12.17.2013 LEWIS 2

continuing  the biography by a.n. wilson

204 (charles williams dies suddenly)
as one would expect of Wil, for whom the Other Side was quite as real as this world,
he did not o away immediately after he had shuffled off this mortal coil.
at the funeral, in the beautiful cemetery of st cross where so many great oxford figures lie,
Dy remarked, 'it is not blasphemous to believe that what was true of Our Lord
is, in its lesser degree, true of all who are in Him.
they do away in order to be with us in a new way, even closer than before'.
L discovered that 'all that talk about 'feeling that he is closer to us than before'
isn't just talk.
it is just what it does feel like
-i can't put it into words.
one seems at moments to be living in a new world.
lots, lots of pain, but not a particle of depression or resentment'.

(regarding L's book 'miracles')
...any dispassionate reader can at once see many flaws in L's arguments here.
for a start, if his distinction between naturalists and supernaturalists held good
it would have to be demonstrable that the supernaturalists had some specific means of
acquiring their superior knowledge and of explaining it to the naturalist.
much more seriously, there is no need whatsoever to posit a dualistic theory
such as L's in order to 'prove' the existence of God.
theism was not a matter to which ludwig wittgenstein was prepared to devote thought.
'whereof one cannot speak, thereon one must be silent'.
nearly all the philosophers of his generation took as their starting point
the opening sentence of Witt's 'tractatus: 'the world is everything that is the case'.
like all Witt's gnomic sayings, this is open to many interpretations and much reflection,
but it must include the sense that for rational conversations to take place
there must be an agreed set of terms, acceptable to both speakers.
but l failed to see this in chapter three of 'miracles',
and the arguments he proceeds to construct about the existence of God
actually depend on a non christian, dualistic concept of the world
in which Spirit and Matter are separate , and religious truth
-this is the ultimate conclusion of such gnostic argument-only available to initiates.

elizabeth anscombe read 'miracles' when it came out and chose to reply to L's argument in chapter 3
when she was invited to read a paper at the socratic club in early 1948.
the resulting debate instantaneously became legend.
anscombe was a match for l not only in mind but also in personality.
she shared his taste for fisticuffs, for brutality as well as finesse in argument.
she is, as countless stories about her attest, deeply exhibitionistic.
like L, she is a massive physical type.
she was quite equal to the bullying and the exploitation of the audience
to which L restored when he was boxed into a corner.
she could employ analogous techniques herself.
that evening at the socratic club was the first in the society's history
that L was thoroughly trounced in argument.
because A was herself a christian (a catholic convert),
the pious audience could not have the satisfaction of feeling
that L was a defender o the faith against the infidel.
he was merely shown up as a man
who had not come to terms with the way that philosophers since Witt thought.

as a result of his encounter at the socratic club,
L wrote a completely new chapter 3 to 'miracles' for subsequent editions,
dropping a considerable part of his argument, building a new case
and changing the name of the chapter from 'the self contradiction of the naturalist' to
'the cardinal difficulty of naturalism'.
in his willingness not just to revise his thinking but to recast i in writing
he demonstrated a virtue rare among academics.
but there is evidence - discounted by anscombe herself -
that if he found the debate intellectually stimulating
he also  found it emotionally depleting.
he told george sayer that 'his argument for the existence of God had been demolished'.
a few days after the debate, dining with a group of male cronies, he was in a state of near despair.
Dy said, 'very well -now (he had) lost everything and come to the foot of the cross'.

seen from a purely academic perspective this hyperbole makes no sense.
all that had happened, humiliating as it had been at the time,
was that L had been shown to have no competence to debate with a professional philosopher
on her own terms.
an exactly analogous situation would have arisen if a member of the english faculty
had challenged him to conduct a debate about james joyce, of whom he knew next to nothing.
indeed, very similar evidences of L's breezy refusal
to follow what was going on outside his own imaginative world
and his own range of old fashioned reading tastes
were apparent even at the kilns dinner table.
('last night at dinner i mentioned tito's volte face in yugoslavia
where there is a state fostered return to christianity.
i thought J very stupid about thee whole affair and we had talked for a minute or two
before i found out that he was under the impression that tito was the king of greece'.)

