The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (40 page)

[Obedience] appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace—the cross and the crown in one … What indeed can we imagine Heaven to be but unimpeded obedience. I think this is one of the causes of our love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful: and though their
kind
of obedience is infinitely lower than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and water.

Griffiths, however, like Barfield before him, was deeply wounded by Lewis’s ban on religious debate. To him it “was a great embarrassment. It meant that I could never really touch on much that meant more to me than anything else, and there was always a certain reserve therefore afterward in our relationship.” Eventually their friendship would have faded in any event, for in 1955 Griffiths relocated to India, and by the time of Lewis’s death in 1963, he had begun to absorb elements of Hinduism into Christian worship. Lewis disliked Eastern thought. When he learned that another former pupil, Martin Lings, had been nosing about Hinduism and wished to encourage Lewis in this direction, he shot off a letter to Griffiths slithery with condescension, in which he calls Lings “my wretched man,” laments his “confusion,” and allows that since Lings “was up till this a person of exclusively literary interests, I daresay even Hindooism [sic] is a step upwards.” Lings would later become a prominent Muslim and the author of an acclaimed English-language biography of the Prophet Muhammad based upon traditional sources.

Lewis’s problems with Griffiths and Lings scarcely surprise; although he retained all his life a love of pagan mythology, no orthodox religion sat well with him other than what he would call “mere” Christianity. Tolkien was convinced that Lewis never wholly uprooted the anti-Catholic bias of his Ulster upbringing (his “Ulsterior motive”). According to Humphrey Carpenter, who takes Tolkien’s view of the matter, Lewis at times labeled Irish Catholics “bog-rats” or “bog-trotters”; Carpenter adds that on one occasion, when Tolkien mentioned to Lewis his devotion to St. John—John being, let us remember, Tolkien’s first name and the name of his oldest son—Lewis barked a scornful retort. It is also true that the term “papist” peppers Lewis’s letters: of Mauriac’s
Vie de Jesus
, “it is papist, of course, and contains what English and Protestant taste” (that is to say, Lewis’s taste) “would call lapses, but it is very good in spite of them”; of the publishing house of Sheed & Ward, “I don’t much like having a book of mine, and specially a religious book, brought out by a Papist publisher.” But we are more inclined to view this way of speaking as a passing vulgarism of the sort that Lewis would permit himself among friends. Lewis certainly felt discomfort with some Catholic practices—but essentially it was a discomfort he would struggle to overcome, rather than a deep-seated antipathy.

Warnie shared in this discomfort with Catholicism but hadn’t the temper to make an issue of it. He rarely made an issue of anything, which was just as well, as it meant that he could settle into the Kilns despite Mrs. Moore’s abrasiveness. Lewis loved having his brother around; when all was said and done, Warnie was his closest companion, if not his match in scholarship or creativity. Warnie, for his part, knew the value of escape hatches and fashioned several for himself, to be used whenever the Kilns grew too claustrophobic. Digging into his savings, he bought a two-berth, twenty-foot-long boat that he named the
Bosphorus
, after a vessel in the Boxen tales, and on it he cruised England’s rivers and canals. Life on the water was bliss, for “no one ever knows where you are, and you have no mail.” Another escape was his diary, in which he could express safely his blossoming dislike of Mrs. Moore. His third escape was booze. Warnie had always been a binge drinker. Stuck at the Kilns or afloat on some quiet river, what better way to pass the time than by opening a bottle? His diary tells the tale. On February 22, 1935, for example, he attends a performance of
Hamlet
produced by Coghill, but finds the lead character to be a “snivelling, attitudinizing, platitudinizing arch bore” and notes that “if I had not been fortified by a double whiskey and soda half way through, I would not have stuck it to the end.” A few days later, he observes that the same fortifying beverage had kept his pet dog going during its final days. And so on. Lewis knew of the drinking and was deeply troubled by it, but there was nothing he could do.

