any of the biographies to get a further sense of the time.

C.S. Lewis was an acclaimed children’s writer, setting the stage for generations of children’s books that speak in a new way to kids and adults with curious minds. Behind this children’s work was C.S. Lewis’ experience as a teacher of English literature, a writer about the history of literary movements, and a tinker in other forms of fiction. In that tinkering, and in his letters and essays, he didn’t mind creating new turns of phrase. This is the second in a series on words that C.S. Lewis coined. You can read the introduction and the first article on Bulverism here.

Charientocracy (ker-ē-en-tä-krə-sē or kär-en-tä-krə-sē)

C.S. Lewis was one of the earliest users of the word “technocracy”–a word that was important in our thinking about the world wars and more recently in the way that technology seems to be worming its way into our patterns in a deep, deep way. In that WWII context, Lewis is in concerned in The Abolition of Man and in essays about an “omnicompetent global technocracy”:

Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man (“Is Progress Possible” = “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State,” responding to C.P. Snow’s “Man in Society”)

This is not Lewis’ only concern about how power operates. Lewis thinks about an “angelocracy,” and in the unfinished, posthumously published “A Reply to Professor Haldane,” talks about theocracy–the idea that God or the gods are truly in power through an individual or a group of people:

Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may, possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations (also in “A Reply to Professor Haldane”)

Lewis repeats the sentiment in “Lilies that Fester,” asserting that:

“All political power is at best a necessary evil: but it is least evil when its sanctions are most modest and commonplace, when it claims no more than to be useful or convenient and sets itself strictly limited objectives. Anything transcendental or spiritual, or even anything very strongly ethical, in its pretensions is dangerous and encourages it to meddle with our private lives.”

In the end, though, Lewis does not think that a theocracy in England is remotely possible. So rather than be concerned with “theocracy,” Lewis is concerned about what he calls “Charientocracy”:

“not the rule of the saints but the rule of the charentes, the venustiores, the Hotel de Rambouillet, the Wits, the Polite, the “Souls,” the “Apostles,” the Sensitive, the Cultured, the Integrated, or whatever the latest password may be” (“Lilies that Fester”).

This may take some explaining, and the meaning might not be certain. Though I would not leave out the possibility that Lewis is making a sardonic pun on the Latin word “caritas” (deep personal love, now called Charity), Charientocracy probably comes from the Greek word for “grace.” Lewis may be using it here as in the higher graces someone in polite society is able to deploy.

We see this from another neologism in the passage, the “Venustiores”—a Latin adjective meaning “the charming ones.” I think “Charentes” probably goes back to Pineau des Charentes, a posh product from a French region that also exports premium cognac. The rest of the words are just names Lewis found lying around for high brow culture. We might add pop culture phrases like the elite, the literati, the cognoscenti, plutarchs, the glitterati, the 1%, or even—depending on how your world works—the people from X Avenue or Club Y. In my area, it vacillates between wealthy folk in Brighton who have political and financial power, and the inside crowd that frequents the farmers market and whose members smell faintly of honey, good earth, and marijuana smoke. One group has the structural power, but the other a kind of social power.

Lewis’ concern was really when those two groups coalesced. It is a bare fact that as older social orders disappear, “we find all sorts of people building themselves into groups within which they can feel superior to the mass; little unofficial, self-appointed aristocracies” (“Lilies that Fester”). When the social elite and the economic elite find each other, Lewis was certain that it would be the end of art, for children would be put to good use in their education. They wouldn’t be allowed to simply discover poetry or play in nature, but would be taught to evaluate it. If Wordsworth were born in this sort of technocratic culture, he would be put to useful writing and may never have found the words that changed the world.

That is Charientocracy, a greater social danger in contemporary post-religious society than theocracy ever could be because it turns the human into a product of a socio-economic machine. The dehumanized person then disappears from the inside out.

It is difficult to imagine that Lewis didn’t have foresight into our own age.

C.S. Lewis was an acclaimed children’s writer, setting the stage for generations of children’s books that speak in a new way to kids and adults with curious minds. Behind this children’s work was C.S. Lewis’ experience as a teacher of English literature, a writer about the history of literary movements, and a tinker in other forms of fiction. In that tinkering, and in his letters and essays, he didn’t mind creating new turns of phrase when it was needed. This is the third in the series on words that C.S. Lewis coined. You can read the introduction and the first article here and the second piece here.

Rebunker (rē-bəNG-kər)

Essays Presented to Charles Williams is a remarkable book. It is a meeting of the Inklings and their friends between two boards, bound to the page but playing with ideas that would have an impact. Meant as a gift to their friend Charles Williams, it became a memorial volume instead. And if T.S. Eliot—a dear friend of Williams—had completed a piece as he intended, more than just a few of us may remember it still.

Beyond Lewis’ preface to the volume is remarkable for his characterization of Williams:

In appearance he was tall, slim, and straight as a boy, though grey-haired. His face we thought ugly: I am not sure that the word ‘monkey’ has not been murmured in this context. But the moment he spoke it became, as was also said, like the face of an angel (Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ix).

While Lewis was moved by Williams’ charisma more than his simian architecture, he was also struck by his facility with fireside literary criticism:

He delighted to repeat favourite passages, and nearly always both his voice and the context got something new out of them. He excelled at showing you the little grain of truth or felicity in some passage generally quoted for ridicule, while at the same time he fully enjoyed the absurdity: or, contrariwise, at detecting the little falsity or dash of silliness in a passage which you, and he, also, admired. He was both a ‘debunker’ and (if I may coin the word) a ‘rebunker’. Fidelia vulnera amantis (Essays Presented to Charles Williams, xi).

Lewis loved this “double-sidedness” in Williams, and I find myself wanting to become a rebunker myself.

The Latin phrase Lewis slid in at the end of that part of this eulogy is perhaps best translated as, “the wounds of a lover are faithful” (or, loosely, “lovers are vulnerable to one another”). Williams’ ability to play with the authors he read came from a deep well of respect, and we see that respect Lewis has for Williams. Anyone who wants to understand The Four Loves needs to read this preface. Anyone who wants to read the work of a rebunker (and remythologizer) should turn to Williams’ strange thrillers from the 1930s-40s. “Rebunking” might be the best name for the genre that holds all of Williams’ disparate works together.

Just in time for Hallowe’en, and in concert with the British Library’s “Harry Potter: A History of Magic” exhibit, BBC has produced an hour-long Potterlicious documentary. I saw this film on Twitter yesterday, and thought it was worth sharing–and not simply because it will be so satisfying to Potter lovers. This is a piece for lovers of literature, writing, magic, and the textural delights of books.

In “A History of Magic,” we are invited into J.K. Rowling’s process of creation in an intriguing way. Rather than merely hearing  stories of her sketching characters and inventing ideas, we see Rowling flipping through the massive collection of magical materials within the library’s collection. While some will doubtless love this documentary for the ways that the Potter-world construct is related to folk magic–and I would hate to deny anyone that curiosity–for me it wasn’t just the connection of how much was made up by Rowling, and how much was adapted from the cultural canon of magic and folklore.

For me, it was a beautiful thing simply to watch Joanne Rowling walk among these old and ancient texts, scrolls, and artifacts. Her reactions are organic–a lover of books and ideas and old things, discovering the connections between Potter’s world and folk-magic, rather than merely explaining them. As she looks at the old illustrations and ancient texts, little bits of creation and legend simply flow out. Rowling’s curiosity and professionalism sit at the front of the documentary, and as someone very curious about the creation of fictional worlds, it was refreshing to watch.

Beyond my strange niche ideas, there is a lot here for fans. Part of the British Library exhibit includes some of Rowlings’ sketches and notes, placed among these artifacts from the past. The crash of the fantastic and realistic is irresistible.

Behind C.S. Lewis’ famous Narnian chronicles was his experience as a teacher of English literature, a writer about the history of literary movements, and a tinker in other forms of fiction. In that tinkering, and in his letters and essays, he would sometimes create new turns of phrase when it was needed. This is the ninth in the series on words that C.S. Lewis coined. The previous two posts (Disredemption and Viricidal) were a little dark; hopefully this week’s sketch lightens things up a week.  

It was the Unblank button that did me in. I was setting up my slides for a lecture and looked down at the new tech set up. Among the buttons that control the project was the “Blank” screen button and–wait for it–its logical opposite: Unblank. Really? That’s the best they could do? This seems to me to be a repeat of the “The Door is Ajar” silliness of talking cars in the 80s.

But the tradition of throwing words onto the beginning or end a word is a long and dis/honourable one. Some of these stick with us, like dysfunctional or mistake. Others have disappeared, like the peculiar forms unabandoned, unabsoiled, unabsolute, unabsolved, unabuilyeit, disabridge, and disafforest. Others change form over time, so that we still say “unable” but the word “unability” has become “inability” and “unablety” has become “disability.” Other verbicidal forms we wish would disappear, like all the prefixes and suffixes attached to “truth” these days. Many of these words are unaccounted for because we forget they are prefixes at all (like the “a” in “unaccounted”).

Here are some of C.S. Lewis’ humorous–if not terribly elegant–uses of prefixes and suffixes to make his point in a new and interesting way.

Unvalue

I suspect many have said the word “unvalued” in the adjectival form to mean something or someone who is not properly valued. John Bail in vol. 1 of his 1551 treatise with the snappy title, The first two parts of the Actes, or vnchast examples of the Englysh votaryes, uses it as a verb: “in hys mouthe myght vnualue or dysable their masses.”

Lewis, though, tried to use “unvalue” as a noun. It is in his dialogue with philosopher C.E.M. Joad on “The Pains of Animals” that Lewis suggests that a single instance of pain where there is no accompanying fear or reflection on the pain is, from the point of view of the one who experiences the pain, essentially not pain, but a sensation. “Unvalue” may have been a good rhetorical invention for the purpose, but in this context it simply means “nil value,” so just a variation of “value” rather than its opposite. The noun in a better sense was attempted by John Ruskin in an obscure Daily Telegraph piece of 1864, “Intrinsic value or goodness in some things, and … intrinsic unvalue or badness in other things.” Still, not a terribly elegant word.

In any case, Lewis was not alone in reaching for this word, though doubtless he thought he was. Though rare, the word “unvalue” is actually attested in two kinds of 20th century literature: philosophy books that no one reads and tax surveys that no one should read. Exciting stuff.

Letterlessness

While Lewis found most of his made-up words were inelegant–and in some cases we’d agree– he liked this one. While Lewis coined “letterlessness” in a letter to his father on Mar 1^st, 1917, to capture the (for him, blissful) state of not having any letters he had to write, the adjective “letterless” was already in play for a long time. “Letterless” meant “unlettered” or illiterate in the earliest 16^th and 17^th centuries. It took on a more tactile sense later, even referring to an unmarked grave in the 18^th century. By this time it was also being used for the person who has no letters to receive or write, and Lewis uses it himself as a teenager.

Still, we know how much Lewis detested letter writing: “it is an essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman’s knock” (Surprised by Joy 143). I wish for him that the afterlife is some state of letterlessness–though few of us hope that heaven is letterless in the Renaissance sense of the word.

Antiparody

Lewis had a way of looking at things upside down. This is the G.K. Chesterton in him, though I suspect that he comes by the trait honestly. David Mark Purdy has argued in Both Sides of the Wardrobe (edited by Rob Fennell)–and I think argued correctly–that The Screwtape Letters is not a parody or satire exactly, but an inverted parody or inverted satire. This “double inversion” gives Screwtape it’s peculiar disorienting and bracing quality.

This isn’t the only time that Lewis tried to think in terms of double inversion. In English Literature in the Sixteenth Century he coined “antiparody” as an academic word to describe a certain kind of phenomenon:

“The excellent lyric ‘All my lufe leif me not’ … belongs to a large class [of] …  ‘antiparodies’ (if I may coin a most necessary word): the conversion of popular and secular songs to devout purposes” (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century 112).

Lewis makes the observation that there is a feature of Medieval and early Renaissance poetry that converts popular and secular songs to devout purposes, such as a hymn or sacred poetry. Thus it is a kind of parody, but lacking the humour or mocking tone altogether. These folks songs will go on to make up some of the early Protestant hymns and the poetic books that the Puritans read, and began as parodies and drinking songs—and often with bawdy content. While the word is thrown about academic circles these days and means something different, Lewis enjoyed the subversive nature of this inversion that took up the popular poem and made it religious.

Not Thinkable-out

In 5 Dec 1949 letter to American correspondent Dr. Warfield M. Firor, Lewis wrote:

“I don’t think ‘incomprehensible’ in the Creed or ‘passing comprehension’ [Phil 4:7] mean what is usually thought. It doesn’t mean, I am told, simply unintelligible, like a book in an unknown tongue. It means not thinkable-out, not capable of being fully summed up or intellectually mastered).”

Here Lewis uses “not thinkable-out” as a nonce word to show the difference between something that is incomprehensible in the way we use that word today, and something that is indescribable (in its various uses). A more elegant usage would be “not think-out-able”–but that grammar break may have stretched him too much. Like the concept Lewis was trying to describe, sometimes words are elusive.

Resnuggle

We have already seen that Lewis played with words in his children’s works, though I had missed some of the tradition of those words when I wrote the piece. “Re-snuggled” might have occurred in literature before Lewis, but I cannot find it. Neither is it necessary to reach very far to imagine the concept. I bet no kid reading the sentence in which it occurred ever had doubts.

Here is the passage from the Narnian prequel, The Magician’s Nephew:

“Fledge trotted to and fro, sniffing and whinnying. The children tip-toed this way and that, looking behind every bush and tree. They kept on thinking they saw things, and there was one time when Polly was perfectly certain she had seen-a tall, dark figure gliding quickly away in a westerly direction. But they caught nothing and in the end Fledge lay down again and the children re-snuggled (if that is the right word) under his wings. They went to sleep at once” (The Magician’s Nephew ch. 12).

The words “snug” and “snuggle” have an almost onomatopoeia quality to them, don’t they? To snuggle in is an important activity, and perhaps deserves to have been put in the “re-” category a long time ago. Alas, this word hasn’t been taken up, which is true of almost none of Lewis’ neologisms and borrowed nonce words.

The Words C.S. Lewis Made Up

• Part 1 and Introduction: Bulverism
• Part 2: Charientocracy
• Part 3: Rebunker
• Part 4: Jollification, Uglification, and the Miserific Vision
• Part 5: Grailologist
• Part 6: Curialisation
• Part 7: Viricidal
• Part 8: Disredemption
• Part 9: Re/Anti/Un/Ness

This is an honest question that I hope readers can help me with, and a proposal I would like to test out. C.S. Lewis’ second space travel adventure, Perelandra, begins like this: “As I left the railway station at Worchester….” It just occurred to me to find out where that station is (or was).

