XIV

 

Personal Writer of the Sixties:

Reason and Imagination United

THE shift in Lewis’s emphases and ideas in the late 1940s, which led to a reconciliation of reason and imagination, is evident in his works of the early 1960s, the last few years of Lewis’s life. It is apparent first in Lewis’s literary criticism, where his willingness to take the self and subjectivity into account leads to new approaches and attitudes in his later work. It is even more apparent in his writings on personal and Christian topics. Lewis wrote no fiction after Till We Have Faces, but he began to direct his creative abilities toward the development of forms which would unite imagination and reason in treating personal and Christian topics. The results, in A Grief Observed and Letters to Malcolm, are among the most creative and impressive of Lewis’s career.

            Although An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis’s most important critical work of the sixties,¹ is primarily a response to evaluative criticism, the sort of criticism which regards it as important to separate “good” or “worthwhile” books from the others,² it is also a book about reading: the “experiment” is, instead of judging people’s literary taste by evaluating the books they read, to try judging books by the way people read them: “If all went ideally well we should end by defining good literature as that which permits, invites, or even compels good reading; and bad, as that which does the same for bad reading” (p. 104). The contrast between the approach and attitude here and in “The Personal Heresy” shows the extent to which Lewis’s thinking had shifted over the years. [< p. 163]

            The emphasis in “The Personal Heresy” was on the object, and on reading as a quasi-mechanical process of absorbing the objects presented by the author. The personalities of author and reader were to be disengaged, in good reading, so that private images or overtones would not distort the universality of the things or ideas the author was depicting. Lewis’s intention was to remove as far as possible the subjective element in writing (the writer should imitate universals) and in reading (the reader should simply look through the author’s eyes at the universals the author was imitating). In keeping with his heavy emphasis on objectivism philosophically, and his avoidance of attention to the self, he advocated an objective, depersonalized approach to literature.

            Two decades later one finds a good deal of Lewis’s critical energy being directed toward the act of reading. That is the starting point in a chapter of a proposed book, written sometime after 1957: it begins, “There are more ways than one of reading old books,” and goes on to compare them and argue for the advantages of a historical approach.³ His essay on “Metre” asks not “which analysis . . . is ‘true’ but which is the most useful” within the “different and defensible ways of reading poetry aloud.”⁴ And in “The Anthropological Approach” Lewis argues that to approach literature as a source for data on ancient rites and practices differs from reading for its impact as literature^.5 Lewis was ahead of the times when, in the 1950s, he was treating the act of reading as central to the experience of literature—in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, reading theory became the most influential and controversial area of literary study.

            As he focused on reading in his fifties, Lewis was picking up and developing a remark he made in his diary in his twenties: “A poem unread is not a poem at all.”⁶ The words in a book are only ink markings on paper: they are real ink marks, but they become a real work of literature only as an intelligence takes in the words and combinations of words and finds them meaningful. In An Experiment in Criticism Lewis put it as follows: “Whatever the value of literature may be, it is actual only when and where good readers read. [< p. 164] Books on a shelf are only potential literature” (p. 104). In evaluating literature, then, Lewis suggests that attention should be directed toward readers and reading rather than toward an abstract text.

            For such an approach, one’s definition of reading becomes crucial—and this may be where Lewis’s approach becomes limited because of residues from his approaches in “The Personal Heresy.” Thus, early in An Experiment in Criticism, he says that in reading one must be “carried through and beyond words into something non-verbal and non-literary” (p. 27). This sounds much like the mechanical process of “The Personal Heresy,” and to the extent that it is, Lewis’s definition of reading will not be able to account adequately for the imaginative activity reading involves. For reading is not just a matter of getting self out of the way so one can absorb, directly, what the author saw. Of course readers can and should, as Lewis says, lay aside their own set of beliefs while reading and “enter into other men’s beliefs (those, say, of Lucretius or Lawrence) even though we think them untrue” (p. 138). But attaining “objectivity” is not so simple as this, for this deals only with a sort of large-scale subjectivity, but neglects a more basic, smaller-scale subjectivity: the words, images, and experiences the author uses can be received and “grasped” only as they are interpreted, shaped, felt, and reacted to in terms of the reader’s own experience with similar words, images, and experiences. Thus, in one sense, no reader sees the thing or idea the author saw: the reader sees only his or her private version of it. In that sense it is often said that no two readings of a poem or novel are the same, or that the poem or novel itself is not the same for different readers of it. Reading involves an imaginative, emotional, and intellectual interaction between the words an author writes and a reader’s understanding of and response to them. Subjectivity on the large scale can be set aside—systems of belief can be ignored while one is reading a work whose ideas one disagrees with. But subjectivity on the smaller scale hardly can be, for one cannot set aside or ignore the entire range of minute [< p. 165] particulars which enables one to receive and respond to words themselves.

