Eden's Courtesy

Such natural love twixt beast and man we find
That children all desire an animal book,
And all brutes, not perverted from their kind,
Woo us with whinny, tongue, tail, song, or look;
So much of Eden's courtesy yet remains.
But when a creature's dread, or mine, has built
A wall between, I think I feel the pains
That Adam earned and do confess my guilt.
For till I tame sly fox and timorous hare
And lording lion in my self, no peace
Can be without; but after, I shall dare
Uncage the shadowy zoo and war will cease;
Because the brutes within, I do not doubt,
Are archetypal of the brutes without.

C.S. Lewis
Poems (Bles, 1964)

Narnian Suite 1

March for Strings, Kettledrums, and Sixty-three Dwarfs

With plucking pizzicato and the prattle of the kettledrum
We’re trotting into battle mid a clatter of accoutrement;
Our beards are big as periwigs and trickle with opopanax,
And trinketry and treasure twinkle out on every part of us –
          (Scrape! Tap! The fiddle and the kettledrum).

The chuckle-headed humans think we’re only petty puppetry
And all our battle-tackle nothing more than pretty bric-a–brac;
But a little shrub has prickles, and they’ll soon be in a pickle if
A scud of dwarfish archery has crippled all their cavalry –
          (Whizz! Twang! The quarrel and the javelin).

And when the tussle thickens we can writhe and wriggle under it;
Then dagger-point’ll tickle ‘em, and grab and grip’ll grapple ‘em,
And trap and trick’ll trouble ‘em and tackle ‘em and topple ‘em
Till they’re huddled, all be-diddled, in the middle of our caperings –
          (Dodge! Jump! The wriggle and the summersault).

When we’ve scattered ‘em and peppered ‘em with pebbles from our catapults
We’ll turn again in triumph and by crannies and by crevices
Go back to where the capitol and cradle of our people is,
Our forges and our furnaces, the caverns of the earth –
          (Gold! Fire! The anvil and the smithying).

C.S. Lewis
Poems (Bles, 1964)

A storm of flash-bulbs

I am neither disturbed (nor surprised) at the limitations of my 'fame'. There are lots of people in Oxford who have never heard of me, let alone of my books. But I can repay many of them with equal ignorance: neither wilful nor contemptuous, simply accidental. An amusing incident occurred in November, when I went as a courtesy to hear the last lecture of this series of his given by the Professor of Poetry: Robert Graves. (A remarkable creature, entertaining, likeable, odd, bonnet full of wild bees, half-German, half-Irish, very tall, must have looked like Siegfried/Sigurd in his youth, but an Ass.) It was the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard. After it he introduced me to a pleasant young woman who had attended it: well but quietly dressed, easy and agreeable, and we got on quite well. But Graves started to laugh; and he said: “it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before”. Quite true. And I had not supposed that the lady would ever have heard of me. Her name was Ava Gardner, but it still meant nothing, till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude, and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her.

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
#267 : 9-10 January 1965

Lilith

"It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought... Phantastes. A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist deep in Romanticism, and likely enough, at any moment, to founder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity... What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience... the quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live."

Foreword by C. S. Lewis to Lilith by George MacDonald

Cambridge, and Criticism

[Image: Girton College]

I knew C. S. Lewis only during his last years when he was Professor of English at Cambridge. His arrival there coincided with my own, it so happened; I had been invited to return to my old College (Girton) as a Research Fellow, in order to complete my work on William Blake. This invitation came through Dr Bradbrook, who had herself been a pupil of C. S. Lewis for a time in Oxford, and it was she who invited him out to Girton to the dinner-party at which I met him for the first time. I had not expected to like him so much, for at that time I had read only The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters which I did not feel to be in any way for me; but to meet him was to know that here was a man of great learning, continuously kindled into life by imagination. He seemed to possess a kind of boyish greatness — an unique combination of qualities, in my experience, for in him neither seemed to vitiate the other. He was not, certainly intellectually boyish (no reader of his works of scholarship could suppose that) but in the freshness and joyousness with which he carried his learning. I think of Stevenson's line as particularly applicable to him, “Glory of youth glowed in his soul.” The sense of glory has become rare, even in youth; was it perhaps an Irish trait in him, never to doubt the worth of the game? — and for him learning was a joyful and inexhaustible game.