As far as I can tell, Worchester spelled thusly is not a place we would have found in WWII England. There is a Worcester College at Oxford, the alma mater of Emma Watson and Richard Adams—a fact that probably is more interesting to me than to Lewis. Lewis had a friend named Wyllie at Worcester while he was attending Oxford as a student. Lewis had once been given a pair of swans by the Provost of Worcester College, which he hated—the swans, not the Provost. Still, not a terribly strong link.

There is a Worcester in Worcestershire, England—a small city I passed by last year on my way from Birmingham to Cheltenham to visit friends. There are random historical events that are set in Worcester that Lewis might have found significant. Tyndale appeared for charges of heresy there in the early 1520s. Hugh Latimer was Bishop there 1535-39 when he resigned to take up being a heretic full time. Most significantly, the Battle of Worcester closed the English Civil War as Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarian army defeated King Charles II’s Royalist and Scottish army. Worcester was also plan B for the Parliament in WWII in case London had to be abandoned, though I doubt if Lewis knew that.

And, of course, there is the Lea & Perrins brand of Worcestershire sauce, an ill-used staple in our home and many others, I am sure.

Perhaps the link is more personal. Lewis and his brother Warren spent a good deal of time at the schools of Malvern College, which is in Worcestershire. It is where C.S. Lewis abandoned his Christian faith, as he describes in Surprised by Joy and therein calls his school Wyvern College. This was not a warm place in Lewis’ memories, though he had friends, and he would have gone to the city of Worcester for enjoyable outings (escapes) from school.

Of all these, the links to Ransom’s world are not terribly clear. The strongest one is the Battle—and that link might not be more than tangential. Let’s walk through them.

Great Malvern Railway Station

In Perelandra, Lewis the character-narrator gets off at the Worchester station to go to Dr. Ransom’s cottage in the first lines of Perelandra. Ransom is a Cambridge philologist at the fictional Leicester College. If Worchester is Worcester–the misspelling is made with frequency and my audiobook pronounces it like the latter spelling–then the commute from Worcester to Cambridge would be unusually long—at least four hours. The reason that Ransom isn’t home when Lewis gets there is because he had to slip up to Cambridge. There is now a West Chesterton district in the suburbs of Cambridge, but I doubt that is the fictional town in view. Lewis did end up commuting from Oxford to Cambridge, which might have been a three-hour trip, but this wasn’t until more than a decade after Perelandra was written.

Is Worchester meant to be the Worcester of Lewis’ youth? Most of the geographical set up of the Ransom Cycle is fictional. In Out of the Silent Planet, the hiking villages of Nadderby and Sterk are not (unfortunately) real places where a philologist could have walked in the 30s. St. Anne’s in That Hideous Strength is not the end of any line I know (though there is a St. Anne’s College not far from Worcester College in Oxford). Among early readers or the Inklings, there may have been conjecture that Lewis was veiling real places in THS. It seems some thought Lewis’ Town of Edgestow and Bracton College were related to Durham:

A very small university [in That Hideous Strength] is imagined because that has certain conveniences for fiction. Edgestow has no resemblance, save for its smallness, to Durham—a university with which the only connection I have ever had was entirely pleasant (Preface to That Hideous Strength).

Malvern College Chapel

The fiction of Edgestow is filled out with a number of scenes in the text and with a college that has a deep history that roots the story:

Though I am Oxford-bred and very fond of Cambridge, I think that Edgestow is more beautiful than either. For one thing it is so small. No maker of cars or sausages or marmalades has yet come to industrialize the country town which is the setting of the University, and the University itself is tiny. Apart from Bracton and from the nineteenth-century women’s college beyond the railway, there are only two colleges: Northumberland which stands below Bracton on the river Wynd, and Duke’s opposite the Abbey. Bracton takes no undergraduates. It was founded in 1300 for the support of ten learned men whose duties were to pray for the soul of Henry de Bracton and to study the laws of England (ch. 1).

The Holy Well of Malvern

If Edgestow is fictional, there are some real English reference points in THS. Oxford is added to Cambridge as real universities, and there is also London, Lancaster, and, as we see below, York in the north and Warwickshire, on the borders of Worcestershire. Belbury, which houses the evil N.I.C.E., is fictional. But Belbury and Edgestow must be within a difficult walking distance of Worcester, as N.I.C.E.’s forced exodus has driven “driven two thousand families from their homes to die of exposure in every ditch from here to Birmingham or Worcester.” We also find out that St. Anne’s is on the way to Birmingham when Jane is saved from a riot in ch. 8 and as Mark tries to stumble towards his wife in ch. 17.

Plaque at the Sidbury Gate, Worcester

As mentioned above, the clearest link to the historical area of Worcester is to the Battle of Worcester that ends the reign of Charles II. It is captured here in this dialogue with Jane and Miss Ironwood at St. Anne’s Manor, as Jane is slowly discovering she is a seer—a thing she doesn’t believe in:

“What was your maiden name?” asked Miss Ironwood.

“Tudor,” said Jane. At any other moment she would have said it rather self-consciously, for she was very anxious not to be supposed vain of her ancient ancestry.

“The Warwickshire branch of the family?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever read a little book—it is only forty pages long—written by an ancestor of yours about the battle of Worcester?”

“No. Father had a copy—the only copy, I think he said. But I never read it. It was lost when the house was broken up after his death.”

“Your father was mistaken in thinking it the only copy. There are at least two others: one is in America, and the other is in this house.”

“Well?”

“Your ancestor gave a full and, on the whole, correct account of the battle, which he says he completed on the same day on which it was fought. But he was not at it. He was in York at the time” (ch. 3).

How do all these individual links connect?

Malvern College

My proposal is this: That Lewis’ fictional Edgestow is in a small town (2000 people or fewer) in the real Worcestershire, and that That Hideous Strength is likely set in a fictionalized campus like Lewis’ own Malvern College, which is about 10 miles southwest of Worcester in Worcestershire. I will explore a few connections which leads me to this idea.

Lewis loved the architecture of Malvern, and was delighted by the “great blue plain below us and, behind, those green, peaked hills, so mountainous in form and yet so manageably small in size” (Surprised by Joy ch. 4). THS is filled with small English villages, college buildings, large hills, open fields, and ancient woods. Great Malvern and Malvern Hills is a good fit for the novel, though many other places would do as well.

Pressing in on distances, if one was a N.I.C.E. exile pulling a farm cart or a wheelbarrow full of one’s possessions—”chests of drawers, bedsteads, mattresses, boxes, and a canary in a cage”—Great Malvern would be a long day’s walk to Worcester. Birmingham would be two or three days further at the pace of an exodus as one reads in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds–the image doubtless at the back of Lewis’ exiles in THS. Moreover, a train from Edgestow to St. Anne’s would follow a Birmingham direction from Malvern (or any number of nearby places).

St. Ann’s Well, Great Malvern

Malvern, then, transformed into a late medieval university instead of a Victorian school (with its nostalgic architecture), could be the setting. Great Malvern, before its post-war renovations, would have had a lot of the features of the classic English village of Edgestow. Particularly intriguing is the St. Anne’s Manor in THS. Great Malvern–the town connected to Lewis’ boyhood schooling–is home to St. Ann’s Well, which has a cafe attached to its spring water well named after Saint Anne, mother of Mary. The inclusion of Merlin’s Well and St. Anne’s Manor in That Hideous Strength makes a pretty interesting connection to Great Malvern.

If Malvern is the site of Edgestow and Bracton College, and Worchester is Worcester, it also means that Ransom’s move to St. Anne’s Manor at his sister’s will would have been a relatively simple one. He would have merely moved from his cottage in Worcester city–which would be about a half hour walk from the main station–to an estate a few trains stops that side of Great Malvern.

Register Office, Great Malvern

If all of this geographical speculation is remotely plausible, the really critical question remains: Would Merlin’s resting place be in Worcestershire?

Merlin’s Tomb in Brittany in Paimpont Forest

That’s hard for me to answer. While Merlin is probably from Welsh origins—and Malvern isn’t far from the border of Wales—I would expect Merlin to be asleep in Broceliande.  Where would that be? Bookies would say to put your money on Brittany, and the French tradition of the Matter of Britain is critical.

Clearly, though, Brittany would not suit Lewis’ purposes in his modern English Arthurian tale. It is a peculiarly English apocalypse (as is H.G. Wells’ apocalypse fifty years before). Oxfordshire and Worcestershire are not far from the legendary downtown Logres, and almost any historic place of interest south of there has a claim of being Camelot. Wales is not that far away, and I have heard the area north of there called “Merlin’s Land” (though I don’t know why).

Could Malvern as Edgestow be where Merlin has been secretly asleep for centuries? It’s possible, and Merlin’s waking is distinctly Lewisian in THS, and pulls at the threads of the Arthurian garment in more ways than just geography.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell more from the details. Most of Lewis’ connections with the area are later. Lewis walked in Great Malvern at various times in his adult life, including a tour with J.R.R. Tolkien. George Sayer was a friend of Lewis’ and his biographer, and he was head of English at Malvern from 1944–Sayer got the post as Lewis was editing THS (the draft was complete the previous December). And, of course, we don’t know how clear in his own mind Lewis had the geography of the Ransom Cycle in place. Perhaps he was just making it up as he went along.

The use of Worcester does seem striking, though. The claim that the action of That Hideous Strength takes place around Malvern–the college, Great Malvern, the evocative hills, with train and exodus lines to Worcester and Birmingham–is a good one.

Still, now it’s your turn: What do you see in the tale? Is there a significance to Worc(h)ester? Or are the geographies drawn variously to obscure a non-location for the tale—or intentionally hidden, as per the conspiracy intimated at the end of Out of the Silent Planet or Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia thesis? I would love your thoughts.

Malvern Abbey Gateway

The Malvern Hills of England

As an afterthought, and certainly no link in C.S. Lewis’ mind, is the College Grace (which is the same as Christ Church’s long-form grace. It is always given in Latin, but here is the English translation I took from Wikipedia. You “unhappy” isn’t the right word, it strikes me as a good Ransom Cycle prayer, with its request for the heavenly food that brings true sustenance:

“We unhappy and unworthy men do give thee most reverent thanks, Almighty God, our heavenly Father, for the victuals which thou hast bestowed on us for the sustenance of the body, at the same time beseeching thee that we may use them soberly, modestly and gratefully. And above all we beseech thee to impart to us the food of angels, the true bread of heaven, the eternal Word of God, Jesus Christ our Lord, so that the mind of each of us may feed on him and that through his flesh and blood we may be sustained, nourished and strengthened. Amen.”

Worcester College, Oxford

This is the 10th in the series on words that C.S. Lewis made up. In his tinkering with ideas, and in his letters and essays, Lewis would sometimes create new turns of phrase when it was needed. Today we go low and we go high. 

Of the words that C.S. Lewis made up, “Lowerarchy” is perhaps the most fun, and yet carries with it a certain kind of poignancy.

The title character of The Screwtape Letters is neither “a suave and subtle Mephistopheles with red cloak and rapier and a feather in his cap, [nor] even a sombre tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost” (Perelandra, ch. 10). Instead, Screwtape is quasi-sophisticated smoking room boor. If he made himself visible locally, he would take on the arrogant posture of the Ivy League or Cambridge elite, slouching in a comfortable chair while others sat at attention, waxing philosophically while he looked at his wine by the light of the fire, secretly enjoying the Château Léoville-Las Cases but wishing it was the ’96. Screwtape is the commensurate utilitarian, and thus makes an excellent bureaucrat.

As a good bureaucrat, he both relishes in his own strong position in the bureaucracy of hell and is deferential to those “below” him: “this question is decided for us by spirits far deeper down in the Lowerarchy than you and I” (Letter XX). In the inverted perspective of the anti-spirituality of Screwtape, low is the new high in hell. This is no mere ambiguity: the levels of hell are not like the notes on a scale, so that the lower, more resonant note compliments the clarity of notes higher up (as our best hierarchies do). In Screwtape’s hell, all strong seek to devour the weak:

Rest assured, my love for you and your love for me are as like as two peas. I have always desired you, as you (pitiful fool) desired me. The difference is that I am the stronger. I think they will give you to me now; or a bit of you. Love you? Why, yes. As dainty a morsel as ever I grew fat on (Letter XXXI).

Though “hierarchy” comes from the order of priests and temple workers rather from the word “higher,” the linguistic ring is probably what helped the word shift to its current meaning. Moreover, the play on words is tempting. “Lowerarchy” has been picked up as a term in systems management, and according to Urban Dictionary is since the ‘90s the “scale on which one measures one’s social standing among the hipsters; working-and paying-less often than all your friends, getting more comps, mooching more smokes, diving more dumpsters.” Lithe minds have no doubt reached for this word dozens of times over the generations.

When we think of the lowerarchies and hierarchies of everyday culture, I think even Lewis would admit that he sat awkwardly at the top of the social ladder with his appointment to a boutique-designed Cambridge Professorship in 1954. Liking his new environment, Lewis’ speech to the Cambridge University English Club a year later, on Nov 24^th, 1955, was filled with humour (see “On Science Fiction” in On Other Worlds). It is a polemical piece, poking at the hidden presuppositions of those who think that realistic fiction is the only critically appropriate form of storytelling. Lewis turns expectations upside down, putting canonical writers like Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Coleridge in the speculative fiction category with Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke.

Hidden within the speech are a number of great throwaway points that later readers of the printed version have the time and space to enjoy. One of them is the neologism “aristocratophobe.” In talking about books that certain kinds of people are sure to dislike, Lewis admits that he dislikes SciFi based on scientifically precise worlds in the way a pacificist is going to dislike war stories and an aristocratophobe will dislike Sidney’s Arcadia. American literature is aristocratophobic in that it has in it since WWII the desire for the institutions of the elite to rust and rot beneath them. It pulls down leisurely heroes from their high places, whereas Sidney delighted in them.

These days we are in love with the suffix “phobia.” Like Lewis, we use it not to describe irrational fear, like “phobia,” or even like the Greek root of “fear” or “respect.” Now it is a general dislike or visceral prejudice against someone or something. As a culture we are constantly breeding social media-phobes, technophobes, acrophobes, homophobes, transphobes, Islamophobes, Christophobes, commitmentphobes, germophobes, xenophobes. Perhaps “aristocratophobia” would have hung on as a term if we still used “aristocrat” for the elite—the 1%, the financial noble class, the plutocracy, the wolves of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Ave.

But we don’t, and the word didn’t catch. And probably almost no one is reading Sidney anyway–except the literary 1%.