If Lewis ranked male friendship as his chief happiness, work ran a close second. He excepted tutoring, however; while he liked and even admired some of his pupils, such as Griffiths, he found others a terrible drain on his time and energy. Dr. Dimble in
That Hideous Strength
speaks for him: “There is my dullest pupil just ringing the bell. I must go to the study, and listen to an essay on Swift beginning ‘Swift was born.’” But writing, reading, and lecturing gave him strength. During the 1930s, as always, he absorbed books at a ferocious pace, reading intensively in early English literature while ranging afield into authors as diverse as Kafka, whom he likened to George MacDonald for mythic profundity, and David Lindsay, whose metaphysical space adventure,
A Voyage to Arcturus
, dazzled both him and Tolkien. In 1937, down with the flu, he managed during one “grand week in bed” to read
Northanger Abbey
,
The Moonstone
,
The Vision of Judgment
,
Our Mutual Friend
, the third volume of Ruskin’s
Modern Painters
, and
The Egoist
(“There’s a good deal of the ass about Meredith—that dreadful first chapter—Carlyle in icing sugar”)
.
As if to balance the ledger, letters poured out at an equally prodigious pace, he cast Virgil into rhyming alexandrines, and, at the invitation of OUP, commenced work on a major investigation of sixteenth-century English literature for the multivolume
Oxford History of English Literature
. The book’s immense labors weighed upon him for many years, and he took to calling the series
OHEL
and, finally,
O HELL
. To top off this frenzy of activity, he fulfilled his pledge to match Tolkien’s time-travel tale with a space-travel adventure of his own by writing his first real novel and possibly his most lucid work of fiction:
Out of the Silent Planet
.

A Journey to Malacandra

The model for
Out of the Silent Planet
(1938) was a childhood favorite of Lewis’s: H. G. Wells’s anti-imperialist
First Men in the Moon
(1901). In this early science fiction tale, which Lewis considered “the best of the sort I have read,” a scientist and a young adventurer, working in secret in a remote English country setting, build a spherical spaceship out of gravity-repellent material and travel to the moon, where, captured by insectlike inhabitants who dwell beneath its inhospitable surface, they inadvertently reveal the brutality of the human race and are brought before the “Grand Lunar” for judgment.

Lewis took his scaffolding from this tale, borrowing more than a few details of setting and plot, but the edifice he built upon it was altogether different; for he had been convinced, by reading David Lindsay’s
A Voyage to Arcturus
, that the planetary romance could be a vehicle for profound “
spiritual
adventures.” He thought he could use this form to counter the materialistic picture of the universe that dominated popular science writing. As an adolescent, Lewis had pored over the scientific potboilers of the Victorian astronomer Sir Robert Stawell Ball, in which the universe was depicted as a vast wasteland where humans are of vanishingly little account. More recently, he had found in Olaf Stapledon’s
Last and First Men
(1930) and in the essays of the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane (
Possible Worlds
, 1927) an admirable speculative power allied to chilling schemes of interplanetary colonization, moral and genetic reprogramming, material advancement, and limitless life extension. He had been dismayed to discover that, for some of his own students, such utopian fantasies had supplanted both Christian realism and Christian hope. Lewis hoped, in this novel, to present an appealing imaginative alternative. “I like the whole interplanetary idea as a
mythology
,” he told Roger Lancelyn Green, “and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) pt. of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side.”

The novel’s hero is Dr. Ransom (identified at first, with a suggestion of allegory, as “the Pedestrian”), a Cambridge philologist on holiday. Tolkien denied that Ransom was based on him, and Lewis put readers off the scent by stating in the epilogue that Ransom was a pseudonym, not the hero’s real name. But there are hints to the contrary: as an English surname, Ransom means “Ranolf’s son,” but as an English noun and verb, Ransom comes from Anglo-Norman for the Latin
redemptio
and savors of English Catholicism. It is under the title of “Our Lady of Ransom” that Catholic Oxford claims the patronage of the Virgin Mary; and the Guild of Ransomers, founded in 1887 for the purpose of asking Our Lady of Ransom to intercede for the conversion of England and Wales, was (and still is) a going concern. A painting of Our Lady of Ransom was (and still is) venerated in a special chapel in Tolkien’s parish church. Could there be a more feeling tribute to Tolkien than to create a philologist-hero with such a name? Moreover, Ransom’s Christian name, Elwin, Old English for “Elf-friend,” completes the tribute and signals the extent to which Lewis would rely on Tolkien’s inspiration in developing his un-Wellsian version of Wells.

