George Orwell on the style and quality of C.S. Lewis's arguments

When I wrote about the philosopher C.E.M. Joad last month, a comment suggested I read one of George Orwell's 'As I Please' columns from Tribune. 

In it (it was the column for the 27 October 1944 issue), Orwell defended Joad as someone associated in the public mind with Science and Rationalism (his capitals), unlike the religious right-wingers who tended to dominate debate on the BBC.

But the column was mostly about C.S. Lewis and Orwell's criticism of his writing style and the quality of his arguments. It's worth quoting at length:

Reading, a week or two ago, Mr C. S. Lewis’s recently-published book, Beyond Personality (it is a series of reprinted broadcasts on theology), I learned from the blurb on the dust jacket that a critic who should, and indeed does, know better had likened an earlier book, The Screwtape Letters, to The Pilgrim’s Progress. ‘I do not hesitate to compare Mr Lewis’s achievement with Pilgrim’s Progress’ were his quoted words. Here is a sample, entirely representative, from the later book:

Well, even on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There’s a bad kind, where the pretence is instead of the real thing, as when a man pretends he’s going to help you instead of really helping you. But there’s also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the real thing. When you’re not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a much nicer chap than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we've all noticed. you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get a quality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That’s why children’s games are so important. They're always pretending to be grown-up – playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits, so that the pretence of being grown-ups helps them in earnest.

The book is like this all the way through, and I think most of us would hesitate a long time before equating Mr Lewis with Bunyan. One must make some allowance for the fact that these essays are reprinted broadcasts, but even on the air it is not really necessary to insult your hearers with homey little asides like "you know" and "mind you", or Edwardian slang like "awfully", "jolly well", "specially" for "especially", "awful cheek" and so forth. The idea, of course, is to persuade the suspicious reader, or listener, that one can be a Christian and a "jolly good chap" at the same time. I don’t imagine that the attempt would have much success, and in any case the cotton wool with which the BBC stuffs its speakers’ mouths makes any real discussion of theological problems impossible, even from an orthodox angle. But Mr Lewis’s vogue at this moment, the time allowed to him on the air and the exaggerated praise he has received, are bad symptoms and worth noticing.

Students of popular religious apologetics will notice early in the book a side-kick at "all these people who turn up every few years with some patent simplified religion of their own", and various hints that unbelief is "out of date", "old-fashioned" and so forth. And they will remember Ronald Knox saying much the same thing fifteen years ago, and R. H. Benson twenty or thirty years before that, and they will know in which pigeon-hole Mr Lewis should be placed.

And Orwell goes on to describe that pigeon-hole: 

A kind of book that has been endemic in England for quite sixty years is the silly-clever religious book, which goes on the principle not of threatening the unbeliever with Hell, but of showing him up as an illogical ass, incapable of clear thought and unaware that everything he says has been said and refuted before. ... The line of attack is always the same. Every heresy has been uttered before (with the implication that it has also been refuted before); and theology is only understood by theologians (with the implication that you should leave your thinking to the priests). Along these lines one can, of course, have a lot of clean fun by ‘correcting loose thinking’ and pointing out that so-and-so is only saying what Pelagius said in A.D. 400 (or whenever it was), and has in any case used the word transubstantiation in the wrong sense.

Lewis is still a revered figure among British Evangelicals, and in the US he enjoys an extraordinary reputation, so much so that there are those who seek his canonisation, but I think Orwell got it about right here.

Liz Crowther played Lucy in a 1967 adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was first adapted for the screen in 1967 by ABC Weekend Television. I was reminded of this when I watched the first episode of A Very Peculiar Practice on BBC4 last night and Liz Crowther was in the cast.

That's because Liz Crowther played Lucy Pevensie in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1969. Broadcast in ten 30-minute episodes, the series was written by Trevor Preston and directed by Helen Standage. According to Wikipedia, only the first and eighth episodes have survived, along with an audio recording of episode 7.

But there is some good news: half of episode 8 has found its way on to YouTube – in two parts. If you click on play above, you can watch a short section in which Liz Crowther features. 

Liz Crowther, the daughter of the comedian and Crackerjack ("Crackerjack!") host Lesley Crowther, trained as a dancer when she was a girl and has long been a highly regarded stage actress. 

Because of her success in the theatre, her 21 episodes as Sonia the Radio West receptionist in Shoestring has turned out to be her most substantial screen role. I discovered this adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and her part in it when researching a post on Shoestring earlier this year.

Elidor or Narnia? Adam Mars-Jones, Alan Garner and C.S. Lewis

"I remember being disappointed by Elidor," writes Adam Mars-Jones in his essay on Alan Garner for the London Review of Books.

Well, I remember loving Elidor and still admire it, in part because reading it, in contrast to some of Garner other work, does not make you feel as though you're being hit over the head with a compendium of folklore. He is disgraced beyond rescue, but William Mayne used to handle such material with a lighter touch - see his treatment of the legend of the Richmond drummer boy in Earthfasts for an example.

Mars-Jones's central complaint about Elidor is that, having invited comparisons with C.S. Lewis by packing four children off to a magic kingdom, he treats the story differently in every way:

It turns out that in their role as (exiled) champions of Elidor they must wield magical implements known as the Treasures, but these are issued with little ceremony. C.S. Lewis would have taken at least thirty pages to unite the children with the Treasures; Tolkien might have taken three hundred. In Elidor there’s a gap of only three pages between the news that the Treasures exist and the children acquiring them. It’s not much of a quest – barely a trip to the toy shop.

It's not a quest at all, and it's not a trip to a toy shop either. There is a strong sense that the children are being used: given the Treasures and then bundled back into their own world to face danger when other beings from Elidor try to force their way in.

