I wrote last week about Mary Poppins (the book) and its theme of tough love of children, and a natural progression from that would be to write about C.S.Lewis’s Narnia books which show even tougher love. But Narnia is too written about, and besides, although I read the books to and with my children, I’ve never been tempted to re-read them. I prefer Lewis’s other writing, especially his novel That Hideous Strength, which is not a children’s book at all. It was first published in 1945 but completed (according to its preface) while the war was still on, in 1943.
It is the third book in a trilogy, but it can be read without first reading the other two. The first book, Out of the Silent Planet (1938)is about a university lecturer, Ransom, who is kidnapped and tricked onto a spaceship while he is on a walking tour of England during his ‘long vac’, the university holidays which in those days lasted from early July to early October. (This is probably the most ‘science-fiction’ aspect of the book for the modern academic reader.) It’s a good read, with more action than its immediate sequel (see bibliography, below)but I loathe spaceships,so the value of That Hideous Strength for me is that it is science-fiction without any space travel.
It is also science-fiction as dystopian vision, and it is particularly prophetic about universities. Bracton, an old, venerable college of an old, venerable university called Edgestow (both are fictional), votes away its independence and its cherished traditions and territories in one over-long meeting dominated by people with a strong agenda. Precious time is frittered away arguing about fencing a wood and fellows’ stipends (both contingent matters) while all the time the biggest betrayal of all – the fact that the university has agreed to host the new National Institute for Controlled Experimentation (acronym NICE) – is perpetrated without a murmur, for financial considerations. A decision has been not so much taken, as taken for granted. In fact, its acquisition (Bracton fondly imagines that it is doing the acquiring)is touted as a feather in Bracton/Edgestow’s cap – Oxford and Cambridge have been passed over for this honour. Mark Studdock, a Fellow in Sociology, is all for the changes and he stifles his qualms about the brutal silencing of some of the older, protesting academics, who are getting hung up on minutiae anyway. As Lewis comments, if they were any good at grasping the essentials of financial administration they would probably be in some other line of work.
Curry, a prominent member of the ‘progressive element’, humble-brags about neglecting his academic work because he ‘has to’ spend so much time securing the ‘future’ of the university. This, too, is prophetic, because the academic who is light on scholarship and heavy on self-importance now controls many if not most universities on these islands. Curry neither knows nor cares what NICE is about, he just wants in on it because it is the coming thing. Mark is glad to be in Curry’s confidence (the ‘in-crowd’) but delirious with joy when the charismatic Lord Feverstone (one of those who kidnapped Ransom in the first book) admits him into an even smaller inner circle, leaving Curry far behind. Like a lot of vain, shallow people, Mark does not question his sudden rise in the world. It is his wife that NICE are really after, because Jane has prophetic powers that might be of use to them. Jane, who has resentfully abandoned her postgraduate studies to keep house for the lumpish Mark, neither wants nor welcomes these visions, which appear to her in the form of dreams.
Mark is whisked by Feverstone in his fast car to Belbury, the temporary HQ of NICE, and is baffled by the vacuous management-speak of the Deputy Director, Wither, which doesn’t really strike the modern reader as odd, because we’ve become used to the kind of talk that says nothing in a complicated way. Meanwhile, Jane, disturbed by her visions, visits the Manor at St.Anne’s, a village reached by the vividly-described slow-moving branch-line of a railway, where she meets some extraordinary people, and leaves, vowing not be drawn in. But she is glad of that haven of sanity later in the book. NICE takes over the town of Edgestow, knocking down houses and trees and evicting people. On previous readings I thought the speed with which they managed to do this far-fetched, but since March 2020 and the overnight imposition of covid restrictions (which, like most people, I accepted completely, without question), I do not find it far-fetched at all.
Harder to swallow are Lewis’s fears of the welfare state, which call to mind John Betjeman’s poem, ‘The Planster’s Vision’ – ‘No right! No wrong! All’s perfect evermore!’, published around the same time. Many panicked British intellectuals believed that the universal free education, healthcare and improved social housing promised by the Beveridge Report (1942) would inevitably lead to state control of everything and everybody, from selective breeding of humans to the abolition of tasty food and good beer. (‘The workers’ flats in rows of soya beans’, as Betjeman’s poem puts it, while the elimination of the ‘unsanitary’ village pub is high on NICE’s agenda in Lewis’s book.) Lewis also disdains the relatively new discipline of Sociology, which (he suggests) has not provided Mark with any intellectual or moral defences against evil – ‘not a rag of noble thought, Christian or Pagan’. What is ‘noble thought’? This is all forgiveable, though, in the light of Lewis’s fascinating exposition of early medieval life and the centrality of magic to it, and his explanation of the splitting off of magic from materiality (I’m not explaining it very well – you have to read it. It is an irresistible theory and the man could write.) He is also good on the changing definitions of luxury and comfort over the centuries. When Ransom asks Merlin, the magician from King Arthur’s time, (who has come alive again), if he is comfortable at the Manor, Merlin responds:
‘You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it…..windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open…but I lie in [my bedroom] alone with no more honour than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there are warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial, but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes….not a hawk, not a hound.’