            Lewis does at times seem to acknowledge the inescapability of subjectivism in the smaller scale. In An Experiment in Criticism he appears to regard reading less mechanically and objectively than in “The Personal Heresy.” Thus he writes, “Admittedly, we can never quite get out of our own skins. Whatever we do, something of our own and of our age’s making will remain in our experience of all literature” (p. 101). And thus he calls for a critical approach centered on “literature in operation” (p. 105) and compares reading to “taking part in a choric dance invented by a good choreographer” (p. 134). In such statements, together with the emphasis on “the very objects [works of literature] are” (p. 82), Lewis appears to be attempting to integrate the objectivity he had long believed crucial to right thinking with the subjective element in reading. He remains a firm objectivist, but does so while granting that objectivism is not as simple and clear-cut in practice as it had seemed to him in the thirties and forties. He attempts to develop an approach which accents the activity of reading, while retaining an emphasis on the work as object: one’s perceptions must be kept in check by a steady attention to the “real” work, the “thing made” by the author. It is sound advice and potentially valuable as a corrective to criticism today, although, because it does not take the lower-scale subjectivity fully into account, it does not adequately resolve the issue of how one can come to know “the real” so that one can attend to it properly. ⁷

            It is in the context of his desire to acknowledge subjectivity, but use “reality” as a check upon it, that Lewis’s distinction between “receiving” and “using"—which seems initially to strengthen the earlier, narrowly objective sort of reading—should be understood. Lewis elaborates the two terms as follows: “A Work of (whatever) art can be either ‘received’ or ‘used.’ When we ‘receive’ it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we ‘use’ it we treat it as assistance for our own activities” (p. 88). Such “use” may [< p. 166] be fantasizing and castle-building, or isolating an author’s “themes” and thus turning from the work experienced imaginatively to a reflective abstraction of one’s own making. In any case, it is wholly subjective, without the restraint or corrective of an external frame of reference: “We are so busy doing things with the work that we give it little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves” (p. 85). In contrast, “receiving” seems initially to be wholly objective, the reader simply taking in and processing the verbal signals emitted by the work. But if Lewis is, throughout the book, acknowledging and taking into consideration a subjective element in reading, then “receiving” cannot be quite the mechanical process its metaphor implies. Then Lewis’s distinction is not between a nonsubjective activity (receiving) and a subjective one (using), but between an acceptable kind and degree of subjectivity (one kept in check by contact with external reality) and a kind less acceptable because it is unrestrained by reality. That this is Lewis’s intent for the terms comes out in his application of them to art:

We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. . . . I do not mean by this that the right spectator is passive. His also is an imaginative activity; but an obedient one. He seems passive at first because he is making sure of his orders. (p. 19)

There is, here, less tension than there was in the 1930s between the subjective and the objective in Lewis. His literary criticism of the late 1950s and early 1960s shows a movement toward reconciliation of the inner and the outer, an acceptance of and comfortableness with ambiguity, and an awareness of the importance of self and the subjective, which is evident also in his writings about Christianity at the same time.

            Without that willingness to give attention to self and to use the subjective, Lewis would not have been able to write A Grief Observed, a beautiful, sensitive book based on his feelings after the death of his wife, Helen Joy Davidman. [< p. 167] The point is precisely that the book is about his feelings: it necessarily is subjective; instead of rejecting the subject because it is personal, Lewis here seeks a form and style which will allow him to take advantage of its personalness.

