Some humour; some Lewis

My dears, CM has been bedevilled both by computer problems and by her own natural distraction these last few days, which is why she hasn't been posting anything, in spite of having several half-finished, or half-started, posts in the works. To amuse you, once again, and to let you know that there's still life in Clio's Mortal, here's another quotation from the works of Logan Pearsall Smith.

The servant gave me my coat and hat, and in a glow of self-satisfaction I walked out into the night. "A delightful evening," I reflected, "the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and philosophy impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a pig squealing.

But soon after, "God, it's awful", I muttered, "I wish I was dead".

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH, Trivia, 1918

And just because I like it, a bit from C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, as the ship's company is deciding not to sail on into a mysterious darkness ahead of them. One member of the party - the immortal mouse Reepicheep - objects:

"If I were addressing peasants or slaves," [Reepicheep] said, "I might assume that this suggestion proceeded from cowardice. But I hope it will never be told in Narnia that a company of noble and royal persons in the flower of their age turned tail because they were afraid of the dark."

"But what manner of use would it be plowing through that blackness?" asked Drinian.

"Use?" replied Reepicheep. "Use, Captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be of no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventure. And here is as great an adventure as ever I heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honours."

I don't think Lewis's great gift for pastiche was ever on better display than in certain passages of his Narnia series. This particular excerpt is also a good summary of the way that aristocrats once perceived themselves in relation to their social inferiors. Whether it was ever accurate is another matter. I thought of quoting it to my students in order to explain the distinction between "aristocratic" and "bourgeois", because they had some difficulty grasping the idea, beyond the matter of titles, but feared I might get a reputation for frivolity.

Lewis has sometimes been described as a "coarse" writer, partly because of his tendency to use his fiction for didactic purposes, and partly because of his occasional lapses into a kind of bullying tone in his non-fictional works. One of the reasons A.N. Wilson preferred his scholarly commentaries on English literature is that it was the one area of Lewis's work, he believed, in which Lewis's tendency to fight like a "police-court solicitor" was held in check. I understand what these critics mean; I can think of many examples in Lewis's work to support these views; and yet, and yet - I don't agree with them. In all his work, Lewis could move from coarseness and bullying to a hyper-sensitive, poetic awareness of the texture of the human experience of the senses, of life in the body. Smells, sounds, the weather, the look of firelight or sunlight in the interior of a house, their effect upon our moods - all these he conveys with a fidelity and vigour that few writers have equalled. In re-reading the Narnia series, in particular, I've found that they awaken not merely the memory of previous readings, but a curious sense that I am reading and remembering an account of my own experience, so intensely did I respond to Lewis's word-pictures and sensations. It may not be coincidental that Lewis was especially good at conveying the feelings and characteristics of animals.

A few favourites follow:

Mr. Bultitude's mind was as furry and unhuman in shape as his body. He did not remember, as a man in his situation would have remembered, the provincial zoo from which he had escaped during a fire, nor his first snarling and terrified arrival at the Manor, nor the slow stages whereby he had learned to love and trust its inhabitants. He did not know that he loved and trusted them now. He did not know that they were people, nor that he was a bear. Indeed, he did not know that he existed at all: everything that is represented by the words I and Me and Thou was absent from his mind. When Mrs. Maggs gave him a tin of golden syrup, as she did every Sunday morning, he did not recognize either a giver or a recipient. Goodness occurred and he tasted it. And that was all. Hence his loves might, if you wished, all be described as cupboard loves: food and warmth, hands that caressed, voices that reassured, were their objects. But if by a cupboard love you meant something cold or calculating you would be quite misunderstanding the real quality of the beast's sensations. He was no more like a human egoist than he was like a human altruist. There was no prose in his life. The appetencies which a human mind might disdain as cupboard loves were for him quivering and ecstatic aspirations which absorbed his whole being, infinite yearnings, stabbed with the threat of tragedy and shot through with the colours of Paradise. One of our race, if plunged back for a moment in the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness, would have emerged believing that he had grasped the absolute: for the states below reason and the states above it have, by their common contrast to the life we know, a certain superficial resemblance. Sometimes there returns to us from infancy the memory of a nameless delight or terror, attached to any delightful or dreadful thing, a potent adjective floating in a nounless void, a pure quality. At such moments we have experience of the shallows of that pool. But fathoms deeper than any memory can take us, right down in the central warmth and dimness, the bear lived all its life. --THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH

Though Tashbaan looked very far away when they first saw it, it refused to look any further away as they went on. Shasta gave up looking back at it, for it only gave him the feeling that they were not moving at all. Then the light became a nuisance. The glare of the sand made his eyes ache: but he knew he mustn't shut them. He must screw them up and keep looking on ahead at Mount Pire and shouting out directions. Then came the heat. He noticed it for the first time when he had to dismount and walk: as he slipped down to the sand the heat from it struck up into his face as if from the opening of an oven door. Next time it was worse. But the third time, as his bare feet touched the sand he screamed with pain and got one foot back in the strirrup and the other half over Bree's back before you could have said knife.
[...]
On again, trot and walk and trot, jingle-jingle-jingle, squeak-squeak-squeak, smell of hot horse, smell of hot self, blinding glare, headache. And nothing at all different for mile after mile. Tashbaan would never look any further away. The mountains would never look any nearer. You felt this had been going on for always--jingle-jingle-jingle, squeak-squeak-squeak, smell of hot horse, smell of hot self. --THE HORSE AND HIS BOY

It wasn't nearly such a nice cave as Mr Tumnus's, Lucy thought--just a hole in the ground but dry and earthy. It was very small so that when they all lay down they were all a bundle of clothes together, and what with that and being warmed up by their long walk they were really rather snug. If only the floor of the cave had been a little smoother! Then Mrs. Beaver handed round in the dark a little flask out of which everyone drank something--it made one cough and splutter a little and stung the throat, but it also made you feel deliciously warm after you'd swallowed it--and everyone went to sleep. --THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE

The voice...seemed to be sunlight and gold. Like gold not only as gold beautiful but as it is heavy: like sunlight not only as it falls gently on English walls in autumn but as it beats down on the jungle or the desert to engender life or destroy it. --THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH (again)