C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

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Bibliographical details
The Allegory of Love / A study in Medieval Tradition / By / C.S. Lewis M.A. // [Multa renascentur quae jan cecidere, cadentque / Quae nunc sunt in honore] / Oxford 1936 [ded. To Owen Barfield / wisest and best / of my / unofficial teachers.] CONTENTS: I. Courtly Lover; II. Allegory; III. The Romance of the Rose; IV. Chaucer; V. Gower; Thomas Usk; VI. Allegory as the Dominant Form; VII The Faerie Queene. Appendix I
Appendix II. [See extracts, under Quotations, infra].

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955) [ded. Dom Bede Griffiths, OSB]. CONTENTS [Chap. titles]: Peace; The First years; Concentration Camp; Muntbracken and Campbell; I Broaden my Mind; Renaissance; Bloodery; Light and Shade; Release; The Great Knock; Fortune’s Smile; Check; Guns and Good Company; The New Look; Checkmate; The Beginning. [No extracts available.]

The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles 1942), 160pp. [ded. to J. R. R. Tolkien]; 9 reprints, Feb.-Dec. 1942; 3 reps. 1943; 2 reps. 1944; 3 reps. 1945; 3 reps. March-Sept. 1946; printed by Unwin Bros., Woking; lists as by same author, The Pilgrim’s Regress; Out of the Silent Planet; The Problem of Pain; Broadcast Talks; Christian Behaviourt; Beyond Personality; The Great Divorce.

Epigraph: ‘The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to text of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.’ (Luther.) ‘The devill ... the prowde spirit ... can endure to be mocked.’ (Thomas More.) Pref. dated 5 July, 1941. (See further under Quotations, infra.)

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Commentary
Robert Greacen, review of Ronald W. Bresland, The Backward Glance: C. S. Lewis and Ireland (1999), in Books Ireland (Feb. 2000), pp.20-21: quotes Nevill Coghill’s account of Lewis, reflecting similarities between Lewis and his literary hero Dr Samuel Johnson: ‘thick set, full fleshed, deep-voiced, learned, rough, golden-hearted, flattening in dispute, a notable bit, kindly affectioned with a great circle of friends, some of them men of genius like Tolkien, untidy, virtuous, devoted to a wife untimely lost … a Tory and a High Church man. Could anyone since Dr Johnson be so described except Jack Lewis?’ Further, Greacen quotes Lewis on his own antecedents, his father of Welsh extraction ( ‘true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate and rhetorical, readily moved to anger and to tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much talent for happiness’), whom he believed himself to more closely resemble than his mother, a Hamilton (’a cooler race’ that had “the talent for happiness in a high degree’). Greacen comments at some length on the snobbish class divisions within the Belfast middle class. Coghill, a nephew of Edith Somerville, helped Lewis to publish his long narrative poem “Dymer” in London and remained a life-long friend.

Anne Fogarty cites C. S. Lewis to the effect that The Faerie Queene is the ‘work of one who is turning into an Irishman’ (Fogarty, ‘The Colonization of Language: Narrative Strategies in A View of the Present State of Ireland and The Faerie Queene, Book VI’, in Patricia Coughlan, ed., Spenser in Ireland [ ... &c.] , Cork UP 1989; quoting p.76.)

Stephen Medcalf, review of Don W. King, C. S. Lewis, Poet (Kent State UP): Medcalf writes, ‘If pressed, I should say that Adam’s Curse is about what C. S. Lewis describes in his allegory of Love as “the kind and degree of incarnation and embodiment which we can safely give to the spiritual’, and further quotes Lewis’s view that by and large, Catholics suspect “that all spiritual gifts are falsely claimed if they cannot be embodied in bricks and mortar, or official positions, or institutions”, while Protestants think that “nothing retains its spirituality if incarnation is pushed to that degree and in that way”. Also quotes a poem by Lewis on the Incarnation: “Master, they say that when I seem / To be in speech with you, / Since you make no replies, it’s all a dream /-One talker aping two. // They are half right, but not as they / Imagine; rather, I / Seek in myself the things I mean to say, / And lo! the words are dry. // And thus you neither need reply / Nor can; thus, while we seem / Two talking, thou art One forever, and I / No dreamer, but thy dream.’ Also cites the poem chosen by Larkin for Oxford Book of Verse, “On a Vulgar Error”: ‘No. It’s an impudent falsehood. Men did not / Invariably think a newer way / Prosaic, mad, inelegant, or what not. / Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot / Upon the church? Did anybody say / How modern and how ugly? They did not.’ Remarks that the novel Till We have Faces is ‘the autobiography of a woman who only realises at the end of her life that her whole figuration of reality has been flawed from its foundation by jealousy of her sister and the god who has taken her away.’

