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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 14, 2013 12:27:04 GMT
Hibernicus, what do you mean by "an irritating strain of cliquishness in Lewis himself?". Do you mean his tendency to quote friends like Owen Barfield as if they were renowned authorities? Surely cliquishness was one of Lewis's great horrors, although of course this wouldn't prevent him from indulging in it himself? Just curious. (If you can remember what you meant, since you wrote that post five years ago now!)
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 15, 2013 15:45:36 GMT
Quoting friends as if they were renowned authorities could be justifiable if what they said was relevant to the argument. Lewis had a tendency to overpraise and overpromote his friends (his securing the election as Oxford Professor of Poetry of a friend who was a versifying cleric over a much more competent academic is a pretty notorious example). He also tends to be dismissive of tastes and views outside his own ken, such as TS Eliot's modernist poetry - note I do not say he was not entitled to dislike it, but that he ridiculed and dismissed it in a facile manner. There is a strain of smug "one of the lads" self-congratulation in Lewis's relations with the Inklings that can be very irritating. As you say, Lewis's essay "THe Inner Ring" is a very incisive dissection of the danger of substituting the sense of being one of a circle of initiates for real achievement and fellow-feeling, and its fictional equivalent (Mark Sturgis's seduction by NICE in THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH) is very powerful. But bear in mind Lewis's oft-repeated point that he only condemned those sins to which he was tempted himself, because he didn't feel entitled to judge until he knew the force of the temptation.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 14, 2013 15:08:22 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 16, 2013 20:17:33 GMT
Have been reading Alistair McGrath's new life of Lewis - a few scattered thoughts:
(1) It's a major and very effective response to AN Wilson's biography, which essentially presents Lewis as someone whose whole life is dominated by emotional regression to childhood and retreat into fantasy, his rationalism being in this reading just another fantasy - it's a psychoanalytic/therapeutic model, a reductionism which starts from the assumption that LEwis's professed beliefs cannot be taken seriously. I might add that Wilson's biography is quite spectacularly inaccurate both on matters of detail and political context when I check it, and there is a persistent demeaning and belittling tone in his attitude to Lewis. McGrath does not disguise the dark side of Lewis - indeed in some respects Lewis comes across as more unpleasant than I previously realised - but he presents him very well in terms of social context and emphasises that Lewis's enterprise is about the relationship between feeling and reason in a very sophisticated way; that he is developing and testing intuitions, not disappearing into wild escapist fantasy. He also shows pretty clearly that the clash with Elizabeth Anscombe was not as devastating as Wilson and some others make it out to be, but simply another academic disputation of a type which Lewis as a don was used to. (Incidentally, when reading this I suddenly realised one reason why quite a few Catholic thinkers have admired Karl Popper, which struck me as odd given that Popper was an atheist and that one corollary of his thesis is that revelation cannot be a valid source of knowledge. The answer which struck me is that Popper's point that intellectual discovery starts with the theory - you must develop the theory, only then can you test it - has certain affinities with the idea that while faith can be justified by reason, it is not a simple matter of rational analysis - at some point it can only be understood from inside and you must take the leap; whereas Dawkins' contempt for philosophy includes contempt for epistemology, so that he simply sees positivism as synonymous with reason).
(2) McGrath spells out the basic features of the Oxbridge/public school system of Lewis's day, which Lewis and many other writers on him take for granted. This is very useful; in general he is very good at spelling out what LEwis assumed or took for granted. Very clear that this is an academic study, with the virtues and limitations that implis - and not a quasi-memoir as many other accounts; McGrath emphasises that he never met LEwis. It helps that he is a Northern IReland Protestant who went through a period of atheism in his youth, and that he is a trained theologian. HE teaches a lot of visiting American evangelicals, and I suspect this book partly grew out of their questions.
(3) I was struck by the fact that Lewis's basic academic training was originally in classics and philosophy - he sought posts in both subjects before ending up in English Literature - and that this gave him an insight into the mindset of the mediaeval and early modern world which someone whose interests are in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and who thinks philosophy began with Kant or Descartes just doesn't have.
(4) Joy Davidman comes across as much more calculatingly mercenary than I had realised (there have been new letters discovered which make this clear) but also as contributing more to some of Lewis's late work than has been realised, by pushing him to develop/finish projects. Oddly enough, one of them was TILL WE HAVE FACES because I have believed for quite some time that that book is, among other things, Lewis's last word on his relationship with Mrs Moore. We know that Mrs Moore, who remained an atheist, resented Lewis's conversion as taking him away from her, just as Orual's possessive love for Psyche leads her to resent that Psyche is loved by the god; the mother figures who appear in SCREWTAPE and THE GREAT DIVORCE are dominated by possessive resentment, and it is fairly clear that they are versions of MRs Moore in her later years. McGrath is rather more sympathetic and understanding towards MRs Moore than previous biographers (who took Warnie LEwis's resentful attitude towards her). When I first read TILL WE HAVE FACES I found it incomprehensible; as I get older I find its dissection of how we can get trapped in mistaken ways of thinking and thereby harm others without realising it one of the most profound things he wrote. Similarly, I found the scene in VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER where Aslan rips off Eustace's accumulated dragon skins and leaves him raw before healing his wounds to be simply horrific when I was young - who wants to be skinned alive? As I grow older and look back on my mistakes and sins and vanities and some of the things they led to and how hard or impossible it is to undo their consequences, that scene become dreadfully understandable. Some people ridicule sin and hell, but their existence is almost self-evident. The most shocking thing - the hardest to understand, the most startling hope - is that we can be forgiven. Jesus made a greater claim when he forgave sins than when he performed miracles of healing. Lewis's relationship with his father, and the amount of lying, deception and contempt he perpetrated on him, also come out in this (though MCGrath does produce a few mitigations). One really understands why in later life Lewis repeated that he had treated his father abominably and it was the worst thing he had ever done. The image of the ageing Lewis in his study with those two ghosts - the lonely old man, the angry old woman - standing beside him somehow recurs to me.
(5) This is a bare-bones life, not life and works; the works are contextualised (and something said about the deep structure of Narnia) but they are not expounded at length. PErhaps there is a touch of McGrath's evangelicalism here, and he certainly does bring out LEwis's attraction for evangelicals (and conversely he tends to downplay his more Catholic/sacramentalist features, though he acknowledges their existence) - he emphasises the idea of LEwis as someone who is relatively detached from church structures and has an individual voice/faith, and he says he has spoken to Catholics who find LEwis attractive because they feel detached/disillusioned with our own structures and hierarchies.
(6) A nice little detail - LEwis's parish church in BElfast was St MARK's Dundela - St Mark's symbol is a lion, and the place is decorated with lion symbolism, and this obviously feeds into the image of Aslan. I knew about the lion of St Mark, and I have seen the church's name scores of times. How could I never have made the connection?
(7) I have had a tendency to be suspicious of Walter Hooper in recent years - partly because he overhypes Lewis in very embarrassing ways with a hint of blindness to Lewis's darker side, partly because some evangelical criticisms have brought out his tendency to behave as if he was English and to play up his connection to Lewis (but McGrath does note that although Hooper only met LEwis in the last months of his life, they had corresponded since the early 50s so the connection was deeper than some critics suggest.) McGrath makes it utterly clear, however, that LEwis's reputation and presence would be much weaker than it is but for Hooper's management of the estate, not only in editing unpublished material but in insisting on keeping LEwis's less-known works available in print.
All in all, a worthwhile book so far as it goes. How odd to think that I have probably engaged with Lewis more long and deeply than any other author - that I first read him as a child and shall probably return to him and grapple with him at intervals until my life ends. I was absolutely besotted on GKC and Belloc for years in my teens (my prose style is very marked by BElloc, though I always found his Francophilia excessive and the more I think him over the more downright sinister I find him) but I left them aside when I went to university because I had so much new information and understanding to grapple with, and so many naivetes cruelly exposed, and though I dabble from time to time I have never gone back and wrestled with GKC again as I have several times with Lewis.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Nov 16, 2013 21:01:26 GMT
Thanks for this post Hibernicus-- most interesting, and useful for those who would like to read the book but probably won't be able to get their hands on a copy for some time. (I thought about buying it when I saw it, but decided against.)
It is especially nice to hear that Lewis's treatment of his father may not be as bad as it has seemed. Would you be able to elaborate on this a little?
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Post by maolsheachlann on Nov 16, 2013 21:20:56 GMT
I think I know what you mean about Chesterton, too, though you may be astounded to hear me say that. Chesterton has entered into my soul so much that I think he has completely and permanently formed my outlook on the world. On the other hand, I sometimes get exasperated with him. For a writer so lauded for his range of interests, and his ability to write about anything, his themes are actually quite narrow-- his modus operandi was to relate whatever subject he wrote about to those themes, often quite ingeniously.
His paradoxes are simply a mannerism and it's silly to complain about them (they don't bother me at all). His parallelism is a lot more irritating. Admittedly, he has the greatest of all models, but does he really have to paraphrase everything he says four or five times in a row? Lewis does, indeed, seem measured and precise compared to Chesterton's rollicking, heedless style-- which is intoxicating in short draughts, but tends to induce hangovers.
In saying all this, I am in the position of a son (or a nephew) letting off steam about a deeply beloved and revered father or nephew. I still think Chesterton is a bigger talent and a deeper thinker than Lewis.
It's interesting that neither of them were "churchy"-- apparently Chesterton rarely went to church before crossing the Tiber, and hauled himself to Mass rather reluctantly on days of obligation, while Lewis had no great taste for it either. I sometimes wonder if Chesterton's apparent lack of hunger for the sacrament might be an impediment to his cause for sainthood. The saints usually seem marked by an insatiable appetite for the sacraments, prayer, Eucharistic adoration etc.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 16, 2013 21:54:18 GMT
The mitigating points about Lewis's relations with his father are: (a) The decision to send his sons to English schools, with the consequent distancing from him, was Albert's so he must share responsibility for the consequences. McGrath thinks that sending Lewis to the school described in SURPRISED BY JOY as "Belsen" on the basis of an agency recommendation and without making further enquiries was extraordinary negligence, and he also thinks that Lewis would have been content to stay in Campbell College in East Belfast and that Albert made another mistake in sending him to Malvern which he calls "Wyvern", though Warnie was fairly happy there and disliked the portrayal of the school in SURPRISED BY JOY. McGrath thinks Lewis's statement that he suffered more at Malvern than in the trenches reflects a mental block about his war experiences, but the fact that Lewis, who was there and McGrath wasn't, would say it is still pretty grim.
OTOH he thinks Albert's decision to send LEwis for tutoring to Kirkpatrick was inspired - I must say BTW that Kirkpatrick's talent as a teacher, of a fairly rigorous kind that turned out to suit Lewis but would not have suited everyone, as well as the man's basic honesty and uprightness really shine through; I remember Lewis said when he got abusive hatemail from atheists - he got quite a lot - he felt ashamed not for himself but because such honest atheists as KIrkpatrick were being besmirched by association with this sort of stuff. Having seen Atheist Ireland and the Dawkins fanclub in full howl, I understand what he meant a lot better than I used.
(b) He also thinks that it was not Lewis's fault that he was not there when his father died - he had spent several weeks with him despite the chilly relations between them, had to go back to Oxford to prepare for the new term's teaching, and thought his father was on the mend after his operation - Albert died suddenly and unexpectedly of a brain haemorrhage which may or may not have been an unforeseen side-effect of the operation.
On the other hand, the list of lies and deliberate deception Lewis practised with his father, and the contempt with which he spoke of him - sometimes to him - are quite horrific enough. (Albert BTW eventually found out that he was unintentionally subsidising Mrs Moore and her daughter and that Lewis had lied to him, but continued to pay up even after Lewis had insulted him to his face, which makes things even worse.) McGrath mentions that many of Albert's BElfast friends handed down in their families a distaste for CS LEwis because of his treatment of Albert, and it certainly brings home why the son felt such terrible remorse over it in later life (one element of which is that he preserved Albert's record of some of their worse exchanges, which he could easily have destroyed). As I often say, one of the most admirable things about CS Lewis was his acknowledgment of his own vices and failings. Some of the NArnia stories are real commentaries on the parable of the LAbourers in the Vineyard, on being saved at the last after so many faults.
BTW another little detail I hadn't known and which I picked up from McGrath is that there was a slight difference between the order of composition and of publications of THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA - THE HORSE AND HIS BOY was written before THE SILVER CHAIR but published afterwards, and THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW was written after THE LAST BATTLE but published before. It would make emotional sense to "take a break" between portraying Caspian's youth and vigour in VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER and his old age and death, and to make the last visit to Narnia a looking back to the beginning rather than concluding with the apocalyptic. (BTW this also shows one of the minor disadvantages of this sort of reboot; it would make a certain kind of sense for Diggory and Polly to have married as adults - it might have been a nice touch if he was presented as having been a widower, and met her again at the end of THE LAST BATTLE - but that was ruled out because he had already been described as a bachelor in THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE.)
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Post by maolsheachlann on Nov 16, 2013 23:04:16 GMT
Thanks for that, Hibernicus-- extremely interesting.
Surprised By Joy is one of my favourite books, but I tend to think Lewis shows a startling lack of pietas in his portrayal of his father. Did a decent man's faults and absurdities need to be paraded for posterity? I see that it does add a lot to the narrative, but it still bothers me a bit.
I also feel sympathy for Lewis senior with regard to his spectacular ability to misremember what he had been told, or even what he had witnessed. I share this trait with him (the first part, anyway) and others often think I am being perverse or inattentive when I genuinely can't help it, or at least, not without immense effort.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 18, 2013 22:43:55 GMT
To be fair to Lewis, the portrayal of the father in SURPRISED BY JOY is suffused by guilt over his treatment of him, and once he is going to write about his relations with his father it is reasonable enough to try to explain all the circumstances. What makes me uncomfortable, rather, are the analysis of the "mother" characters in THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS and THE GREAT DIVORCE because once the possibility that these are versions of Mrs Moore occurs to you it doesn't go away. Even granted that Lewis may have assumed that few if any of his readers would ever know his domestic circumstances, and that Mrs Moore's anger at his conversion as a betrayal of her and her late-life dementia were among the most severe trials of his life, it still seems to me that while he might legitimately have sought advice and counsel and a listening ear, there is something very problematic about working through it in fiction in this way. I wonder what her daughter thought of it? BTW here is a link to the only surviving wartime Lewis broadcast. The accent seems to wander quite a bit, though it's basically Churchill-like Received PRonunciation (he's also probably deliberately projecting his voice, so this will be different from his conversational accent) - it does sound like someone using an acquired pronunciation. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHxs3gdtV8A
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 26, 2013 22:31:08 GMT