            The text states that the book originated as “notes” jotted as a sort of diary in four empty manuscript books that happened to be in the house. According to Walter Hooper, Lewis seemed always to have a notebook on his desk in front of him in which he would scribble ideas as they occurred to him. Drafts of the opening paragraphs of essays and books, such as “Reply to Professor Haldane” and That Hideous Strength, are in such notebooks.⁸ Perhaps A Grief Observed began so, too—the evidence suggests to me that it did not. The important thing, however, is that, even if Lewis did not write in four such books, they did give him the idea for a form in which he could express deep and private feelings in a way that could be helpful to others. It is crucial to separate the truth of the book from biographical accuracy. Lewis wrote what was—in its published form, at any rate—a fictional diary, and used in it a “persona,” an imaginary “diarist” through whom he could express himself. He indicates the separation of the diarist from himself by using a pseudonym, N. W. Clerk—the book was published under Lewis’s own name only after his death—and by including a reference to “J.” (that is “Jack,” his own nickname) as a third person, in addition to the diarist and H.⁹ The “I” in the book, therefore, must not be completely identified with Lewis, and great caution should be used in treating the book as a source of information about Lewis’s life or marriage. In its form it was an imaginative book, one for which matters of historical factuality are not relevant.

            But the truth value of the book does not depend on its biographical accuracy, or on its being a transcript of notes Lewis wrote in manuscript books to vent his grief. The real test is its value as an account of the stages of grief: if this is successful, and I think it is, then Lewis’s choice of form and approach was a wise one. The use of a fictional framework does not mean that Lewis did not experience the feelings he describes. Surely much of the book is a firsthand [< p. 168] record of what grief feels like, particularly the unexpected emotions and reactions: “There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in” (p. 7). Similarly, grief “gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness” (p. 29). And, “the agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness?” (p. 30). If they are emotions and reactions he remembers he had rather than ones recorded immediately in a journal, that would not make them less real, or less valuable—valuable to those who go through the experiences he has just passed through, and to others who may misunderstand them. Thus the “diary” suggests its own purpose: “Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation” (p. 37). What Lewis should have been told but wasn’t, he will seek to tell others.

Although Lewis intended that the book be instructive, he chose not to make it expository. To have organized what he experienced and learned into neat essays would have cost much of its immediacy and impact. So he turned instead to a form which would engage the imagination and emotions. To the extent that the book could be made to sound convincingly like a private diary, it would be both moving and instructive: a fruitful blending of reason and imagination. It was necessary, therefore, that the “diary” have sufficient detail to seem genuine. Thus precise details are given about the manuscript books: “This is the fourth—and the last—empty MS. book I can find in the house. . . . I resolve to let this limit my jottings. I will not start buying books for the purpose” (p. 47). And thus he lingers over the motives that led to the diary-keeping: “What am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down (all?—no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get a little outside it” (p. 12). Such devices for cre-[< p. 169]ating verisimilitude—a semblance of truth—are old and conventional features of imaginative writing.

The writing must seem casual and informal in tone and manner, but also be sufficiently attractive and orderly to be pleasing and inviting to a reader. Lewis achieves this balance by unobtrusive, but effective, rhetorical techniques. There are the parallel phrasings—“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear” (p. 7); “And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief” (p. 8); “And grief still feels like fear” (p. 29)—and the repeated images, which unify the book and give it a sense of movement and progress:

But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in the face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. (p. 9)

I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance [of continued existence after death] about H. There is no answer. Only the locked door. (p. 11)

Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door. (p. 49)

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of “No answer.” It is not the locked door. (p. 54)

The prose style is equally effective: “Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night—little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end” (p. 19). The beauty—in image, rhythm, and sound—of such a passage exceeds that of much of his other published work.

