On Stories Read online

  Except for his academic works, Lewis never wrote more than a single draft of his novels, which indeed suggests that the stories were worked out in his head before he put pen to paper. And it seems in this case that the final impetus which produced his first words on the page was a kind of bargain or wager he made with Tolkien early in 1937. Writing about it some years later, Tolkien recalled: ‘Lewis said to me one day: “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to write some ourselves.”’8 Tolkien did not in fact complete the story he began, but Lewis kept his part of the bargain and sometime between the spring and autumn of 1937 he wrote Out of the Silent Planet. Lewis told me that he did not at this time foresee his other science-fiction novels. It wasn’t long, however, before other ‘pictures’ began forming in his mind, resulting in Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945), which make up his interplanetary trilogy. The one-time heady attraction exercised upon him by ‘other worlds’ had been resolved. And of this he was later to write, ‘My own planetary romances have been not so much the gratification of that fierce curiosity as its exorcism.’

  And so it was that Lewis strode out of the prison of ‘realism’. Not by any self-conscious ‘daring’ or attempted ‘originality’, but by writing what it had been given him to say. There was at the time the expected flutter about a distinguished medievalist prostituting his talents and great learning on the highly suspect field of science fiction. But this significant contribution to the new mythology carried an inner weight which none of the so-called realists even dared to approach. And, really, at the bottom of all this, lay a little lad’s desire to play in an imaginary world of Boxen. For again, from back over the years, it was as if Boxen was returning to him. Certainly the desire to construct these ‘other worlds’ had seized him now as never before, and came, perforce, trailing glory.

  The way was now open for Narnia—that beloved outpouring of everlasting charity. Typical of Lewis, the ‘childishness’ of these books was presented with anything but apologies. In the fourth essay in this book, written in 1952, Lewis said, ‘When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.’ The essays which follow are surely evidence for this.

  It is a pleasure to record my gratitude to Mr Owen Barfield and Dr Barbara Reynolds for much valuable advice on the editing of this book. I should point out that, except for the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, nineteenth, and twentieth pieces, which appeared in Of Other Worlds, all the others are here published in book form for the first time.

  ‘On Stories’ was first published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams in 1947. It was originally read, in a slightly fuller form, to a Merton College undergraduate literary society on the 14th November 1940 as ‘The Kappa Element in Romance’. ‘Kappa’ is taken from κρυπτόν and means the ‘hidden element’.

  ‘The Novels of Charles Williams’ was written at the request of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Lewis read it over the Third Programme of the BBC on the 11th February 1949. It has never been published before and, indeed, had lain undetected in the BBC Written Archives until I came across it quite by accident in 1980. I am indebted to the British Broadcasting Corporation for permission to publish it here.

  The novels of E. R. Eddison—The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Styrbion the Strong (1926), Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), and the posthumous Mezentian Gate (1958)—were to become an indispensable part of Lewis’s library after his discovery of The Worm Ouroboros in 1942. This led to a friendship between the two men, and it may have been Lewis’s rapturous enthusiasm for Eddison’s romances which led to their publication in paperback in New York in 1968. While we could wish it much longer, this ‘Tribute to E. R. Eddison’ (written some years before it was printed on the dust jacket of The Mezentian Gate) is too good to ignore and for that reason is reproduced here.

  ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’ was read to the Library Association and published in their Proceedings, Papers, and Summaries of Discussions at the Bournemouth Conference 29th April to 2nd May 1952.

  ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said’ first appeared in The New York Times Book Review of 18 November 1956.

  ‘On Juvenile Tastes’ is reprinted from the Church Times, Children’s Book Supplement, 28 November 1958.

  ‘It All Began with a Picture . . .’ is reprinted here from the Radio Times, 15 July 1960.

