The Wheaton Archives & Special Collections and the Marion E. Wade Center are pleased to announce new additions to their archival holdings donated from the estate of Ralph Blair. Dr. Blair collected widely in the areas of American evangelicalism and British Christianity. Earlier this spring, several boxes containing artifacts from the Blair collection arrived at Wheaton College for campus archival staff to add to our rich collections. These items will soon be available for research, and a few highlights from the collections are featured below. We are grateful for these donations!
Continue readingAnnouncing the Walter Hooper Papers
The Wade Center is pleased to announce the release of the Walter Hooper Papers. This archive includes professional and personal documents relating to the life and work of Walter Hooper—particularly his extensive correspondence.
Hooper edited many of C.S. Lewis’s posthumously published works, including Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, God in the Dock, and the three volumes of The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis. He also wrote C.S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to his Life and Works (previously titled C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide). In 2009, the Wade Center presented Walter with the Clyde S. Kilby Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his many years of dedicated work and significant contributions to Lewis studies.
The collection spans from 1918 to 2020, with emphasis on materials from 1963 until 2000, and includes 11 boxes of materials in over 400 folders. The finding aid for the collection is available here:
https://archives.wheaton.edu/repositories/3/resources/1231.
The Walter Hooper Papers collection is available for use on-site at the Wade Center, and research appointments may be scheduled by contacting the Wade and reviewing the Kilby Reading Room Appointments page. We are grateful to Walter for sharing these materials and for the opportunity to make them accessible for ongoing interest and scholarship.
Barfield Halfway Along Life’s Journey
By Sørina Higgins
The concept of the “mid-life crisis” is commonly cited and generally accepted. However, there’s a lesser-known developmental stage of “mid-life synthesis” when—for some people—the knowledge, wisdom, and skills we have spent four or five decades acquiring start to come together, creating a unified system of thought. In my own case, Owen Barfield is currently serving as a midwife to such a mid-life synthesis, as his own well-developed notion of unity influences my ideas. I am not yet ready to articulate this nascent cognitive harmony (and please note that it can coexist with painful personal dissonance), but it has something to do with the significance of material reality, the infinite value of each individual human, the creative power of words and imagination, and a spiritual transcendence of time and space.
Barfield himself was a master synthesizer, yet his writings still await the comprehensive scholarly analysis that has been applied to his friends Lewis and Tolkien. There are several of his works that remain unpublished, many books that lack rigorous literary critical studies, and most of his ideas that still need popular explanations produced and disseminated. In particular, there are many exciting materials in the rich treasure troves of the Marion E. Wade Center that eagerly anticipate their chance for publication, distribution, and exploration. Here are some of the types of jewels awaiting the light.
First, there is an astonishing hoard of unpublished manuscripts. These include fragments, drafts and revisions, lecture notes, poems, and critical notes on Charles Williams’s Descent into Hell.
Next, there are many letters to and from Barfield as well as many interviews with OB and other audio recordings of his voice. If you, like me, feel you know OB less well than some of his contemporaries, listening to him speak and reading his personal letter are great ways to become acquainted with his tone, style, and priorities. The Wade also possesses books and pamphlets that were owned by Owen Barfield, some of which he annotated. Of course, there are also many published books by and about Barfield, dissertations and theses, scholarly articles, conference presentations, and other academic materials in the field of Barfield studies.
It is time for the study of Barfield to mature and ripen, bringing to fruition the seeds previous scholars have sown: Now we need a good, solid, thorough, yet still popular biography; a rigorous study of Barfield’s linguistic philosophy; some serious theological examination of his anthroposophy; an honest look at his place inside and outside of the “Inklings” and of modernist milieus; and a great deal of contextualization of his fiction, poetry, and plays. To emerging scholars looking for rewarding projects, I say you could scarcely go wrong at the Wade Center (and at the Bodleian Libraries) researching the life, works, and times of Owen Barfield.
