Through the Open Door

by Dabney Adams Hart

Overview

"This book focuses on Lewis as a teacher, how he opens doors by challenging 20th-century views... Two ideas run through and unify the book. The first is that in all his writing Lewis encourage 'radical key' to all Lewis's critical and imaginative writings. Hart's aim is to show that there is in Lewis a single, integrated, systematic theory of literature focused on the importance of imagination and language. "The book raises many of the right questions about Lewis and explores them in a stimulating and informative way."

-Christianity and Literature

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817385088
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	03/16/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	262 KB

About the Author

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Read an Excerpt

Through the Open Door

A New Look at C. S. Lewis

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By Dabney Adams Hart

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 1984 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8508-8

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CHAPTER 1

FACE TO FACE WITH C. S. LEWIS

"... how would it be if you came and had tea with me?" — THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE

When I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1950s, C. S. Lewis's English Literature in the Sixteenth Century joined The Allegory of Love and A Preface to Paradise Lost as landmark scholarly criticism for English majors. Some of my friends were also familiar with The Screwtape Letters as a classic of collegiate religious discussion groups, and a few of us had read the space trilogy. When I realized that the same Lewis had written these varied books and was currently publishing a series of children's tales, my search for a dissertation topic suddenly came into focus. Instead of boring into some as yet unscratched corner of a well-known writer's corpus, I wanted to estimate the literary significance of a writer whose work had never been considered as a whole. In Lewis's writing I detected but could not describe a pattern in the grain.

The Wisconsin English faculty were reluctant to accept a proposal for a dissertation on the literary theory of C. S. Lewis. Scholars in the Modern British field, where he belonged as a living writer, did not consider him a major creative talent and did not share his medieval and Renaissance interests. But Professor Paul Wiley was generous-spirited enough to agree to direct my farfetched intentions, and the Fulbright Committee backed me with a scholarship for research in England. In 1955 very little had been written about Lewis. Chad Walsh's Apostle to the Skeptics had treated religious themes, but the only assessments of his literary achievements were in reviews of individual books. Much of Lewis's own criticism was in periodicals and monographs not available in the United States. I needed a year in England to prove to myself as well as to my committee that my topic was important.

In 1954 Lewis had startled English academic circles with his inaugural address as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature in the University of Cambridge. Describing the two periods thus united in his new chair as closely related phases of "Old Western culture," Lewis postulated that changes in politics, the arts, religion, and technology have caused a greater divide within the past century than at any other period in history. Between the time of Sir Walter Scott or Jane Austen and the second half of the twentieth century, "a new archetypal image ... of old machines being superseded by new and better ones" has been imposed on the human mind. Identifying himself as an Old Western man rather than a modern, Lewis claimed a special qualification for his new job: "You don't want to be lectured on Neanderthal Man by a Neanderthaler, still less on dinosaurs by a dinosaur. And yet, is that the whole story? If a live dinosaur dragged its slow length into the laboratory, would we not all look back as we fled? ... I would give a great deal to hear any Athenian, even a stupid one, talking about Greek tragedy. He would know in his bones so much that we seek in vain. ... where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. ... use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs." When Lewis's Surprised By Joy and the third volume of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings were published in the fall of 1955, both these Old Western men became increasingly popular. The dinosaur image seemed inappropriate, but none of the reviews anticipated the influence Lewis and Tolkien would have on the next generation.

Soon I had an opportunity to see and hear the "specimen" when he gave a series of four lectures at Oxford, his first official return engagement as a Cambridge professor. He had been at "the other university" for more than a year but spent weekends and vacations at his home just outside Oxford. Therefore the lectures were scheduled for his convenience at five o'clock on Friday afternoon and ten-thirty Saturday morning on two consecutive November weekends. I was amazed when a Rhodes scholar friend insisted that we should have tea early at a shop in the High, across the street from the lecture hall, in order to get good seats; but he was right: by five o'clock people were standing. When Lewis began to speak it was obvious why he could attract hundreds of students and faculty to hear about Milton's minor poems, as many on the second Saturday as on the first Friday.

Lewis was a consummate entertainer, illustrating Milton's artistry with some of the techniques he ascribed to Milton. He called the Latin elegies "poetry at the lowest level — on a par with the joiner's art or fencing." The fifth in particular, he thought, must have been more fun to write than to read. The image of the graceful flourish, parry, and thrust depicts Lewis's own style. He obviously had fun sharing his views on Milton, just as he said Milton in "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" was expressing nothing more than the enjoyment of making the poems. He was the "old Mozartian Milton," using poetry as now only music is used for occasions and moods. His artistry could even be described in a culinary metaphor: Lewis urged us to think of Comus as a "confection, in which Platonic theology, etc., are the ingredients. The art is the blend." But Lewis's flourishes were accompanied by rapier thrusts at critics who misjudge the minor poems by taking them more seriously than Milton intended. Lewis said, for instance, that Comus could not be elucidated by an anthropologist's study of savage rites and taboos, since Milton was neither an anthropologist nor a savage. The best critic of Samson Agonistes would be a man in a concentration camp confronted with a glamorous spy.

