I’m having an attack of obsession with my translation work tonight — coming up on a milestone and eager to get to it. So you’ll have to settle for a message from better writer than me — C. S. Lewis talking about the books of his friend, Charles Williams.
It does not hurt that he’s defending the precise kind of fiction I write. I think it’s fair to say that posterity has justified Lewis’ position.
I thought, since it’s Friday, I’d post some music consistent with my overheated musings in yesterday’s post. So here’s a lovely arrangement of “This Is My Father’s World,” one of my old favorite hymns. It was originally published in 1901, with lyrics by Rev. Maltbie D. Babcock (1858-1901), a sadly short-lived Presbyterian pastor who published several popular hymns. The tune is Terra Beata, based on an English folk song. (And I’m pretty sure they cribbed the first line for the Shire theme in the Lord of the Rings movies.)
Here’s an interesting item from the latest issue of the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. It’s all the better for being written by our good friend Dale Nelson:
Pages 22 and 23 feature Dale’s article on Thomas Dewar Weldon (1896-1958), with whom Lewis had a variable relationship. They came to Oxford at the same time, and were good friends for a while. But even before he stopped being an atheist, Lewis grew weary of Weldon’s relentless, materialist cynicism. As a tutor in Moral Philosophy his teaching method (according to R. W. Johnson’s book, Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age) was to first demolish his students’ conventional beliefs, and then to demolish whatever new beliefs they constructed, until they were left “in a state of free-floating agnostic cleverness.”
Weldon declared, in a 1944 lecture at Bomber Command Headquarters, near Oxford, that the carpet bombing of German cities was justified because it would shorten the war and save lives. Lewis was already on the record, along with a number of Anglican clergy, as rejecting that argument categorically.
Weldon was (according to George Sayer) that “hardest-boiled atheist” who remarked to Lewis in his rooms one day that the evidence for the Resurrection of Christ was remarkably good, saying, “Rum thing,” as Lewis recalled in Surprised By Joy.
Weldon was also the model for the Dick Devine, the cynical, flippant character who’s so annoying in Out of the Silent Planet and (promoted to the title, Lord Feverstone) in That Hideous Strength.
Reading Passively: “One of the problems of shouldering one’s way through books—worldview machete in hand—is that we become the kind of readers who get from a book only what we bring to it.” Professor Jermey Larson writes about reading for experience and enjoyment and letting active learning take a back seat. He leans on C.S. Lewis’s effort to equip readers of medieval literature to stay with the story instead of looking at commentaries every other page.
And the Gulag Remains: The Gulag Archipelago in English is 50 years old this year. Gary Saul Morson writes, “Before Solzhenitsyn, Western intellectuals of course knew that the Soviet regime had been ‘repressive,’ but for the most part they imagined that all that had ended decades ago. So it was shocking when the book described how it had to be written secretly, with parts scattered so that not everything could be seized in a single raid. Solzhenitsyn offered an apology for the work’s lack of polish: ‘I must explain that never once did this whole book . . . lie on the same desk at the same time!’ ‘The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of our persecuted literature.’ Since this persecution is itself one of the work’s themes, its imperfections are strangely appropriate and so, perhaps, not imperfections at all.”
The Past that Binds: Gina Dalfanzo reviews The Blackbird & Other Stories by Sally Thomas. “Our pasts are always part of us, shaping who we are, and that includes the people in them.”
Remembering How We Cooked: Writer Megan Braden-Perry talks about authentic New Orleans gumbo and how strangers change historic recipes. “To me, the composition of gumbo is a topic serious enough to invade my dreams. Recently I had the most awful nightmare, that I made gumbo and forgot all the ingredients and spices. It was just a roux and broth.”
The Steel Man Cometh: How the music business can course correct on artificial intelligence. “I guess training AI to replace human musicians is evil—unless they can make a buck from it.”
Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Point: Few people buy books that aren’t celebrity aligned. Britney Spears’s autobiography, released October 24, 2023, is currently #1 in Kindle, #10 in hardcover on Amazon. Aside of these, publishing houses stay afloat through backlist sales: Bibles, coloring books, and Don Quixote.
Counterpoint: Plenty of people are buying books, and the big publishers aren’t objective reporters on their own business.