what had happened at the socratic club was no mere intellectual brawl, however.
it awakened all sorts of deeply seated fears in L, not leas his fear of women.
once the bullying hero of the hour had been cut down to size,
he became a child, a little boy who was being degraded and shaken
by a figure who, in his imagination, took on witch like dimensions.
he felt that he was arguing so coherently for the existence of that other world
because he had been there himself.
and now here was a grown up who was not convinced by his explanations
of those inner adventures beyond the discernible surface of things.
it was all a little like what had happened to his mother, when as a child in rome,
she had believed she saw a statue moving and none of the grown ups had credited her tale.
ever since his mother had died, L had been in search of her
and the journey which had begun when he first read george macdonald's 'phantastes'
and which had continued through his discovery of great christian literature and wise christian friends,
now chillingly felt as it perhaps it had been a game of make believe.
unless, unless...unless, that is,
tolkien and dyson had been right during their great conversation in addison's walk in 1931;
unless make believe was really another way of talking about the reality of things;
unless the brutal and cerebral way in which grown ups
tried to come to conclusions about the world was not the only way;
unless he could explore the way of 'phantastes'-
in which another world opens up to the dreamer through a piece of bedroom furniture.
the seeds of the firs narnia story were dawning in his mind.
L never attempted to write another work of christian apologetics after 'miracles'.
even though this book and the argumentative works which precede it
-the problem of pain, mere christianity-
remain so vastly popular in the christian world
and continue to sell in christian bookshops,
he came to feel that their method and manner were spurious.
there must be another way 'further up and further in'.

...regarding the chronicles of narnia...'not all his friends liked them.
Tol hated 'th lion, the witch and the wardrobe'.
he regarded it as scrappily put together and not in his sense a 'sub creation';
that is, a coherently made imaginative world.
moreover it was an allegory, a literary form which he never enjoyed.
but presumably, since he was only human, he also felt an element of resentment at L's fluency,
his ability to get a thing done and his increasing attractiveness to publishers.
Tod himself managed to finish 'the lord of the rings' in 1949, after 12 difficult years' work.
it had first been submitted, together with 'the silmarillion',
to the publishers collins, and whether or not it would be published
still remained a matter of great uncertainty.
he showed the completed typescript to L, who, undeterred by Tol's view that narnia 'just won't do',
happily reabsorbed himself in his friend's great work.
when he had finished it, he was effusive in his genuinely felt praise.

but as far as the thursday evenings went, it was the end of the story.
by october 1949 War's diary was recording, 'no one showed up after dinner.
there was still a regular assembly of L's friends on tuesdays at the eagle and child in st giles's' (but that's all).
....

..the hellish responsibility of looking after an alcoholic brother and a furiously senile old woman were to remain with him for another ten months...

...referring to some of the main characters of the chronicles of narnia..
in 'the silver chair', puddleglum, the heroically melancholy marshwiggle,
is a direct portrait, as L acknowledged, of his gardener at the kilns, paxford.
the moment when the witch traps the children underground
and tries to persuade them that there is no world above the ground as they supposed..
characteristically, L places the best speech of reply on the lips of puddleglum himself:

'one word, ma'am...one word.
all you've been saying is quite right, i shouldn't wonder.
i'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face i can see on it.
so i won't deny any of what you said.
but there's one thing more to be said, even so.
suppose we have only dreamed or make up all those things
-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and aslan himself.
suppose we have.
then all i can say is that, in that case, the made up things
seem a good deal more important than the real ones.
suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world.
well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.
and that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it.
we're just babies making up a game, if you're right.
but four babies playing a game can make a play world which licks your real world hollow.
that's why i'm going to stand by the play world.
i'm on aslan's side even if there isn't any aslan to lead it.
i'm going to live as like a narnian as i can even if there isn't any narnia...

'only one of the children from the original quartet is excluded from heaven.  this is susan.
she has committed the unforgivable sin of growing up...

and again, referring to susan....'yes, said eustace, and whenever you've t4ied to get her to
come and talk about narnia or do anything about narnia, she says,
'what wonderful memories you have!
fancy you s5till thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'
'oh, susan! said jill, she's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.
she always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown up'.