            There is also a tidiness in the development of the four parts, a sense of completion at the end of each stage and of a terminus in style. This is true especially of the final section. The conclusion goes back to H.’s last words, “I am at peace with God” (p. 24), first quoted when the diarist was very much not at peace and very much wished her back with him. When the phrase returns, supplemented by a line from The Divine Comedy, it gives a sense of acceptance and assurance: “How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the [< p. 170] dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me. Poi si torno all’ eterna fontana” (p. 60). The quoted line is from the Paradiso, XXXI, 93, as Beatrice, Dante’s beloved and his spiritual guide, leaves him and returns to her heavenly throne high above him. In response to his words of praise and gratitude for what she meant to him, she, “it seemed, did smile,” and “then to the eternal fountain turned her head."¹⁰ The identification of H. with Beatrice, the suggestion that H. has led the writer to a deeper spiritual maturity, as Beatrice did for Dante, and the gentle affirmation that H. too has gone to a heavenly throne, creates a beautiful, touching, deeply satisfying—and carefully crafted—ending.

            The central theme of the book is grief—a description not of the “state” but the “process” of sorrow (p. 47) offered in the hope that a description of one person’s experience may be of help to others in their efforts to deal with bereavement. Beyond that theme is another, which could be explored only with the deliberate, willing acceptance of “self” shown in the book’s form and style. Central to the book is a further, and more successful, effort to reconcile the “subjective” and the “real.” The issue grows out of the writer’s initial desire to remember H. as she “really was”; he fears that he will forget what she was really like, for he has no good photograph of her and cannot picture her accurately in his mind. He is nearly always thinking about her, but he realizes that his mind selects and groups the memories, and he fears he will replace the real person with an illusory one of his own devising: “Already . . . I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman” (p. 18). He must avoid the trap into which Dymer nearly fell, of attaching himself to an illusion, a projection of an ideal lover who “will do whatever you want, . . . smile or frown, be tender, gay, ribald, or argumentative just as your mood demands” (p. 20). That is not at all his desire: “It was H. I loved. As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be a sort of incest” (p. 19).¹¹ The subjective is unavoidable, but he must not allow his own [< p. 171] perceptions to replace reality, as Lewis’s father so often did in Surprised by Joy. Perceptions and images must be kept in check by comparison with the real. The difficulty comes in knowing where that reality is to be found and how it is to be held.

            The answer now, unlike earlier in Lewis’s life, is not a total rejection of subjectivity and an unrelenting pursuit of that which is solid, universal, and unchangingly “objective.” The answer begins with acknowledgment of the subjective: “Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them—never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?” (p. 51). The position Lewis now puts forward is a conscious interaction between the “self” and the “real.” The images and impressions of the subjective self must, time after time, be brought into contact with external stimuli, must be confronted so that which is merely projection or illusion may be shattered. The diarist’s experience in desiring an awareness of H.’s continuing existence illustrates this. He had formed his own impressions of how that awareness would come and how it would feel. But his impressions had to be shattered in order for the awareness to come, and it proved to be very different from what he expected. It was not a mental image or an emotional fullness, but a mental or intellectual intimacy: “Not at all like a rapturous re-union of lovers. Much more like getting a telephone call or a wire from her about some practical arrangement. Not that there was any ‘message’—just intelligence and attention” (p. 57). Something like this was Lewis’s experience; that of others may not be the same—Lewis’s was what it was because Lewis was the sort of man he was. But others also must avoid being locked in by their preconceptions, and Lewis’s recounting of his experience may form part of the external data which will help others shatter their “idols” and become open to reality.