Peter Hitchens offers some characteristically provocative reflections on Lewis and how he survives - his view that the Narnia stories which hold up best are THE HORSE AND HIS BOY and THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW, because they are the least dependent on aspects of mid-century middle-class life which Lewis took for granted (in THE HORSE AND HIS BOY the Pevensies appear as Kings and Queens of Narnia rather than as mid-C20 schoolchildren, in THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW the Victorian setting lies in Lewis's past and so is not taken for granted as he took his own present for granted) is very interesting. The fact that Hitchens emphasises the bureaucratic tyranny of THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH and THE ABOLITION OF MAN says as much/more about him than about Lewis as does his admission that he is all at sea in philosophy. The last paragraph (quoted below) brings out a point MAolseachlainn often makes. EXTRACT And, as a non-theologian, as a loather of literary criticism and as one who abandoned the study of philosophy after losing his way in its arid foothills, I can’t say much about many of the things that dominated Lewis’s working and writing life (others, who know better than I, have persuasively suggested that he was far better writer, and literary academic, than he was a philosopher or a theologian). What I have always liked is the love of language, the steeping of the mind in legend and poetry ( there’s a passage about language in ‘Surprised by Joy’, about Homer’s description of a ship at sea, which must be one of the best passages ever written about the true music of words, and how in their original tongue they mean far more than any translation can possibly convey ). And the sense of a voice, a very powerful, individual voice, in clear, unaffected English, warning us (long before it was too late) of the dangers of the modern world. And ,yes, I did choose the name of ‘The Abolition of Britain’, my first book, after reading ‘The Abolition of Man’. And I wish I could write fiction, for I understand ‘The Abolition of Man’ far better after I had read its fictional counterpart ‘That Hideous Strength’. Lewis knew what his latter-day foe, Philip Pullman, also knows; that ‘once upon a time’ is a far more effective way of influencing your readers than ‘thou shalt not’. END hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/11/in-westminster-abbeyreflections-on-cslewis.htmlADDENDUM Sorry I forgot to include the link when I posted this originally
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 1, 2014 15:52:33 GMT
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Post by maolsheachlann on May 8, 2014 19:22:57 GMT
I finally laid my hands on Alister McGrath's biography of C.S. Lewis. I'm just a little past the War years (although the narrative is not very chronological so I'm not sure the author is finished discussing the trenches, though he's skipped ahead at the moment). I like it so far, despite the author's tendency to psychoanalyze Lewis-- a tendency hardly unique to this biographer or this subject.
One thing that struck me was the claim that Lewis spends too much time describing his boarding school misery in Surprised by Joy. McGrath writes: "Even a sympathetic reader of this work cannot fail to see that the pace of the book slackens in the three chapters devoted to Malvern, where the narrative details obscure the plotline." I couldn't disagree more. I think those chapters are some of the most readable and gripping of the whole work. As a slice of social history they are very valuable, and they don't seem irrelevant to the overall theme of the memoir-- it doesn't take much imagination to see a correspondence between the regime at Malvern and the stoic materialism that Lewis was trapped in.
It's interesting that Lewis avoided volunteering for WWI until he pretty much had to jump before he would be pushed. I would do exactly the same thing in his position, but the impression I got from other books was that he enlisted from a sense of duty.
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Post by Tertium Non Datur on Aug 5, 2014 1:31:18 GMT
CS Lewis, ? For some very odd reason certain devout catholic prelates and laypeople have often recommended this author for my instruction in the ways of Christianity. Not wanting to appear rude I once agreed to accept a book written by this non catholic. Having got thoroughly bored after about three pages in I now realize the true value of the 1951 Maynooth Cathechism which strictly advised having nothing whatsoever to do with non catholics when it came to matters of the faith
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 5, 2014 8:33:02 GMT
I think it's very possible that I would never have overcome certain intellectual difficulties I had with the Christian faith if it hadn't been for the writings of C.S. Lewis.
So where do the writings of pre-conversion Chesterton and Newman fit in to this philosophy?
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 5, 2014 20:26:35 GMT
Which of Lewis's books was it, and why did you get bored? It's important to analyse your own responses in order to understand them better. What a remarkable person you must be to be able to judge not only all of Lewis, but everything ever written by non-Catholics, on the basis of three pages of his work. What do you think of St Thomas Aquinas? Not only are his works not exactly a bundle of laughs, but he notoriously makes use of non-Catholic writers, so by your standards he can't be any good either.
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