Among so many academic figures whose attitude towards literature was one of bored superiority or active hatred, his love of the material itself was life-giving as a spring in a desert. I went to some of his lectures on the 'matter' of Rome, France, and Britain, and remember how he made the dullest Latin text seem enthralling (he would I am sure here have retorted that no one could possibly consider Boethius dull). The element of play was never far away. He came to tea one day I remember, and walking in the Girton grounds began to imagine how Dryden would have written Blake's The Tyger. He produced instantly a fine couplet (I wish I could remember it) then exclaimed, “No, that is much too good for Dryden, it is almost good enough for Pope,” and unhesitatingly set about polishing it up to Pope's standard. He could put together clear well-made sentences even in verse, and I have heard him express astonishment at how badly a certain world-famous professional colleague put together even the simplest sentence — a sign, he thought, of a fundamental insensitivity to language.

He took a poor view of 'literary criticism' and once asked me if I did not think it entirely useless? I said that I did: scholarship can help towards the better understanding of a poem whose difficulty arises from our lack of certain knowledge; but criticism is a kind of mould or cancer. I found in him an enthusiastic ally in my own work on the sources of William Blake, and little more than a week before his death I received a letter from him from which, since its application goes beyond my own work, I quote: “Yes. Once one goes in for Blake (or Milton or Kipling) one meets, disguised as literary critics, a great many dissentients of quite a different sort. But you'll knock 'em all down, like a second Camilla. Plenty of fact, reasoning as brief and clear as English sunshine, and no personal comment at all.” That was the only kind of criticism he was any use for.

Light on C. S. Lewis (Bles 1965)

“From a Poet” by Kathleen Raine

A Williams Biography...

There are signs that Charles Williams is being reassessed. Recent reprints of his novels, and editions of his letters, in Britain and North America, as well as increasing presence on the internet, indicate that there is a new groundswell of interest in him. A full biography is urgently needed, for its own interest and to further not just Tolkien studies but an understanding of the whole of mid-twentieth-century English writing. He is 'the last magician' both as the last of the magically creative 'Inklings' to receive due attention, and as the last major writer to emerge, as Yeats did before him, from the Western Occult tradition.

A new biography by Grevel Lindop, based on a wealth of hitherto unused archive material and many hours of candid interviews with those who knew Williams, will open up an astonishing life to 21st century readers. My new biography is planned for publication by Oxford University Press in due course.

Grevel Lindop

Children and 'Childishness'

I had to think about it, however, before I gave an 'Andrew Lang' lecture at St Andrews on Fairy-stories; and I must say I think the result was entirely beneficial to The Lord of the Rings, which was a practical demonstration of the views that I expressed. It was not written 'for children', or for any kind of person in particular, but for itself. (If any parts or elements in it appear 'childish', it is because I am childish, and like that kind of thing myself now.) I believe children do read it or listen to it eagerly, even quite young ones, and I am very pleased to hear it, though they must fail to understand most of it, and it is in any case stuffed with words that they are unlikely to understand – if by that one means 'recognize as something already known'. I hope it increases their vocabularies.

As for plenilune and argent, they are beautiful words before they are understood – I wish I could have the pleasure of meeting them for the first time again! — and how is one to know them till one does meet them? And surely the first meeting should be in a living context, and not in a dictionary, like dried flowers in a hortus siccus!

Children are not a class or kind, they are a heterogeneous collection of immature persons, varying, as persons do, in their reach, and in their ability to extend it when stimulated. As soon as you limit your vocabulary to what you suppose to be within their reach, you in fact simply cut off the gifted ones from the chance of extending it.