As the novel begins, Ransom has set out with map and pack on a solo walking tour in the English Midlands. He soon finds his ramble thwarted by a thunderstorm, an unfriendly innkeeper, and a mother worried about her retarded son, who has failed to come home from his job working for a professor and a London businessman in a desolate country house. Ransom agrees to inquire after the boy, but the dwelling is strangely forbidding, and the moment he throws his pack over the gate in order to crawl through the hedge into the garden, he realizes that there is no turning back. Like Lewis the reluctant convert in
Surprised by Joy
, he has been drawn in and is about to be prodigiously interfered with
.

On the other side of the hedge, Ransom discovers the missing boy trying to escape from the clutches of two men—the brilliant physicist Dr. Weston and an old schoolmate of Ransom’s, the venal, vulgar industrialist Dick Devine. Ransom intervenes and saves the boy, only to become himself a substitute victim. He is drugged, tied up, and bundled onto a spaceship of Weston’s design, which takes off for Mars (Malacandra). Weston, he learns, is a Stapledonian raised to the
n
th power, the architect of a grandiose experiment to tame other worlds for human habitation once Earth’s resources run out. Devine’s intentions, by contrast, are almost refreshingly crass; he plans to exploit Mars for commercial gain. Ransom is to be offered as a sacrifice to the Malacandrians, whom all three assume to be savages or worse (Ransom pictures insectoid monstrosities).

His expectations are, however, quickly overturned. Space, which he had always imagined to be dark and cold, turns out to be an ocean of living light. The intense heat caresses rather than oppresses, filling him with vigor and sensual delight: “Stretched naked on his bed, a second Dana
ë
, he found it night by night more difficult to disbelieve in old astrology: almost he felt, wholly he imagined, ‘sweet influence’ pouring or even stabbing into his surrendered body.” “Almost he felt, wholly he imagined”: the archaism of the language, with its anastrophe (inverted word order) and parallelism characteristic of heigh stile—more muted than in Tolkien’s prose, however—and its faint echo of the biblical “almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian,” presages Ransom’s coming entry into a hieratic and mythic world.

Ransom’s first glimpse of Malacandra reveals “nothing but colours—colours that refused to form themselves into things,” but he begins to see the landscape more clearly once he opens his soul to it. When he meets his first Malacandrian and realizes that the creature possesses the gift of language, his zeal as a philologist overcomes his fear. Lewis gives a similar account in
Surprised by Joy
of conquering his own insect phobia by developing a scientific interest in entomology. The cure lies in the curiosity: a scientific curiosity that is genuinely objective and disinterested cleanses the vision.

As Ransom discovers the rationality and humanity of the three Malacandrian races—the furry, childlike, poetry-loving
hrossa
, the froglike, technically dexterous
pfifiltriggi
, and the fantastically tall, white-feathered, austerely intellectual
s
é
roni
—so do his own rationality and humanity expand. He exchanges fear for trust and places himself in the Malacandrians’ hands. Under their guidance, he comes to understand the high-pitched voice of a fourth type of being, the angel-like
eldila
, learns the value of obedience, and is brought to meet the Oyarsa, the planet’s ruling Intelligence, comparable to an archangel or to the planetary archons of Hellenistic and Gnostic lore. The Oyarsa reveals to Ransom a terrible secret, the etiology of all Earth’s woe: Ransom’s beloved home planet is Thulcandra, the silent planet, estranged from the company of the heavens by the perverse design of the fallen angel who is its ruling Intelligence and by the sin of the archetypal man, Adam. The whole human race is “bent” (
incurvatus
—a word favored by St. Anselm—though created to mirror God, we have become bent, like mirrors in a fun house, reflecting lower things).

Meanwhile, Weston and Divine, driven by lust for knowledge and power, have committed the first Malacandrian murder, slaying Ransom’s closest friend among the
hrossa.
Dragged before the Oyarsa, Weston delivers a jingoistic speech in a scene that makes high comedy out of his pose as a noble martyr for science and civilization. The Oyarsa, with perfect justice, sends the three humans back to Earth. Weston and Devine plan to kill Ransom en route, but he narrowly escapes, and returns to tell the tale to his friend, the fictional C. S. Lewis, and to await further angelic instructions. The earth is under siege, but not abandoned, for it has been ransomed by the divine Son, Maleldil; and Ransom’s own journey into deep heaven, though seemingly a chance event, is a sign that the siege may be lifting.