Tag Archives: C.S. Lewis

Fiction, Reading

Reading through ‘That Hideous Strength’

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Still reading That Hideous Strength, so what shall I blog about? Are you interested in the fact that I fell down the basement stairs the other day? Moving too fast for a man my age; I’d just come inside and my rubber shoe soles were wet. One of them slipped on a stair tread, because I took it too close to the edge, and I went down a few steps.

No major damage that I could tell. Nothing seems to be broken. I can’t even see any bruises; maybe they’re in back, out of my view in the mirror. But I assume there’s a muscle bruise in one of the stabilizing muscles on the left side of my trunk. Walking’s a little painful, but it’s getting up and sitting down that hurt most. Today I did some shopping, and I took my cane. It helped. Surprisingly, I’ve been feeling a little better each day (isn’t the third day supposed to be the worst?), so I expect I’ll be fairly mobile by the weekend.

I did some noodling on the internet and found the “trailer” above – a fake somebody mugged up. I like it, though I can’t endorse all the casting. Hopkins is way too old to play Ransom, and where’s the sweeping golden beard? Gielgud is dead, always an inconvenience. I used to dream of doing a film of the book myself – even had the first shots planned out. I wanted Orson Welles as Merlin – he’d have done it too, if we’d had the money; he’d take any role at the end. I’m glad other people feel the same way about THS; I’m always surprised when anybody likes the book – I’ve encountered so much hostility to it over the years.

Reader’s impressions: First of all, we’re told that Jane Studdock’s maiden name was Tudor. That’s significant for any Arthurian – the Tudors were the dynasty that really promoted the revival of the Arthurian legend in the late Middle Ages. As a Welsh family, and thus Celtic/British, they claimed through Arthur a prior right of sovereignty over the upstart Normans.

I expect it’s the character of Jane that offends people the most in our time – the idea that she’s missed her true vocation by refusing to bear children. But in the context of the book, Jane is far less in the wrong than her husband Mark. She’s merely petty; Mark runs the danger of genuine corruption, becoming part of something worse than the Nazis.

Anyway, I’m enjoying my reading.

Fiction, Religion, Reviews

Rereading the Indescribable Perelandra

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He picked one of [the fruits] and turned it over and over. The rind was smooth and firm and seemed impossible to tear open. Then by accident one of his fingers punctured it and went through into coldness. After a moment’s hesitation he put the little aperture to his lips. He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger. But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant. For one draft of this on Earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed. It could not be classified…

I told you yesterday that I was reading C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra. As the taste of the fruit in the passage above surpassed the narrator’s powers of description, I have a hard time expressing the effect this wonderful book had on me. I’ve read it several times before – once aloud, in fact – but though the plot is familiar, the experience is always a surprise.

Perelandra was the first book of Lewis’ science fiction trilogy that I read, long ago. My preference is to read series in order, but this was the only one they had in the little church library from which I borrowed it. I was still just getting to know Lewis at the time, and I little imagined what I was letting myself in for.

The book opens with the only instance I recall in Lewis’ works where he inserts himself into one of his own stories (reminiscent of his theological argument comparing the Incarnation to Shakespeare writing himself into a play. Amusingly, a couple of Lewis’ real-life friends get mentions). He describes walking to Ransom’s cottage at night, in response to a pre-arranged summons. He finds the journey surprisingly difficult; he’s assailed by irrational fears and sudden resentment against Ransom. When he arrives, Ransom isn’t home – but Something is. After an encounter with a genuine angel (Eldil), Ransom shows up at last and Lewis helps him to prepare for a journey to Perelandra (the planet Venus) by supernatural means.

The choice of conveyance here is emblematic of the whole book. Out of the Silent Planet was perfectly adequate in its attempts at hard science fiction writing by a non-scientist, imagining some kind of theoretical higher physics propulsion system. But by this point Lewis had figured out that his strength wasn’t in the direction of hard SF. He was a fantasist at heart, and from here on the books would be science fantasy. Science fantasy can be a lazy shortcut, when a writer is doing something like Buck Rogers space opera. But for Lewis, this approach provided a springboard for a deep dive into metaphysics.