  ‘On Science Fiction’, a talk given to the Cambridge University English Club on the 24th November 1955, appeared first in Of Other Worlds, as did ‘A Reply to Professor Haldane’, which is a rejoinder to Professor J. B. S. Haldane’s article ‘Auld Hornie, F. R. S.’, in the Modern Quarterly of Autumn 1946, in which essay he criticises Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy. Professor Haldane, a theoretical biologist, was at once a disillusioned Marxist and violently anti-Christian. I have not thought it necessary to reprint Haldane’s article, for Lewis makes the argument quite clear. Besides, the chief value of Lewis’s reply is not in its polemical nature, but in the valuable light he throws on his own books.

  ‘The Hobbit’ is Lewis’s review of his friend Tolkien’s book of the same title, and the review is taken from The Times Literary Supplement of 2 October 1937.

  ‘Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings’ is a combination of two reviews about Tolkien’s great trilogy. The first portion of this piece appeared as ‘The Gods Return to Earth’ in Time and Tide, 14 August 1954, and the second was published as ‘The Dethronement of Power’, also in Time and Tide, 22 October 1955. Professor Tolkien told me that he had been reading various genealogies and appendices to Lewis long before there was any written story. His interests, he told me, were primarily in those aspects of ‘Middle Earth’ and that it was his friend C. S., or ‘Jack’, Lewis who encouraged him to write a story to go with them. ‘You know Jack,’ he said to me. ‘He had to have a story! And that story—The Lord of the Rings—was written to keep him quiet!’ It is, as it was meant to be, a generous and telling tribute.

  When his friend Dorothy L. Sayers died in December 1957, Lewis was asked to write a panegyric for the memorial service to be held for her at St Margaret’s Church, London, on the 15th January 1958. Lewis was unable to attend the service, and his composition was read by the Lord Bishop of Chichester (George Bell). Following Lewis’s death, I was one of those who began searching for the unpublished panegyric—a piece of writing which seemed determined to elude discovery. Indeed, it was not until this book was about to go to the printers that Miss Sayers’s son, Anthony Fleming, came to my rescue with the rather messy typescript which had been made for the Bishop to read from. Then, glory of glories, a further search uncovered the ‘real thing’. Finally, best of all was the day when Mr Fleming and I sat in the drawing-room of the Athenaeum Club in London, reading the original manuscript—which Lewis had given him after the memorial service. I am most deeply grateful to Mr Fleming for solving what his talented mother might have called ‘The Case of the Missing Panegyric’—and I hope it will prove as enjoyable found as it was desired when lost.

  ‘The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard’ is my title for Lewis’s review of Morton Cohen’s biography of Haggard. It appeared under the title ‘Haggard Rides Again’ in Time and Tide, 3 September 1960.

  ‘George Orwell’ is taken from Time and Tide of 8 January 1955.

  ‘The Death of Words’ was originally published in The Spectator, 22 September 1944.

  ‘The Parthenon and the Optative’ was Lewis’s title for the essay which appeared without one in the section ‘Notes on the Way’, of Time and Tide, 11 March 1944.

  ‘Period Criticism’ was Lewis’s own title for the essay in ‘Notes on the Way’, Time and Tide, 9 November 1946.

  ‘Different Tastes in Literature’ is the titl
e I have given Lewis’s ‘Notes on the Way’ as it appeared in two parts in Time and Tide of 25 May 1946 and 1 June 1946.

  ‘On Criticism’, written fairly late in the author’s life, appeared first in Of Other Worlds.

  ‘Unreal Estates’ is an informal conversation about science fiction between Lewis, Kingsley Amis, and Brian Aldiss. It was recorded on tape by Brian Aldiss in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalene College, Cambridge, on the 4th December 1962. It was first published as ‘The Establishment Must Die and Rot . . .’ in SF Horizons, Spring 1964, and later as ‘Unreal Estates’ in Encounter, March 1965.

  Readers should know that the person to whom this book is dedicated is Lady Collins of Collins Publishers, London. The idea of making the collection was hers, and when the Trustees of the Lewis Estate learned of her plans to retire in October 1981 it seemed right that it should be offered to her. Lady Collins has for many years been in charge of Collins’s Religious Books, and it is primarily through the Fontana Series that she has introduced C. S. Lewis to most of those who now read him. In my long friendship with Lady Collins I have found so much to admire that every effort to praise her falls short of what is adequate. The author of the Proverbs expressed it much better in saying ‘Let her own works praise her’.