“Someone from a prestige big 5 imprint whose books are often award-contenders and bestsellers once told me any book that sold less than 25,000 in print was a failure for them. OTOH, when I was in an MFA program—where many of the professors wrote experimental literary novels and such—I was told anything more than 5,000 sales was a success. Some small press editors might be happy with 1,000 sales.”
Topping Amazon’s fiction list for most sold this week are The Women,
by Kristin Hannah (12 weeks on the list) and The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese (33 weeks).
As booklovers, we may want many more people to join us in reading, sharing, and enjoying the written or recorded word, but I don’t think the sky is falling yet.
Also in this vein, Ted Gioia offers “10 Reasons Why I’m Publishing My Next Book on Substack.“
What else do we need to know?
Poetry: On April 26, 1336, a great poet climbed into the Alps just for the thrill of it, which people didn’t do in those days. Petrarch climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux (which is much higher today because of inflation) and read from Augustine’s Confessions, “Where I fixed my eyes first, it was written: ‘And men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean and the revolutions of the stars – and desert themselves.’ . . .”
Memoir: Writing about his life, Marvin Olasky says to be open to change. Don’t set a groove early and try to stay there.
C.S. Lewis: Screwtape praises certain celebrities and the sheep of their flock
Music: Ted Gioia writes western music isn’t what we think it is. “Just stop and think for a moment about the importance of Venice in the history of music. Everything from madrigals to operas found their home in that bustling port city—a key connecting point between West and East in the modern imagination.”
As you may recall (though it won’t be on the test), I’m a long-time member of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. I’ve been getting their monthly Bulletin for just as long. But the latest issue (Nov./Dec. 2023) features something novel – my name listed as an attendee in the minutes of a meeting. Being among those present was never convenient for me when they met in person, but since Covid, the meetings have been held on Zoom. The regular meeting date is, unfortunately, a night on which I usually have an obligation, but last June I finally got in, in a virtual manner.
Aside from that momentous development, this latest issue also features a headline article of considerable interest. It’s a reprint of a notable memoir by the late Alastair Fowler, originally published in the Yale Review (October, 2003). Dr. Fowler had C. S. Lewis as his dissertation supervisor while he attended Oxford University, beginning in 1952.
His memoir seems a fairly even-handed one – he clearly liked and admired Lewis very much, but he’s careful to describe his weaknesses, both as a supervisor and as a man, and to include some unsaintly details.
This article is particularly notable, though, as the one that finally exploded the unfortunate theory promoted by the late Kathryn Lindskoog in her 1988 book, The C. S. Lewis Hoax. Ms. Lindskoog insisted that Lewis’ abandoned novel, The Dark Tower, which his secretary Walter Hooper published in the collection, The Dark Tower: and Other Stories, was a counterfeit. She accused Hooper of writing it himself, and passing it off as a Lewis fragment. A lot of heat got generated by this accusation. But Dr. Fowler’s memoir states explicitly: “He showed me several unfinished or abandoned pieces… these included The Dark Tower, and Till We Have Faces. Another fragment, a time travel story, had been aborted after only a few pages.”
The Dark Tower is certainly different from Lewis’ other works, and many readers have found it distasteful. But Lewis wasn’t a one-note author, and he made conscious efforts to avoid that. Till We Have Faces, for instance, is quite unlike anything else he wrote.
There’s also a fascinating section on Lewis’ remarkable powers of memory:
Kenneth Tynan, whom Lewis tutored, tells of a memory game. Tynan had to choose a number from one to forty, for the shelf in Lewis’ library; a number from one to twenty, for the place in this shelf; from one to a hundred, for the page; and from one to twenty-five for the line, which he read aloud. Lewis had then to identify the book and say what the page was about. I can believe this, having seen how rapidly he found passages in his complete Rudyard Kipling or his William Morris.
I’m pretty sure (but here I rely on my own, far less robust, memory) that I read an account elsewhere which exaggerated this feat. That account claimed you could name a book, suggest a page and a line, and Lewis could recite it on the spot, verbatim. That always struck me as implausible, especially as Lewis often misremembers quotations in his letters. Fowler’s version seems far more likely, but still testifies to a remarkable memory.