Meanwhile, Barfield’s thought is getting a bit of a boost at an upcoming conference in San Franscisco at the end of January: his grandson, Owen A. Barfield, is a keynote speaker at Fahrenheit 2451: Ideas Worth Saving at the Internet Archive, January 31–February 1st, 2025. Owen will speak about his grandfather’s legacy, and he and I will present a workshop designed to introduce attendees to Barfield’s foundational ideas. And there’s more to look forward to at this conference, as well: Crystal and David Downing, former Co-Directors of the Wade Center, are the other keynote speakers! Crystal will speak about changing systems of signs, and David will argue that C.S. Lewis was a man worth saving. Registration for the conference is still open, and there are also fun evening events featuring analysis of movie clips, costume contests, and lively panel discussions. Eastgate Creative will be present, too, sharing clips from their Inklings-related documentary The Forge of Friendship about Tolkien and Lewis. I like to think that Barfield—a poet, novelist, dancer, and compelling public speaker—would approve of this synthesis of academic rigor with the popular pleasures available from literature, film, and great conversation.
Indeed, Barfield lived a very long life, just a few months short of a century, and watched the medium of movies develop from its infancy. In his essay “The Harp and the Camera,” as David Lavery explains, he uses the metaphor of “the camera man” and of “the camera civilization” for our current phase in the evolution of consciousness: our separation from original participation and our tendency to see only a visual surface, not a spiritual unity. We only peer outward from our limited, subjective viewpoints; we cannot get outside ourselves and see the wider reality. Yet that is not to say that movies cannot be, like any work of imagination, a vehicle for deeper meaning and even for something moving towards final participation. I began this post with a reference to mid-life synthesis; Barfield himself had a particularly fruitful middle age, publishing several influential works in his forties and fifties, including Romanticism Comes of Age (1944), This Ever Diverse Pair (1950), and Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957). These books probe deeply into the nature of language, literature, culture, thought, and perception—and they are profound companions on one’s own journey towards meaning and understanding. To anyone seeking significance in our troubled times, I recommend the study of Barfield’s works. If you’re like me, you may want to start with his fiction (perhaps the novella Night Operation), in which philosophy grows legs and acts out its ideas in human bodies with human emotions. His works can accompany the developing human mind through youth, middle age, old age, and beyond.
Announcing the Shirley Sugerman Papers at the Wade Center
The Wade Center is pleased to announce the release of the Shirley Sugerman Papers, comprised of correspondence, notes, and drafts relating to the publication of Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity (Wesleyan University Press, 1976). Edited by Shirley Sugerman, Evolution of Consciousness contains scholarly contributions written to honor Owen Barfield on his 75th birthday.
Sugerman was a psychology professor at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. She authored the book Sin and Madness: Studies in Narcissism, and her article “BARSPECS: Owen Barfield’s Vision” was published in the Wade Center’s journal, VII, Volume 11 (1994). The Barfield Centenary Celebration—held in 1998 to mark the 100th anniversary of Barfield’s birth—was dedicated to Sugerman, and she passed away on November 23, 2020, at the age of 101.
The Sugerman Papers trace the production of Evolution of Consciousness through drafts, notes, and extensive correspondence with contributors Lionel Adey, Colin Hardie, Cecil Harwood, Clyde S. Kilby, G.B. Tennyson, Nevill Coghill and others.
One of the highlights in the collection is an interview Sugerman conducted with Barfield in April 1974. The interview, titled “A Psychography: Conversation with Owen Barfield,” is stored as sound recording OB-V / SR-22 in the Wade’s audio-visual collections, and two transcripts of the recording (one with Barfield’s edits; the other with his changes incorporated) are available in folders 73 and 74 of the Sugerman Papers. Barfield’s edited version not only provides a window into his revision process but also reveals details that didn’t make it into the book.
During one part of the interview (which was later cut), Barfield discussed meeting the woman who would become his wife through his involvement in a dance society:
When I first went to Oxford, the first term I was there, I had heard of a country dance movement, an English folk dance society which was taking country dancing seriously so I joined up….This led to my getting an invitation to an amateur concert party touring some villages in Cornwall. They had a lady who designed the costumes and who taught the dances, and her name was Maud Douie and she became my wife. (15-16)
Dancing was important for Barfield for other reasons as well. He went on to tell Sugerman, “I think dancing meant a lot in my intellectual, emotional, artistic, whatever you want to call it, development. There again you are ‘bringing it down to earth,’ right into the physical body, when you are doing something” (16).