...speaking post mortem concerning mrs. moore...
'the real strain of living with minto had not been what War or L's friends thought it was...
the 'cursed fate' was that his relationship with minto forced him into the position, from the very beginning,
of living a lie.
as an undergraduate he had had to conceal his actual living arrangements from his college,
or he would certainly have been sent down from the university.
he also felt hi had to lie to his father, and pretended that he was not living with mrs. moore.
it was during these years that the formula emerged of her being his 'mother' of 'adopted mother'.
but this in itself was artificial, because she was not his mother,
and the relations he had with her were far more intense than those which most men have with their mothers.
whatever the relationship was, it was a closed book to War.

now that she was dead, J was ready to start his life all over again.
the children's books written at this period were more than an imaginative return to his own childhood.
they were a sort of sluicing of the system which,
together with his regular confessions and communions, represented a conversion every bit as deep as
the conversion to a belief in the supernatural and the divinity of Jesus Christ which occurred in 1929-31.
then, it will be remembered, he had no real interest in the traditional teachings or concerns of christianity.
the teachings of st paul, about the cross, about grace, about the forgiveness of sins, meant nothing to him:
he could 'get nothing out of them'.  (evidence from his life?)
the only doctrine of st paul's  which seemed to have 'stuck' at this period
was the rather esoteric one that a man and a woman, having once made love,
whether or not they are married, have become one flesh,
and are therefore bound to one another forever afterwards, through thick or thin.
after he had 'become a christian', the tension of his life with minto therefore became all the more pronounced.
he was having to live with her in a way which would conceal, even from War,
whatever had once been 'sinful' in the relationship.
no wonder all his friends found that relationship totally baffling.
no wonder, too, that he developed the habit of never discussing personal matters,
never seeming, when in the company of male friends, even to have a personal life.

shuffling off the guilt and relief which came at the time of his father's death,
L had felt (in his mystical experience on the bus on headington hill)
as though 'some stiff clothing, like corsets or even a suit of armour, as if i were a lobster'
were being removed from him.
in his second and more radical, phase of conversion, twenty and more years after the first,
L began to feel for the first time that he knew what was meant by the grace and forgiveness of God.
in june 1951, he wrote to sister penelope at wantage:

'i specially need your prayers because i am (like the pilgrim in bunyan)
travelling across 'a plain called Ease'.
everything without and many things within, are marvellously well at present.
indeed (i do not know whether to be more ashamed or joyful in confessing it)
i realise that until about a month ago i never really believed (tho' i thought i did) in God's forgiveness.

regarding his thinking about marriage before and coming into the time of his own with joy gresham...
'my own view, he had said in his broadcast talk, is that the church should frankly recognise
that the majority of british people are not christians and therefore cannot be expected to live christian lives.
there ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage:
one governed by the church with rules enforced by her on her own members.
the distinction ought to be sharp, so that a man knows which couples are
married in a christian sense and which are not'. (note: why don't we do that in america?!...and the world!!!)

this is a wildly unhistorical, untheological and impractical suggestion.
by what possible criterion could 'a man' - or, come to that, a woman -distinguish between such marriages?
for most of the history of the church, marriages did not happen within the church building.
they were civil contracts sealed at the church door.
one thinks of the wife of bath with her 'housbondes at chirche doore i hadde five'.
even when marriage was raised to the dignity of a sacrament
by the medieval western church (largely to make up the number of the sacraments to the magical seven),
it was never suggested that the church or the priest made the marriage.
the ministers of this particular 'sacrament' are the man and the woman who perform it;
and in this sense any marriage, in catholic teaching, is a marriage.
a marriage between a pair of hindus or a pair of modern secular agnostics is still,
in orthodox christian thinking, a marriage.
by L's argument, agnostic married couples who subsequently became christians
would presumably have to get 'remarried' in a church.
this suggests a profound spit in his thinking,
not only about the relationship between flesh and spirit, but also about
the relationship between christianity and what he called the Tao.
Tol,in a lengthy and excellently argued critique of L's 'Christian Marriage' idea,
goes to the heart of the matter when he pounces on L's analogy
'i should be very angry if the mahommedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine'.
so, l concludes by extension, christians should not make it difficult for non christians to divorce
(note: the position reflected in I corinthians 7.12-15)
this is, as Tol says, 'a most stinking red herring:
(something intended to divert attention from the real problem or issue at hand)
'no item of compulsory christian morals is valid only for christians...
toleration of divorce-if a christina does tolerate it-is toleration of a human abuse
...and wrong behaviour (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always:
it never stops at being 'not very good', 'second best'
-it either reforms or goes on to third rate, bad, abominable.'