The Words C.S. Lewis Made Up

• Part 1 and Introduction: Bulverism
• Part 2: Charientocracy
• Part 3: Rebunker
• Part 4: Jollification, Uglification, and the Miserific Vision
• Part 5: Grailologist
• Part 6: Curialisation
• Part 7: Viricidal
• Part 8: Disredemption
• Part 9: Re/Anti/Un/Ness
• Part 10: Aristocratophobia and Lowerarchy

In 2017, A Pilgrim in Narnia passed a number of milestones. We passed the 700-post threshold, had our 500,000th hit, were shared for the 10,000th time, and are nearing in on 7,000 followers. We had our seven biggest months this year, increasing traffic by 25% after a nearly stagnant 2016 season. The numbers were good, despite an editorial shift that moved us from 8-10 original posts a month to about 6 original posts, with some reprieved and rewritten material and an augmented “Feature Friday” segment.

Readers have settled into the newly focussed schedule well, and I hear more often than ever before of readers who don’t comment, share, or “like” a post–a reader who is invisible to most analytics. 2017 was unusual in that there were no guest series, though the features on blogging and “The Words C.S. Lewis Made Up” feature were popular for comments (perhaps partly because of a couple of errors I made!). 2018 will begin with a guest series on the new Inklings and Arthur volume, with guest editor David Llewellyn Dodds.

Meanwhile, here are the most popular new posts of 2017, in case you missed them. The trends are pretty clear: reader response to posts on blogging, Tolkien, and unique perspectives on C.S. Lewis are the weightiest. I am not unaware of that most of these top posts have catch titles that sit on the clickbait spectrum, so it could be that these were not the favourites of regular readers, but simply the posts that were shared and reblogged the most. If that’s the case, let me know what you thought was worth talking about in 2017.

#6: Of Beren and Lúthien, Of Myth and the Worlds We Love

I don’t think I have ever read anything better than the tale of Beren and Lúthien, and the feeling seems to have caught on. This beautifully written and evocative tale occupied a half-century of Tolkien’s life and was finally published with other material from the Beren and Lúthien archive in 2017. In this blog I think of the mythic elements that draw us in to Tolkien’s world.

#5: Approaching “The Silmarillion” for the First Time

As brilliant as lovers of Middle Earth recognize that it is, there are few books as daunting as The Silmarillion. It is a dense and complex text of genealogies, places, and characters, each woven together with multiple names in multiple languages and tucked into mythic threads that go out in various directions. I was slain by the text a couple of times before I finally conquered it. At only 130,000 words, I marvel at the edition that Tolkien must have had in mind when he told publishers it would be 400,000-600,000 words! Here are a number of tips to help draw the text into your own life.

#4: Five Words We Should Banish from our Vocabulary, Or Preventing Verbicide with C.S. Lewis

As a voracious reader and great lover of language, C.S. Lewis was concerned about “verbicide,” what he called the “murder of words.” It is not just a verbicidal age, but we are verbicides: we are word-killing maniacs wandering around the digital library of culture with guns for tongues. Lewis suggests that we “resolve that we ourselves will never commit verbicide” (Studies in Words, 8), ultimately suggesting that “we should banish them from our vocabulary” (Studies in Words, 8). Truthfully, according to the data and not being allegorical, here are 5 not-so-unique words that we should (not literally) banish from our vocabulary.

#3: The Women That Changed C.S. Lewis’ Life

If your experience of encountering C.S. Lewis is only Mere Christianity, Time magazine covers, or a struggle with Susan Pevensie in Narnia, no doubt your most striking image of Lewis will be that of the Oxford Don in shabby tweed surrounded by old books and (moderately old) men. I am one of those who think that even within Lewis’ male-dominated culture, he is a refreshing resource for thinking differently about gender roles, working life, love, marriage, friendship, and human rights. This post highlights the powerful impact of women on Lewis’ life and work.

#2: The 5 Most Common Mistakes Bloggers Make

Great blogs are based on great content–good design, creative network capability, and, especially, great writing. When bloggers get it right, it can be a beautiful thing. Time and time again, though, I see good writers making the same critical errors that keep the blog from experiencing long-term growth. I thought I would share the top 5 mistakes that bloggers make that limit their reach. These are the lessons I’ve learned on my way to becoming a specialized blog that still gets 100,000 hits a year.

#1: The Tolkien Letter that Every Lover of Middle-Earth Must Read

Any true Tolkien fan will say that every page in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien is essential. However, embedded in the bits and pieces of correspondence that remain are some absolute gems. It is in these letters that we discover that Tolkien supported C.S. Lewis in his first foray into fiction. We see the heart-crushing weight of work that Tolkien was faced with, and the struggles that he had to complete The Lord of the Rings. And we have the moments, finally, when he finished his work and made it ready for publication..

For the true lovers of Tolkien’s subcreated world, there are also moments where he explains bits and pieces of Middle-earth and The Silmarillion that we may not know except by a scientific reading of the texts or by archival work that is limited to very few scholars. One of these essential pieces is a 9,500-word letter–really an essay–written to Milton Waldman, a publisher at Collins. I highlight this letter and provide most of its content for fans. And there are plenty of Tolkien fans, making my Tolkien posts the busiest blogs on A Pilgrim in Narnia in 2017.

For those who study authors of the past, you will soon discover that the publication lists and bibliography of an author are not always terribly helpful. After all, writing, editing, and publishing a book are stages that can each take years. Knowing something is published in 1822 or 1946 tells us little about the writing process. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien each had books that took nearly two decades to write. Ezra Pound spent more than a half-century on his famous Cantos–carrying the poems through his London period and WWI, through various parts of France and Europe in the 1920s, into an American prison camp, to a treason trial in the U.S., and to a mental ward where he did some of his best work. In his last decade in Italy he finally published the whole, though parts were published at various points between the years of 1917 and 1948.

A publication date of “1968” doesn’t help us much as historians of Ezra Pound, any more than 1954 suits as the publication date of Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring or Lewis’ English Literature in the 16th Century, Excluding Drama.

Over the last five years, then, I have developed a habit of speaking about when C.S. Lewis or one of the Inklings wrote a book, rather than when they published it. I haven’t been perfectly consistent with this on the blog, but have generally put the writing period in brackets rather than the publication date.

To do this, I discovered that I was slowly building myself a cheat sheet to help me remember when Lewis was writing a book so that I can connect it with what was going on at the time. The cheat sheet includes completed books and incomplete fragments of what would have been a book. I’ve decided to share this cheat sheet with those of you who are interested. This might save you time or inspire you to make connections between Lewis’ work and his life patterns. And, perversely, I’m hoping to draw more people into the project of reading Lewis chronologically, and have provided resources here, here, and here.

I’m also hoping that in sharing you will be able to point out errors. For example, I probably should put the 1916 “The Quest of Bleheris” on this list as a fragment. Or perhaps if someone is able and interested they could format this into some kind of useful internet tool. Whether to make it better or to use it for yourself, if the excel sheet can be of help, email me: junkola [at] gmail [dot] com.

If you decide to print this off and keep it with your Lewis books-to-read pile, I would encourage you to use it with a basic timeline like the one published by the C.S. Lewis Foundation. Digging deeper, Joel Heck’s “Chronologically Lewis,” now complete after 13 years of work, has all the details you could need if you want to press in on a particular period. Critical to pulling this kind of list together were the three-volume Collected Letters, edited by Walter Hooper, and Hooper’s C.S. Lewis: Companion and Guide (1996). Some of the dates on here were adjusted based on facebook discussion groups, blog posts, and notes in three biographies of Lewis, by Alister McGrath (2013), by George Sayer (1988), and by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper (1967). See also critical biographies of the Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter (1978) and by Carol Zaleski and Philip Zaleski (2015), as well as historical work by Diana Pavlac Glyer’s The Company They Keep (2008).

I have left in the fallow years following Lewis’ conversion, but after Lewis found his literary voice in the early 1930s, he was rarely without a book or essay on his desk. A post next week will chase down “The Periods of C.S. Lewis’ Literary Life.”

Note: in copying over the Excel sheet I lost all the formatting, so books are not in italics.

Last week I took time to share my “cheat sheet“–a project that began for me on a scrap of paper but slowly grew up into an excel sheet resource that I consult pretty frequently. What I wanted to do was immerse myself in C.S. Lewis’ writing culture (knowing that the publication dates at the front of our books don’t tell much of the story). What can we learn from the cheat sheet?

It is obviously a tool that can be adapted by scholars and biographers for their own purposes. And anyone who wants to attempt a chronological reading of C.S. Lewis will find it invaluable. Today, I want to focus in on the periods of Lewis’ life, and the kind of things he produced at different points in his life. I have altered the cheat sheet a bit since last week, and even as I type this up I’m a bit unsatisfied. Should I include Boxen and C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid? What about short pieces that come to light, such as a cluster of reviews that Lewis wrote in the late 20’s and early 30’s? What about things that have emerged from his teaching notebooks? Should his “Great War” letters with Own Barfield in the 20s count as a book fragment? I have left all of these out. Still, I think we see Lewis’ life shape up pretty well in these periods:

When we break his life up into periods, we can get a sense of what defined his life and his work. I have included the full chart below, adding to it a couple of elements that pace his work (the number of months it took to publish each book and essay). Here are some trends that came out of the data for me.

Finding His Literary Voice

While Lewis was a prolific author, it took him years to develop his literary voice. Lewis endeavoured to be a poet and was thrilled to find his teenage poetry published as a collection, Spirits in Bondage (1919). If there was not a hunger in UK society to hear from war poets, however, it is doubtful that this volume would have found a prominent publisher. When his narrative poem Dymer was finished in 1925, his publisher rejected it. When it was finally published on merit, it sold very poorly, and Lewis set his dream of being a great poet aside. He attempted at least three other narrative poems at the end of the 20s and the early 30s, but he never completed them.

Because Lewis left the long-form poetry behind, doesn’t mean that he became disinterested in telling stories. In The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), Lewis drew some of his conversion poetry into a piece that he would never replicate in form (allegory) or voice (highly complex and obscure references). After reading David Lindsay, J.B.S. Haldane, and Charles Williams–and taking up a wager with J.R.R. Tolkien–Lewis gave SF writing a try with Out of the Silent Planet (1938). If the conversion allegory was a misstep in literary development, for all its flaws Out of the Silent Planet sets the stage for 15 years of storytelling to follow.

While he would continue to write lyric poetry for the rest of his life, Lewis typically published them under a pseudonym. I have left short book reviews out of my essay treatment (here) and the list below, but in the late 20s Lewis started doing reviews connected with the book that would become The Allegory of Love (1936). These reviews and his literary essays of the 1930s was a testing ground for Lewis’ voice as a literary historian and cultural critic. By the time WWII erupted in Europe, Lewis had trained his voice to meet the public as a controversialist Oxford Don.

It has been noted by biographers, but it is supported by data: C.S. Lewis found his voice as a writer when he surrendered to belief in God and returned to the church in 1930. What an un-reverted Lewis would have produced in his life is unknown to us, but Christianity most certainly energized Lewis in producing a diverse and full catalogue of works.

Book Publication Pace

While Lewis did not begin publishing books in earnest until the late 1930s, he kept a remarkable pace from that point onward, shepherding 45 books to publication (or nearly to publication) in his life. In the 30s, Lewis published a book about every 19 months. In WWII, he increased that pace to a book every 5-6 months. He never quite matched the pace of WWII output in numbers of books, but came close in the Narnian period (a book every 6-7 months) and, intriguingly, during the period after Joy Davidman passed away (a book every 6 months).

Taking into consideration the page counts of the published books–an inaccurate but helpful measure–and we get a clearer image of output. In terms of published pages, taking out reprints, Lewis published 1,000-1,200 pages in each of these four periods: the 1930s, the Interim, Cambridge & Joy, and After Joy. In WWII, Lewis’ published output was 1,772 pages–about 50% higher than normal. In the Narnia period, Lewis produced double his typical output with 2487 published pages (leaving aside his reprint of the various BBC talks as Mere Christianity).

Beyond these two measures, there is also Lewis’ continual work in writing essays. They largely fall into two camps–Christian essays and literary essays. Overall, Lewis kept a remarkable essay-writing pace. He wrote mostly literary essays in the 1930s at a pace of 2 per year. Beginning at about the start of WWII, Lewis took an interest in apologetics, cultural criticism, and Christian teaching. Must of this interest was focussed on essay writing and other short pieces (like sermons and editorials). All through the two periods that dominated the 1940s, Lewis produced an essay every 6 weeks. This slowed down in the Narnian period, and then increased to a pace of an essay every 9 weeks in the last decade of his life. Intriguingly, the Narnian period is an outlier, where essays dropped to just over 2 per year. Much of this was a drop in academic work: Lewis typically kept a pace of 2-3 literary essays per year, but that dropped to less than 1 per year in the period where he is writing Narnia, OHEL, and his memoir.

