On Stories Read online

  Mr Roger Lancelyn Green, writing in English not long ago, remarked that the reading of Rider Haggard had been to many a sort of religious experience. To some people this will have seemed simply grotesque. I myself would strongly disagree with it if ‘religious’ is taken to mean ‘Christian’. And even if we take it in a sub-Christian sense, it would have been safer to say that such people had first met in Haggard’s romances elements which they would meet again in religious experience if they ever came to have any. But I think Mr Green is very much nearer the mark than those who assume that no one has ever read the romances except in order to be thrilled by hair-breadth escapes. If he had said simply that something which the educated receive from poetry can reach the masses through stories of adventure, and almost in no other way, then I think he would have been right. If so, nothing can be more disastrous than the view that the cinema can and should replace popular written fiction. The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world. There is death in the camera.

  As I have admitted, it is very difficult to tell in any given case whether a story is piercing to the unliterary reader’s deeper imagination or only exciting his emotions. You cannot tell even by reading the story for yourself. Its badness proves very little. The more imagination the reader has, being an untrained reader, the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys. The nearest we can come to a test is by asking whether he often re-reads the same story.

  It is, of course, a good test for every reader of every kind of book. An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he ‘has read’ them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter? Yet I think the test has a special application to the matter in hand. For excitement, in the sense defined above, is just what must disappear from a second reading. You cannot, except at the first reading, be really curious about what happened. If you find that the reader of popular romance—however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances—goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.

  The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain surprisingness. The point has often been misunderstood. The man in Peacock thought that he had disposed of ‘surprise’ as an element in landscape gardening when he asked what happened if you walked through the garden for the second time. Wiseacre! In the only sense that matters the surprise works as well the twentieth time as the first. It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delight us. It is even better the second time. Knowing that the ‘surprise’ is coming we can now fully relish the fact that this path through the shrubbery doesn’t look as if it were suddenly going to bring us out on the edge of the cliff. So in literature. We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the ‘surprise’ of discovering that what seemed Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia.

  I should like to be able to believe that I am here in a very small way contributing (for criticism does not always come later than practise) to the encouragement of a better school of prose story in England: of story that can mediate imaginative life to the masses while not being contemptible to the few. But perhaps this is not very likely. It must be admitted that the art of Story as I see it is a very difficult one. What its central difficulty is I have already hinted when I complained that in The War of the Worlds the idea that really matters becomes lost or blunted as the story gets under way. I must now add that there is a perpetual danger of this happening in all stories. To be stories at all they must be series of events: but it must be understood that this series—the plot, as we call it—is only really a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality. Giantship, otherness, the desolation of space, are examples that have crossed our path. The titles of some stories illustrate the point very well. The Well at the World’s End—can a man write a story to that title? Can he find a series of events following one another in time which will really catch and fix and bring home to us all that we grasp at on merely hearing the six words? Can a man write a story on Atlantis—or is it better to leave the word to work on its own? And I must confess that the net very seldom does succeed in catching the bird. Morris in The Well at the World’s End came near to success—quite near enough to make the book worth many readings. Yet, after all, the best moments of it come in the first half.

  But it does sometimes succeed. In the works of the late E. R. Eddison it succeeds completely. You may like or dislike his invented worlds (I myself like that of The Worm Ouroboros and strongly dislike that of Mistress of Mistresses) but there is here no quarrel between the theme and the articulation of the story. Every episode, every speech, helps to incarnate what the author is imagining. You could spare none of them. It takes the whole story to build up that strange blend of renaissance luxury and northern hardness. The secret here is largely the style, and especially the style of the dialogue. These proud, reckless, amorous people create themselves and the whole atmosphere of their world chiefly by talking. Mr de la Mare also succeeds, partly by style and partly by never laying the cards on the table. Mr David Lindsay, however, succeeds while writing a style which is at times (to be frank) abominable. He succeeds because his real theme is, like the plot, sequential, a thing in time, or quasi-time: a passionate spiritual journey. Charles Williams had the same advantage, but I do not mention his stories much here because they are hardly pure story in the sense we are now considering. They are, despite their free use of the supernatural, much closer to the novel; a believed religion, detailed character drawing, and even social satire all come in. The Hobbit escapes the danger of degenerating into mere plot and excitement by a very curious shift of tone. As the humour and homeliness of the early chapters, the sheer ‘Hobbitry’, dies away we pass insensibly into the world of epic. It is as if the battle of Toad Hall had become a serious heimsókn and Badger had begun to talk like Njal. Thus we lose one theme but find another. We kill—but not the same fox.