            As he does so often, Lewis uses the lower to illuminate the higher, a human relationship to illuminate relationship [< p. 172] with the divine. Here too there must be an acceptance of, but a check upon, the subjective. As we form images of others which must be shattered by contact with and reception of their real personalities, so it must be with our approach to God: “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins” (p. 52). As in “Myth Became Fact,” Lewis here moves away from sight imagery, his earlier model for reception of the objective, as inadequate. Loving H., now that she is dead, has become, for the writer, somewhat like loving God: “In both cases I must stretch out the arms and hands of love—its eyes cannot here be used—to the reality, through—across—all the changeful phantasmagoria of my thoughts, passions, and imaginings” (pp. 52-53). “Reality” cannot be “grasped” or “taken in” by the sight, but must be “embraced” by the hands and arms—enclosed as an object of affection, not clutched as if a possession. Such an embrace involves subjectivity, but it keeps one turning outward, critically, toward external stimuli, to ensure that the subjective is processing external data rather than projecting one’s own perceptions in front of, or in place of, the external (as in An Experiment in Criticism, the subjective must be kept in check by steady attention to the text). The outward reflex leads naturally into another familiar image: the writer’s experience of H.’s presence “was quite incredibly unemotional. Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own” (p. 57). “Facing,” intentionally or not, takes one back to Till We Have Faces. Until the writer was able to get past his selfish need of H. and his ideas about how he was to experience her presence, until his subjective projections could be broken by and reshaped by reality, he did not have a face, did not have a real and receptive means to meet and accept the face of her present being.

            Near the end of his life, in a book published after his death, Lewis attempted a new fusion of reason and imagination. In Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer Lewis car- [< p. 173] ries on a fictional correspondence with an imaginary friend, doing it so realistically that many readers have found it hard to believe there was no actual Malcolm. It is in a sense an expository work, intended to clarify and illuminate ideas; but it is at the same time a creative work, engaging many of the same writing skills as a story or novel. The two sides, rational and imaginative, are fully integrated and reveal the wholeness and ease Lewis achieved in his final years.

            To make the correspondence effective required first that Lewis develop for Malcolm a clear and fairly rounded character, much like that of a character in a story. Malcolm is a long-time friend, one with whom Lewis had corresponded on previous occasions. Lewis recalls their undergraduate years with their “interminable letters on the Republic, and classical metres, and what was then the ‘new’ psychology.”¹² Malcolm is a layman, probably a teacher or a don (p. 51; Letter VI), apparently in the natural sciences, since Lewis yields to Malcolm’s superior knowledge when he introduces a scientific issue (p. 57; Vll). He is middle-aged, for he proposed marriage some twenty-five years ago (p. 58; Vll), and married—his wife is named Betty; they have a son named George. He, like Lewis, is an Anglican, but he seems, from his dislike of written prayers, to be less “High Church” than Lewis. He is also less flexible and accepting of new or “different” ways than is Lewis: Malcolm wants simply to reject theologian A. R. Vidler’s call for a “religionless Christianity” (p. 45; VI), while Lewis finds value in what Vidler says,¹³ and Malcolm is bothered by Lewis’s “frivolousness” in using the metaphors of “dance” and “game” for religion (p. 121; XVll).

            Lewis also uses a story-like approach in building a larger context for his acquaintance with Malcolm. He gives it both a past history and a continuing present. Thus Lewis refers to a visit from Malcolm when “the great blow had fallen upon me” and Lewis had tried at first to act as if nothing were wrong (p. 36; IV). He mentions various times they were together: in a pub at Coton (p. 43; V); with Betty at Mullingar (p. 103; XV); on a walk in the Forest of Dean (p. 116; XVII); and in Edinburgh on a night they nearly came to [< p. 174] blows (p. 121; XVII). He reminds Malcolm of a “famous occasion” when a friend named Bill came to them and very reluctantly, hesitantly, asked to borrow a hundred pounds (pp. 53-54; VII). At present Malcolm is receiving and replying to Lewis’s letters. Thus Lewis refers to Malcolm’s letters (e.g., p. 31; IV) and even quotes from them (as on p. 22 and p. 126; II, XVIII). He sometimes disagrees with what Malcolm says in his letters (p. 53; VII), answers questions raised by Malcolm (p. 138; XX), and follows Malcolm’s example in digressing to a related topic (p. 124; XVIII). One letter makes arrangements for Malcolm and George to join Lewis for dinner in college (p. 143; XX), and the last letter concludes with details about Lewis’s approaching weekend visit to Malcolm and Betty’s home (p. 159; XXII). This is another example, more sustained and elaborate, of the kind of verisimilitude Lewis employed in A Grief Observed. If he can be so specific and can go into all that detail, surely it must be true; and if readers are taken in by the apparent truth, the writer has managed the technique very well. To notice the skill with which the author employs his craft becomes one of the pleasures of the book.