on the question of divorce, when he was considering it on a purely cerebral level,
L  had failed to face up to the dilemma.
either Christ, in condemning it (as the gospels say He did),
was uttering a universal moral law, binding for everybody
-in which case a christian cannot believe in 'divorce for non christians'
any more than he can believe in theft for non-christians.
(note: hogwash...unless the people have all previously decided to be bound in a theocracy..
all other systems are gradations away from a uniform application of God's law to all people)
-or it is not a universal law that divorce is in all circumstances wrong.
this is the view that, over the years, various christian denominations have worked towards..

not so for L, with his two tier view of marriage.
he, in any case, belonged to a church which, in spit of being famed for its
wishy washy laodicean approach to the faith, has historically
some of the strictest marriage laws of any denomination in christendom...
(author notes current to time of writing...this standard is changing)...

L must have discussed the matter with his friend austin farrer,
whose views would, roughly speaking, have coincided with those of Tol.
farrer, in all his moral thinking..would have no truck
either with the idea of two tier marriages or with the legality of christian divorce.
but both as a friend and as a priest..(served as a witness to his marriage to joy.)..

...L was by now in a tremendous muddle.
at some stage he had been to see havard (his doctor)-
and ..to ask whether he would be well advised to undertake conjugal duties.
after due examination and consideration, Hav decided that his patient,
though at 58 a little heavy and rather prone to high blood pressure,
could risk the excitements of an erotic life if he took things gently.
but with another part of himself, L was reassuring War
that the marriage was simply a matter of convenience,
to get joy a permit to stay in england.
'there were never two people alive in the history of the world', douglas gresham has said
about his mother and step father, 'more in love than J and joy'.
what was L to do?
his belief in the status of these second tier marriages by the state was now put to the test.
were he and Jo married in the eyes of God or were they not?
if God had joined them together, then there was no reason why they sould be put asunder
and his enquiries in Hav's consulting room could cease to be of purely academic concern.
but there was a lingering doubt.
though he continued to see her every day and though joy confided in her brother
that J was a wonderful lover,
the fiction was maintained that she was mrs gresham and he was merely an ami de la maison
calling each afternoon or evening and often not getting home until after 11.
 only a very few of his friends, like the farrers, were even let into the secret that he was married;
this reticence caused bewilderment and resentment among old friends like Tol and Dy when
-as inevitably happened - the news leaked out.

what on earth did J think he was playing at?
his behaviour during that summer was exuberant and strange
'the most precious gift that marriage gave me, he wrote when it was all over,
was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant -
in a word, real.
this sense of reality, which involved not only a sense of self discovery, but also a readjustment
o what he thought about god and hence about everything else,
was something which had been developing through all the previous year
and is reflected in the novel he wrote now and dedicated to joy:
'till we have faces'.
with a large part of himself L did not want things to go any further.
for the first time in his life, he was enjoying a unique combination of pleasures.
he was happy in his academic work and enjoying the company of his colleagues.
at home,all was peace.
in september he had a very happy holiday on his own in ireland.
he told Gre about Jo and about the civil marriage...
he did not take Jo's aches and pains, reported at intervals over the summer,
any more seriously than he took his own.
when (havard) was consulted,
he gave it as his opinion that she was suffering from fibrositis.