  It may be asked why anyone should be encouraged to write a form in which the means are apparently so often at war with the end. But I am hardly suggesting that anyone who can write great poetry should write stories instead. I am rather suggesting what those whose work will in any case be a romance should aim at. And I do not think it unimportant that good work in this kind, even work less than perfectly good, can come where poetry will never come.

  Shall I be thought whimsical if, in conclusion, I suggest that this internal tension in the heart of every story between the theme and the plot constitutes, after all, its chief resemblance to life? If Story fails in that way does not life commit the same blunder? In real life, as in a story, something must happen. This is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied. The grand idea of finding Atlantis which stirs us in the first chapter of the adventure story is apt to be frittered away in mere excitement when the journey has once been begun. But so, in real life, the idea of adventure fades when the day-to-day details begin to happen. Nor is this merely because actual hardship and danger shoulder it aside. Other
grand ideas—home-coming, reunion with a beloved—similarly elude our grasp. Suppose there is no disappointment; even so—well, you are here. But now, something must happen, and after that something else. All that happens may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted? If the author’s plot is only a net, and usually an imperfect one, a net of time and event for catching what is not really a process at all, is life much more? I am not sure, on second thoughts, that the slow fading of the magic in The Well at the World’s End is, after all, a blemish. It is an image of the truth. Art, indeed, may be expected to do what life cannot do: but so it has done. The bird has escaped us. But it was at least entangled in the net for several chapters. We saw it close and enjoyed the plumage. How many ‘real lives’ have nets that can do as much?

  In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive. Whether in real life there is any doctor who can teach us how to do it, so that at last either the meshes will become fine enough to hold the bird, or we be so changed that we can throw our nets away and follow the bird to its own country, is not a question for this essay. But I think it is sometimes done—or very, very nearly done—in stories. I believe the effort to be well worth making.

  II

  THE NOVELS OF CHARLES WILLIAMS

  One of the silliest critical remarks on record was made by Leigh Hunt when he complained that the Lays of Ancient Rome lacked the true poetical aroma of The Faerie Queene. There is this to be said for him, that he made it not only in a letter, but in a begging letter, to Macaulay himself; and, as Macaulay acknowledged to Napier, that was a manly act.1 But as criticism it is deplorable. I have sometimes wondered whether certain criticisms on the stories of Charles Williams are not equally wide of the mark.

  The complaint often made against them is that they mix what some people call the realistic and the fantastic. I would rather fall back on an older critical terminology and say that they mix the Probable and the Marvellous. We meet in them, on the one hand, very ordinary modern people who talk the slang of our own day, and live in the suburbs: on the other hand, we also meet the supernatural—ghosts, magicians, and archetypal beasts. The first thing to grasp is that this is not a mixture of two literary kinds. That is what some readers suspect and resent. They acknowledge, on the one hand, ‘straight’ fiction, the classical novel as we know it from Fielding to Galsworthy. They acknowledge, on the other, the pure fantasy which creates a world of its own, cut off in a kind of ring fence, from reality; books like The Wind in the Willows or Vathek or The Princess of Babylon, and they complain that Williams is asking them to skip to and fro from the one to the other in the same work. But Williams is really writing a third kind of book which belongs to neither class and has a different value from either. He is writing that sort of book in which we begin by saying ‘Let us suppose that this everyday world were, at some one point, invaded by the marvellous. Let us, in fact, suppose a violation of frontier.’

  The formula is of course no novelty. Even in childhood most of us who are now fifty had learned very clearly the difference in kind between a fairy tale by Grimm and a fairy tale by E. Nesbit. The one transported you to a new world with its own laws and its own characteristic inhabitants. But the whole point of the other was that it supposed Tottenham Court Road or a dingy lodging house to be suddenly invaded by a phoenix or an amulet. The ordinary and, in that sense, classical ghost story does the same thing; the realistic and mundane character of the scene and persons is an essential part of the effect. So, in a far subtler way, Mr de la Mare pours his bottomless misgivings over the very world we all know. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde intrudes its strange horror upon surroundings studiously prosaic. F. Anstey for his comic marvels builds realistic nests. Even the Alice books and the Gulliver books owe much to the matter-of-fact and resolutely unimaginative nature of their principal characters. If Alice were a princess, if Gulliver were a romantic voyager or even a philosopher, the effect would be destroyed. Now if this literary kind is permissible at all, it is surely idle to complain that it mixes two literary levels, the realistic and the fantastic. On the contrary, it keeps its own level throughout: that level on which we suppose that a violation of frontier has occurred in the actual world.