            The fictional correspondence is also functional. At an initial level it serves to remove Lewis from a position of authority. He is not an “expert” qualified to deliver talks on the BBC, or a scholar who has worked out a carefully reasoned defense of the possibility of miracle. These are just “letters”—he does not even dignify them with the label “correspondence.” Thus the form itself suggests a casual, unstudied, personal approach, quite in contrast to what he would need to do if he were “writing a book.” With tongue in cheek, he notes,

However badly needed a good book on prayer is, I shall never try to write it. Two people on the foothills comparing notes in private are all very well. But in a book one would inevitably seem to be attempting, not discussion, but instruction. And for me to offer the world instruction about prayer would be impudence. (p. 87; XII)

The approach he adopted gives formal cognizance to the un-[< p. 175]certainties he felt and allows him to proceed honestly and naturally, without recourse to the disclaimers and apologies which often seem awkward or artificial in an essay.

            But the form is not merely functional: it is not just another imaginative vehicle serving the ends of reason, as in The Screwtape Letters or The Great Divorce. This Robert Merchant failed to appreciate when, about a decade ago, he called Letters to Malcolm “the worst (or should I say, Least attractive?) of Lewis’s books.” He criticizes it as being “self-consciously clever, almost pretentious” and as having “a great deal of somewhat useless filler.” Obvious and valid as he believes these criticisms are, he concludes “they do not negate the essential contents of Malcolm.”¹⁴ Such charges betray a deep lack of sympathy with, or understanding of, what Lewis was attempting, shown particularly in the effort to separate the “contents” from the “useless filler” of the form Lewis adopted. For the “filler” is integral to the content and reflects Lewis’s new ability to live with ambiguity, to accept greys instead of seeking a black and a white side to every issue. No longer does Lewis adopt a rigid attitude and insist on absolutes. He seems to have learned through experience that life does not break down into such formulas, and Letters to Malcolm reflects such experience in its ideas and its form.

            For the book is meant, like a story or a poem, to be read straight through and to be received primarily through the imagination rather than the intellect. To endeavor to distill the “contents” of Letters to Malcolm into an outline and set of notes proves frustrating and futile; one ends up with mostly disconnected ideas and some very quotable snippets. Lewis, however, was not seeking to express a set of insights or lessons which could be listed and discussed quite apart from the form in which they appeared—as can be done quite readily and profitably with his expository works, or with The Screwtape Letters, for example. He was attempting to achieve a key effect of myth in a nonmythical work: to fuse the “knowing” of ideas crucial to Christian growth with the “taste” of experienced reality necessary to give that knowledge vitality. And to a great extent, I believe, he succeeded. [< p. 176]

            His approach is perhaps best illustrated by Letter VIII, particularly when it is contrasted with an essay written some ten years earlier and touching on many of the same points. In “Petitionary Prayer: A Problem without an Answer,” Lewis treats many of the points covered in Letters to Malcolm, in the “simple essay” format Father Merchant would have preferred.¹⁵ The problem Lewis explores is that the New Testament instructs one, on the one hand, to offer petitionary prayers conditionally, always with the qualifier, “Thy will be done,” and on the other hand to pray with unwavering faith that the very things asked for will be received. He explores the biblical basis for both positions, discusses solutions others have offered for the problem, and ends by admitting that after much searching he has found no answer to the problem. It is an excellent essay: clear, orderly, well-supported, honest, and warm. But it remains a rather abstract, distanced discussion of a problem, one step removed from the experiences that make it vital and relevant.