  Walter Hooper

  Oxford

  I

  ON STORIES

  It is astonishing how little attention critics have paid to Story considered in itself. Granted the story, the style in which it should be told, the order in which it should be disposed, and (above all) the delineation of the characters, have been abundantly discussed. But the Story itself, the series of imagined events, is nearly always passed over in silence, or else treated exclusively as affording opportunities for the delineation of character. There are indeed three notable exceptions. Aristotle in the Poetics constructed a theory of Greek tragedy which puts Story in the centre and relegates character to a strictly subordinate place. In the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, Boccaccio and others developed an allegorical theory of Story to explain the ancient myths. And in our own time Jung and his followers have produced their doctrine of Archetypes. Apart from these three attempts the subject has been left almost untouched, and this has had a curious result. Those forms of literature in which Story exists merely as a means to something else—for example, the novel of manners where the story is there for the sake of the characters, or the criticism of social conditions—have had full justice done to them; but those forms in which everything else is there for the sake of the story have been given little serious attention. Not only have they been despised, as if they were fit only for children, but even the kind of pleasure they give has, in my opinion, been misunderstood. It is the second injustice which I am most anxious to remedy. Perhaps the pleasure of Story comes as low in the scale as modern criticism puts it. I do not think so myself, but on that point we may agree to differ. Let us, however, try to see clearly what kind of pleasure it is: or, rather, what different kinds of pleasure it may be. For I suspect that a very hasty assumption has been made on this subject. I think that books which are read merely ‘for the story’ may be enjoyed in two very different ways. It is partly a division of books (some stories can be read only in the one spirit and some only in the other) and partly a division of readers (the same story can be read in different ways).

  What finally convinced me of this distinction was a conversation which I had a few years ago with an intelligent American pupil. We were talking about the books which had delighted our boyhood. His favourite had been Fenimore Cooper whom (as it happens) I have never read. My friend described one particular scene in which the hero was half-sleeping by his bivouac fire in the woods while a Redskin with a tomahawk was silently creeping on him from behind. He remembered the breathless excitement with which he had read the passage, the agonised suspense with which he wondered whether the hero would wake up in time or not. But I, remembering the great moments in my own early reading, felt quite sure that my friend was misrepresenting his experience, and indeed leaving out the real point. Surely, surely, I thought, the sheer excitement, the suspense, was not what had kept him going back and back to Fenimore Cooper. If that were what he wanted any other ‘boy’s blood’ would have done as well. I tried to put my thought into words. I asked him whether he were sure that he was not overemphasising and falsely isolating the importance of the danger simply as danger. For though I had never read Fenimore Cooper I had enjoyed other books about ‘Red Indians’. And I knew that what I wanted from them was not simply ‘excitement’. Dangers, of course, there must be: how else can you keep a story going? But they must (in the mood which led one to such a book) be Redskin dangers. The ‘Redskinnery’ was what really mattered. In such a scene as my friend had described, take away the feathers, the high cheek-bones, the whiskered trousers, substitute a pistol for a tomahawk, and what would be left? For I wanted not the momentary suspense but that whole world to which it belonged—the snow and the snow-shoes, beavers and canoes, warpaths and wigwams, and Hiawatha names. Thus I; and then came the shock. My pupil is a very clear-headed man and he saw at once what I meant and also saw how totally his imaginative life as a boy had differed from mine. He replied that he was perfectly certain that ‘all that’ had made no part of his pleasure. He had never cared one brass farthing for it. Indeed—and this really made me feel as if I were talking to a visitor from another planet—in so far as he had been dimly aware of ‘all that’, he had resented it as a distraction from the main issue. He would, if anything, have preferred to the Redskin some more ordinary danger such as a crook with a revolver.

