The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (51 page)

It fell to Lewis, in these dark times, to interpret the English literary tradition of the Fall and to defend the doctrine as the compelling truth about “the sort of universe in which we have all along been living.” But interpreting this literary tradition meant, first of all, interpreting John Milton, the poet English modernists love to hate. This was a task Lewis relished, for he had long loved
Paradise Lost—
perhaps as far back as his ninth year, when he read the epic poem for the first time. Under Kirkpatrick’s tutelage, Lewis devoted many of his blissful hours of ad-lib reading to Milton’s poems, enthusing about his discoveries in letters to Arthur Greeves. Thrilled with his purchase of a fine edition of
Paradise Lost
, he wrote to him in July 1916, “Don’t you like the Leopard witches? How you will love Milton some day!” A week later, he was more cautious: “I don’t think I should advise Milton: while there are lots of things in him you would love—the descriptions of Hell and Chaos and Paradise and Adam and Eve and Satan’s flight down through the stars, on the other hand his classical allusions, his rather crooked style of English, and his long speeches, might be tedious.” By March 1917, all such hesitations were gone: “I have finished ‘Paradise Lost’ again, enjoying it even more than before. Really you must read it sometime soon. In Milton is everything you get everywhere else, only better. He is as voluptuous as Keats, as romantic as Morris, as grand as Wagner, as wierd [sic] as Poe, and a better lover of nature than even the Bront
ë
s.”

And that was before Lewis became a Christian. Before his conversion, Lewis loved Milton without sharing his convictions, much as the Romantics loved Milton (Blake thought Milton “a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” and Shelley admired the “energy and magnificence” of Milton’s Satan as passionately as he detested the vindictiveness of Milton’s God). It fell to Lewis to rescue
Paradise Lost
from the Romantics who loved Milton for the wrong reasons as well as from the new generation of poets and critics—notably John Middleton Murry and T. S. Eliot—who disliked Milton for a host of reasons: his indigestible epic style, his repellent portrait of God, his political opinions. To Eliot, writing in 1936, Milton was a major poet but a bad moralist, theologian, psychologist, political philosopher—and man—who exerted a corrupting influence on English language and literature from which it was still struggling to recover. As the redoubtable Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis put it, thanks to T. S. Eliot, “Milton’s dislodgement … was effected with remarkably little fuss.”

Perhaps Milton had been dislodged in the circles Leavis knew, but in Oxford, with the arrival of Charles Williams, things were very different. Williams didn’t just love Milton, he channeled him. His Hilary term 1940 lectures on Milton, as Lewis said in
A Preface to Paradise Lost
, which he dedicated to Williams, “partly anticipated, partly confirmed, and most of all clarified and matured, what I had long been thinking about Milton,” namely, “that when the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted.” The lectures are not extant, but Williams distilled them in a preface for the 1940 World’s Classics edition of
The Poetical Works of Milton
, in which he attributes opposition to Milton to ignorance of Christian doctrine, whether it concerns chastity (“that great miracle of the transmutation of the flesh proposed in
Comus
”) or obedience (“the proper order of the universe in relation to … the law of self-abnegation in love” that is the real theme of
Paradise Lost
). In just twenty three-by-five-inch pages, Williams achieved, according to Lewis, “the recovery of a true critical tradition after more than a hundred years of laborious misunderstanding.”

It was during the period of Milton’s disgrace and Williams’s triumph that Lewis received an invitation from the University College of North Wales in Bangor to deliver the Ballard Mathews Lectures (named for a first professor of mathematics at Bangor, the polymath George Ballard Mathews) on a subject of his choosing. Lewis chose
Paradise Lost
. From these lectures, given on the first three days of December 1941, came his book
A Preface to Paradise Lost
, with a handsome testimony to what Williams had done to rescue Milton for modern readers: “Apparently the door of the prison was unlocked all the time; but it was only you who thought of trying the handle. Now we can all come out.”