Merlin has stolen the ragged clothes of a homeless man he met in the woods, and the NICE people, who also need Merlin for their own nefarious purposes, mistake this naked tramp for him. The tramp makes the most of the warm bed and food he is given at Belbury, winking at Mark (at this stage being held prisoner) and telling him they have both landed on their feet, and his interactions with the NICE people are quite funny. When the banquet at the end comes to its grotesque, bloody conclusion, the tramp makes his escape unharmed with as much food and drink as the capacious pockets of his academic robe can carry. Lewis always looks out for the little guy.
There’s one flaw in Lewis’s invocation of the first millenium, though, which I didn’t notice before. When Merlin, shocked at the forces ranged against them, asks Ransom why he does not get the aid of the Emperor, and makes several references to Christendom – Merlin is both Christian and magician – he never suggests looking for the support of the Pope, who would have been the acknowledged spiritual and temporal (there was little difference between the two) leader of all Christians at the time of the legendary King Arthur, the fifth century. Maybe Lewis was trying to avoid Ransom having to explain about the Reformed faith; all the same, it’s a serious omission for an early medievalist. One would suspect the ‘Belfast Protestant coming out in him’, but Lewis wasn’t anti-Catholic by any means. He even wrote an article for an Irish Medical Missionaries of Mary publication. (listed below). And one of his best friends, J.R.R. Tolkien, was a Catholic.
Both Lewis and Tolkien were remembered in Oxford and Cambridge as hard-working, dedicated teachers who put themselves out for their students. Both published academic works and did all the marking and examining academics do; Tolkien was an external examiner of Old and Middle English at University College Galway in the 1960s. They also had full personal lives – Lewis, even before he met Joy Davidman, was an active member of the Moore household, not at all the ‘ivory tower’ academic portrayed in Shadowlands. Tolkien was a devoted family man.Yet they both had the intellectual space (I can think of no other word – maybe freedom?) to build fictional worlds which have endured long after their academic works have been superseded by those of other scholars (which is the nature of scholarship). No academic today would have their depth of philosophical and historical imagination, which can only be developed slowly over long years of research and wide, wide reading undertaken slowly in an unhurried and unharried atmosphere.
NOTE: Lewis is all over the place on the subject of women. The only authoritative female in NICE is the violent, unprincipled lesbian ‘Fairy Hardcastle’. That’s okay, he’s allowed to have a Bad Female in the book, and she is delightfully, thoroughly bad. There are ‘good’ authoritative females – Grace Ironwood is a doctor, and Camilla, Mrs Dimble and Mrs Maggs all exercise authority in their own way, and are all individuals, but they accept male authority unquestioningly. Even following the logic of the book, though, Ransom’s reproach of Jane for not submitting to her husband’s authority is contradictory. If Jane hadn’t had the spiky independence that made Mark a little bit wary of her, he wouldn’t have been afraid of summoning her to Belbury and like a good wife she would have gone, and that would have been a disaster for Ransom and the ‘good guys’. It’s hard for a girl to get it right in a C.S.Lewis book,whether he’s writing for adults or for children.
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C.S.Lewis,Out Of The Silent Planet (London: The Bodley Head 1938).
_______ That Hideous Strength (London: The Bodley Head 1945).
(The second novel in the trilogy is called Perelandra, or Voyage to Venus (London: The Bodley Head 1943). I found it quite dull, consisting mainly of long explicatory conversations like sermons. But some believe it to be the best of the three.)
John Betjeman, ‘The Planster’s Vision’ (1945) is in John Betjeman’s Collected Poems (London: John Murray 1980).
C.S.Lewis, ‘Some Thoughts’ in Medical Missionaries of Mary, The First Decade: ten years’ work of the Medical Missionaries of Mary 1937-1947 (Dublin: Sign of the Three Candles 1948). The book has a foreword by Pope Pius XII and carries an imprimatur from the Archbishop of Dublin.
Roger Lancelyn Green & Walter Hooper, C.S.Lewis: the authorised biography (London: Harper Collins 2003).
Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: the life and imagination of C.S.Lewis (San Francisco: Harper Collins 2005).
CLEAR CLASSICS is where I write about my literary enthusiasms and likes, mainly from the 1930s, 40s and ’50s, and occasionally I write about good history books too. Stay tuned.
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