What does this teach us? I think there are a few lessons:

• The experiences of WWII formed the Lewis we know through a chain of events: Out of the Silent Planet (1938) led to The Problem of Pain (1940) and his work as an apologist. These factors, with The Screwtape Letters (1941) led to the BBC talks and a lot of work in apologetics in the 1940s. Meanwhile, Charles Williams‘ and his own lectures in Paradise Lost led to an academic introduction and Perelandra (1943). Everything seemed to trip forward for Lewis along what seemed like different academic, Christian, and popular pathways. By the end of WWII, it was clear that those pathways were running all along together.
• At the end of the war, Lewis turned an editorial eye to those who influenced him, creating an anthology of George MacDonald‘s work and two Charles Williams‘ collections (one which meant editing J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous “On Fairy-stories). When you consider that much Miracles was made up of material disseminated in various forms during WWII, we see how the Interim period is nearly void of fresh writing. It is the only period where he was interested in editing the work of others and where his own imaginative input was thin.
• Lewis’ sabbatical in 1951-52 clearly contributed to output, allowing him to move Narnia fr0m a couple of books to a full series, and allowing him to finish OHEL. It might be, too, that the step away from academic life gave Lewis some mental space that moved into his memoir writing.
• The sabbatical, however, does not solely explain output in the Narnian period. This was the only period in post-conversion life when he didn’t produce 5-8 essays a year, and it seems that the focus on his long-form fiction and magnum opus academic work paid off–even if it meant that Lewis disappeared from public view.
• I don’t think there is any doubt that Mrs. Moore’s death in 1951 freed Lewis up for work. The period of 1951-53 is the most productive of Lewis’ life, save the period of 1941-43.
• There isn’t a single lesson about busyness and Lewis’ productivity. When Lewis was healthy, the busy periods seemed to spur him on to great work (like in the WWII period). But the Interim period is a testament that to the fact that competing pressures took their toll. The death of his best friend, the soft response to his 1945-47 books, the explosion of post-war students in Oxford, his brother’s increasingly destructive binges, pressures at home, and (potentially) a public defeat in philosophical debate in 1948 choked out Lewis’ productivity and led to a collapse. The busyness of the WWII period produced much good, while the period of the post-war period produced only exhaustion.
• We have an intriguing dark period after Lewis met Joy Davidman and he moved to Cambridge. Joy clearly helped with Till We Have Faces (1956), but it was a couple years later that Lewis produced Reflections on the Psalms (1958). Joy’s influence touches the entire period as she helped shape Till We Have Faces and encouraged the academic books that would fill his last 5 years of work. Still, this 1956 space is an intriguing emptiness.
• Is it surprising that after Joy’s death he turned to writing? A Grief Observed (1961) is a small project that followed her death, but almost immediately Lewis pinned An Experiment in Criticism and worked on editing his essays (which are suggestive of a new period, I think, should Lewis have lived).
• It looks to me, given the productivity, that after his illness in 1962, that Lewis was moving forward with new work in 1963. Had he lived, what would have written?
• After his early 30s, Lewis rarely began anything that he didn’t complete (or kept nothing of what he didn’t think he would complete). I have looked through his remaining sketchbooks, where he tried out various ideas, voices, poems, lectures, book outlines, and introductions. But when he took something to a substantial beginning, he either finished it or burned it.
• Though Lewis produced books and essays at a furious pace, what most don’t know is that they often took a long time:
  • His two books of poetry represented at least 4 years each of concentrated work.
  • The Pilgrim’s Regress was written in 2 weeks but included poetry from 2 years of work.
  • The Allegory of Love is about 7 years of effort.
  • Each of his edited volumes composed 5-15 years of essays.
  • Miracles was made up of essays and speeches over a 3-4 year period, then was abridged in 1958 and revised in 1959 for an (unusual) 2nd edition.
  • The Magician’s Nephew was begun in 1948 or 1949, and was the only book of the Narniad that Lewis struggled with. Though published 2nd last after 5+ years of work–and though it is 1st in American editions–it was completed last.
  • OHEL was commisioned in 1935 and the last bits were completed in 1953, representing 18 years of scholarly work.
  • Surprised by Joy was probably written quickly in 1954, but Lewis had been attempting to write a memoir since at least 1930.
  • Till We Have Faces flowed quickly with Joy Davidman as writing partner, but the central story had been in Lewis’ mind for decades.
  • The Four Loves was written as a lecture series in 1958 and then adapted to a book in 1959, but began as a germ of an idea in the mid-1930s.
  • In the early 1940s Lewis tried to think about a book on prayer, but it didn’t come until he turned to epistolary fiction again in 1963, producing Letters to Malcolm.
  • The Discarded Image, Lewis’ last and one of his most enduring works of literary history, began as lectures in as early as 1934.

C.S. Lewis was a terrifyingly efficient writer. Moreover, he was committed to book publication, and he was almost constantly shepherding a book through the stages of conception, writing, editing, publication correspondence, or proofs. In his three biggest periods–WWII, Narnia, and After Joy–he had a book or essay published every 5 or 6 weeks. It is a tremendous accomplishment.

Even though I produced the chart below this morning, I have already begun adapting it (adding page numbers). I’m also trying to figure out a timeline feature to add all the publication points on a single line. It will, I think, be a project that takes me longer than most of Lewis’ books. I hope you find Lewis’ books more interesting than my analysis, but if the analysis helps–or if you can offer corrections or additions–do let me know.

Bks=Books Complete; Frags=Significant Fragments published later; Mo/Bk=how many months on average it took to publish a book; Mo/Ess=how many months on average it took to publish an essay; Mo/Lit=how many months on average it took to publish a literary essay. Do note the difference between publication year and the year(s) Lewis was working on the project. I have left the pre-Christian period out of some of the analysis. This chart doesn’t include books of Lewis’ works that were not edited by him.

This may very well be the worst book I have ever read.

According to my Goodreads ratings, I have only four other one-star reviews. I can’t remember why I so disliked Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec & Enide, but I remember the other three distinctly. It was not just the tang of the world in William Morris’ utopian News from Nowhere that I disliked, but his jagged style and his hope that the sexism of his age would be idealized. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was 1,500 pages of preaching, where the philosopher Rand beat her audience with a railway tie until we were well into submission. My lack of sympathy for Sidney’s Arcadia is, I’m sure, my own weakness. But the Arcadia tasted to me like sucralose drinks: artificial, and so sickly sweet that it threatens to overwhelm the artificiality.

Note that these are four of the more memorable and canonical authors of Western history. Chrétien de Troyes helps create our English Arthurian tradition, Sir. Phillip Sydney is one of the great poets of the period, William Morris inaugurated 20^th century fantasy (until Tolkien), and Ayn Rand’s philosophy still salinates certain streams of American politics—including an intriguing influence on conservative Christians in the US, despite Rand’s open anti-Christianity and Christ’s clear rejection of the principles behind Atlas Shrugged. Even David Lyndsay himself is influential. Michael Moorcock has called A Voyage to Arcturus a Nietzschean Pilgrim’s Progress with a struggle that becomes “the antithesis of the visionary brutalism embraced by Adolf Hitler.”

And C.S. Lewis loved this book. Lewis called A Voyage to Arcturus “that shattering, intolerable, and irresistible work” (“On Science Fiction”). “Intolerable” is a well-chosen adjective, I think, but I find it less than shattering and entirely resistible. Rather than have to suffer through the last pages of Arcturus, I would have paid William Shatner to come to my bedroom and read the book Shatneresquely while I slept. Because of intellectual honesty, I resisted the temptation. Besides, my wife vetoed the idea. She said it was because of money, but she might have found Shatner’s approach a bit off-putting at night.

Still, I am committed to trying to understand what Lewis saw in this work. So I felt duty bound to discover what was it that caught his imagination. His Oct 29, 1944 letter to Prof. Charles Brady, Lewis admitted that,

“The real father of my planet books is David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, which you also will revel in if you don’t know it. I had grown up on Well’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–suggested the ‘Cross’ (in biological sense). His own spiritual outlook is detestable, almost diabolist I think, and his style crude: but he showed me what a bang you cd. get from mixing these two elements.”

(note: Can any reader help me with the syntax of Lewis’ “cross” comment? There is a lot about sacrifice in the book, but I don’t think that’s what Lewis meant here)

Despite the notes of Schopenhauer or the Manichaean dualism of A Voyage to Arcturus, Lewis consciously used it to shape his works. In a Jan 4, 1947 letter to poet Ruth Pitter, Lewis responded to her vision of the connection between the two pieces:

“Voyage to Arcturus is not the parody of Perelandra but its father. It was published, a dead failure, about 25 years ago. Now that the author is dead it is suddenly leaping into fame: but I’m one of the old guard who had a treasured second hand copy before anyone had heard of it. From Lyndsay I first learned what other planets in fiction are really good for: for spiritual adventures. Only they can satisfy the craving which sends our imaginations off the earth. Or putting it another way, in him I first saw the terrific results produced by the union of two kinds of fiction hitherto kept apart: the Novalis, G. Macdonald, James Stephens sort and the H. G. Wells, Jules Verne sort. My debt to him is very great: tho’ I’m a little alarmed to find it so obvious that the affinity came through to you even from a talk about Lyndsay!

“For the rest, Voyage to A is on the borderline of the diabolical: i.e. the philosophy expressed is so Manichaean as to be almost Satanic. Secondly, the style is often laughably crude. Thirdly, the proper names (Polecrab, Blodsombre, Wombflash, Tydomin, Sullenbode) are superb and perhaps Screwtape owes something to them. Fourthly, you must read it. You will have a disquieting but not-to-be-missed experience.”

The band of brothers Lewis’ places Lindsay within is a strong one, though enigmatic, leaving out as much as it takes in. Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra are patterned after A Voyage to Arcturus in at least three distinct ways.

First, they are all books of Platonic dialogue in space fiction. Second, they include stunning descriptions of landscape that are designed to de-Earth the reader, alienating them for the sake of recovery of something else. Third, in Arcturus and Perelandra especially, there is significant fluidity and play around the idea of gender. The foundation for this gender play is different in each: Lindsay entrenches himself in post-Victorian ideas of masculinity and femininity, while Lewis is playing with classical and medieval images of symbolized gender and sex. While I have argued that The Place of the Lion was one of the triggers of Lewis’ turn to SF, there is no doubt that when Lewis encountered Arcturus in the mid-30s, a vision for theological planetary science fiction began to grow in his mind.

What Lewis learned best from David Lindsay—what he said that planetary romances were good for—is that in taking the reader to an alien world, the return to Earth makes our own reading chairs and family rooms and studies look a little alien. To the degree that Lindsay influenced Lewis in this project of what Darko Suvin would later call “cognitive estrangement,” we should be grateful.

Still, there is the writing itself. Unlike Lewis, I was not impressed by the names, finding them clumsy and random, but I may well be wrong. Lindsay is also fairly good at painting a landscape, though he overplays his hand, pressing for some intricate symbolism that often escaped me. Despite some skill with a paintbrush, Lindsay creates monotonous dialogue from hateful characters who bark back and forth to each other like bad middle school actors reading recipes to one another as if it was romantic poetry. Though Lindsay can create a scene in landscape, in dialogue he a “tell” instead of “show” author, using adverbs to do the work instead of descriptive prose. Here are some examples of adverbial leaning when the nearby prose could have carried the moment or when description would have been better:

• he tranquilly studied him through half closed lids and the smoke of a cigar
• He spoke rather dryly
• “I will be delighted,” said Backhouse coldly
• She smiled rather absently
• his eyes were still disconcertingly bright
• She has decorated the old lounge hall upstairs most beautifully
• Backhouse was slightly acquainted with the latter
• their meeting had immediately acquired additional solemnity
• was most expensively attired
• The room was brilliantly lighted
• A fantastically carved wooden couch
• obliquely placed to the auditorium
• Jameson … watched them as only a deeply interested woman knows how to watch
• “you will immediately see for yourselves”
• It was evident that aesthetically she was by far the most important person present
• Through the gaps in his mind the inhabitants of the invisible, when he summoned them, passed for a moment timidly and awfully into the solid, coloured universe
• It hovered lightly in the air
• the pedestal of the statue was seen to become slightly blurred…. This slowly developed into a visible cloud, coiling hither and thither, and constantly changing shape
• Jameson quietly fainted in her chair, but she was unnoticed, and presently revived
• The figure was by this time unmistakably that of a man lying down
• “Aha-i, gentlemen!” he called out loudly. His voice was piercing, and oddly disagreeable to the ear
• asked Faull sullenly
• said Backhouse quickly
• The guests were unutterably shocked
• demanded Nightspore disdainfully

And so on. That’s just the more obvious ones in the opening scene. There are 300 pages of this. I have no way of counting, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were 1000 unnecessary adverbs in 300 pages of text. There is some nice potential there for good prose, punctuated by the lazy turn to an adverb. Some of this is the overwrought prose of fantasy-writing in the 1920s–as imaginative as H.P. Lovecraft is, I wish he would describe the evil rather than telling my something is evil–but Lindsay is particularly good at bad prose.

And Lindsay’s fascination with people sitting in certain ways! There are dozens and dozens of references to sitting down—this in a book about walking. Here are some of them:

• he immediately settled himself in the most comfortable of many comfortable chairs
• they retained their seats with difficulty
• Her voice was retarded, scornful, viola-like. She sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and looked away
• she sat down on the ground, her legs gracefully thrust under her body, and pulled down the skirt of her robe. Maskull remained standing just behind her, with crossed arms.
• Oceaxe sat down carelessly
• He laughed again, but nevertheless sat down on the ground beside her
• Tydomin suggested to him to set down the corpse, and both sat down to rest in the shade
• He sat up and began to smile, without any especial reason; and then stood upright
• He sat up, blinking
• When I sat up, it was night and the others had vanished
• He sat up, but the fisherman did not stir
• He … strolled on to the sands, and sat down in the full sunlight
• The woman sat cross-legged in the stern, and seized the pole
• Without appearing to care about an answer, he sat up
• Then he sat down by the side of the lake, and, leaning on his side, placed his right hand, open palm downward, on the ground, at the same time stretching out his right leg, so that the foot was in contact with the water
• Maskull sat down by its edge, in imitation of Earthrid’s attitude
• And he sat down passively to rest
• While Maskull sat, Corpang walked restlessly to and fro, swinging his arms
• Going to the meat line, he took down a large double handful, and sat down on a pile of skins to eat at his ease
• Then he sat down, crossed his legs, and turned to Maskull
• Corpang now sat up suddenly
• He sat down moodily, but the next minute was up again
• When they had covered about half a mile, Maskull, who went second of the party, staggered, caught the cliff, and finally sat down
• She sat erect, on crossed legs, asleep
• He paced up and down, while the others sat
• Maskull and Sullenbode sat down on a boulder
• When he had reached the boulder overlooking the landslip, on which they had sat together, he lowered his burden, and, placing the dead girl on the stone, seated himself beside her for a time, gazing over toward Barey
• He sat up and yawned feebly
• From where he sat he was unable to see the pool
• Maskull sat down near the edge, and periodically splashed water over his head. Gangnet sat on his haunches next to him. Krag paced up and down with short, quick steps, like an animal in a cage

See my note above about middle school stage direction. Honestly, how do you sit down passively?  or moodily? That is something I’d like to have described to me so I can practice. And where I have been all this time that people have been yawning in a way that wasn’t feeble?

And, believe it or not, this codpiece prose is not the worst part of Arcturus. If you have been paying attention there is a lot of carrying around of corpses. This is because the characters are absolutely despicable. The hero of the tale lands in a beautiful other-world, and despite mentoring by a peace-loving couple, invests his life there in slaughtering the people of Tormance, taking their lives one by one because they are hideous or annoying or they make him feel sad. Honestly, the best part of the book was when the prophecy arrived that Maskill would die. His four days in Tormance are a millennium of drudgery. He doesn’t even like it, so why should the reader?

All of this, I know, is to tell us something of Lindsay’s philosophical approach. The worldview that Lewis called “diabolical” is a strange kind of dualism. God and Satan, pain and pleasure, self and other, male and female, lover and enemy, near and far, good and evil, death and life—these are all binaries that serve to illustrate a complex philosophical dualism. Lindsay’s skepticism—what Moorcock calls his “God-questioning genius”—is one of the more interesting parts of the book, especially when combined with passages that describe religious experience.

All of this rich questioning, however, is described in philosophical conversation that sounds like a dot matrix printer, spoken by characters who are like squeaky hinges to the reader’s spirit, all set against a backdrop of imaginative genius so mishandled that, in the end, would make Justin Bieber look like a lyrical savant.

So, perhaps I am wrong about this book. People have committed their lives to preserving this book. Colin Wilson called Arcturus “the greatest novel of the 20th century.” (see here). Philip Pullman thought it was a severely underrated book—and we know how good of a reader he is.

As painful as this book was to read, it was important to C.S. Lewis. In “Two Ways with the Self,” Lewis was concerned with the tendency to worship suffering in Lindsay’s novel, and he warned that “I shd. think twice before introducing it to the young” unless they are in “perfect psychological health” (Jan 31, 1960 letter to Alan Hindle). My psychological health was better before I picked it up–but then I’m not a child.

And though he never loved the writing, he held the opinion throughout his life that it was an important book. In a discussion with leading SF writers of the period, Lewis floated Lindsay’s masterpiece:

C.S. LEWIS: Well, the one you probably disapprove of because he’s so very unscientific is David Lindsay, in Voyage to Arcturus. It’s a remarkable thing, because scientifically it’s nonsense, the style is appalling, and yet this ghastly vision comes through.

BRIAN ALDISS: It didn’t come through to me.

KINGSLEY AMIS: Nor me. Still … Victor Gollancz told me a very interesting remark of Lindsay’s about Arcturus; he said, ‘I shall never appeal to a large public at all, but I think that as long as our civilisation lasts one person a year will read me.’ I respect that attitude.

C.S. LEWIS: Quite so. Modest and becoming (“Unreal Estates”).

Unfortunately, I was the one person to read Arcturus this year. The only thing that depresses me more than the idea of me having to read this book is that with more than 10 months left in the year there could be countless others who stumble upon it.

We will turn below to a passage that has some of the least worst prose in the book, but captures some of the hateful quality of the characters and the worldview. But before that, let’s look at Lewis’ published literary criticism of A Voyage to Arcturus with a few of my comments interspersed. In “On Stories,” Lewis is concerned with developing atmosphere, rather than stories driven by suspenseful plot devices:

“But perhaps the most remarkable achievement in this kind is that of Mr David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus. The experienced reader, noting the threats and promises of the opening chapter, even while he gratefully enjoys them, feels sure that they cannot be carried out. He reflects that in stories of this kind the first chapter is nearly always the best and reconciles himself to disappointment; Tormance, when we reach it, he forbodes, will be less interesting than Tormance seen from the Earth. But never will he have been more mistaken.”

I am clearly not an experienced reader.

“Unaided by any special skill or even any sound taste in language, the author leads us up a stair of unpredictables.”

This is a precisely accurate statement. The book goes on and on through those winding, crumbling, meaningless stairways.

“In each chapter we think we have found his final position; each time we are utterly mistaken. He builds whole worlds of imagery and passion, any one of which would have served another writer for a whole book, only to pull each of them to pieces and pour scorn on it. The physical dangers, which are plentiful, here count for nothing; it is we ourselves and the author who walk through a world of spiritual dangers which makes them seem trivial. There is no recipe for writing of this kind.

That there is no recipe for this kind of writing is its own blessing.

“But part of the secret is that the author (like Kafka) is recording a lived dialectic. 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 realise 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” (“On Stories”).

I don’t know that Lewis is right that the realm of the spirit is the only Adventureland left to us–and he may have considered the “heavens” a spiritual region–but that vision of transdimensional distance really does create marvellous opportunities for philosophical exploration—what other planets are really good for.

I have complained enough, and am very aware that I may have missed something entirely. If forced to choose from my one-star books for a reread, I would choose Chrétien and Sydney and learn to like them. Morris’ utopia I only found horrifying, so I could read that again. And pressed to the wall, I would rather reread the 561,996 pork-barrel words of Atlas Shrugged rather than return to a single chapter of dialogue in Arcturus. At least Ayn Rand can present her despicable characters with moral courage. And there are lots of pretty trains.

Now to one of the better scenes, this one with that elegant rhythm of a ceiling fan missing a blade.

From Chapter 19, Sullenbode

Corpang, who had been staring steadily along the ridge, here abruptly broke in. “The road is plain now, Maskull. If you wish it, I’ll go on alone.”

“No, we’ll go on together. Sullenbode will accompany us.”

“A little way,” said the woman, “but not to Adage, to pit my strength against unseen powers. That light is not for me. I know how to renounce love, but I will never be a traitor to it.”

“Who knows what we shall find on Adage, or what will happen? Corpang is as ignorant as myself.”

Corpang looked him full in the face. “Maskull, you are quite well aware that you never dare approach that awful fire in the society of a beautiful woman.”

Maskull gave an uneasy laugh. “What Corpang doesn’t tell you, Sullenbode, is that I am far better acquainted with Muspel-light than he, and that, but for a chance meeting with me, he would still be saying his prayers in Threal.”

“Still, what he says must be true,” she replied, looking from one to the other.

“And so I am not to be allowed to — ”

“So long as I am with you, I shall urge you onward, and not backward, Maskull.”

“We need not quarrel yet,” he remarked, with a forced smile. “No doubt things will straighten themselves out.”

Sullenbode began kicking the snow about with her foot. “I picked up another piece of wisdom in my sleep, Corpang.”

“Tell it to me, then.”

“Men who live by laws and rules are parasites. Others shed their strength to bring these laws out of nothing into the light of day, but the law-abiders live at their ease — they have conquered nothing for themselves.”

“It is given to some to discover, and to others to preserve and perfect. You cannot condemn me for wishing Maskull well.”

“No, but a child cannot lead a thunderstorm.”

They started walking again along the centre of the ridge. All three were abreast, Sullenbode in the middle.

The road descended by an easy gradient, and was for a long distance comparatively smooth. The freezing point seemed higher than on Earth, for the few inches of snow through which they trudged felt almost warm to their naked feet. Maskull’s soles were by now like tough hides. The moonlit snow was green and dazzling. Their slanting, abbreviated shadows were sharply defined, and red-black in colour. Maskull, who walked on Sullenbode’s right hand, looked constantly to the left, toward the galaxy of glorious distant peaks.

“You cannot belong to this world,” said the woman. “Men of your stamp are not to be looked for here.”

“No, I have come here from Earth.”

“Is that larger than our world?”

“Smaller, I think. Small, and overcrowded with men and women. With all those people, confusion would result but for orderly laws, and therefore the laws are of iron. As adventure would be impossible without encroaching on these laws, there is no longer any spirit of adventure among the Earthmen. Everything is safe, vulgar, and completed.”

“Do men hate women there, and women men?”

“No, the meeting of the sexes is sweet, though shameful. So poignant is the sweetness that the accompanying shame is ignored, with open eyes. There is no hatred, or only among a few eccentric persons.”

“That shame surely must be the rudiment of our Lichstorm passion. But now say — why did you come here?”

“To meet with new experiences, perhaps. The old ones no longer interested me.”

“How long have you been in this world?”

“This is the end of my fourth day.”

“Then tell me what you have seen and done during those four days. You cannot have been inactive.”

“Great misfortunes have happened to me.”

He proceeded briefly to relate everything that had taken place from the moment of his first awakening in the scarlet desert. Sullenbode listened, with half-closed eyes, nodding her head from time to time. only twice did she interrupt him. After his description of Tydomin’s death, she said, speaking in a low voice — “None of us women ought by right of nature to fall short of Tydomin in sacrifice. For that one act of hers, I almost love her, although she brought evil to your door.” Again, speaking of Gleameil, she remarked, “That grand-souled girl I admire the most of all. She listened to her inner voice, and to nothing else besides. Which of us others is strong enough for that?”

When his tale was quite over, Sullenbode said, “Does it not strike you, Maskull, that these women you have met have been far nobler than the men?”

“I recognise that. We men often sacrifice ourselves, but only for a substantial cause. For you women almost any cause will serve. You love the sacrifice for its own sake, and that is because you are naturally noble.”

Turning her head a little, she threw him a smile so proud, yet so sweet, that he was struck into silence.

They tramped on quietly for some distance, and then he said, “Now you understand the sort of man I am. Much brutality, more weakness, scant pity for anyone — Oh, it has been a bloody journey!”

She laid her hand on his arm. “I, for one, would not have it less rugged.”

“Nothing good can be said of my crimes.”

“To me you seem like a lonely giant, searching for you know not what. . . . The grandest that life holds. . . . You at least have no cause to look up to women.”

“Thanks, Sullenbode!” he responded, with a troubled smile.

“When Maskull passes, let people watch. Everyone is thrown out of your road. You go on, looking neither to right nor left.”

“Take care that you are not thrown as well,” said Corpang gravely.

“Maskull shall do with me whatever he pleases, old skull! And for whatever he does, I will thank him. . . . In place of a heart you have a bag of loose dust. Someone has described love to you. You have had it described to you. You have heard that it is a small, fearful, selfish joy. It is not that — it is wild, and scornful, and sportive, and bloody. . . . How should you know.”

“Selfishness has far too many disguises.”

“If a woman wills to give up all, what can there be selfish in that?”

“Only do not deceive yourself. Act decisively, or fate will be too swift for you both.”

Sullenbode studied him through her lashes. “Do you mean death — his death as well as mine?”

“You go too far, Corpang,” said Maskull, turning a shade darker. “I don’t accept you as the arbiter of our fortunes.”

“If honest counsel is disagreeable to you, let me go on ahead.”

The woman detained him with her slow, light fingers. “I wish you to stay with us.”

“Why?”

“I think you may know what you are talking about. I don’t wish to bring harm to Maskull. Presently I’ll leave you.”

“That will be best,” said Corpang.

Maskull looked angry. “I shall decide — Sullenbode, whether you go on, or back, I stay with you. My mind is made up.”

An expression of joyousness overspread her face, in spite of her efforts to conceal it. “Why do you scowl at me, Maskull?”

He returned no answer, but continued walking onward with puckered brows. After a dozen paces or so, he halted abruptly. “Wait, Sullenbode!”

The others came to a standstill. Corpang looked puzzled, but the woman smiled. Maskull, without a word, bent over and kissed her lips. Then he relinquished her body, and turned around to Corpang.

“How do you, in your great wisdom, interpret that kiss?”

“It requires no great wisdom to interpret kisses, Maskull.”

“Hereafter, never dare to come between us. Sullenbode belongs to me.”

“Then I say no more; but you are a fated man.”

From that time forward he spoke not another word to either of the others.

A heavy gleam appeared in the woman’s eyes. “Now things are changed, Maskull. Where are you taking me?”

“Choose, you.”

“The man I love must complete his journey. I won’t have it otherwise. You shall not stand lower than Corpang.”

“Where you go, I will go.”

“And I— as long as your love endures, I will accompany you even to Adage.”

“Do you doubt its lasting?”

“I wish not to. . . . Now I will tell you what I refused to tell you before. The term of your love is the term of my life. When you love me no longer, I must die.”

“And why?” asked Maskull slowly.

“Yes, that’s the responsibility you incurred when you kissed me for the first time. I never meant to tell you.”

“Do you mean that if I had gone on alone, you would have died?”

“I have no other life but what you give me.”

My most significant alien encounter this year has been in the science fiction of Octavia E. Butler. I have only dipped into her work, enjoying her Xenogenesis Trilogy (1987-89) and a collection of short pieces, Bloodchild and Other Stories (2nd ed., 2005). Butler’s work creates space for highly complex conversations about gender, race, slavery, and 20th c. sf’s main questions: what does it mean to be human and can humanity be remade? Recently in the wake of the stunning Marvel Cinematic Universe superhit, The Black Panther, Butler’s name has been associated with Afrofuturism. She might be distinguished as perhaps the only black woman making a living as a science fiction writer in her generation. However, she has won pretty much all the awards–including the Genius Grant–so I think her work speaks for itself.

Butler’s heritage is not incidental to her work. Beyond drawing minority and poor characters into her work, Butler consistently speaks of being a black woman writing in a white man’s worlds. While her brilliantly constructed worlds and elegant prose style might seem to predict success, it was a long time before she found herself in the writing community. Growing up poor–her mother was a maid and her father, dead when she was 7, a shoeshine man–the idea of being a writer seemed almost impossible to everyone around her. From high school through her late 20s, Butler wrote as much as she could while working or studying. She often woke up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning to get some writing done before heading to her shift at the factory or restaurant.

When she was 23 she caught a break, making friends with groundbreaking black sf writer Samuel R. Delany and selling a couple of stories. It was 5 years, though, before her first novel was picked up. Once she broke as a writer, she never stopped, even in the face of difficulties.

Butler was generous as an experienced writer, often sharing advice and anecdotes about the trade in readings and speeches. One of her advice pieces is “Furor Scribendi”–“rage writing” or perhaps “furious scribbling” or “burning to write” might capture the meaning of that. Or maybe “Furor Scribendi” is captured by the title of a companion piece in the Bloodchild collection, “Positive Obsession.” Drafted from her public talks for an L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future volume, Butler shares her “rules for writing” (see below). They are a mix of oft-ignored common sense and the shockingly counterintuitive, and make for a valuable guide to professional writing.

I suspect that they are in some way in conversation with Robert A. Heinlein’s much more famous set of rules. You can read his entire article, “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction,” where he shares his story of writing, these rules, and famously invents the term “speculative fiction.” You may already have heard of Heinlein’s Rules:

1. You must write
2. Finish what you start
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order
4. You must put your story on the market
5. You must keep it on the market until it has sold

Heinlein admits in the article that the rules are sculpted for speculative fiction–with its idiosyncratic publishing environment–and terribly difficult to follow. The reason he is “not afraid to give away the racket,” though, is because so few people follow this plan. In Heinlein’s view, that is why there are “so few professional writers and so many aspirants.”

Since I’m in the “aspirant” category and Heinlein is one of the most important sf writers ever, I hate to quibble with the master. However, #3 is a deadly piece of advice for most writers, and a good deal of Stephen King‘s “On Writing” and Butler’s 4th rule are about subverting Heinlein’s advice. I wonder if Heinlein himself could have used a bit more editorial control. In a blog post I never wrote, “Why I Hated Stranger in a Strange Land,” I note that there are 280 uses of “uh…”, “eh?”, or “huh?” and related words in Heinlein’s classic god-alien novel. That’s one on almost every page and undercuts the tone of moral superiority–he is, after all, the all-powerful judge of the solar system in this piece–that he is trying to achieve.

So I think I will leave you with Octavia Butler’s advice. She is a little less influential as a science fiction author than Heinlein, but as a writer and as someone who fought to find a place in a difficult field, she makes for a fine model.  I have blogicized her short piece, “Furor Scribendi,” taking this abridged piece from its paragraph form and giving it this checklist-like shape. But the words are hers, and the most important word is the last one.

1. Read.

• Read about the art, the craft, and the business of writing.
• Read the kind of work you’d like to write.
• Read good literature and bad, fiction and fact.
• Read every day and learn from what you read.
• If you commute to work or if you spend part of your day doing relatively mindless work, listen to book tapes…. [Audiobooks] provide a painless way to ponder use of language, the sounds of words, conflict, characterization, plotting, and the multitudes of ideas you can find in history, biography, medicine, the sciences, etc.

2. Take classes and go to writers’ workshops.

Writing is communication. You need other people to let you know whether you’re communicating what you think you are and whether you’re doing it in ways that are not only accessible and entertaining, but as compelling as you can make them. In other words, you need to know that you’re telling a good story. You want to be the writer who keeps readers up late at night, not the one who drives them off to watch television. Workshops and classes are rented readers—rented audiences—for your work. Learn from the comments, questions, and suggestions of both the teacher and the class. These relative strangers are more likely to tell you the truth about your work than are your friends and family who may not want to hurt or offend you.

One tiresome truth they might tell you, for instance, is that you need to take a grammar class. If they say this, listen. Take the class. Vocabulary and grammar are your primary tools. They’re most effectively used, even most effectively abused, by people who understand them. No computer program, no friend or employee can take the place of a sound knowledge of your tools.

3. Write.

• Write every day.
• Write whether you feel like writing or not.
• Choose a time of day. Perhaps you can get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, give up an hour of recreation, or even give up your lunch hour.
• If you can’t think of anything in your chosen genre, keep a journal. You should be keeping one anyway. Journal writing helps you to be more observant of your world, and a journal is a good place to store story ideas for later projects.

4. Revise your writing until it’s as good as you can make it.

All the reading, the writing, and the classes should help you do this. Check your writing, your research (never neglect your research), and the physical appearance of your manuscript. Let nothing substandard slip through. If you notice something that needs fixing, fix it, no excuses. There will be plenty that’s wrong that you won’t catch. Don’t make the mistake of ignoring flaws that are obvious to you. The moment you find yourself saying, “This doesn’t matter. It’s good enough.” Stop. Go back. Fix the flaw. Make a habit of doing your best.

5. Submit your work for publication.

1. First research the markets that interest you. Seek out and study the books or magazines of publishers to whom you want to sell.
2. Then submit your work. If the idea of doing this scares you, fine. Go ahead and be afraid. But send your work out anyway.
3. If it’s rejected, send it out again, and again. Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They’re every writer’s rite of passage.
4. Don’t give up on a piece of work that you can’t sell. You may be able to sell it later to new publications or to new editors of old publications. At worst, you should be able to learn from your rejected work. You may even be able to use all or part of it in a new work. One way or another, writers can use, or at least learn from, everything.

6. Here are some potential impediments for you to forget about:

1. First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.
2. Forget talent. If you have it, fine. Use it. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter. As habit is more dependable than inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than talent. Never let pride or laziness prevent you from learning, improving your work, changing its direction when necessary. Persistence is essential to any writer—the persistence to finish your work, to keep writing in spite of rejection, to keep reading, studying, submitting work for sale. But stubbornness, the refusal to change unproductive behavior or to revise unsalable work can be lethal to your writing hopes.
3. Finally, don’t worry about imagination. You have all the imagination you need, and all the reading, journal writing, and learning you will be doing will stimulate it. Play with your ideas. Have fun with them. Don’t worry about being silly or outrageous or wrong. So much of writing is fun. It’s first letting your interests and your imagination take you anywhere at all. Once you’re able to do that, you’ll have more ideas than you can use. Then the real work of fashioning them into a story begins. Stay with it.

Persist.

I tell my students often enough to read the fore-matter in their textbooks. “That’s where the good stuff is,” I argue. “That’s where the author shares his or her vision for writing.”

Now, I suspect that students rarely heed my advice. And I suspect this not just because they often fail to grasp the heart of their authors–which is true–but because, as a student, I rarely did this. And I probably frequently missed the author’s real task. I skipped over the preface with its roadmap to the text ahead and moved into the book, anxious to finish as quickly as I could. I simply didn’t believe my profs when they told me the fore-matter had all the good stuff.

As a maturing reader, I’ve begun to read the fore-matter seriously. Consequently, I’ve begun to discover wonderful things hidden there.

As an aspiring writer, it was Lewis’s dedication to his Goddaughter Lucy Barfield that first caught my eye years ago.

“My dear Lucy,
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realised that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it.”
your affectionate Godfather,
C.S. Lewis

Anyone who has tried to write a story for someone they love, as I have for my niece, will know that girls certainly do grow quicker than books. But there is a hidden truth in this little dedication: there may be a stage where children pull away from fairytale or fantasy or “children’s literature,” but good readers will return again. We grow up, and we may yet again be old enough to read fancifully. As Lewis says in his essay, “On 3 Ways of Writing for Children,”

“I put in what I would have liked to read when I was a child and what I still like reading now that I am in my fifties.”

It is, I believe, the foundational rule of writing for children–or writing anything, perhaps.

Another author that captured me when I was young shares her vision for writing in the fore-matter. I’ve transcribed the following from the audio of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time–a book that rocked my world as a child who, like the main character, frequently baffled teachers at my inability to “get” school. Of course, I discovered later that it was at least as much that the school didn’t get me–a truth we see lived out in chapters of A Wrinkle in Time. It is only in this little note to her listeners that L’Engle tells us why this is.

Hello, this is Madeleine L’Engle. I’m going to be reading A Wrinkle in Time to you. It’s a book that almost never got published. I’d already had half a dozen books published but this was a very different one and nobody knew quite what it was or who it was for. And the general feeling was that it was much too hard for children. Well, my kids were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it, and at night I’d read them what I’d written during the day they said, “Oh, mother! Go back to the typewriter!” So I knew kids could understand it.

The problem is, it’s not that it’s too difficult for kids but that it’s too difficult for grown ups. Too many grown ups tend to put themselves into little rooms with windows that don’t open and doors that are locked. And they want to close themselves off from any new ideas. And you’re ready and open for new ideas, and new things, and new places, and new excitements. So I hope you’ll enjoy this book. I had a wonderful time writing it.

Isn’t that the truth, that it is us adults who struggle, often enough, to see time wrinkle and planets tilt? And because we do, we don’t often feel the cool breeze at the back of the wardrobe.

One of these traits I think we need to re-learn is to read the fore-matter of books, like when our parents read us our picture books from cover to cover. After all, who knows what we might find there?

How many times have you heard of the struggling writer providentially bumping into an established author or writing a letter? And then that writer on the edge of hopelessness becomes the recipient of a little piece of advice or encouragement that changes their life, setting them on the path to fulfilled dreams of their books in print?

This is not one of those stories.

Lewis wrote thousands of letters, and many of them contain advice to writers and other kinds of personal support. The Letters to Children and Letters to an American Lady collections have those sorts of letters, and he took time with people who would go on to be important writers, like Arthur C. Clarke, J.R.R. Tolkien, Joy Davidman, and Roger Lancelyn Green. In 1960, however, Lewis just did not have it in him to take much time with a Meredith Lee. Many of his Q&A-style letters are desperately thin, and I wonder if he resented them a wee bit.

In this case, the letter contained all those generic questions that inexperienced or uncreative journalists ask established authors: Why did you become a writer? How do you come up with your books? Why did you choose to write fiction? and the like. Lewis gets off with the briefest possible answers without brushing Ms. Lee off altogether. Why did he turn to writing as a career? Lewis’ answer was,

“because my clumsiness of fingers prevented me from making things in any other way.”

Even Lewis must have known that almost any of us would like to know the heart and grit and vision of that calling to creation, not the clumsy reason he first picked up a pen.

Out of this clearly awful letter comes something, though, that I had suspected of Lewis but never found confirmation for until recently. Lewis admits that he carries around dozens of plans for books at any one time, but that the emerging happenstance of book ideas often thwarts his plans:

Very often a book of mine gets written when I’m tidying a drawer and come across notes for a plan rejected by me years ago, and now suddenly realise I can do it after all.

It could be that this might be the most valuable insight into Lewis’ writing that I have seen from him, from what is one of his least insightful letters. Here’s the entire letter, for your enjoyment.

As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge
6 Dec. 1960

Dear Miss Lee,

1. Why did I become a writer? Chiefly, I think, because my clumsiness of fingers prevented me from making things in any other way. See my Surprised by Joy, chapter I.

2. What ‘inspires’ my books? Really, I don’t know. Does anyone know where, exactly, an idea comes from? With me all fiction begins with pictures in my head. But where the pictures come from I couldn’t say.

3. Which of my books do I think most ‘representational’? Do you mean (a.) Most representative, most typical, most characteristic? Or (b.) Most full of ‘representations’ i.e. images. But whichever you mean, surely this is a question not for me but for my readers to decide. Or do you mean simply which do I like best? If so, the answer wd. be Till We Have Faces and Perelandra.

4. I have, as usual, dozens of ‘plans’ for books, but I don’t know which, if any, of these will come off. Very often a book of mine gets written when I’m tidying a drawer and come across notes for a plan rejected by me years ago, and now suddenly realise I can do it after all. This, you see, makes predictions rather difficult!

5. I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn’t anyone?

Good luck with your ‘project’.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis

While L.M. Montgomery could be viewed as a writer’s writer for her prose, imaginative vim, and her shaping of characters, her novel Emily of New Moon is almost a textbook on the writer’s life. A friend tipped me off to the rich writing moments in Emily of New Moon and I’d like to highlight one now.

In 1917, Montgomery wrote a serial autobiography in Everywoman’s World magazine, later published as The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career (1974). In many ways, Emily of New Moon could be read as the fictionalization of Montgomery’s own steep climb up “The Alpine Path” to recognition as an author. The recently orphaned Emily arrives at the adventure-less New Moon estate with an author’s imagination intact. Against the anvil of family persecution, that imagination is forged into the vocation of a writer. Even as a young child, Emily jots down poems and stories on any scrap of paper she can find–including leftover stationary from the post office and little journals slipped to her from one of the household confederates.

Though her adoptive family does not understand and actively discourages the craft–largely because of a sense of feminine and aristocratic pride–Emily is able to find confederates outside her home. Next week I will speak of a special adult in the community who heard the horns of elfland as Emily did, but this week I want to highlight a co-adventurer in words, Emily’s curmudgeonly teacher, Mr. Carpenter.

It is difficult for us to get the shock of Montgomery’s writing as we sit as readers in a culture where the only thing that could be shocking would be modesty or chastity. But Montgomery embedded all kinds of problematic characters throughout her work. Child readers might miss the controversy altogether, or it might be intimated in the little clues left by Montgomery in the text. One of these is Mr. Alexander, a scholar on an elite pathway who loses his way in “wild living,” as the parable goes. In an age where ministers were among the best educated, Francis Carpenter was top of his class at McGill until “he fell into the drink,” as Islanders might have said back then. So instead of life as a hot young public intellectual, he was a small rural school teacher past his prime. Mr. Alexander was astute enough to only fall off the wagon on weekends, so that his dipsomania didn’t disturb his teaching career, as menial as it was.

Montgomery’s description of Alexander’s physique is vivid (not quite captured in the Emily of New Moon TV actor to the right), especially if you imagine a small girl looking up at her schoolmaster hiding behind that moustache and eyebrows:

Mr Carpenter was somewhere between forty and fifty–a tall man, with an upstanding shock of bushy grey hair, bristling grey moustache and eyebrows, a truculent beard, bright blue eyes out of which all his wild life had not yet burned the fire, and a long, lean, greyish face, deeply lined.

He had an explosive temper which generally burst into flame at least once a day, and then he would storm about wildly for a few minutes, tugging at his beard, imploring heaven to grant him patience, abusing everybody in general and the luckless object of his wrath in particular. But these tempers never lasted long. In a few minutes Mr Carpenter would be smiling as graciously as a sun bursting through a storm-cloud on the very pupil he had been rating. Nobody seemed to cherish any grudge because of his scoldings. He never said any of the biting things Miss Brownell was wont to say, which rankled and festered for weeks; his hail of words fell alike on just and unjust and rolled off harmlessly.

He could take a joke on himself in perfect good nature. “Do you hear me? Do you hear me, sirrah?” he bellowed to Perry Miller one day. “Of course I hear you,” retorted Perry coolly, “they could hear you in Charlottetown.” Mr Carpenter stared for a moment, then broke into a great, jolly laugh.

In the heroic stance of all of Montgomery’s best characters, Emily found herself both a little frightened by him, but also a little sad for him. But it was his interest in poetry that drew Emily in over time, as she longed to be a great poet. Her first encounter with Mr. Carpenter was not hopeful:

“So you’re the girl that writes poetry, eh? Better stick to your needle and duster. Too many fools in the world trying to write poetry and failing. I tried it myself once. Got better sense now.”

But Emily was insistent on being such a fool, and kept with her poetry, except for rare exceptions quietly hiding it from the eyes of her classmates, her family members, and her teachers. One of those rare occasions of inviting the world into her work was when she chose to show it to Mr. Carpenter. I want to include a rather lengthy selection from Emily of New Moon. It is a way of sealing in Master Carpenter’s character but is revelatory in other ways. It shows the value of true criticism, the rarity of true praise, and the chancy encounters we have in the shaping of our writerly vocations. It also, ominously, hints at the darkness of the writer’s life–a darkness that Emily cannot imagine as a child but will come to discover as an adult, as L.M. Montgomery herself did. This is one of the passages in Montgomery’s work where deep calls to deep, and there is great richness for those who can see it.

One afternoon amid the golden days and hazes of October [Mr. Carpenter] asked her gruffly to let him see some of her verses.

“I never meant to encourage you in it,” he said. “I don’t mean it now. Probably you can’t write a line of real poetry and never will. But let me see your stuff. If it’s hopelessly bad I’ll tell you so. I won’t have you wasting years striving for the unattainable–at least I won’t have it on my conscience if you do. If there’s any promise in it, I’ll tell you so just as honestly. And bring some of your stories, too–they’re trash yet, that’s certain, but I’ll see if they show just and sufficient cause for going on.”

Emily spent a very solemn hour that evening, weighing, choosing, rejecting. To the little bundle of verse she added one of her Jimmy-books which contained, as she thought, her best stories. She went to school next day, so secret and mysterious that Ilse took offence, started in to call her names–and then stopped. Ilse [her best friend] had promised her father that she would try to break herself of the habit of calling names. She was making fairly good headway and her conversation, if less vivid, was beginning to approximate to New Moon standards.

Emily made a sad mess of her lessons that day. She was nervous and frightened. She had a tremendous respect for Mr Carpenter’s opinion. Father Cassidy had told her to keep on [see next week’s post]–Dean Priest had told her that some day she might really write–but perhaps they were only trying to be encouraging because they liked her and didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Emily knew Mr Carpenter would not do this. No matter if he did like her he would nip her aspirations mercilessly if he thought the root of the matter was not in her. If, on the contrary, he bade her God-speed, she would rest content with that against the world and never lose heart in the face of any future criticism. No wonder the day seemed fraught with tremendous issues to Emily.

When school was out Mr Carpenter asked her to remain. She was so white and tense that the other pupils thought she must have been found out by Mr Carpenter in some especially dreadful behaviour and knew she was going to “catch it.” Rhoda Stuart flung her a significantly malicious smile from the porch–which Emily never even saw. She was, indeed, at a momentous bar, with Mr Carpenter as supreme judge, and her whole future career–so she believed–hanging on his verdict.

The pupils disappeared and a mellow, sunshiny stillness settled over the old schoolroom. Mr Carpenter took the little packet she had given him in the morning out of his desk, came down the aisle and sat in the seat before her, facing her. Very deliberately he settled his glasses astride his hooked nose, took out her manuscripts and began to read–or rather to glance over them, flinging scraps of comments, mingled with grunts, sniffs and hoots, at her as he glanced. Emily folded her cold hands on her desk and braced her feet against the legs of it to keep her knees from trembling. This was a very terrible experience. She wished she had never given her verses to Mr Carpenter. They were no good–of course they were no good. Remember the editor of the Enterprise.

“Humph!” said Mr Carpenter. “Sunset–Lord, how many poems have been written on ‘Sunset’–

The clouds are massed in splendid state
At heaven’s unbarred western gate
Where troops of star-eyed spirits wait–

By gad, what does that mean?”

“I–I–don’t know,” faltered startled Emily, whose wits had been scattered by the sudden swoop of his spiked glance.

Mr Carpenter snorted.

“For heaven’s sake, girl, don’t write what you can’t understand yourself. And this–To Life–‘Life, as thy gift I ask no rainbow joy’–is that sincere? Is it, girl? Stop and think. Do you ask ‘no rainbow joy’ of life?”

He transfixed her with another glare. But Emily was beginning to pick herself up a bit. Nevertheless, she suddenly felt oddly ashamed of the very elevated and unselfish desires expressed in that sonnet.

“No–o,” she answered reluctantly, “I do want rainbow joy–lots of it.”

“Of course you do. We all do. We don’t get it–you won’t get it–but don’t be hypocrite enough to pretend you don’t want it, even in a sonnet. Lines to a Mountain Cascade–‘On its dark rocks like the whiteness of a veil around a bride’–Where did you see a mountain cascade in Prince Edward Island?”

“Nowhere–there’s a picture of one in Dr Burnley’s library.”

“A Wood Stream–

The threading sunbeams quiver,
The bending bushes shiver,
O’er the little shadowy river–

There’s only one more rhyme that occurs to me and that’s ‘liver.’ Why did you leave it out?”

Emily writhed.

“Wind Song–

I have shaken the dew in the meadows
From the clover’s creamy gown–

Pretty, but weak. June–June, for heaven’s sake, girl, don’t write poetry on June. It’s the sickliest subject in the world. It’s been written to death.”

“No, June is immortal,” cried Emily suddenly, a mutinous sparkle replacing the strained look in her eyes. She was not going to let Mr Carpenter have it all his own way.

But Mr Carpenter had tossed June aside without reading a line of it.

“‘I weary of the hungry world’–what do you know of the hungry world?–you in your New Moon seclusion of old trees and old maids–but it is hungry. Ode to Winter–the seasons are a sort of disease all young poets must have, it seems–ha! ‘Spring will not forget’–that’s a good line–the only good line in it. H’m’m–Wanderings—

I’ve heard the secret of the rune
That the somber pines on the hillside croon–

Have you–have you learned that secret?”

“I think I’ve always known it,” said Emily dreamily. That flash of unimaginable sweetness that sometimes surprised her had just come and gone. “Aim and Endeavour–too didactic–too didactic. You’ve no right to try to teach until you’re old–and then you won’t want to–

Her face was like a star all pale and fair–

Were you looking in the glass when you composed that line?”

“No–” indignantly.

“‘When the morning light is shaken like a banner on the hill’–a good line–a good line–

Oh, on such a golden morning
To be living is delight–

Too much like a faint echo of Wordsworth. The Sea in September–‘blue and austerely bright’–‘austerely bright’–child, how can you marry the right adjectives like that? Morning–‘all the secret fears that haunt the night’–what do you know of the fears that haunt the night?”

“I know something,” said Emily decidedly, remembering her first night at Wyther Grange.

“To a Dead Day–

With the chilly calm on her brow
That only the dead may wear–

Have you even seen the chilly calm on the brow of the dead, Emily?”

“Yes,” said Emily softly, recalling that grey dawn in the old house in the hollow.

“I thought so–otherwise you couldn’t have written that–and even as it is–how old are you, jade?”

“Thirteen, last May.”

“Humph! Lines to Mrs George Irving’s Infant Son–you should study the art of titles, Emily–there’s a fashion in them as in everything else. Your titles are as out of date as the candles of New Moon–

Soundly he sleeps with his red lips pressed
Like a beautiful blossom close to her breast–

The rest isn’t worth reading. September–is there a month you’ve missed?–‘Windy meadows harvest-deep’–good line. Blair Water by Moonlight–gossamer, Emily, nothing but gossamer. The Garden of New Moon—

Beguiling laughter and old song
Of merry maids and men–

Good line–I suppose New Moon is full of ghosts. ‘Death’s fell minion well fulfilled its part’–that might have passed in Addison’s day but not now–not now, Emily–

Your azure dimples are the graves
Where million buried sunbeams play–

Atrocious, girl–atrocious. Graves aren’t playgrounds. How much would you play if you were buried?”

Emily writhed and blushed again. Why couldn’t she have seen that herself? Any goose could have seen it.

“Sail onward, ships–white wings, sail on,
Till past the horizon’s purple bar
You drift from sight.–In flush of dawn
Sail on, and ‘neath the evening star–

Trash–trash–and yet there’s a picture in it–

Lap softly, purple waves. I dream,
And dreams are sweet–I’ll wake no more–

Ah, but you’ll have to wake if you want to accomplish anything. Girl, you’ve used purple twice in the same poem.

Buttercups in a golden frenzy–

‘a golden frenzy’–girl, I see the wind shaking the buttercups,

From the purple gates of the west I come–

You’re too fond of purple, Emily.”

“It’s such a lovely word,” said Emily.

“Dreams that seem too bright to die–

Seem but never are, Emily–

The luring voice of the echo, fame–

So you’ve heard it, too? It is a lure and for most of us only an echo. And that’s the last of the lot.”

Mr Carpenter swept the little sheets aside, folded his arms on the desk, and looked over his glasses at Emily.

Emily looked back at him mutely, nervelessly. All the life seemed to have been drained out of her body and concentrated in her eyes.

“Ten good lines out of four hundred, Emily–comparatively good, that is–and all the rest balderdash–balderdash, Emily.”

“I–suppose so,” said Emily faintly.

Her eyes brimmed with tears–her lips quivered. She could not help it. Pride was hopelessly submerged in the bitterness of her disappointment. She felt exactly like a candle that somebody had blown out.

“What are you crying for?” demanded Mr Carpenter.

Emily blinked away the tears and tried to laugh.

“I–I’m sorry–you think it’s no good–” she said.

Mr Carpenter gave the desk a mighty thump.

“No good! Didn’t I tell you there were ten good lines? Jade, for ten righteous men Sodom had been spared.”

“Do you mean–that–after all–” The candle was being relighted again.

“Of course, I mean. If at thirteen you can write ten good lines, at twenty you’ll write ten times ten–if the gods are kind. Stop messing over months, though–and don’t imagine you’re a genius either, if you have written ten decent lines. I think there’s something trying to speak through you–but you’ll have to make yourself a fit instrument for it. You’ve got to work hard and sacrifice–by gad, girl, you’ve chosen a jealous goddess. And she never lets her votaries go–even when she shuts her ears for ever to their plea. What have you there?”

Emily, her heart thrilling, handed him her Jimmy-book. She was so happy that it shone through her whole being with a positive radiance. She saw her future, wonderful, brilliant–oh, her goddess would listen to her–“Emily B. Starr, the distinguished poet”–“E. Byrd Starr, the rising young novelist.”

She was recalled from her enchanting reverie by a chuckle from Mr Carpenter. Emily wondered a little uneasily what he was laughing at. She didn’t think there was anything funny in that book. It contained only three or four of her latest stories–The Butterfly Queen, a little fairy tale; The Disappointed House, wherein she had woven a pretty dream of hopes come true after long years; The Secret of the Glen, which, in spite of its title, was a fanciful little dialogue between the Spirit of the Snow, the Spirit of the Grey Rain, the Spirit of Mist, and the Spirit of Moonshine.

“So you think I am not beautiful when I say my prayers?” said Mr Carpenter.

Emily gasped–realized what had happened–made a frantic grab at her Jimmy-book–missed it. Mr Carpenter held it up beyond her reach and mocked at her.

She had given him the wrong Jimmy-book! And this one, oh, horrors, what was in it? Or rather, what wasn’t in it? Sketches of everyone in Blair Water–and a full–a very full–description of Mr Carpenter himself. Intent on describing him exactly, she had been as mercilessly lucid as she always was, especially in regard to the odd faces he made on mornings when he opened the school day with a prayer. Thanks to her dramatic knack of word painting, Mr Carpenter lived in that sketch. Emily did not know it, but he did–he saw himself as in a glass and the artistry of it pleased him so that he cared for nothing else. Besides, she had drawn his good points quite as clearly as his bad ones. And there were some sentences in it–“He looks as if he knew a great deal that can never be any use to him”–“I think he wears the black coat Mondays because it makes him feel that he hasn’t been drunk at all.” Who or what had taught the little jade these things? Oh, her goddess would not pass Emily by!

“I’m–sorry,” said Emily, crimson with shame all over her dainty paleness.

“Why, I wouldn’t have missed this for all the poetry you’ve written or ever will write! By gad, its literature–literature–and you’re only thirteen. But you don’t know what’s ahead of you–the stony hills–the steep ascents–the buffets–the discouragements. Stay in the valley if you’re wise. Emily, why do you want to write? Give me your reason.”

“I want to be famous and rich,” said Emily coolly.

“Everybody does. Is that all?”

“No. I just love to write.”

“A better reason–but not enough–not enough. Tell me this–if you knew you would be poor as a church mouse all your life–if you knew you’d never have a line published–would you still go on writing—would you?”

“Of course I would,” said Emily disdainfully. “Why, I have to write–I can’t help it at times–I’ve just got to.”

“Oh–then I’d waste my breath giving advice at all. If it’s in you to climb you must–there are those who must lift their eyes to the hills–they can’t breathe properly in the valleys. God help them if there’s some weakness in them that prevents their climbing. You don’t understand a word I’m saying–yet. But go on–climb! There, take your book and go home. Thirty years from now I will have a claim to distinction in the fact that Emily Byrd Starr was once a pupil of mine. Go–go–before I remember what a disrespectful baggage you are to write such stuff about me and be properly enraged.”

Emily went, still a bit scared but oddly exultant behind her fright. She was so happy that her happiness seemed to irradiate the world with its own splendour. All the sweet sounds of nature around her seemed like the broken words of her own delight. Mr Carpenter watched her out of sight from the old worn threshold.

“Wind–and flame–and sea!” he muttered. “Nature is always taking us by surprise. This child has–what I have never had and would have made any sacrifice to have. But ‘the gods don’t allow us to be in their debt’–she will pay for it–she will pay.”

I never enjoyed the Emily of New Moon television series from a generation ago, though my wife did babysit the star, Martha MacIsaac, and I should have some loyalty to the local show. The only clip I could find of Mr. Carpenter is below, and captures the addict and not the critic. It also misses the gruffness I can imagine in his voice, the detached critical eye, but seems to be an engaging figure otherwise. Thanks to Callum Beck, a local minister who was once the pastor in a church that Montgomery attended as a youth (though he was a pastor a century too late to meet her). He tipped me off to Emily of New Moon as a writer’s book.

One of the more poignant aspects of Montgomery’s work for readers is how she charts her path as a writer in Emily of New Moon. Universally recognized as the book that most encoded her personality, it is also the one that imaginatively captures the challenges and joys of being a writer. There is one poem–or a part of a poem–that is captured in both Emily of New Moon and Montgomery’s memoir of the craft, originally published as a serial in a Canadian magazine in 1917 and later published as The Alpine Path in 1974. In Emily of New Moon the poem is sent to Emily as a selection from “The Fringed Gentian,” and includes this stanza:

Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep
How I may upward climb
The Alpine Path, so hard, so steep,
That leads to heights sublime.
How I may reach that far-off goal
Of true and honoured fame
And write upon its shining scroll
A woman’s humble name.

In little Emily, this triggers “the Flash”–a mystical moment of thrilling clarity where her everyday life connects to an immortal or heavenly beauty, which she then works out as a vocation of writing. It is not hard to see, for a budding author, how this would be an inspirational verse. Emily of New Moon sets up Emily’s journey in the following two books, as she weighs her vocation as a writer against the sufferings she encounters as well as the pressures from society, family, and friends. She is warned that the author’s life is indeed an uphill climb whose sublime heights are for much of life out of reach. And yet, for those of us called to the Alpine Path, we climb.

Montgomery recognized the hardness, and in the introduction to her memoir she wrote:

It is indeed a “hard and steep” path; and if any word I can write will assist or encourage another pilgrim along that path, that word I gladly and willingly write (The Alpine Path, ch. 1).

From childhood, Montgomery had braced herself for the steep, hard climb. She had encountered the verses quoted above in a magazine when she was a child and pasted them in a writing book she used for her own poems and school essays. This poem was a great comfort to Lucy Maud Montgomery. Her classic book, Anne of Green Gables, was rejected at least five times. By the time Montgomery had a book deal she had a hundred stories in print and was making a living (about $500 per year) by her pen. But a lot of that work was what she called Sunday School stories–moralistic tales that were limited by the essential lesson built into the tale. She yearned to be a real storyteller, and more than a decade after she began in earnest to be an “author” she had published a bestseller.

Being the peculiar person that I am, I thought I would look up the poem, “To the Fringed Gentian.” The Poetry Foundation provided the full text by William Cullen Bryant:

Thou blossom bright with autumn dew,

And colored with the heaven’s own blue,

That openest when the quiet light

Succeeds the keen and frosty night.

Thou comest not when violets lean

O’er wandering brooks and springs unseen,

Or columbines, in purple dressed,

Nod o’er the ground-bird’s hidden nest.

Thou waitest late and com’st alone,

When woods are bare and birds are flown,

And frosts and shortening days portend

The aged year is near his end.

Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye

Look through its fringes to the sky,

Blue-blue-as if that sky let fall

A flower from its cerulean wall.

I would that thus, when I shall see

The hour of death draw near to me,

Hope, blossoming within my heart,

May look to heaven as I depart.

So, yeah, I know I am not an internationally renowned poetry critic, but it strikes me that this is an entirely different poem. There is a blossom in both poems, and a journey. But there isn’t much else that connects them. I don’t think I am being overly literal when I suggest that either Montgomery has misattributed the original poem, or that her version is a pretty radical interpretation.

And maybe a better one. I am perhaps not the best judge, but it seems to me the gritty upward-way poem is better than the floral lift to heaven. Bryant, however, is a celebrated poet, and Montgomery merely an interesting poet. My personal connection to the upward way and my own struggles to work out my vocation might bias me.

But granted these are different poems, we are left with the curious problem of where Montgomery found the Alpine Path poem. Surprisingly, after reading a dozen or so academic articles on Emily of New Moon and Montgomery’s vocation as an author–as well as a couple of good biographies–scholars have not pinned down the reference. After an extensive internet search, it seems to me that blogger Faith Elizabeth Hough may have begun to work it out. She includes the longer version of the poem here:

“The Fringed Gentian,” Author Unknown

Lift up, thy dewy fringed eyes,
Oh, little Alpine flower,
The tear that trembling on them lies
Has sympathetic power
To move my own, for I, too, dream
With thee of distant heights
Whose lofty peaks are all agleam
With rosy dazzling lights.

Who dreams of wider spheres revealed
Up higher near the sky
Within the valley’s narrow field
Cannot contented lie.
Who longs for mountain breezes rare
Is restless down below
Like me for stronger purer air
Thou pinest, too, I know.

Where aspirations, hopes, desires
Combining fondly dwell,
Where burn the never-dying flowers
Of Genius’ wondrous spell.
Such towering summits would I reach
Who climb and grope in vain,
Oh, little flower, the secret teach
The weary way make plain.

When whisper blossom in thy sleep
How I may upward climb
The Alpine path, so hard, so steep
That leads to heights sublime.
How I may reach that far-off goal
Of true and honored fame
And write upon its shining scroll
A woman’s humble name.

Like Bryant’s poem, this verse is about autumnal flowers. With some searching I found this poem in the 1884 New Year’s edition of Godey’s Lady’s Book. “Tam! The Story of a Woman” by Ella Rodman Church and August De Bubna includes this poem. In the story the verses are found in a copy of Bryant’s poetry–hence Montgomery’s connection to the poem–but in the (relatively boring) story they are actually written on a slip of paper that was found in the Bryant book–and written by a woman who tentatively hopes to make a career as a poet in a male’s publishing world. Intriguingly, Montgomery seems to have forgotten the original context of the verse, but herself emulated the desire of “Miss Powell” in the story.

It seems to me that Montgomery selects out the best bit of the poem, but again you see my bias. I am that “blossom,” I hope–but if all four verses are included it becomes rather silly to press the metaphor. Still, I think Montgomery was on the right track with her idea of “The Alpine Path.” It is a peculiar provenance that brings us this poem, but it has been an interesting journey. Once I found the names of Ella Rodman Church and August De Bubna I found that others have followed my path of curiosity. The Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown has some of L.M. Montgomery’s scrapbooks, including her copy of the poem. But the search has been interesting, nonetheless.

One of the assignments that I give my students, adapted from the late C.S. Lewis scholar Dr. Bruce Edwards, is for students to get into groups and sketch out an 8th Chronicle of Narnia in the form of a book proposal or film treatment. It is always a rewarding assignment for both me and the students. Students may insert another court tale like The Horse and His Boy, explore the background of Puddleglum or the secret history of Tumnus, or spend time thinking about “The Problem of Susan,” as Neil Gaiman called it. As students creatively integrate their reading experience, artistic talents, and writerly instincts, I have never failed to enjoy reading these assignments. Plus, it helps students think through the process of the creation of Narnia and some effective ways to read the series.

And the assignment fits pretty well with Lewis’ view of the matter. Lewis approved of teachers reading the books with students and playing dramatically with the content (see the 2 Nov 1956 to Walter Hooper). Letters to Children is filled with notes about Narnia, including moments where Lewis encourage children to continue his Narnia tradition:

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
29th March 1961

Dear Jonathan Muehl,
Yours is one of the nicest letters I have had about the Narnian books, and it was very good of you to write it. But I’m afraid there will be no more of these stories. But why don’t you try writing some Narnian tales? I began to write when I was about your age, and it was the greatest fun. Do try!
With all best wishes,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis

The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
8 Sept 62

Dear Denise
I am delighted to hear that you liked the Narnian books, and it was nice of you to write and tell me. There is a map at the end of some of them in some editions. But why not do one yourself? And why not write stories yourself to fill up the gaps in Narnian history? I’ve left you plenty of hints–especially where Lucy and the Unicorn are talking in The Last Battle. I feel I have done all I can!
All good wishes.
Yours
C. S. Lewis

Even with the thing most troubling to fans–Susan’s excision from Narnia–Lewis invited readers to write up the story of her return to Narnia (see the 19 Feb 1960 letter to Pauline Bannister). When you read through his letters, you see that Lewis has a pretty loose view of intellectual property.

The same is not the case with J.R.R. Tolkien’s later work. Delighted to have The Hobbit in print, from the time it became popular through the two decades of working on The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien worked to ensure that his text was as accurate as possible. It drove him crazy when people carelessly “corrected” his spelling and grammar (see the 4 August 1953 letter to Christopher Tolkien). If Tolkien thought that this would be a great obstacle for him to deal with, he underestimated the response of the world to LOTR. Almost as soon as it was clear LOTR would sell, it was pirated in America. Tolkien took some months to create an authorized American edition, but many North Americans read about Númenor and the war of the ring for the first time in copies that Tolkien was never paid for.

Then there were the fan fiction requests. This letter to his publisher is among the spiciest of Tolkien’s responses to the phenomenon, filled with a sense of defeat and somewhat lacking in the open approach that Lewis had to his fans.

12 December 1966
76 Sandfield Road, Headington, Oxford

Dear Miss Hill,
I send you the enclosed impertinent contribution to my troubles. I do not know what the legal position is, I suppose that since one cannot claim property in inventing proper names, that there is no legal obstacle to this young ass publishing his sequel, if he could find any publisher, either respectable or disreputable, who would accept such tripe.

I have merely informed him that I have forwarded his letter and samples to you. I think that a suitable letter from Allen & Unwin might be more effective than one from me. I once had a similar proposal, couched in the most obsequious terms, from a young woman, and when I replied in the negative, I received a most vituperative letter.

With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
J. R. R. Tolkien.

Vituperative indeed. It is notes like this that has created a tentative approach to fan fiction within Tolkien and Inklings scholarship. And is there an author that has created more fan fiction and shadow books that Tolkien? There are memorial volumes, like After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien (1992), and careful disciples like Guy Gavriel Kay‘s The Fionavar Tapestry (1984), but copies of Tolkien’s style, atmosphere, and his elfin invention are myriad and quite varied in quality. Tolkien and Lewis each created a new framework for writing fantasy in the late 20th century, but the degree to which Tolkien’s vision has inspired and impelled fans to write similarly is unparalleled.

Lewis’ relative ease in the face of fan response has a context. If Lewis had faced the pressures that Tolkien felt from early fans, publishers, and pirates, he may have responded differently. Both Lewis and Tolkien were skeptical that film could capture their authorial vision–were they correct? Lewis discouraged stage productions of The Screwtape Letters, encouraging them to simply adopt the “general diabolical framework” and create their own stories. Lewis and Tolkien each attempted to exert editorial control over translations, and Lewis resisted what he considered “fundamentalist” appropriations of his work (see the 9 May 1960 letter to his publisher).

And certainly the Lewis estate did not retain a completely open approach to publishing (as can be expected). Someone did write an 8th Narnian chronicle on the topic of Susan–a Carmelite nun, it turns outs, with the title The Centaur’s Cavern–and it is rumoured to have been denied permission to print. I have read authors that have quietly looped Narnian elements or Tolkienesque elves into their work to good effect. And I generally love intertextual looping. Still, I have little hope that The Centaur’s Cavern and the 30 or 40 others like it out there would be any good.

While Lewis and Tolkien each had their own feelings about how their work was met in the world, I don’t think either of them could have imagined today’s world of fan fiction, spurred on by the digital connectivity that our technology allows. And I’m hardly the person to speak critically about the field. My students get it and they write excellent papers about fanfic, but I just don’t know it well enough. Reading comments by Lewis and Tolkien, though, stirs up opposing feelings.

For one, I feel both rebellious against editorial control and yet I am grateful when the work is protected from idiotic things (see the Anne thing below or what could appear on the right).

And I also wonder if my ignorance of fan fiction has been given to me by osmosis rather than critically chosen. What am I missing? I’d love to know.

Here is a couple of pictures I smooshed together of interpretations of Anne in the Anne of Green Gables series. Anyone who has read the story knows what Anne should look like. Should it be the thin, (sort of) homely, red-headed orphan on the right (Kevin Sullivan’s film), or the blond, buxom, “come-hither” farm-girl on the left (the Amazon print edition)? Perhaps copyright control isn’t totally a bad thing.

This summer I introduced an occasional feature I call “Throwback Thursday.” This is where I find a blog post from the past–raiding either my own vault or someone else’s–and throw it back out into the digital world. This might be an idea or book that is now relevant again, or a concept I’d like to think about more, or even “an oldie but a goodie” that I think needs a bit of spin time.

This post comes from the second anniversary of my blog in August 2013. When I wrote it I was at August 1937 of my project of reading Lewis Chronologically. I had just finished reading The Allegory of Love (1935) and Out of the Silent Planet (1937), and I was nearly complete The Personal Heresy (1933-9) and the 1930s pieces that would become Rehabilitations and Other Essays (published in 1939). 

As I paced my chronological reading project to Lewis’ letters, I got to know them intimately. What I noticed then and still see in Lewis’ work is that he will often try out an idea for a book or line of argument while writing a letter. No doubt he did this in everyday conversations too, but we have the letters and so that is where our attention goes. I don’t know which comes first: Does Lewis use the letter to test an idea? Or does the correspondence trigger something that will eventually become a book or essay? I suspect both are true, and in this short post, we see some of these emergent ideas. At the end of this piece I talk about the trails that Lewis leaves for us. Intriguingly, on the winding path of a PhD project, these are the breadcrumbs that I am still following into the wood of Lewis’ imaginative work. 

One of the reasons I like reading C.S. Lewis’ letters is that I get to see hints of ideas that will one day become books. Except for some pretty boring entries in his 20s, we don’t have Lewis’ diaries and most of his notebooks aren’t published. So what we have most to go on are the little ideas that pop up in his letters to friends, colleagues, and fans.

One of the friends is Leo Baker, a teacher and Anthroposophist that Lewis had gone to Oxford with. In a 24 Jun 1936 letter talking about Lewis’ The Allegory of Love, Lewis offers a hilarious self-deprecating apology for the length of his new book. Then he turns to Baker’s personal issues:

I am greatly distressed to hear that you are still suffering….

I must confess I have not myself yet got beyond the stage of feeling physical pain as the worst of evils. I am the worst person in the world to help anyone else to support it. I don’t mean that it presents quite the intellectual difficulties it used to, but that my nerves even in imagination refuse to move with my philosophy. In my own limited experience the sufferer himself nearly always towers above those around him: in fact, nothing confirms the Christian view of this world so much as the treasures of patience and unselfishness one sees elicited from quite commonplace people when the trial really comes. Age, too–nearly everyone improves as he gets old, if this is a ‘vale of soul making’, it seems to, by round and by large, to be working pretty well. Of course I can’t hazard a guess why you should be picked out for this prolonged suffering.

I am told that the great thing is to surrender to physical pain–I mean not to do what’s commonly called ‘standing’ it, above all not to brace the soul (which usually braces the muscles as well) not to try to ignore it: to be like earth being ploughed not like marble being cut. But I have no right to discuss such things on the basis of my very limited experience.

In these words, we see the beginnings of Lewis first apologetics book, The Problem of Pain (1939-40). The book argues for a Christian response to thoughts about pain with Lewis’ own admission that thinking about pain as a philosophical problem is a lot different than actually living through it.

“when pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all” (Preface to The Problem of Pain).

Perhaps it is conversations like those with Baker combined with the ill-health of people in his household and the looming prospect of war that turned Lewis to a book of apologetics that is surprisingly personal. Lewis’ works of nonfiction emerge in the letters, but the germ of some of Lewis’ characters also appear there. In a June 1937 letter to Dom Bede Griffiths–a student of Lewis’ who became a monk–we see the character of Weston from Out of the Silent Planet. Weston is a megalomaniacal genius who would sacrifice the environment or humans or the people of other worlds or “savage” societies in order to extend his particular idea of the human race. Here is what Lewis wrote to Griffiths about nine weeks before completing Out of the Silent Planet:

I was talking the other day to an intelligent infidel who said that he pinned all his hopes for any significance in the universe on the chance that the human race by adapting itself to changed conditions and first planet jumping, then star jumping, finally nebula jumping, could really last forever and subject matter wholly to mind.

When I said that it was overwhelmingly improbable, he said Yes, but one had to believe even in the 1000th chance or life was mockery. I of course asked why, feeling like that, he did not prefer to believe in the other and traditional ‘chance’ of a spiritual immortality. To that he replied–obviously not for effect but producing something that had long been in his mind–‘Oh I never can believe that: for if that were true our having a physical existence wd. be so pointless.’

Was this encounter the invention of Weston that became a mental trigger that finally gave the imaginative energy for Lewis to write Out of the Silent Planet (and fulfill his wager with Tolkien)? Or had Lewis been working on Out of the Silent Planet and Griffiths’ letter became an opportunity to think through his encounter with the planet-jumping infidel colleague?

We cannot know. But a study could be made of all the idea-seeds that appear in Lewis’ letters. He was a percolator, someone who would have an idea and let in roll around his brain for a while. He would jot notes down, make false starts on stories and lectures, and write poems in the margins. And, of course, he would test his ideas out on others.

Which, if we can insert ourselves into Lewis’ story as an imaginative correspondents, leaves a trail for all of us.