This random sampling of my notes may give some impression of Lewis's charm as a lecturer. I recognized some characteristic themes and stylistic features of his criticism, but there was one unexpected element that I did not fully appreciate until much later. On the last morning Lewis began with a gracious retraction of a comment the afternoon before about Aristotle: that he had ignored the Dionysian elements in tragedy. Conversation in the evening with a better Aristotelian than himself led him to agree that possibly Aristotle had merely thought it unnecessary to mention what everyone took for granted. Lewis's careful attention to this correction struck me as significant for Lewis as much as for Aristotle and Samson Agonistes. He was showing how easy it is to make a mistake, how likely one is to be wrong. With all his genial assurance about the right way to enjoy Milton, Lewis was never authoritarian. Yet the more I learned about him and his work, the more convinced I became of his authoritative consistency.

After an academic year of research on the literary theory underlying all of Lewis's work, I convinced my London University faculty adviser that my bibliography was reasonably comprehensive. He sent it to Lewis, asking him to check it for possible omissions and indicating that its compiler would welcome an interview. The reply was characteristically prompt, concise, helpful, and generous.

28/5/56

Dear Mr. Crow

I return Miss Adams' list with a few addenda. I can't remember anything else which she has omitted; and if I don't, it's not likely anyone else will. If the lady really thinks it worth her while to come & see an author who is no v. accurate scholar in his own works, of course she is welcome to do so. I shall be here till June 8th, after that at The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

On a separate page there were five items: an introduction in an anthology, three articles in Theology, and an unsigned review. He noted that he had forgotten a few other short reviews, and on the back of the envelope he added a P.S. about "some things in The Month."

My elation at this response was tempered, though not diminished, by the subtlety of Lewis's self-deprecation. He took neither himself nor my research very seriously. He had recently expressed his low estimation of the American Ph.D. system in a Cambridge Review article comparing Oxford and Cambridge (reluctantly, and only under pressure from the student editors):

The other evil (on my view) is the incubus of "Research." The system was, I believe, first devised to attract the Americans and to emulate the scientists. But the wisest Americans are themselves already sick of it. ... it is surely clear by now that the needs of the humanities are different from those of the scientists. ... the man who has just got his First in English or Modern Languages, ... far from being able or anxious ... to add to the sum of human knowledge, wants to acquire a good deal more of the knowledge we already have. ... What keeps the system going is the fact that it becomes increasingly difficult to get an academic job without a "research degree."

Lewis would have considered it more worth the lady's while to read Greats at Oxford or to immerse herself in medieval literature than to write a dissertation on him.

Despite this attitude, he was gracious in his reply to my letter leaving the decision about place and date to him:

1/6/56

Dear Miss Adams

I think it wd. be more use to you to come here, for it is here that I have two fat envelopes full of old articles etc. which you cd. go through to see if you've missed anything (wh. you most likely have not). I have two sitting rooms, so you can have one to yourself and do the job in peace and comfort. Wednesday wd. be the best day. Shall I expect you at about 2 o'clock?

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

When I arrived at Lewis's set of rooms in Magdalene College, I was beginning to wonder why I had come, how I dared intrude. Lewis had always stressed that what the writer intends should be clear in what he writes. To raise questions about meaning would indicate either his failure or my stupidity; to raise questions about himself would represent what he disparaged as "the personal heresy."

The minute Lewis opened the door, looking exactly like one of the genially smiling pictures on the book covers, he put me completely at ease. The only features of his comfortable, nondescript, somewhat cluttered living room that I remember are the big sofa opposite the fireplace and the long, low coffee table where I could spread out the scribbled notes, incomplete drafts of poems, offprints of articles, and newspaper clippings that he offered me to look through. Also on the table was a gift box of chocolates that he urged me to finish up since he was "supposed to be slimming." I felt as if I were visiting a favorite uncle. I realize now that Lewis was like the thoughtful adult in a childless household who provides a box of toys or curios for young visitors. Most of the newspaper articles I had seen; some of the fragments were intriguing. The material did not seem significant, and I gathered that Lewis himself did not know or care what was there.

My attention was distracted only once in two hours, when Lewis answered a knock at the door. A young man's voice said eagerly, "Professor Lewis, the chalice has just come and I wanted you to be the first to see it." They crossed behind the sofa and went into the study without disturbing me, so I glimpsed nothing but a brown paper package. Presumably the new chalice was for the college chapel; obviously the new professor's door was always open to students.