At the time Lewis was writing (mid-World War II), our knowledge of the planet Venus was negligible. This offered tremendous scope for the imagination. Lewis’s brain conceived the idea of an ocean planet where organic islands bearing paradisical fruits and fantastical animals floated constantly on a golden sea. And ruling the planet, a pair of naked, green-skinned human beings, the unfallen Adam and Eve of that world. The man and the woman have been separated. Ransom meets the woman. Then Ransom’s old enemy Dr Weston shows up (by “conventional” spacecraft), and it falls on Ransom to protect a second Paradise from a second Fall.

I told you about it yesterday – sometimes I had to just set this book down for a while, because it was too beautiful to bear. The authorial challenge Lewis takes on here is supremely audacious – to imagine a true state of innocence in a way that won’t be misinterpreted by dirty minds. To describe colors the reader has never seen and tastes he’ll never taste, without sounding precious. To provide a parable of the life of faith that even skeptics can appreciate – even if they don’t get the point.

But it works. It works in every line, every paragraph. This is Lewis at the height of his creative powers. This is the kind of work Tolkien dreamed “Jack” would do more of, when he arranged for him to get a chair at Cambridge – something which, in God’s economy, was never to be. That Hideous Strength is a worthy sequel, but Perelandra stands alone – not only in Lewis’ oeuvre, but in the science fiction genre as a whole. An amazing book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Out of the Silent Planet,’ by C. S. Lewis

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It seemed to Ransom that he had never looked out on such a frosty night. Pulsing with a brightness as with some unbearable pain or pleasure, clustered in pathless and countless multitudes, dreamlike in clarity, blazing in perfect blackness, the stars seized all his attention, troubled him, excited him, and drew him to a sitting position.

Yet another book that I love and haven’t read in a while is Out of the Silent Planet, first in C. S. Lewis’ science fiction trilogy. Perhaps the least noted of the three books, because it’s less lyrical/symphonic than Perelandra and less controversial than That Hideous Strength, it is nevertheless one of the great space travel books of the 1930s, and (I believe) a game-changer in the genre.

If you haven’t read it before, we meet our hero, philologist Elwin Ransom, out on a walking tour. Traveling later than he intended due to a disappointment in accommodations, Ransom encounters an old woman, weeping and searching for “her Henry.” Henry is her son, who is a little “simple.” Henry works at a nearby facility run by two rich men, one of them a university don. Hearing about this don, a colleague who might offer a night’s rest, Ransom offers to go look for the boy. He manages to get onto the facility grounds, where he sees two men trying subdue poor Henry, who cries out that he doesn’t want to go “in there.” Ransom interferes, enabling the boy to escape. Then he finds that one of the men is in fact someone he knows (and has always disliked), a man named Devine, once a scholar, now a businessman. He introduces his colleague Weston, a world-famous physicist. After some initial unpleasantness, Ransom is indeed invited in to spend the night.

What he doesn’t know is that Devine and Weston are planning a trip to “Malacandra” (Mars). They’ve been there before, and encountered creatures called Sorns. The Sorns asked them to bring them someone “of their own kind.” Assuming the Sorns want a human sacrifice, they’d intended to use poor Henry. But if Ransom insists on interfering, he’ll do just as well.

So soon Ransom finds himself on a spherical spacecraft, headed to Mars. He finds space (wonderfully) different from what he expected. Once he’s arrived on Malacandra (brilliantly imagined according to the scientific knowledge of the time), he gets free from his captors and soon encounters a “Hrossa,” one of the three indigenous sapient species. Again and again, what he finds confounds his presumptions and expectations. Aliens aren’t what he expects, the universe isn’t what he expects, and at last he even gets an objective look at humanity itself, through alien eyes. Then finally through Eyes even more alien.

I’m not an expert on Science Fiction in the 1930s-40s period, but my impression (reinforced by references in this book) is that the common assumption in the field was that aliens were either hostile super-intellects or primitives. Lewis lampoons this latter view in the character of Weston, who gives a ridiculous, patronizing, “me give-um you pretty beads” speech to an Intelligence infinitely above his comprehension. It’s a brilliant satirical scene, and – I suspect – stories like “Avatar” may be the distant descendants of this seminal book.

It goes without saying that I recommend Out of the Silent Planet unreservedly.

Authors, Reading, Religion

Jack and his privacy

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Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom in the 1985 “Shadowlands”

My metaphorical Advent calendar opened today and dispensed paying translating work. This is excellent. I’ve been idle for a couple months, and I can use the income. An interesting project, too.

So, little time for reading and no book to review today. Of what shall I write?

I watched the Most Reluctant Convert movie, as I said. Then I watched it again. And last night I thought, “Might as well watch Shadowlands too, and close the circuit.” And when I say Shadowlands, I mean, of course, the original 1985 BBC production with Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom. The 1993 version, with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, isn’t even on my radar. I watched it once and was unimpressed (except by Winger, who is much closer to the real Joy Davidman than the refined Claire Bloom. But otherwise the 1985 version is more authentic and more concerned with the characters’ Christian faith. My impression of the 1993 movie is that it portrays Lewis as an immature man rescued by True Love. And his Christianity is regarded as one of his immature traits).

Anyway, you get a pretty good overview of Lewis’ life by watching the two movies in sequence. The Most Reluctant Convert offers a fairly authentic (though necessarily incomplete) picture of Lewis’ life up to his conversion. Shadowlands (if you watch the right version) gives a broadly decent impression of what happened in his later years, when he got married and suffered bereavement and a crisis of faith.

Of course, it’s an incomplete picture, as any cinematic portrayals must be. The Most Reluctant Convert leaves out much of the story, notably Lewis’ unhappy time in English public schools (what we’d call private academies in this country). And the book it’s based on, Surprised by Joy, omits much in the first place. In particular, Lewis’ domestic life with Mrs. Moore, the mother of a friend killed in the Great War, whom Lewis cared for in fulfillment of a promise to that friend. He wouldn’t have liked that story re-told; it began in infatuation in his atheist days and was transformed into voluntary servanthood after his conversion.

Shadowlands is a moving story, but heavily tailored to its dramatic form. Jack’s and Joy’s marriage actually lasted four years – her sons were nearly grown and away at school when she died. The affecting scene at the end where Jack and the boy Douglas Gresham grieve together never happened – sadly.

Most of all I was wondering what Jack himself would have thought about all this bother. And I thought I’d ponder that tonight in this post, to see if I could figure out what I think. I’m pretty sure Jack would have been mortified by the whole business. Aside from his personal modesty, there’s the fact that he deplored any examination of a writer’s life in order to interpret his work. The work, he frequently insisted, must stand on its own. It’s not for the critic to poke around in the author’s history and personality, hunting for repressions and obsessions.

Although I’m pretty sure he didn’t object to Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Because that’s a work of literature in its own right.

However, the two films I’m discussing are works of art in their own rights too. So does that make it OK?

Well, we have to deal with things as they are, I suppose. Whether he liked it or not, Jack Lewis was an interesting man. And people who love his books frequently want to know more about the man who wrote them.

This interest, surprisingly, even generally survives their first exposure to a picture of Lewis, something he himself described as a “most undecorative object.”

Maybe – and I’m very likely projecting here – it’s the fact that people experience Lewis’ writings as letters from a friend. We’d very much like to have a friend like that. Friendship is an experience that’s fallen on hard times in our evil world. Lewis had a splendid gift for friendship, as we know from his life story.

I know what he’d say to that, though – “Do you live on a deserted island? Is there no church in your community? You might be surprised what qualities lie concealed in the people in the next pew.”

Authors, Reviews

Video review: ‘The Most Reluctant Convert’

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I finally saw it. I touted the film, The Most Reluctant Convert when it first appeared in theaters, but didn’t get around to going myself. Because I’m old, and there’s Covid, and it would have been a long drive, etc., etc. But now I’ve got the DVD, and I must say I was impressed. Better even than I expected.