Later in the interview, Barfield used the concept of polarity (the keyword of the collection’s subtitle) to speak to his relationship with C.S. Lewis: “I have felt that there was a relation definitely in the nature of polarity between myself and C.S. Lewis. That I think has become more and more of a reality to me the more I have reflected on it” (44). In the original interview, Barfield went on to elaborate on the distinction between Lewis and himself, suggesting that Lewis represented the prosaic pole while he himself represented the poetic pole (45). “I don’t mean he was a prosaic man,” Barfield was quick to clarify. However, Barfield later crossed out many of these comments and replaced them with the following: “I don’t think I could enlarge on it [i.e., the polarity between himself and Lewis] without being forced into a degree of crudity that would amount to actual misrepresentation.” While reflecting on and editing his remarks, Barfield seems to have wanted to avoid making reductive comments about his longtime friend.
Shirley Sugerman served for almost four decades on the Advisory Board of VII (volumes 1-37). In June 2020, she also generously donated her Barfield papers to the Wade for the benefit of other scholars. We remain grateful for her many years of support to the Wade.
We are glad to offer the Sugerman Papers to visitors, and research appointments to view the collection may be scheduled by emailing the Wade Center.
“Yuletide at the Wade” – A Work of Fiction by Chloe DuBois and Elise Peterson
This Christmas season the Wade Center staff was treated to an original story by two of our student workers, Chloe DuBois and Elise Peterson, both juniors at Wheaton College. The story is based on Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” and centers on Dr. Mortimer Stein, an ill-behaved Wade Center researcher who is visited by three ghosts who try to help him see the value of the Wade Center’s authors and collections. This is the third installment in Dr. Stein’s adventures by DuBois and Peterson, who first featured him in “Murder at the Wade” where Dr. Stein is a murder victim after committing various crimes at the Wade. “Yuletide at the Wade” was read by DuBois and Peterson at a staff Christmas gathering this December, accompanied by a little hand-made “Dr. Stein” doll dressed in holiday attire. Enjoy these photos and reading through “Yuletide at the Wade.” Merry Christmas!
~ Yuletide at the Wade ~
In Verse.
Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.
Written by Chloe DuBois and Elise Peterson
Illustrated by Chloe DuBois
Adapted from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
First printing December 2023
(Because all good publishers date their work.)
Stave I ~
Mudd’s been dead and buried deep
These seven lengthy years,
Dead as nails of any sort.
This fact must be made clear.
Dr. Stein knew Mudd had died—
They’d often been coauthors—
Yet Stein still published with both names,
Which really was a bother.
The practice peeved the archivists,
Made labeling a pain.
But since nobody read their works,
It wasn’t a great shame.
So now that this has been laid out
As plain as plain can be,
I’ll show you to Stein’s research desk
One fateful Christmas Eve.
Stein’s doodling. He often does,
As other scholars might,
But not always upon the page
Of Sayers’s Gaudy Night.
Poor Laura would have stopped his sin
But she was buried deep
‘Neath articles he’d riffled through
And books he’d left in heaps.
She’d hoped to spend the day with John
Where the love light gleams,
But sadly, she’d be home for Christmas
Only in her dreams.
“Oh, Laura!” Dr. Stein called out.
“I’ve read my fill of hacks.”
He shoved Phantastes in her face.
“Now get me more from Stacks!”
With weary eyes, the archivist
Gazed glumly at the clock.
“It’s ten to four,” she protested.
“The room will soon be locked.”
“Well, I don’t give a sugar-plum!”
The stubborn scholar cried.
“Is this a Reading Room or not?
I’m researching!” he lied.
“I’m sorry, sir, you have to leave.
The Reading Room is closed.”
You can’t imagine what it took
For her to stay composed.