Membership in the New York C. S. Lewis Society is not expensive, and I’ve always found it rewarding. I might also mention that our friend Dale Nelson adorns many Bulletin issues with his “Jack and the Bookshelf” column. The Society’s web page is here.
I was casting about (nice English idiomatic expression, that) for a subject tonight, and it crossed my mind that Owen Barfield was the longest-lived of the original Inklings, and he traveled extensively in his later years, lecturing in the US. There must be footage of him around somewhere.
And behold, the video above surfaced on YouTube. It’s the great Lewis promoter Clyde Kilby with Barfield, in a location which I take to be the Marion Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois. They chat a bit about his friendship with Lewis, and then we get to see just the beginning of one of Barfield’s lectures.
I forget which book about the Inklings it came from, but I was interested to learn that Barfield was an enthusiastic dancer all his life (or as long as he was able, I suppose). Everyone who’s read Surprised by Joy knows he was an Anthroposophist, but he also joined the Church of England later on.
George Orwell both liked and disliked C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. In his 1945 review printed in Manchester Evening News, Orwell outlined the plot and mad scheme of the enemy, saying it was not “outrageously improbable.”
Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.
But he disliked the supernatural elements in it. Bringing in God and demons tips the scales, as it were, “one always knows which side is going to win.” (via Andrew Snyder on Twitter)
And one other thought:
Culture War: Daniel Strand reviews Russell Moore recent book. “Losing Our Religion would be more persuasive if—instead of affecting to be a simple piece of pastoral counseling—it straightforwardly acknowledged its own agenda. Moore has an argument to make, and he wants to advance his project and defeat his opponents. But his book frames the gospel as some pure, otherworldly abstraction that has little to do with power or politics.”
More Lewis: Joseph Pollard has three posts on Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. Here is a link to all three. “While the Narnia series positively oozes with Christian symbolism and biblical allusion, in this, his final work of fiction, Lewis effectually communicates what so many thoroughly orthodox theology textbooks tirelessly aim to do: Till We Have Faces (1956) gently coaxes the reader to come to terms with both the futility of quarreling with the Almighty, and the resplendent beauty of the thrice-holy King.”
Economic Freedom: When Howard Ahmanson “heard [author John M.] Perkins speak, he heard something like his father’s message from the 1960s: free enterprise works, and small banks help people with modest incomes get mortgages so they have better homes. In India, the free enterprise message would take five more years to sink in, but in 1989 voters threw out Congress Party socialism. The result? India in recent years has been the world’s fastest-growing major economy.”
From History’s Wars: Patrick Kurp shares a few words from letters from a Civil War soldier. “Historians attribute more than half the 618,000 Union and Confederate deaths in the war not to battlefield wounds but disease: dysentery, pneumonia, malaria, typhus, chicken pox, enteric (typhoid) fever.”
Photo: Main Street, Iowa. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Heap on more wood! the wind is chill;
But let it whistle as it will,
We’ll keep our Christmas merry still.
Letters: J.R.R. Tolkien wrote and illustrated letters to his boys as Father Christmas. They were originally published in 1976, the third anniversary of his death. Here’s the start of the one from 1925, copied from BritishHeritage.com.
My dear boys,
I am dreadfully busy this year — it makes my hand more shaky than ever when I think of it — and not very rich. In fact, awful things have been happening, and some of the presents have got spoilt and I haven’t got the North Polar Bear to help me and I have had to move house just before Christmas, so you can imagine what a state everything is in, and you will see why I have a new address, and why I can only write one letter between you both.
Domestic and religious rite Gave honour to the holy night; On Christmas Eve the bells were rung; On Christmas Eve the mass was sung:
Historic Peace: Here’s a review of Tom Holland’s Pax, a history of the Roman Empire. It covers from the end of Nero to Hadrian, about 70 years. “He is the rare breed of serious historian who is fluent in the material, confident in his interpretations, and able to write with a novelistic flourish. Honestly, all 400+ pages of Pax are just so fun to read.“
Hadrian’s Wall: Speaking of Emperor Hadrian, the 200-year-old sycamore tree that stood to the side of Hadrian’s Wall between two hillocks was cut down in September by vandals, but the tree is not lost. “The National Trust confirmed that the seeds from the 200-year-old tree are expected to be able to grow new trees.” And the stump will likely grow again too.