(…)

Surely I am 'childish' enough, and that ought to be enough for real children or any one 'childish' in the same sort of way, and never mind if the old chap knows a lot of jolly words. I send you a little piece of nonsense that I wrote only the other day, as evidence of my childishness. Though I have alas! picked up enough grown-up jargon to write in imitation of my elders; and I might say 'it is a neatly constructed trifle, an amusing attempt to penetrate the elf-childishness of an elf-child, if any such thing existed!' (...) Don't bother about the 'opinions'. In fact I write as I do, ill or well, because I cannot write otherwise. If it pleases anybody, large or small, I am as much surprised as delighted. God bless you. Very much love.

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

#234  :  22 November 1961

Ballade of a Street Door

As I came up into the town
Wherein my father's house abide,
I met a man in tattered gown,
In ragged garment blowing wide,
With terror fleet and open-eyed ;
' Ho, whither now so fast, I pray ? '
Fearfully looked he back and cried :
' I pulled the bell and ran away !

' Good sir, if thou hast held renown
Among this people, be my guide !
I from their welcome, not their frown,
In shelter would obscurely hide.
For when, being tired, a latch I tried.
Whence came a sound of revels gay.
Fear rose within me like a tide, —
I pulled the bell and ran away.

' A voice called " Bring the festal crown ! "
And running footsteps gateward hied.
Wherethrough I heard, as they came down.
Great names that challenged and replied.
And torchlight through the chinks I spied
My soul became a wild dismay.
And as the doors began to slide
I pulled the bell and ran away ! '

                                L'EVOI

Prince, was it you and I whose pride
So turned, so fled, upon our Day ?
Was it our voices then which sighed
' I pulled the bell and ran away ' ?

Charles Williams
Poems of Conformity (OUP 1917)

Numinor in CS Lewis

Your discovery of 'Numinor' in C.S.L.'s That Hideous Strength is discovery of a plagiarism: well, not that, since he used the word, taken from my legends of the First and Second Ages, in the belief that they would soon appear. They have not, but I suppose now they may. The spelling Numinor is due to his hearing it and not seeing it. Númenóre or Númenor means in High-elven simply West-land. As for the shape of the world of the Third Age, I am afraid that was devised 'dramatically' rather than geologically, or paleontologically.  I do sometimes wish that I had made some sort of agreement between the imaginations or theories of the geologists and my map a little more possible.  But that would only have made more trouble with human history.

J.R.R. Tolkien
#169 From a letter to Hugh Brogan 11 September 1955

The Brobdingnagianly tactless thing

[The High in Oxford, 50 years ago]

It came over me like a thunderclap about 30 seconds after I had left you in the Lodge this afternoon that I must seem to you to have committed, in one very short conversation, all the most unprovoked and indeed inexplicable kinds of rudeness there are.* I implore you to try to understand - and believe - how it came about with no such intention.

The starting point was the fact that I have never noticed the slightest inequality in your gait. Seeing it for the first time when I was waiting behind you to cross the street I therefore immediately assumed some temporary mishap to be the cause: no alternative explanation entered my head. My evil genius then led me to ask you about it - largely because two people who see each other once a week can't very well meet on an 'island' and say just nothing. After your answer I ought of course to have apologized and dropped the subject at once: but by that time I had completely lost my head.

You are not the first to suffer this kind of thing from me: I am subject to a kind of black-out in conversation which now and then leads to ask and say the utterly wrong thing - the Brobdingnagianly tactless thing. I have (quite against my will) made many enemies this way. I hope very much you will not become one of them: give me a fool's pardon.

C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letter of C.S. Lewis: Volume III,

Letter to Robin Oakley-Hill Feb 16, 1953

___________________

*The recipient of this letter said:

"I was walking from the boathouse back to college on an unpleasantly raw winter afternoon after an unsatisfactory session of coxing when I was joined by C.S. Lewis waiting to cross the High. He said something like: "You're limping - did you hurt yourself?" I said no, I'd had polio, in a fairly unfriendly manner, because I was fed up with the weather, the unsatisfactory rowing and the tedious unfinished work I was going back to. He looked embarrassed and said "Oh, poor chap," and we went our separate ways. I was astounded to get the letter next day, and was inclined to reply that it didn't signify, but a confidant warned me to take the apology in a serious manner because otherwise it would seem that I did not appreciate the trouble he had taken in writing the letter, and I did so."