  Now some people doubt whether the kind is permissible. Of what value, it may be asked, are such supposals? And one answer to that question I myself would rule out at once. They are not allegories. I hasten to add that it is almost impossible to make a story of this kind, or of any kind, which the reader cannot turn into an allegory if he chooses. Everything in art and most things in Nature can be allegorised if you are determined to do it: as the history of medieval thought shows. But I do not think that is how such stories were written nor how they ought to be read. The starting point is a supposal. ‘Suppose I found a country inhabited by dwarfs. Suppose two men could exchange bodies.’ Nothing less, but equally nothing more, is demanded. And now, what is the point of it?

  For some of us, of course, the question hardly arises. Such supposing appears to us the inalienable right and inveterate habit of the human mind. We do it all day long: and therefore do not see why we should not do it, at times, more energetically and consistently, in a story. But for those others who feel that it needs justification, I think a justification can be found.

  Every supposal is an ideal experiment: an experiment done with ideas because you can’t do it any other way. And the function of an experiment is to teach us more about the things we experiment on. When we suppose the world of daily life to be invaded by something other, we are subjecting either our conception of daily life or our conception of that other, or both, to a new test. We put them together to see how they will react. If it succeeds, we shall come to think, and feel, and imagine more accurately, more richly, more attentively, either about the world which is invaded or about that which invades it, or about both. And here, of course, we come to the great division between writers of this kind.

  Some are experimenting solely on the world of daily life: others are experimenting on the invader as well. It depends partly on their literary choice, but partly on their philosophy. Some people, of course, do not believe that there is a potential invader. For them the sole purpose of supposing an invasion must be to throw light on our daily and normal experience. Others, who believe that there is a possible invader, can (though it is not necessary that they always should) expect light on it also to flow from the supposal. Hence we get two kinds of invasion story. Vice Versa is a perfect example of the first. The only function of the Garuda Stone is to put Mr Bultitude and Dr Grimstone and the rest in an otherwise impossible relation in order that we may watch their reactions. So in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The machinery whereby the two selves are separated is some trumpery about draughts and powders in which Stevenson hardly invites our interest: what matters is the result. Comic, or strongly ethical, authors usually adopt this method. Mr de la Mare is at the other extreme. His achievement is to awake ‘thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls’, to bring home to us the precariousness of our common-sense world, and to share with us his own disquieting consciousness of that which, on his view, it conceals. ‘Supposing’, he says, ‘this concealment, never very efficient, broke down completely for a few hours.’

  Now Williams is at the same end of the scale as Mr de la Mare. I do not mean that they are in any other respect alike. In the quality of their imagination they are as different as possible: Mr de la Mare’s world is one of half-lights and silence and distances, a dusk ‘washed with silver’, whereas Williams’s is one of blazing colours, hard outlines, and bell-like resonance. You would look in vain in Williams for the delicacy, the immense importance of what is not said, which delights us in Mr de la Mare: you would be equally disappointed if you searched Mr de la Mare for the aquiline energy, the pomp, the gaiety, the orgiastic quality, of Williams. But in this one respect they are alike; each, having supposed a violation of frontier
, is interested in both sides of the frontier.

  No doubt, the first and simplest approach to Williams’s stories is to note and enjoy the lights which they cast on this side of the frontier, on our normal experience. His story The Place of the Lion2 seems to me to throw a light which I dare not neglect on the world that I myself chiefly inhabit, the academic world. The heroine, Damaris Tighe, is an extreme example of the complacent researcher. She is studying medieval philosophy and it has never once occurred to her that the objects of medieval thought might have any reality. As Williams tells us, she regarded Abelard and St Bernard as the top form in a school of which she was not so much the headmistress as the inspector. Then comes the supposal. How if those objects were, after all, real? How if they began to manifest themselves? How if this research-beetle had to experience what it so glibly catalogued? Even those who do not feel at the end of the book that we know any more about the Platonic Forms may well feel that we know more about ourselves as researchers—have seen, as if from outside, the fatuous assumption of superiority which will certainly dominate all our thinking about the past if we take no measures to correct it.