he went back to cambridge at the beginning of october,
ready for another happy round of lectures punctuated by long delicious days in his college rooms.
no undergraduate here would knock at his door or read him an essay beginning 'jonathan swift was born...
but on 19 october he received a telephone call to say
that Jo's rheumatic pains had been investigated at the wingfield orthopedic hospital  in headington.
the call was from havard, whom he went to see as soon as he could get back to oxford.
preliminary x rays had revealed that Jo had broken her left thigh bone
and that she had a lump on her breast.

he went to see her.
she was plucky and good humoured.
jokes were inevitably made about (havard)
but there was a problem of much more practical concern.
she had entered the hospital as mrs gresham, an american citizen.
as mrs c.s. L, of course, she could have claimed free treatment on the National Health,
but her true marital status was still a secret.
L was prepared to pay the bill - but that was not the point.
what was now at issue was whether he was prepared to acknowledge as his wife
the woman he loved and who might, for all they knew, be suffering from a mortal illness.
they did not have to wait long.
she was moved half a mile down the road to the churchill hospital...
used ever since (world war II) as a cancer hospital for oxford's residents.
the biopsy revealed that her tumour was indeed malignant and her chances of survival were
as War said, 'put at evens'.
'i have never loved her more than since she was struck down', he added.
'her pluck and her cheerfulness are beyond praise, and she talks of her disease and its fluctuations
as if she were describing the experiences of a friend of hers'.

on 14 november, J wrote to one of the many correspondents whom he had never met,
'i wish you would pray very hard for a lady called Jo ..and me...
i am shortly to be both a bridegoom and a widower, for she has cancer.
you need not mention this till the marriage
(which will be at the hospital bedside if it occurs).
this positively wagnerian blend of love and death could not, however,
be accomplished without L's flying in the face of his own church.

he went to see harry carpenter, the bishop of oxford....(who) was a fairly old fashioned high churchman
(who was) quite as clear in his mind as archbishop fisher and princess margaret
had been in theirs when faced with a parallel dilemma.

'mindful of the church's teachings',
as they then stood, he said that there was no possibility
of allowing mrs gresham, a divorced woman, to be given a church marriage.
the fact that her bridegroom was a famous christian apologist made the case all the more impossible,
for the marriage would undoubtedly attract publicity
and if it should be known that it had received the bishop's sanction,
he would have been flooded with requests by couples in similar positions,
anxious to bend the rules to fit their own particular cases.
L left the bishop's house in a state of very great anger.
austin farrer, as an obedient priest in carpenter's diocese,
could not oblige his friend by performing the ceremony.
it was not a matter of charity;
it was a matter of canon law.
such a marriage would simply be illegal.
but L was by now desperate that Jo should be able to come home - that is, to the kilns -to die,
and he wanted her to do so 'without scandal'.
the irony is that if they had been roman catholics, it would almost certainly have been possible
by roman canon law for them to be united in the eyes of the church.
in his near despair, he looked to the church to fulfill a higher law, the law of love,
and he felt that he was having the door slammed in his face.

several months went by and Jo's condition was visibly deteriorating.
since no help was at hand from any of his normal circle of friends,
L turned to an acquaintance of 20 years' standing called peter bide...
L asked him to intercede for Jo and to lay hands on her.
he also put to bide their dilemma about the illegality of a marriage service.
'joy's first marriage (had been) to an already divorced man
and therefore in the eyes of the church, no marriage was possible'...
for the church to deny their request for marriage was now
'to try to have your cake and eat it'.
father bide agreed.
'Jo desperately wanted to solemnize her marriage before God
and to claim the grace of the sacrament before she died', he wrote afterwards:
a statement which more than implies that Jo, since her register office marriage,
had dutifully excommunicated herself.
'it did not seem to me in the circumstances possible to refuse her
the outward and visible sign of grace which she so ardently desired
and which might lead to a peaceful end to a fairly desperate situation'.

on 21 march, the doctors pronounced the death sentence
and said that Jo's condition was beyond hope of recovery.
at 11 a.m. War accompanied J to Jo's ward at the churchill.
there was only one other witness - the ward sister.
bide said mass and gave holy communion to those present.
War knew that 'to feel pity for anyone so magnificently brave as Jo is almost an insult',
but her eagerness for 'the pitiable consolation of dying under the same roof as J (was ) heartrending'.
the two of them made their vows,'as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement
when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed'...

...interlaced with such strange ideas, there are sentences in 'the four loves'
of memorable wisdom and calm common sense.
'say your prayers in the garden early, ignoring steadfastly
the dew, the birds and the flowers and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy;
go there to be overwhelmed and after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you
...affection almost slinks or seeps through our lives.
it lives with humble, un dress, private things: soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes,
the thump of a sleepy dog's tail on the kitchen floor,
the sound of a sewing machine, a golliwog left on the lawn'.
it is for paragraphs such as this that one remembers the book with gratitude...

'if we cannot 'practise the presence of God',
it is something to be able to practise the absence of God,
to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like
a man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise
or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there,
or a man in  a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch.

...L did indeed have a wide range;
his examples in 'studies in words' are chosen from all over the library
and, as so often in his writings, he makes us long to read the books he quotes..
there is, in all his paragraphs, the stimulating sense of a lively intelligence at work,
prepared to look up from his books and talk in an intelligible way to anyone who will listen.
and there is such common sense in what he writes...
above all from the idea that language is always to be mixed up with the thing it attempts to signify.
'statements about crime are not criminal language;
nor are statements about emotions necessarily emotional language
...';it is not cancer after all'
'the germans have surrendered'
'i love you' - may all be true statements about matter of fact.
and of course it is the facts, not the language, that arouse the emotion'.

282... L's natural reaction to any experience was to write it up or down.
as he had discovered, with a mixture of joyful shock and embarrassment
('what an ass i have been'),
this often led to a curious effect of unreality, as in the case of his over eager desire to defend
religious positions which he had  really only fallen in love with from the outside,
before learning what it was like to LIVE them.
'a grief observed', in its shooting stabs of pain, its yelps of despair, its tear
its emotional zig zagging, bears testimony to just such a shattering.
there can be no doubt that it was written from the heart.
in its very scrappiness, it is far truer than the apparently cohesive 'surprised y joy' of 5 years earlier.

he confronts, in the experience of grief, some of the most fundamental questions a man can ever ask.
he does so, not without flinching, for one of the endlessly appealing things about the book
is its admission of hear,
its willingness to lay hurt bare, but without fudging.
in marriage he recognized that
he had been 'forced out of (his) shell'.
was he now doomed to crawl back, or to be sucked back into it?
one of the reasons for keeping the notebooks
was to keep alive that newborn self that Jo had nursed into being,
a tender and more vulnerable self.
but how could he do so, without either indulging in morbid displays of emotion
or making Jo into a sanctified figure which she was not?
he recognized quite truthfully that she was 'rather a battle axe'.
it had been more than he had ever dared to admit about minto (or about his own mother?)

but the truth telling was excruciatingly painful.
the boys, as he realized,m found him embarrassing.
he saw in their faces the same feelings as he and War had had about the P'daytabird
in the weeks after his own mother died.
he seemed, according to douglas gresham,
'incapable of understanding that if he kept on talking about my mother,
i was going to burst into tears - what embarrassed me was that fear'.
presumably one of the things which makes 'a grief observed' such a consoling and helpful book to
thousands of bereaved people is that L knew by instinct
what is now a commonplace of bereavement counselling,
that grief must be expressed and lived through.
his whole life had been warped by his failure to express grief for his mother.
ever  since that disastrous day in august 1908, he had been buttoned up.
perhaps even the release caused by loving Jo was not enough to melt him;
it was in losing here that the essential work of healing mysteriously began.
he had to weep.
sometimes, if a person mentioned Jo in his presence, he would burst into uncontrollable tears.
only once, even so, could he bring himself to comfort the boys physically.
one day when douglas was crying, L came and hugged him
and they stood there for some moments crying together.
thereafter they found it easier to talk to each other....

..now beaten down into a position of absolute honesty, he faced a much more terrible thought
than the facile idea that God was really a projection of his father.
what, instead, if the reactions of irritation and disgust
which he had foisted on the unfortunate Albert lewis
were really emotions more properly reserved for his heavenly Father?
total unbelief flickered across his consciousness
-'go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain
and what do you find?
a door slammed in your face and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.
after that, silence."
but his imagination could not absorb the idea of no-God.
instead, with promethean courage, he faced a more dreadful alternative.
'fate (or whatever it is) delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it.
beethoven went deaf.
by our standards a mean joke; the monkey trick of a spiteful imbecile.'.
if God is all powerful and if He made the world in which we suffer,
what other alternative can there be?
in his beethoven example, the crucial phrase is BY OUR STANDARDS...

..concerning L's book 'an experiment in criticism'...
the Experiment was not to replace one sort of literary evaluation with another
but to abandon evaluative literary criticism altogether.

'can i honestly and strictly speaking, say with any confidence that my appreciation
of any scene, chapter, stanza or line
has been improved by my reading of aristotle, dryden, johnson, lessing, coleridge, arnold..pater or bradley?
i am not sure that i can...
it is always better to read chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.

this seems like common sense today,
but in the cambridge of 1960 it was explosive stuff.
l proposed that instead of dividing books and authors into 'good' and 'bad' on the say so of critics,
we should judge literature by the way we read it.
the duty of reading, as well as its pleasure,
was, he believed, in submission to what the author actually intended.
'we seek an enlargement of our being.
we want to be more than ourselves'.
books which compel us to re read them frequently,
to be attentive to their exact wording and style,
books which CANNOT be read as non literary people read trash,
will always emerge and remain as the great books.
the advantage of L's approach is that it need not give way
either to snobbery (pretending we like books which happen to be fashionable)
or to inverted snobbery (in the way that L's temptation was to see more merit in captain marryat
than in t.s. eliot).
it does not really matter what judgement we pass on a book.
what matters is not what we do to the book
but what the book does to us.

the Experiment ends with one of the finest paragraphs in the whole L oeuvre:

'literary experience heals the wound,
without undermining the privilege, of individuality.
there are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege.
in them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub individuality.
but IN READING GREAT LITERATURE I BECOME A THOUSAND MEN
AND YET REMAIN MYSELF.
like a night sky in the greek poen, i see with a myriad eyes,
but it is still i who see.
here, as in worship, in love, in moral action and in knowing,
i transcend myself;
and am never more myself than when i do'.

when it appeared posthumouly, j.r.r. Tol was repelled by 'letters to malcolm',
finding in it precisely the attitude which L professed to find distasteful in his grandparents
-'cosily at ease in zion'.
among a lot of criticisms which seem wide of the mark, To managed to score some very palpable hits,
most notably when he said that the Letters were not 'about prayer' but 'about L praying'.
in the same way it could be said the 'An Experiment..is not about literature
but about L reading,
and 'A Grief..is candidly, though anonymously, what its title says it is.
doubtless if 'Letters..were being offered to us as a manual of prayer,
a substitute for st francois de sales or william law,
Tol's objection would be only proper.
but a taste for L is, in large part, a taste for reading about him. (?)
though it was denied him to become a great poet,
he shares with 'the last Romantics'
a vivid awareness of his ow consciousness,
a sense that the chief end of writing is to communicate sensation and experience.
a high proportion of L's oeuvre when properly considered
can be found to be of the same kind as wordsworth's 'Prelude', a book which was always very dear to him.
what the catholic Tol found distasteful
-in particular the inference drawn from Malcolm that
an 'unqualified' protestant layman might take upon himself a teaching office
in a matter so delicate as to how we should pray
-was precisely what l would have felt justified  his position as a writer.
he disclaimed the role of directeur,
which was why he framed his book in the form of fictitious letters to the invented figure of malcolm,
who has apparently (his letters are not attempted) been hitting back, barfield style,
at chinks in L's armour.
at the same time, he was not frightened of soliloquy, either as a literary mode
or as a means of discovering or conveying religious truth,
as he made plain by quoting one of his own poems, pretending that the identity of the author was unknown..

'they tell me, Lord, that when i seem
to be in speech with You,
since but one voice is heard, its all a dream,
one talker aping two.

sometimes it is, yet not as they
conceive it. rather, i
seek in myself the things i hoped to say,
but lo! my wells are dry.

the, seeing me empty, You forsake
the listener's role and through
my dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake
the thoughts i never knew.

and thus You neither need reply
nor can; thus, while we seem
two talkers, Thou art one forever, and i
no dreamer, but Thy dream.

'Dream, adds L the critic,  makes it too like pantheism and was perhaps dragged in for the rhyme.
but is he not right in thinking that prayer in its most perfect state is a soliloquy?
(utterance or discourse by a person who is talking to himself)
if the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God.
but the human petitioner does not therefore become a'dream'.

maybe not a dream.
but there remains a sense in which all ROMANTIC writers (..in the sense of  POST WORDWORTHIANs
who make themselves and their own sensations the subject of their work)
are difficult to pin down.
there are those who, discerning that L, like yeats, worked by assuming a number of masks,
have come to the conclusion that there was something bogus about him;
that either in his literary attitudes or his bluff conservatism or his religious faith
he was 'putting it on'.
this misjudgement of l surely  stems from a mistaken view of how anything comes o be written
or possibly even perceived.
just as, all those years ago, Tol and Dy drew L into christianity
by making him see that it was truth told by means of story,
so himself as a writer is so constantly accessible and interesting
because he is unashamed of the story telling element in all literary modes.
it is not a Lie to recognize that literature itself is unnatural.
so, having tried to write a straight book on prayer and found in the early 1950s that he had to abandon it.
in Malcolm he found the perfect mode.
it was almost certainly suggested by reading rose macaulay's 'real' 'letters to a friend'
a correspondence with her former confessor
and largely taken up with spiritual matters.
but the fact that the mode is only a mode does not mean that the content of Malcolm is bogus,
any more than the semifictionalized pattern of A grief observed should make us suppose
that he did not really go through the experience of bereavement.

a failure to understand the kind of writer L was
-a Romantic egoist in the tradition of wordsworth and yeats-
has led to two of the grosser extreme among those expressing views about him since his death.
(and similar extremes are noticeable among those who love or loathe Words and Y).
on the one hand there are those who would dismiss all three..as mere poseurs,
shallow men pretending to be deep, mortals putting on immortal masks.
this view must be false
-in L's case-
because every single piece of biographical evidence which exists supports the opposite point of view.
in love, in friendship and above all in religion
there can be no doubt of his passionate sincerity.


on the other hand there are those readers
who are so uplifted by the sublimity of L at his best as a writer
that they assume that he was himself a sublime being, devoid of blemishes.
readers of this kind either ignore L's faults altogether
and attribute any mention of them to some ulterior motive (possibly anti religious)
on behalf of the speaker,
or-oddest of all to neutral observers who perhaps haven't read much L
of made up their minds about him
-they acknowledge the faults but wish to make them into virtues.
we suddenly find ourselves in an uncongenial world where a bullying, hectoring technique in public debate
is held up as a courageous defence of the faith,
or spells of club room misogyny are taken as evidence of holy celibacy.

all this seems a pity because it dehumanizes a man who was not posing
when he described his wife and himself
as 'a sinful woman married to a sinful man;
two of God's patients, not yet cured'.
if we ignore the kind of man l was, in our anxiety
to dismiss him as a fraud or canonize him as a plaster saint,
we miss the unmistakable and remarkable evidence of something like sanctification
which occurred in him towards the end of his days.
the suffering which smashed him up and made him so vulnerable did not destroy his faith.
now did it destroy the kind of man he was.
he went on being a red faced ulsterman,
he continued to smoke and drink heavily,
his aesthetic tastes remained much the same
-that is to say broad.
he never did see the point in Gre's fondness for proust;
but nor could you ever classify L as a man who 'only liked' fantasy,or epic poems, or e. nesbit,
much as he liked all three.
a fortnight before his death, he was reading 'les liaisons dangereuses'
and writing to a colleague at magdalene, cambridge -'Wow what a book!
come to lunch of friday (fish) and tell me about it'.