Black Gate

This is the third in a series of posts about the fictions of C.S. Lewis. I began on Sunday with a look at his juvinilia, published in Boxen: Childhood Chronicles Before Narnia, and then yesterday looked at his first book of lyric poems, Spirits in Bondage. Today I round out my look at Lewis’ early works with some thoughts on the first of his long narratives to be published, an epic poem called Dymer, written while he was struggling to get a job as a professor and while he was in the process of moving from strict atheism to belief in Christianity. I also take a look at his short story “The Man Born Blind,” probably written soon after Dymer was published.

In 1922 C.S. Lewis recorded in his diary that he had “started a poem on ‘Dymer’ in rhyme royal.” His phrasing’s interesting: a work “on” Dymer, as though it were a well-known subject. “Dymer” was already a familiar story to him. He’d written it out in prose in 1917, one of his first mature prose works to use modern diction and avoid the archaisms of William Morris’ novels. Late in 1918 he wrote in a letter that he’d just completed a “short narrative, which is a verse version of our old friend Dymer, greatly reduced and altered to my new ideas. The main idea is that of development by self-destruction, both of individuals and species.” Nothing of this version seems to have survived in the 1922 poem, which was finished in 1925 and published in 1926 to mixed reviews.

Dymer is a fast-moving poem, and it’s to Lewis’ credit that few or none of the rhyme royal stanzas seem to solely serve the plot; each stanza has some image or line striving to catch the eye. On the other hand, the striving’s often too obvious. The quick pace also means some material feels underexplored, while incidents on the whole come too quickly. Much as one must grant some poetic license, questions can’t help but arise. Some key events reported to Dymer feel underexplored, and some plot elements feel abandoned too easily. Symbolism is occasionally obtrusive. Lewis himself wrote in his diary on June 22, 1922 that he was dissatisfied at “having now left the myth and being forced to use fiction[.]”

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Yesterday I began a series of posts looking at the fiction of C.S. Lewis. Lewis has an unusually varied body of work, and I intend to wander through it chronologically and see what leaps out at me. I started with Lewis’ childhood tales of Boxen. Tomorrow I’ll take a look at his long poem Dymer. Today, I want to go through Lewis’ first book, a collection of lyric poems called Spirits in Bondage, published in 1919 when Lewis was still an atheist.

Yesterday I quoted Lewis’ judgement in his 1955 autobiography Surprised by Joy that the Boxen tales are novelistic and not poetic. If that’s so, what did the older Lewis think about the poetry he wrote in his youth? Did he find wonder and romance in the verse of Spirits in Bondage and Dymer? Hard to judge. Lewis doesn’t mention either volume in Surprised by Joy. Which strikes me as a little odd.

That book — again, published almost thirty years after Dymer, and twenty-five years after his conversion — describes his attempt to recapture a specific sense of imaginative joy. Lewis concludes that the emotion he felt was a kind of signpost directing him to God — that the ‘joy’ he felt and later sought came from feeling a specific kind of desire, of which God was the object. He also says that “I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental,” and associates his experience of joy with myth and poetry as well as nature. Though Lewis states that his Boxen stories had nothing to do with that kind of inner experience, one might think his poetry at least would have a direct bearing on the subject. In fact, though, he mentions going through a kind of reaction against myth and the fantastic at about the time Spirits in Bondage was published and in the years after — “a retreat, almost a panic-stricken flight, from all that sort of romanticism which had hitherto been the chief concern of my life.” Given that, what does Spirits look like?

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C.S. Lewis loved walking, and in one letter to his friend Arthur Greaves he wrote of a fifty-mile three-day expedition he undertook alongside other friends: walking by day through woods and river valleys, at evenings stopping at local houses where the company might discuss the nature of the Good. Bearing this image in mind I’ve decided to begin wandering through the terrain of Lewis’ fiction. It is well-trodden ground, as many others have done this before me. But there’s a certain charm in seeing things for oneself. It is also just possible that another pair of eyes may spot something new in even the most familiar landscape, if the terrain is varied enough. And Lewis’ writing, as a whole, stands out as heterogeneous indeed.

I have read some, though far from all, of Lewis’ non-fiction; I intend to talk about it only insofar as I see a bearing on his fiction. I’m interested in seeing what images, tones, ideas, and approaches unite a fairly disparate corpus of writing. I want to see how Lewis’ approach to storytelling developed over his life, and how motifs and themes recurred in his work. I hope that by doing this I’ll better understand his individual books. At any rate, I’ll begin here with a look at Lewis’ published juvenilia. Tomorrow I’ll have a look at his early collection of poetry, Spirits in Bondage, then the day after that his long poem Dymer. Next Sunday I’ll move on to his first long prose work, The Pilgrim’s Regress, and see what sort of schedule I can manage from there until I reach Lewis’ last novel, Till We Have Faces.

Note that these posts will be merely my own impression of Lewis’ work, rather than, say, an attempt to read Lewis by his own lights. So while Lewis believed that a writer’s biographical details were by and large irrelevant to their literary accomplishments, I’m a little more interested in how the story of a writer’s life maps onto the stories they choose to tell. Some chronological landmarks therefore follow by which to survey Lewis’ early writings.

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Ben Okri’s 1991 novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize and was followed in 1993 by Songs of Enchantment and in 1998 by Infinite Riches. Riches called itself “Volume Three of The Famished Road cycle,” which seems an apt term. The books individually are visionary accomplishments, filled with ecstatic and elegant prose; and they are concerned with cycles, of lives and stories. They are concerned with myth, and themselves create myth, a mythology of history or at least a mythology intersecting with history.

They follow Azaro, whose name is short for ‘Lazarus.’ He is an abiku, a spirit child, in what appears to be pre-independence Nigeria (the country where the books take place are never named). Abiku, we are told, are supposed to be born many times, dying young repeatedly; Azaro has decided to stay in this world, but can see spirits and in fact remembers his existence before birth. His friends in the spirit world remember him, too, and want him back. The first book in particular revolves around his determination to stay with the family into which he has been born, and his desire to make his mother happy. The second book, as Azaro himself observes, changes focus; it is less about his struggles with the other world, as his spirit friends change tack: “They chose to draw me deeper into the horrors of existence as a way of forcing me to recoil from life.” The focus here moves away from Abiku, toward his parents and his ghetto community; by the third book we are caught up in their myth, following their story as it moves on toward the end of its cycle.

The books are about, among other things, story and history and the ending of one cycle in a people’s existence and the beginning of a new. They are about the creation of a new nation. Are they fantasies? I suppose it’s mostly possible to read them as realistic — to see Azaro as delusional, to dismiss all the myths and visions as unreal. I am wildly skeptical that such an approach would produce any useful understanding of the books. On the other hand, these books are involved with myth as opposed to the kind of writing normally described by the word “fantasy.” Personally, I’d describe them as fantasies because to me “fantasy” includes the visionary — which these books are, 1990s equivalent to the prophecies of William Blake. It’s fair to argue that I’m getting those words backwards, that fantasy is a subspecies of the visionary instead of the reverse; but I think that “fantasy” perhaps also implies the kind of creative response demanded here of readers. As I said, I don’t think approaching these books with a perspective that privileges the realistic will get very far. Whatever world you use for them, it’s worth acknowledging that these are books of myth that call out to the mythic sensibility.

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