The heir, with roses in his shoes, That night might village partner choose; The Lord, underogating, share The vulgar game of ‘post and pair’.
C.S. Lewis: A 1946 Christmas sermon for pagans by the author of The Abolition of Man. “When something is wrong, Lewis suggests, the post-Christian Englishperson points to the Government or the education system or to God or whatever as the problem. Rarely does a post-Christian carry around a sense that they might be at fault.”
England was merry England, when Old Christmas brought his sports again. ‘Twas Christmas broach’d the mightiest ale; ‘Twas Christmas told the merriest tale; A Christmas gambol oft could cheer The poor man’s heart through half the year.
The poetry in this post is taken from a Christmas section of Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field, via the Scottish Poetry Library
Photo: “Child holding Christmas card” by Annie Spratt/ Unsplash
In the video above, I share from an 1898 (or earlier) inexpensive edition of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a’ Kempis. It’s one of those books that looks as if it could have been valuable (just because it’s old and if it was in better shape), but it’s actually a cheap copy. This site on Chicago history notes the publisher of my book, Donohue, Henneberry, & Co., as purveyors of “inexpensive and unauthorized copies of popular books,” mostly fiction. I think my copy is from their set of cloth bound books, 50 in the series, sold at 75¢ each.
Most of the video is my unpolished reading from the book with a couple comments.
Art: Does great art come mainly from morally great men? “One lesson of a great city like Florence is that cruelty, greed, and depravity often coexist with civilization’s finest achievements. “
C.S. Lewis: November 29 is the author’s birthday. He was born in Belfast, 1898. In his chronicle of Lewis, Colin Duriez notes a meeting of Tolkien, Charlies Williams, Dr. Robert “Humphrey” Harvard, Owen Barfield, and Lewis on Nov. 23, 1944. Tolkien said the conversation was “most amusing and highly contentious.” Barfield, he said, could meet Lewis head on during a rousing argument, “interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo’s.”
Intellectuals: Philosopher Roger Scruton talks with Hamza Yusuf about the natural bent of intellectuals toward leftism and what should just as naturally draw them out of it. That’s the first part of the linked recording. They go on to speak of many other topics, including the King James Bible, English grammar, and Islamic society.
Tristram Shandy: Writing advice from Laurence Sterne, “a line drawn as straight as I could draw it.”
“Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint;
preserve my life from dread of the enemy.
Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked,
from the throng of evildoers,
who whet their tongues like swords,
who aim bitter words like arrows,
shooting from ambush at the blameless,
shooting at him suddenly and without fear.” (Ps. 64:1-4 ESV)
Israel: Israel has fought for peace for decades. Here’s one story of the life-long war:
The occupation of Gaza was a burr, not a territorial benefit. In the decades following the 1967 war, hundreds of thousands of Israelis moved themselves to the West Bank, to the ancient provinces of Judea and Samaria, the historical home of the Jewish people, where they formed the “settlements” that have caused such controversy. But Jews do not hear the same mystic chords of memory from Gaza, and so efforts to settle them in Gaza to create geopolitical “facts on the ground” never really took root. By the early 2000s, 8,500 Israelis had moved to 21 tiny settlements, in a situation so dangerous that those 8,500 Jewish Gazans had to be guarded by 24,000 Israeli soldiers.
Israel’s enemies: Will the real neo-Nazi please stand up? “Contemporary Marxism is not some secret conspiracy. It is right there in the open telling us what it is and what it wants.”
Novels: Author Richard Russo “discovered that what really interested readers were his stories about growing up with an often-absent father in a declining upstate New York manufacturing community filled with struggling but memorable characters whom some might call ‘deplorables.’”
Un-cancelation: Timothy L. Jackson, a professor of music theory, seems to be winning his fight against those who would censor him.
Family of C.S. Lewis: What happened to Warnie Lewis after his brother Jack’s death? A new book focuses on his correspondence with a missionary doctor in in Papua New Guinea.
Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash