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Quotations

Allegory of Love (1936) - “Courtly Love” [Chap. 1]: ‘The allegorical love poetry of the Middle Ages is apt to repel the modern reader both by its form and by its matter. The form, which is that of a struggle between personified abstractions, can hardly be expected to appeal to an age which holds that “art means what it says” or even that art is meaningless - for it is essential to this form that the literal narrative and the significacio should be separable. As for the matter, what have we to do with these medieval lovers - “servants” or “prisoners” they called themselves - who seem to be always weeping and always on their knees before ladies of inflexible cruelty? The popular erotic literature of our own day tends rather to sheikhs and “Salvage Men” and marriage by capture, while that which is in favour with our intellectuals recommends either frank animalism or the free companionship of the sexes. In every way, if we have not outgrown, we have at least grown away from, the Romance of the Rose. The study of this whole tradition may seem, at first sight, to be but one more example of that itch for “revival”, that refusal to leave any corpse ungalvanized, which is among the more distressing accidents of scholarship. But such a view would be superficial. Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still. Neither the form nor the sentiment of this old poetry has passed away without leaving indelible traces on our minds. We shall understand our present, and perhaps even our future, the better if we can succeed, by an effort of the historical imagination, in reconstructing that long-lost state of mind for which the allegorical love poem was a natural mode of expression. But we shall not [2] be able to do so unless we begin by carrying our attention back to a period long before that poetry was born. In this and the following chapter, I shall trace in turn the rise both of the sentiment called “Courtly Love” and of the allegorical method. The discussion will seem, no doubt, to carry us far from our main subject: but it cannot be avoided. / Every one has heard of courtly love, and every one knows that it appears quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in Languedoc. The characteristics of the Troubadour poetry have been repeatedly described. [...]’ (pp.1-2.) [Cont.]

Allegory of Love (1936) - “Courtly Love” [Chap. 1] - cont.: ‘[...] The new thing itself, I do not pretend to explain. Real changes in human sentiment are very rare - there are perhaps three or four on record - but I believe that they occur, and that this is one of them. I am not sure that they have ‘causes’, if by a cause we mean something which would wholly account for the new state of affairs, and so explain away what seemed its novelty. It is, at any rate, certain that the efforts of scholars have so far failed to find an origin for the content of Provençal love poetry. Celtic, Byzantine, and even Arabic influence have been suspected; but it has not been made clear that these, if granted, could account for the results we see. A more promising theory attempts to trace the whole thing to Ovid; but this view - apart from the inadequacy which I suggested above - finds itself faced with the fatal difficulty that the evidence points to a much stronger Ovidian influence in the north of France than in the south. Something can be extracted from a study of the social conditions in which the new poetry arose, but not so much as we might hope. [...; 12] But if we abandon the attempt to explain the new feeling, we can at least explain - indeed we have partly explained already - the peculiar form which it first took; the four marks of Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love. To account for the humility we need no more than has already been said. Before the coming of courtly love the relation of vassal and lord, in all its intensity and warmth, already existed; it was a mould into which romantic passion would almost certainly be poured. [12] And if the beloved were also the feudal superior the thing becomes entirely natural and inevitable. The emphasis on courtesy results from the same conditions. It is in courts that the new feeling arises: the lady, by her social and feudal position, is already the arbitress of manners and the scourge of ‘villany’ even before she is loved. The association of love with adultery - an association which has lasted in continental literature down to our own times - has deeper causes. In part, it can be explained by the picture we have already drawn; but there is much more to be said about it than this. Two things prevented the men of that age from connecting their ideal of romantic and passionate love with marriage.

[Cont.] The first is, of course, the actual practice of feudal society. [....]The second factor is the medieval theory of marriage - what may be called, by a convenient modern barbarism, the ‘sexology’ of the medieval church. A nineteenth-century Englishman felt that the same passion - romantic love - could be either virtuous or vicious according as it [13] was directed towards marriage or not. But according to the medieval view passionate love itself was wicked, and did not cease to be wicked if the object of it were your wife. If a man had once yielded to this emotion he had no choice between ‘guilty’ and ‘innocent’ love before him: he had only the choice, either of repentance, or else of different forms of guilt.’ (pp.12-14.) [Cont.]

Allegory of Love (1936) - “Courtly Love” [Chap. 1] - cont.: ‘[...] Before we proceed to examine two important expressions of courtly love, I must put the reader on his guard against a necessary abstraction in my treatment of the subject. I have spoken hitherto as if men first became conscious of a new emotion and then invented a new kind of poetry to express it: as if the Troubadour poetry were necessarily ‘sincere’ in the crudely biographical sense of the word: as if convention played no part in literary history. My excuse for this procedure must be that a full consideration of such problems belongs rather to the theory of literature in general than to the history of one kind of poem: if we admit them, our narrative will be interrupted in every chapter by almost metaphysical digressions. For our purpose it is enough to point out that life and letters are inextricably intermixed. If the feeling came first a literary convention would soon arise to express it: if the convention came first it would soon teach those who practised it a new feeling. It does not much matter what view we hold provided we avoid that fatal dichotomy which makes every poem either an autobiographical document or a ‘literary exercise’ - as if any poem worth writing were either the one or the other. We may be quite sure that the poetry which initiated all over Europe so great a change of heart was not a ‘mere’ convention: we can be quite as sure that it was not a transcript of fact. It was poetry.’ (p.22; end chap.; for longer extracts from this chapter, see attached.) Note epigraph of Chap. 1: ‘When in the world I lived I was the world’s commander’ —Shakespeare.

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Screwtape Letters (1942) - cont.: ‘When two human beings have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother’s eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery and let him know how much he dislikes it.’ (Letter III; p.22.) [For longer extracts, see attached.]

Magdalen/Magdalene: on being offered the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, Lewis said: “I think I shall like Magdalene better than Magdalen. It’s a tiny college (a perfect cameo architecturally) and they’re all so old-fashioned and pious, and gentle and conservative - unlike this leftist, atheist, cynical, hard-boiled, huge Magdalene. Perhaps from being the fogey and “old woman” here I shall become the enfant terrible there.’ (Quoted in Robert Greacen, “Ulstermen Unspancelled’, review of Ronald W. Bresland, The Backward Glance: C. S. Lewis and Ireland in Books Ireland Feb. 2000, p.20-21.)

W. B. Yeats: ‘Yeats believed his “ever-living ones” were not merely feigned or merely desired. He really thought that there was a world of beings more or less like them, and that contact between that world and ours was possible. [...] I now learned that there were people, not traditionally orthodox, who nevertheless rejected the whole Materialist philosophy out of hand.’ (Surprised by Joy, p.141; quoted in Terence Brown, ‘Louis MacNeice’s Ireland’, Brown & Nicholas Grene, eds., Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Irish Poetry, London: Macmillan 1989, pp.79-96; p.89.)

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References

Frank Ormsby, ed., Northern Windows: An Anthology of Ulster Autobiography (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1987), contains an extract from Surprised by Joy (1966 edn., here pp.65-78).

British Library lists 302 titles since 1972 (incl. translations) - see attached.

Books in Print (1994): Out of the Silent Planet (London: J. Lane 1938.) Perelandra [later issued as Voyage to Venus] (London: J. Cape 1943.) That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (J. Lane 1945.) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (London: Geoffrey Bles 1950; Puffin 1959) [1st of the Narnia Quartet]; Prince Caspian, The Return to Narnia (London: Geoffrey Bles 1951.) The Silver Chair (London: Geoffrey Bles 1953.) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London: Geoffrey Bles 1952; Puffin 1965), all ill. Pauline Baynes; The Magician’s Nephew (London: Bodley Head 1955; Puffin 1963.) The Last Battle (London: Geoffrey Bles 1956; Puffin 1964.) Till We Have Faces (London: Geoffrey Bles 1956) [Note transcription errors in non-English typography.]

Peter Ellis (Cat. 10; 2002) lists Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast (London: Geoffrey Bles 1961) [£65]; also A Note on Jane Austen ([Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1954]), 13 pp. offprint from Essays in Criticism; printed on rectos only; copy of Owen Barlfield [£250].

Peter Harrington Books (Cat. 2005) lists C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle: A Story for Children (London: Bodley Head [1st edn.,; 1st imp.; £1,800] . Also, ex. lib. C. S. Lewis, W. J. B. Crotch, The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton (Early Eng. Texts Soc.; OUP 1928), 1st edn., imp.; signature [£950]

Belfast Central Public Library holds 12 titles.

Notes
Corrig.: it is somewhere recorded that C. S. Lewis was born in North Belfast, later moving to the east of the city with his family; corrected [as infra] by Dr. John Gillespie (Univ. of Ulster).

Surprised by Joy: The title-phrase of Lewis’s autobiography and testimony to his love for Joy Davidman Gresham, derives from the sonnet of 1815 by William Wordsworth:

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