Though his debt to Williams was real, Lewis’s approach to the appreciation of
Paradise Lost
was characteristically his own. The first task, Lewis said, is to understand the
genre
with which one is dealing.
Paradise Lost
is an epic poem, a genre that has its roots in oral recitation and is never merely “original” or idiosyncratic. The “primary epic” (Homer,
Beowulf
) tells of heroic adventures; the “secondary epic” (Virgil, Milton) treats “great subjects,” events by which the world is forever changed, and uses an elevated style to convey the momentousness of its theme.

W. W. Robson, among others, was of the opinion that Lewis was so intent on defending
Paradise Lost
that he lost touch with “any of the normal standards and criteria which it is usual to apply to poetry traditionally considered great” and in his “frenzy of special pleading” inadvertently called attention to Milton’s faults. But was it special pleading? That there are defects in Milton’s verse, Lewis freely admits. That there are unattractive elements in Milton’s theology and that he could have done a better job portraying unfallen sexuality, Lewis also admits. But Lewis was convinced that understanding
Paradise Lost
as an epic meant reading it differently from the way one would read a lyric poem or any essentially private work of art.

In
Paradise Lost
, Milton took on the greatest of all great subjects, the fundamental Christian story: that God made all creation good while knowing that it would be marred by Satan’s rebellion and mankind’s Fall. For that purpose an elevated style and a high didacticism is certainly in order. To approach the poem through a film of modernist assumptions (the “normal standards and criteria”) is inevitably to miss the point. F. R. Leavis was a good judge of Milton’s verse but a bad judge of Milton’s universe: “It is not that he and I see different things when we look at
Paradise Lost
. He sees and hates the very same that I see and love. Hence the disagreement between us tends to escape from the realm of literary criticism. We differ not about the nature of Milton’s poetry, but about the nature of man, or even the nature of joy itself.”

When Eric Fenn wrote to suggest a radio broadcast about
Paradise Lost
, Lewis declined, arguing that the listening audience would not derive any pleasure from Milton. But another possibility suggested itself: a way of defending, not the seventeenth-century Puritan poet himself, but the essential Christian vision of his poem, by transmuting it into a very different kind of story. Fiction can make an argument more compelling than even the best criticism (hence Lewis told T. S. Eliot that Charles Williams would do more good “if only he cd. be induced to write more fiction”—like
Descent into Hell
—“and less criticism!”). It was time to return to Ransom.

Voyage to Venus

The parting words of Ransom in the fictional letter that concludes
Out of the Silent Planet
suggest that Lewis did not plan to send his hero on another planetary voyage: “Now that ‘Weston’ has shut the door, the way to the planets lies through the past; if there is to be any more space-traveling, it will have to be time-traveling as well…!”

Tolkien’s attempt to write a time-travel novel had been abortive; now Lewis thought he would give it a try. Sometime during 1938 or 1939, he began
The Dark Tower
, a sequel to
Out of the Silent Planet
, discovered in unfinished form by Walter Hooper years after Lewis’s death. Its authenticity, once questioned, is now accepted by the great majority of Lewis scholars; Alastair Fowler remembers having seen it in Lewis’s rooms, and Fr. Gervase Mathew said that Lewis read it to an Inklings meeting in 1939 or 1940.
The Dark Tower
picks up where
Out of the Silent Planet
leaves off, beginning with a Cambridge don named Orfieu saying “‘Of course … the sort of time-travelling you read about in books—time-travelling in the body—is absolutely impossible.’” Orfieu invents a “chronoscope” by means of which his friends (among them Ransom) first observe and eventually interact with the alien, mutagenic, parallel universe of Othertime. Perhaps Lewis thought the tale too weird to continue. In any event, he dropped it after a few scenes and instead reopened the door Weston had shut, sending Ransom on another planetary journey, this time to Venus.

The new Ransom adventure enabled Lewis to grapple with a question frequently raised about
Paradise Lost
and only half-answered in his
Preface
: Did Milton succeed—can anyone succeed—in making plausible the Fall of Man? Can one convincingly portray, can one even coherently imagine, the temptation of a wholly innocent being? What chink could there be in Eve’s armor of holiness and bliss that would make an opening for the serpent’s fatal suggestion? Conversely, can one convincingly portray, can one even coherently imagine, an Eve who is genuinely tempted yet ultimately prevails, a Paradise nearly, yet not finally, lost? To answer these questions, to defend Milton—and with Milton the entire classical Christian Augustinian tradition—called for another imaginative supposal. Venus,
Perelandra
in the Old Solar tongue, would be a young planet at the Adam-and-Eve stage, Lewis told Arthur; and Ransom would arrive “in time to prevent their ‘falling’ as
our
first pair did.”