What Garner does is force the reader to question the deepest assumptions of this sort of story.¹ Did the children really visit Elidor or just imagine it? Is Malebron, the only being they meet there, as good as they found it natural to assume?

C.S. Lewis has his moments - I loved the scene early in Prince Caspian where the boy is told that the legends about a golden age of Narnia and talking animals are all true, and I loved reading the scene from The Magician's Nephew where Jadis drives a London cab like a chariot. But that latter scene, like much that is good in the book, is a pastiche of Edith Nesbit.

So when Mars-Jones commends Lewis to Garner as someone to study on how to write about relationships between brothers and sisters, you feel he has missed the mark. It would be more economical to send him straight to Nesbit.

But then I have always been puzzled by the reverence with which Lewis is treated as a children's writer and, in America in particular, as a religious thinker. Whatever is good about the Narnia books is progressively throttled by allegory until we arrive at the final book in the series, The Last Battle, which is positively unpleasant to read.

While his religious thought, and treatment of the Problem of Evil in particular, combine the faux mateyness that George Orwell complained of, with a near thuggishness. It's like reading theology written by Kenneth More.

Notes

1. Having just written this, I came across an essay on Tyger Tale called The Anti-Narnia: Elidor by Alan Garner.

The Box of Delights as a whodunnit and as social history

John Masefield's The Box of Delights is many things, and one of them is a crime novel.

Shedunnit, an excellent podcast on women crime writers, has made a previously subscriber-only episode available to everyone. It looks at The Box of Delights as crime fiction.

Kay Harker, after all, is trying to report a nasty case of scrobbling, but like many amateur detectives in fiction, he finds that the police don't take him seriously.

The podcast emphasises that The Box of Delights is a long book - there's a lot in it that didn't make it into the television adaptation. 

And it suggests that the themes of snow and Christmas were an influence on C.S. Lewis and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

The word 'Scrobbling' was coined by Masefield. A post on Tyger Tale reminds us that:

One of the many pleasures of reading classic Christmas books is the way they open a window into the past in an especially vivid way. More than just present another idealised vision of Victorian festivities, the best of them can highlight the small details and forgotten language of Christmas’s past. As Piers Torday’s delightful stage adaptation reminded me, few books do this more effectively than John Masefield’s The Box of Delights.

The Joy of Six 1181

Alwyn Turner argues that the roots of the Daleks are to be found in the second world war: "That night 165 people were killed, hundreds of houses were destroyed and Llandaff Cathedral was so badly damaged that it was closed for the next 15 months. A couple of hundred yards from the cathedral, ten-year-old Terry Nation was alone in an Anderson shelter. ... He spent that night and many others sheltering from the Luftwaffe’s bombs on his own, reading adventure stories and listening to incongruously cheerful programmes on the radio."

"The Conservatives now have a choice, they’ve even invented a new buzzword ‘headroom’, to describe the leeway they have. They could reject that Faragist populism wholesale and address the problems that confront people every day – food inflation, high rents/mortgages, bus and train cuts, crumbling public buildings – but they actively choose not to." Matthew Pennell says Rishi Sunak has brought with him  bad working practices from the corporate world and transferred them into the public affairs realm.

Municipal Dreams on the London County Council's open-air schools for delicate children.

Rose Staveley-Wadham looks at how the press covered the story during the Loch Ness Monster boom of the 1930s.

"Exploring the Midlands slowly and meticulously on foot also leads to other schemas materialising for dividing up the region. The jokey local name 'Banburyshire' for the uplands, partly in the Cotswolds, in the far south of Warwickshire, south western Northamptonshire and northern Oxfordshire, turns out to have a lot of grounding in topographical fact." Josh Allen introduces his no-cars-required walking guide to the English Midlands.

"Lewis works with analogies all the time – and the older you are of course, the more transparent the analogy.  In some ways, reading Narnia books as an adult makes you actually nostalgic for an age when you saw 'through a glass darkly'." Conrad Brunstrom reread C.S. Lewis's Narnia books during Covid lockdown.

The Joy of Six 1174

"Like a partner in an abusive relationship, the BBC is desperate to be loved by those who despise it and everything it stands for. So, even as this tired and disgraced Government, reeling from a series of catastrophic by-election defeats, is limping timidly towards its reckoning with an increasingly hostile electorate, the BBC’s Director-General felt it necessary to abase himself before its baying backbenchers." Patrick Howse on Tim Davie's self-basement before the 1922 Committee.

Johnny Rich says the government is wrecking its own reforms of technical education.

"Young Deer’s version of the Osage tragedies opened just four months after the January 1926 arrests of William King Hale, Ernest Burkhart and John Ramsey - played by Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tay Mitchell, respectively, in Scorsese’s film - for the horrifying murders of several dozen or more Osage Indians over their oil headrights." Angela Aleiss rediscovers the Native American filmmaker James Young Deer, who first told the story of Killers of the Flower Moon.

Iain Sharpe, who was one of the most interesting Lib Dem voices in the golden age of blogging, has revived his blog Eaten by Missionaries after 11 years. Here he explains why he was away so long.

"One of the things that has always struck me about the Narnia novel is how wildly and recklessly they borrow from other narratives.  Lewis blends together Classical myth with English folklore, adds bits of The Secret Garden and the Gospels, gestures to Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Malory, and sends the reader off to wander through this dazzling landscape." Jem Bloomfield introduces his new book, which untangles the literary roots of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Katy Alston is interviewed about her new map of medieval Ludlow: "I tried to ensure that everything on the map had been researched. For example, I wanted to add boats on the river but didn’t because Ludlow didn’t have a decent boat trade route. It was blocked intermittently and very unreliable. Artists have added trows ( boats) in the past, but this was apparently just artistic licence."