  To those whose literary experiences are at all like my own the distinction which I am trying to make between two kinds of pleasure will probably be clear enough from this one example. But to make it doubly clear I will add another. I was once taken to see a film version of King Solomon’s Mines. Of its many sins—not least the introduction of a totally irrelevant young woman in shorts who accompanied the three adventurers wherever they went—only one here concerns us. At the end of Haggard’s book, as everyone remembers, the heroes are awaiting death entombed in a rock chamber and surrounded by the mummified kings of that land. The maker of the film version, however, apparently thought this tame. He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption, and then went one better by adding an earthquake. Perhaps we should not blame him. Perhaps the scene in the original was not ‘cinematic’ and the man was right, by the canons of his own art, in altering it. But it would have been better not to have chosen in the first place a story which could be adapted to the screen only by being ruined. Ruined, at least, for me. No doubt if sheer excitement is all you want from a story, and if increase of dangers increases excitement, then a rapidly changing series of two risks (that of being burned alive and that of being crushed to bits) would be better than the single prolonged danger of starving to death in a cave. But that is just the point. There must be a pleasure in such stories distinct from mere excitement or I should not feel that I had been cheated in being given the earthquake instead of Haggard’s actual scene. What I lose is the whole sense of the deathly (quite a different thing from simple danger of death)—the cold, the silence, and the surrounding faces of the ancient, the crowned and sceptred, dead. You may, if you please, say that Rider Haggard’s effect is quite as ‘crude’ or ‘vulgar’ or ‘sensational’ as that which the film substituted for it. I am not at present discussing that. The point is that it is extremely different. The one lays a hushing spell on the imagination; the other excites a rapid flutter of the nerves. In reading that chapter of the book curiosity or suspense about the escape of the heroes from their death-trap makes a very minor part of one’s experience. The trap I remember for ever: how they got out I have long since forgotten.

  It seems to me that in talking of books which are ‘mere stories’—books, that is, which concern themselves principally with the imagined event and not with character or society—nearly everyone makes the assumption that ‘excitement’ is the o
nly pleasure they ever give or are intended to give. Excitement, in this sense, may be defined as the alternate tension and appeasement of imagined anxiety. This is what I think untrue. In some such books, and for some readers, another factor comes in.

  To put it at the very lowest, I know that something else comes in for at least one reader—myself. I must here be autobiographical for the sake of being evidential. Here is a man who has spent more hours than he cares to remember in reading romances, and received from them more pleasure perhaps than he should. I know the geography of Tormance better than that of Tellus. I have been more curious about travels from Uplands to Utterbol and from Morna Moruna to Koshtra Belorn than about those recorded in Hakluyt. Though I saw the trenches before Arras I could not now lecture on them so tactically as on the Greek wall, and Scamander and the Scaean Gate. As a social historian I am sounder on Toad Hall and the Wild Wood or the cave-dwelling Selenites or Hrothgar’s court or Vortigern’s than on London, Oxford, and Belfast. If to love Story is to love excitement then I ought to be the greatest lover of excitement alive. But the fact is that what is said to be the most ‘exciting’ novel in the world, The Three Musketeers, makes no appeal to me at all. The total lack of atmosphere repels me. There is no country in the book—save as a storehouse of inns and ambushes. There is no weather. When they cross to London there is no feeling that London differs from Paris. There is not a moment’s rest from the ‘adventures’: one’s nose is kept ruthlessly to the grindstone. It all means nothing to me. If that is what is meant by Romance, then Romance is my aversion and I greatly prefer George Eliot or Trollope. In saying this I am not attempting to criticise The Three Musketeers. I believe on the testimony of others that it is a capital story. I am sure that my own inability to like it is in me a defect and a misfortune. But that misfortune is evidence. If a man sensitive and perhaps oversensitive to Romance likes least that Romance which is, by common consent, the most ‘exciting’ of all, then it follows that ‘excitement’ is not the only kind of pleasure to be got out of Romance. If a man loves wine and yet hates one of the strongest wines, then surely the sole source of pleasure in wine cannot be the alcohol?