A November 1941 letter to Sister Penelope indicates that the story was in medias res and already at a troubling crux: “I’ve got Ransom to Venus and through his first conversation with the ‘Eve’ of that world: a difficult chapter.” The difficulty was that “this woman has got to combine characteristics which the Fall has put poles apart—she’s got to be in some ways like a Pagan goddess and in other ways like the Blessed Virgin.” Meanwhile, Lewis himself was in medias res and feeling rather like a moral failure; he accused himself of relapsing into old (unspecified) sins and asked the nun, “Have you room for an extra prayer? Pray for
Jane
if you have. She is the old lady I call my mother and live with (she is really the mother of a friend)—an unbeliever, ill, old, frightened, full of charity in the sense of alms, but full of uncharity in several other senses. And I can do so little for her.”

Venus had an obvious appeal for Lewis, who knew better than any man alive all her attributes in pagan, medieval, and Renaissance mythology; he loved to observe the planet in the morning and evening sky and point out its splendors to his friends, as in this April 1940 note to Warnie: “Every night Venus grows more spectacular. It is true
Chaucerian
weather! How impossible not to believe, after so many disappointments, that it
means
what it says.” If one imagines, as Ransom suggests in
Perelandra
, that the things we hear of in myths are “scattered through other worlds as realities,” the planet Venus, afloat in the ocean of Deep Heaven, younger and closer to the sun than Mars, is an obvious location for the blessed island realms of ancient lore—the Fortunate Isles, the Celtic T
í
r na n
Ó
g, the Garden of the Hesperides.

But how to connect this book to
Out of the Silent Planet
? A frame narrative solves the problem by having Lewis recapitulate Ransom’s initial journey. Now it is Lewis who is the Pedestrian, grudgingly making his way to Ransom’s cottage in answer to his friend’s urgent wire, growing more anxious with every step, fearful of meeting the unearthly
eldila
, of being “drawn in,” of going mad: He is experiencing, as he soon discovers, a barrage by the
eldila
of the Dark Lord, not unlike the way Christian monks of the desert were bombarded by demonic
logismoi
. The attack is in the open now because the great siege is drawing to its end. The forces of good and evil (Allies and Axis, Lewis obviously intends us to think) have started to emerge “in something a little more like their true colours,” and ordinary people are being called upon to do the fighting.

Lewis’s part in this engagement “with principalities and powers and depraved hypersomatic beings” is small. He is to help Ransom climb naked and blindfolded into a casket that the Oyarsa of Malacandra will send to Venus; in contrast to
Out of the Silent Planet
, there is no effort here to construct a plausible technology for space travel; preternatural means suffice. Lewis is also charged with summoning the “four or five people whom we can trust”—Inklings, in other words—to convene whenever he returns, with “Humphrey” (another nickname for Dr. Havard, who seemed to invite them) to provide any necessary medical support. Not knowing the details of his mission or why he was chosen for it, Ransom climbs into his “celestial coffin” with a self-abandonment that is at once trusting and despairing. Lewis closes the coffin lid, goes into the house, and is sick.

After a little more than a year, during which “we had raids and bad news and hopes deferred and all the earth became full of darkness and cruel habitations,” Ransom returns. He emerges from his coffin like St. Antony from his cave, glowing with vitality and wondering why his friends look so pale. The only injury he bears is a wound that bleeds incessantly from the heel, suggesting an affinity with the Fisher King, a mirror of Christ. Conversations with B. (Barfield) and “a sceptical friend of ours called McPhee” elicit the unsettling fact that Ransom has “seen” the Platonic Form of Life itself, has had a taste of Paradise and a foretaste of the Resurrection—a reality “too
definite
” to be put into words, in which bodily experience is not transcended but “engulfed.”