            In Letters to Malcolm Lewis attempts to eliminate that step. After a discussion in Letter VII of the relation between petitionary prayer and determinism, Lewis creates a dramatic situation in which George (Malcolm and Betty’s son) is ill, perhaps seriously ill; the diagnosis awaits the results of medical tests. Letter VIII opens with a comment on the difference this situation makes: “The distance between the abstract, ‘Does God hear petitionary prayers?’ and the concrete, ‘Will He—can He—grant our prayers for George?’ is apparently infinite” (p. 60). The abstract issues discussed in Letter VII, and in “Petitionary Prayer,” somehow seem hollow, for the moment, in the face of an immediate, personal situation and the anxiety it causes. Lewis examines at some length that sense of anxiety and anguish and abandonment. Anguish, in the face of such uncertainty, does not show a defective faith—indeed, Christ felt such anguish in the garden of Gethsemane. It is, rather, characteristic and representative, “the human situation writ large. These are among the things it means to be a man. Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed shut as you reach it. To [< p. 177] be like the fox at the end of the run; the earths all staked” (p. 64). Such a situation, such anxiety (the imagery of the door echoes the passages of near-desperation in A Grief Observed), strips away the abstractions and forces one to take matters seriously:

Certainly we were talking too lightly and easily about these things a fortnight ago. We were playing with counters. One used to be told as a child: “Think what you’re saying.” Apparently we need also to be told: “Think what you’re thinking.” The stakes have to be raised before we take the game quite seriously. I know this is the opposite of what is often said about the necessity of keeping all emotion out of our intellectual processes—“You can’t think straight unless you are cool.” But then neither can you think deep if you are. I suppose one must try every problem in both states. (p. 66)

Lewis uses the episode about George, and other similar touches, to raise the stakes for the reader, to take the reader beyond an abstract discussion to a deep and serious involvement in a situation.¹⁶

            To all this may come the reply that it is not real: since there was no Malcolm and the letters are a fiction, it is still a game of counters. It is if one reads the book with the intellect, searching for principles to draw out and testing the historical accuracy of the details. But so too is every myth a game of counters, unless one receives it imaginatively, as it was meant to be received. Lewis expects a reader to enter with the imagination the world he creates in Letters to Malcolm, to accept—for as long as one is reading the book—the pretense that Malcolm and Betty and George, and their problems and anxieties, are real. Lewis intended to deceive no one about their actual reality: he was using an old literary convention, an imaginary correspondence, a convention he had used before; he expected readers to recognize it and accept it for what it was, as he had expected them to in The Screwtape Letters and the letter at the end of Out of the Silent Planet. The convention demands that readers share the anxiety when George is ill and the relief when Lewis hears that the danger is past. Through such imaginative involvement in the correspondence, one is taken [< p. 178] outside the self to share the experience of another; one gains knowledge, not through abstract intellectual means but embodied in the experiences and personalities of others.

            There is much Lewis wanted to communicate in Letters to Malcolm, often points or ideas he had expressed elsewhere in essays. But unlike The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, the imaginative structure is not there to serve reason, in getting a message across. The sense of separation, the tension between reason and imagination, is gone. In Letters to Malcolm reason and imagination do more than cooperate: they are unified. Neither has priority over the other; neither is held back by a sense of “limitation” upon it. Form and ideas are virtually inseparable: the ideas must be experienced through the form, through the letters and through the characters and lives the letters create, to do the ideas justice. In Letters to Malcolm Lewis achieved outside of myth what he had achieved, at last, through myth in Till We Have Faces: a full reconciliation and unification of the reason he admired with the imagination he loved.

            Having examined Lewis’s attitude toward reason and imagination across his career, we should perhaps return to “Reason,” the poem discussed briefly in the Preface. Its endorsement of reason is strong and unequivocal:

 

Set on the soul’s acropolis the reason stands

A virgin, arm’d, commercing with celestial light,

And he who sins against her has defiled his own

Virginity: no cleansing makes his garment white;

So clear is reason.¹⁷

Lewis associates reason with Athena, Greek goddess of defensive warfare and practical reason, who resided in the Acropolis, the highest point of her city Athens, and became protectress of the ruling kings. He depicts reason in a protectress role, defending the soul not against the imagination but against unreason or error, which assaults and attempts to capture the soul, the citadel of the human personality. Lewis’s high regard for the reason is best revealed by the sexual and religious imagery he uses. Reason is clear and pure and stable—there is nothing indulgent, or lax, or compromising about her; the life of reason is closely linked with [< p. 179] sexual virginity, with its traditionally strong positive connotations. Those connotations lead into the equally close links with religion: reason is “celestial” and can be sinned against, not just in the sense that one human can wrong another but in the sense of a violation of divine expectations.