A Young Atheist

Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side. You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to "know of the doctrine." All my acts, desires, and thoughts were to be brought into harmony with universal Spirit. For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion. Of course I could do nothing - I could not last out one hour - without continual conscious recourse to what I called Spirit. But the fine, philosophical distinction between this and what ordinary people call "prayer to God" breaks down as soon as you start doing it in earnest. Idealism can be talked, and even felt; it cannot be lived.

C.S. Lewis
Surprise by Joy (XIV Checkmate)

The Stone

Meanwhile the Prince Ali drove through the London streets till he reached the Embassy, steering the car almost mechanically while he surveyed in his mind the position in which he found himself He foresaw some difficulty in persuading his chief, who concealed under a sedate rationalism an almost intense scepticism, of the disastrous chance which, it appeared to the Prince, had befallen the august Relic. Yet not to attempt to enlist on the side of the Faith such prestige and power as lay in the Embassy would be to abandon it to the ungodly uses of Western financiers. Ali himself had been trained through his childhood in the Koran and the traditions, and, though the shifting policies of Persia had flung him for awhile into the army and afterwards into the diplomatic service his mind moved with most ease in the romantic regions of myth. Suleiman ben Daood, he knew, was a historic figurethe ruler of a small nation which, in the momentary decrease of its two neighbours, Egypt and Assyria, had attained an unstable pre-eminence. But Suleiman was also one of the four great world-shakers before the Prophet, a commander of the Faithful, peculiarly favoured by Allah. He had been a Jew, but the Jews in those days were the only witnesses to the Unity. "There is no God but God," he murmured to himself, and cast a hostile glance at a crucifix which stood as a war memorial in the grounds of a church near the Embassy. " 'Say: for those who believe not is the torment of hell: an evil journey shall it be.' " With which quotation he delivered the car to a servant and went in to find the Ambassador, whom he discovered half-asleep over the latest volume of Memoirs. He bowed and waited in silence.

Charles Williams
The Stone (Chapter One), Many Dimensions (1931)

The Pattern in the Web

The best book yet done on Charles Williams's poetry. Dr. King treats Williams’s poetry as poetry and Williams as a poet. Too often CW's poetry has been seen as theology or evidence for his love life, or pretty good retellings of medieval romance, or who knows what else. But now Dr. King shows it as poetry and reveals that it is indeed very good poetry as poetry… Who has written better than Roma King on what poetry really is? And the sections on Williams's Arthurian poetry surpass anything I have read on this modern lyric cycle.

Joe McCatchey (Wheaton College) review of ‘The Pattern in the Web’ The Mythical Poetry of Charles Williams, by Roma A. King, Jr.

from "The Geste of Beren and Lúthien"

There Fëanor mourned his jewels divine,
the Silmarils he made. Like wine
his wild and potent words them fill;
a great host harkens deathly still.
but all he said both wild and wise,
half truth and half the fruit of lies
that Morgoth sowed in Valinor,
in other songs and other lore
recorded is. He bade them flee
from lands divine, to cross the sea,
the pathless plains, the perilous shores
where ice-infested water roars;
to follow Morgoth to the unlit earth
leaving their dwellings and olden mirth;
to go back to the Outer Lands
to wars and weeping. There their hands
they joined in vows, those kinsmen seven,
swearing beneath the stars of Heaven,
by Varda the Holy that them wrought
and bore them each with radiance fraught
and set them in the deeps to flame.
Timbrenting's holy height they name,
whereon are built the timeless halls
of Manwë Lord of Gods. Who calls
these names in witness may not break
his oath, though earth and heaven shake.

J.R.R. Tolkien
(Lines 1,602 to 1,627)