Essentially, this production is a dramatization of Lewis’ memoir, Surprised by Joy, with some The Weight of Glory thrown in. Originally a stage play, the film adaptation takes an interesting approach. We start with the filming preparations, as makeup people finish their work on the actor Max McLean. Then he seems to nod off, and when he lifts his head he’s Lewis. He walks out of the studio and directly into the Museum of Natural History at Oxford, all the while discussing how he moved from atheism to Christianity. As we follow, the film alternates between the “present” – Lewis talking to the camera – and recreations of dramatic scenes from his life. Often Lewis sits on the sidelines, watching his younger self, a dramatic element I rather like.

The production is really very well done all around. It has an authentic look; the acting is excellent. Good costumes and sets. The actors even vaguely resemble the people they’re playing. And the story is presented with what I think is considerable power. Some memorable parts of Surprised, like Lewis’ miserable time in public school, are skipped over as the narrative sticks with the main topic.

Max McLean is good – I won’t say great – as Lewis. In makeup he resembles the man, in a sort of rubber-faced way. Having never met Lewis, I can’t really say more with any authority, but I still think the definitive portrayal is Joss Ackland’s in the original BBC version of Shadowlands (which had the same director as this film). Ackland looked less like Lewis, but had the physical bulk and booming voice. And he’d clearly studied Lewis’ mannerisms. He also wore his hat with the brim turned down all the way around, which McLean neglects to do for some reason. (Somebody must have told him about this, I would think.)

But these are quibbles. All in all, The Most Reluctant Convert is a highly successful and impressive adaptation. I’m glad I bought it.

Non-fiction, Religion

Is There a Homogeneous ‘West’?

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In 1958, humor rag Punch published an essay by C.S. Lewis called “Revival or Decay?” in which Lewis criticized broad-brush assessments of his day–the same assessments people still make. Here’s his closing paragraph.

Is there a homogeneous ‘West’? I doubt it. Everything that can go on is going on all round us. Religions buzz about us like bees. A serious sex worship–quite different from the cherry lechery endemic in our species–is one of them. Traces of embryonic religions occur in science-fiction. Meanwhile, as always, the Christian way too is followed. But nowadays, when it is not followed, it need not be feigned. That fact covers a good deal of what is called the decay of religion. Apart from that, is the present so very different from other ages of ‘the West’ from anywhere else?

Authors, Uncategorized

Vulgar Swedish dwarfs

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An illustration by Gustaf Tenggren for “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” (1923)

I think it says a lot about my tremendous personal modesty that, on the rare occasions when I learn something I didn’t know about Scandinavian history and culture, I share it here in public, in front of our FBI surveillance team and everybody, instead of concealing it. And I did learn something new today, in the August issue of the Sons of Norway’s Viking Magazine.

Even better, there’s an Inkling connection. An adversarial connection, but a connection nonetheless.

C. S. Lewis wrote, in Surprised by Joy:, Chapter III

I fell deeply under the spell of Dwarfs—the old bright-hooded, snowy-bearded dwarfs we had in those days before Arthur Rackham sublimed, or Walt Disney vulgarized, the earthmen.

He wrote, further, in a 1939 letter to his friend A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, “Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad.”

Tolkien, it is reliably reported, rebuffed offers from Disney for film rights to the Lord of the Rings, based on similar feelings.

According to “The Art of Trolls,” an article by Rowdy Geirsson in the August Viking Magazine, the fault for this “vulgarization” of dwarfs lies solidly on the head of a Swedish artist, Gustaf Tenggren (1896-1970). Tenggren made his name as an artist in his native Sweden, becoming known for illustrations of fantastical subjects, becoming the featured artist for “Bland tomter och troll,” an annual publication devoted to fairy stories. In 1936 he went to work for Disney Studios, becoming their chief conceptual artist. It was in this capacity that he designed the characters for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” as well as later productions like “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia” and “Bambi.”

Judging by his Swedish work (an example is posted above), I would guess that Lewis would have been equally displeased by Tenggren’s earlier dwarfs, considering them “sublimed” in the Rackham style. (Though Arthur Rackham was an artist whose Wagnerian work he cherished.)

There’s something in Lewis’ and Tolkien’s criticism, of course, and it’s grown more apparent with the years. Animation is subject to fashions over time. I believe I read somewhere that when “Snow White” first came out, critics admired Disney’s dwarfs but found the “human” characters rather bland. Today the human characters look far better than the dwarfs, who possess a rubbery quality that’s gone out of style. (I personally particularly dislike the works of Fleischer Studios. Except for Popeye. I likes me Popeye.)