My host took it for granted that his American visitor would stay for tea. He boiled the water in an electric kettle on the hearth, made the tea in a plain earthenware pot, and served some delectable cream-filled pastries bought at the bakery especially for me. Thus fortified in traditional English fashion, we talked about how Americans regard English literature. Lewis said he had always marveled that people who had never seen the hedgerows and sheepfolds of the English countryside could understand the imagery of English poetry. He was sorry that I had not read Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels, which had interested him as a male novelist's use of a female narrator. Instead of talking about his work, he asked me about my year in England and my teaching in the United States. I did not know that he had recently married an American and did not mention that I had become engaged to an Englishman. His warm and sensitive response to a new acquaintance was focused on our mutual interests in literature and teaching.

The closest Lewis came to a personal remark was some gentle teasing about my scholarly pursuits. As I was leaving, he advised: "You had better finish your dissertation promptly before I publish something that will invalidate your conclusions." Thus finally, on the doorstep, he challenged me to ask, "What do you mean?" But it was too late for questions. I had already said that I must catch the next train to London, and I did not want to overstay my welcome.

At the time, I interpreted Lewis's parting shot as a joke. He fulfilled the avuncular role with tongue in cheek and discharged the professional duty of prodding a student into action. He warned me not so much about what he might do as about what I had done already. I inferred that his low estimation of the value of graduate research in the humanities included mine, whatever I might have revealed about his work. He was not interested enough in himself as a writer to care about my conclusions, which I thought were more perceptive and comprehensive than he would have expected. I could not believe that he would ever publish anything inconsistent with the doctrine of mythopoeia, which was my focus.

When Lewis's Till We Have Faces came out later in 1956, I realized that his comment about Warren's woman narrator referred to this fourth experiment with the novel as a form. His use of the Cupid and Psyche myth was very different from the Ransom trilogy, but there was no challenge to my major premise that Lewis's idea about the function of myth in the human imagination was the heart and core of all his writing in every form. I became convinced that Lewis had been poking fun at the very idea of himself as a dissertation subject.

He did, however, have some surprises up his sleeve. In a 1958 article in the Christian Herald, "Will We Lose God in Outer Space?" Lewis proposed that space travel might challenge the basic Christian tenet of man's uniqueness. There could be rational species for whom Christ's incarnation and sacrifice would be irrelevant. God would have made a different Covenant with them. This intriguing idea attracted the attention of Time and inspired a typical caption for the picture of a balding, smiling, relaxed professor: "Explorer Lewis / Beyond gravity, no fall?" Whatever the theologians made of Lewis's speculations, the connection with his novels and children's stories was clear. The nonhuman rational and spiritual creatures in his fiction, profoundly true as images, might prove closer to fact than he or his readers had imagined. However surprising the Christian Herald article may have been for some readers of Lewis's religious works, any who had understood his novels recognized a similar theme.

Every book or article published during Lewis's lifetime confirmed my conclusions. Since his death in 1963, new material has continued to appear. His literary executor has edited previously unpublished material, brought out collections of articles from diverse and inaccessible sources, and edited one group of letters. Lewis's brother edited the first collection of letters, and many more have been made available to readers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the Wade Collection at Wheaton College in Illinois. Critical studies have proliferated so rapidly that the twelve-page bibliography included in a 1969 book was superseded in 1974 by a 353-page bibliographical volume. Now a lengthy supplement would be required to bring the list up to date. In all this attention to Lewis — primarily in the United States — he has been recognized as a master mythmaker.

During the twenty years I lived in England, while most of the children I knew read the Chronicles of Narnia and my Christian friends were familiar with Screwtape, no one ever asked me to give a talk or paper on Lewis. The prophet was by no means without honor in his own country, particularly among those of my friends who had read English at Oxford, but there were no seminars, no study groups at churches, no conferences (I did not then realize the extent of these activities in the United States). In the early 1970s I was surprised to get a letter from a nun in a convent college in India, asking if I could send her a copy of my dissertation. In her study of Lewis she had learned that it was available on microfilm, but she was hundreds of miles from the nearest microfilm reader. I mailed a typescript that took months to reach her and years to get back to me. I thought she might be my only reader.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Through the Open Door by Dabney Adams Hart. Copyright © 1984 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

CONTENTS
Preface
I. Face to Face with C. S. Lewis
II. Myth: The Master Key
III. The Power of Language
IV. The Real Renaissance
V. The Teacher's Role
VI. The Pedagogical Style
VII. The Prophetic Theme
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This slender, unpretentious, and well-written book is consistently insightful: it deserves the attention of all who find themselves drawn to Lewis the writer and to Lewis the man."—Modern Fiction Studies

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