By contrast, the imagery given to imagination is dark and seductive—she is desirable, even sexually appealing, but thus has a slightly dangerous and questionable character:

 

But how dark, imagining,

Warm, dark, obscure and infinite, daughter of Night:

Dark is her brow, the beauty of her eyes with sleep

Is loaded, and her pains are long, and her delight.¹⁸

 

The “daughter of Night” is Demeter, Greek goddess of vegetative growth and harvest, by some accounts also a goddess of the underworld—a chthonia, or earth goddess. The earth-mother image stresses the creative and generative aspects of the imagination. The warmth, sleep, and delight, with their sensual and sexual overtones, are in sharp contrast with the virginity of Athena, for Demeter was linked traditionally with the Eleusinian mystery religions, which celebrate ritually the loss of virginity as a symbol of “death” giving birth to new life. Thus the endorsement of the imagination is definitely equivocal: for “dark” to be used three times in three lines gives it heavy emphasis and moves beyond suggestions of richness and mysteriousness to a sense of impenetrability and danger.

            The imagery suggests a strong opposition between reason and imagination. Lewis sees positive elements in both—the clarity and strength of reason, the beauty and creativity of imagination—and he recognizes that both must be present in a balanced personality. Thus he urges the reader to “Tempt not Athene” and to “Wound not in her fertile pains / Demeter, nor rebel against her mother-right.” The poet longs for something that will ease the tension in their relationship, that will “make imagination’s dim exploring touch / Ever report the same as intellectual sight.”¹⁹ But such a total harmony of intellect and imagination would seem difficult when the two elements are so strongly opposed as they seem here, or when one is regarded as preferable to or more [< p. 180] reliable than the other, as is surely the case here. That Lewis is more comfortable with reason, that it sets the standard to which imagination must reach, is shown by the imagery of “light,” “height,” and “sight”: the “dim exploring touch” of the imagination falls far short of the firm, assured grasp of “intellectual sight."

            It appears to me most likely, therefore, that the poem was written in the late 1920s, after or near Lewis’s acceptance of Theism but before his conversion to Christianity. What he seems to be seeking is not a general harmony of reason and imagination but a concord between them in the area of Christian doctrines. In his letter to Greeves describing his late-night talk with Tolkien and Dyson, Lewis indicated that the barrier to his acceptance of Christianity was imaginative acceptance of the mythical elements, not at that point, anyway—difficulty in accepting its doctrines intellectually. With Tolkien’s guidance, Lewis reached a harmony of imagination and intellect which enabled him to become a Christian. But it was not the broad concord the poem mentions, in which the imagination and reason always arrive at ("Ever report") the same result. The spiritual wholeness he found as a Christian did not lead directly to a wholeness in the areas of reason and imagination.

            That wholeness did come, but it was much later in his life, under different circumstances, long after he became able to believe in Christianity. Late in his life a shaking of his confidence in the rational and the cumulative effects of a steady growth of confidence in the imaginative and mythical made possible a full reconciliation of the “maid and mother” he had written of so much earlier. The result was a wholeness, not just in Lewis’s writings but in his life generally. It is as if he had adopted much earlier the role of “the fully rational arguer” and attempted to live out that role as tutor, lecturer, apologist, and conversationalist, until, in the 1950s, he was able to let the role fall away, accept the limitations of a totally rational approach, and become a more relaxed and balanced person. He seems to move away from a certain rigidity and dogmaticness in his later years, and to grow in grace and wisdom beyond the growth [< p. 181] that often comes with the mellowing of old age. The works of his last decade have a breadth of outlook, a depth of experience, and a unity of the imaginative with the intellectual greater than those of the earlier works. The tension between Athena and Demeter, between reason and the imagination, which ran throughout Lewis’s life and exerted differing influences in much of it, was at last resolved and gave way to a personal wholeness, a concord of intellectual depth with imaginative height, and his finest works as a Christian writer and story-teller.