It’s a rule that we Norwegians have understood for many centuries – you can never go wrong blaming the Swedes.

Authors, Poetry

Poetry at the Kilns

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Courtesy of our friend, Dale Nelson, here’s a video of poet/priest Malcolm Guite (whose taste in clothing seems unnervingly similar to my own), reading some of C. S. Lewis’s poetry in Lewis’s very study, in his home — the Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford.

Fiction, Reviews

That Hideous Strength – ‘The Educated Reader Can Be Gulled’

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That Hideous Strength is the third of C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, the first two books being Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. One of my friends recommended it as a suitable stand-alone, and we read it together as a group. I have since listened to Out of the Silent Planet and understand the gist of Perelandra, but while they expand and explain That Hideous Strength, they each have somewhat self-contained stories. In fact, one of us noted you could strip this story of its fantasy gods and planetary symbolism and it would remain intact, lacking only a magical framework for the weird stuff. That framework is explored in the first two books and brought to bear in the third.

The story develops slowly to give us time to understand our central characters, Mark and Jane Studdock, both educated, progressively minded people. Mark wants to be an insider, an opinion-maker or influential voice within Bracton College. Jane wants to be her own woman–married, of course, but equal to and independent of her husband. In chapter one, we see her chafe at what her life, marriage, and career had become. Mark doesn’t begin to chafe at his circumstances until much later, when it appears his wife is a hinderance to his career as a high ranking official of the NICE (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments).

If you know anything about the story, you know something of the trouble caused by NICE. They aim to rewrite the world. They bring Mark in initially to write stories for distribution in diverse publications in order to smooth the way for them, and it takes him a while to understand the point.

PanBooks cover of "That Hideous Strength"

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

In his preface, Lewis frames his story as a “fairy tale,” and “a ‘tall story’ about devilry”–a fictional take on the thinking that went into another of his books, The Abolition of Man. If you have not read that book, taking it up before reading That Hideous Strength will likely help draw out its meaning and dramatic imagery.

You could say this book is about marriage, because that tension between Mark and Jane runs throughout. You could say it’s a book on the gloriously mythological roots of Great Britain; Arthur, Merlin, and Atlantis all figure in heavily. But the main theme begins with the quote above–that educated people will believe anything.

Experts, who may be rather immature human beings while still highly skilled in their field, can and do cause great harm to society. They acquire authority and use it for their own ends, perhaps compassionately to a point, perhaps with good intentions, but those ‘who know best’ will eventually force the best down our throats in the name of progress.

This danger could come from many sides; many people and institutions undermine the values they profess. Every one of us must seek the light while it can still be found.

Photo by Niklas Weiss on Unsplash

Non-fiction

A Comic Explains an Important History Principle

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It’s good to see C.S. Lewis’s influence out in the wild.

Karolina Żebrowska is a comic YouTuber who focuses on historic fashion, how some of ye olden times come through in movies, and poking fun at various historic facts. One of her hobby horses is the fact women did wear corsets and it wasn’t an oppression they tolerated because they could handle the pain (she touches on that here). She’s smart and amusing.

I share the video below because she mentions C.S. Lewis’s common-sense notion of chronological snobbery, which she may have gotten off of Wikipedia, but it still counts.

A funny look at wrong history beliefs by Karolina Żebrowska

And just a little more on chronological snobbery from Karl Barth:

But what else can this mean but that it was in the eighteenth century that man began to axiomatically to credit himself with being superior to the past, and assumed a standpoint in relation to it whence he found it possible to set himself up as a judge over past events according to fixed principles, as well as to describe its deeds and to substantiate history’s own report? And the yardstick of these principles, at least as applied by the typical observer of history living at that age, has the inevitable effect of turning that judgment of the past into an extremely radical one. For the yardstick is quite simply the man of the present with his complete trust in his own powers of discernment and judgment, with his feeling for freedom, his desire for intellectual conquest, his urge to form and his supreme moral self-confidence.