Dr. Stein looked down his nose
And answered her with scorn:
“If you won’t let me stay in here,
I’ll see you Christmas morn!”
Before the archivist could speak,
Stein flew into the hall.
Hope waved goodbye to no reply.
He stormed into the squall.
He muttered underneath his breath,
“Bah, humbug, to the Wade!
Who needs your dull librarians,
Your interfering aid?
“Those people cannot keep me out!”
He chuckled with a grin.
“I’ll wriggle down the chimbley
And I’ll nimbly sneak on in.”
He hid himself behind a bush
And quickly looked around.
But to his great dismay, there were
No reindeer to be found.
Did this stop Dr. Stein? Alas!
He would not be deterred.
He waited ‘til they’d all gone home
So he would not be heard.
And then, with deft agility,
He leapt onto the roof.
To look at him, you’d never know
He’d vaulted in his youth.
He squeezed himself into the hole
And slithered down the flue.
If portly Santa Claus could fit,
Then Dr. Stein could, too!
Now on the floor, he looked around
The dusky Reading Room.
No researcher was stirring there,
T’was quiet as a tomb.
An evil grin deformed the face
Of dreadful Dr. Stein.
“I should have done this years ago,
At last, the place is mine!”
READ THE REST OF “YULETIDE AT THE WADE” (PDF DOWNLOAD)
A Wade Visitor Who Once Met C. S. Lewis in Person
by David C. Downing
Back row: C. S. Lewis, Damaris Walsh, Eva Walsh. Madeline Walsh is mostly hidden behind Joy. Photo courtesy of Madeline Walsh Hamblin, August 1955, Wade Call Number: CSL / P-40
Last year the Wade Center was pleased to host Madeline Walsh Hamblin, who met C. S. Lewis when she was only 13 years old. Madeline is the daughter of Dr. Chad Walsh, the Beloit English professor who wrote the first book-length study of Lewis, titled C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (1949). Professor Walsh visited Lewis several times during his trips to England in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In 1955, he took his wife, Eva, and two of his daughters, Damaris and Madeline, to meet Lewis in Oxford.
The Walsh family actually met the Gresham family—Bill, Joy, David, and Douglas—long before they were introduced to C. S. Lewis. Soon after the publication of Professor Walsh’s book C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics in 1949, Joy Davidman Gresham wrote to Chad Walsh directly, and the two became friends. Professor Walsh invited the Greshams, still married at that time, to visit the Walsh’s summer cottage in Vermont. Madeline remembers that it rained all day during their stay. The Walsh sisters played in the basement with the Gresham boys, listening to a conversation upstairs that seemed to get more animated as the adults got more “lubricated.”
Walsh encouraged Joy to write to C. S. Lewis directly, which she did, initiating a sequence of events that would eventually lead to their face-to-face friendship and subsequent marriage.
In 1955, Professor Walsh took his wife and two of his four daughters, Damaris and Madeline, to England, a trip that included a visit with C. S. Lewis at Oxford. Madeline recalls of her first meeting with Lewis that he was “a little bit dour-looking, not terribly familiar with children.” His rounded figure and well-worn clothing did not fit the image of the man she was expecting to meet, the eminent scholar and writer.
Lewis focused mainly on conversation with the adults, while the two girls listened quietly and read books. Madeline recalls especially the beautiful deer park just outside Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen, as well as a trip up the Magdalen bell tower. Lewis was quite proper during their visit up the tower, insisting that the ladies, in dresses, go last up the stairs and first down the stairs, in order to protect their modesty.
After their tour of Magdalen College, Lewis and the Walsh family traveled out to the Kilns, where Joy Davidman Gresham and her two sons were visiting at the time. Madeline recalls that Lewis immediately looked more relaxed in the presence of Joy. The two of them engaged in witty repartee almost the whole time the Walsh family were visiting, with lots of laughter amid the literary and theological topics. There was even a game of charades at one point. Lewis drew the word “bullfinch,” and Madeline laughs at the memory of “Jack” (as Lewis was known to his family and friends) snorting and pawing the ground, trying to illustrate the first syllable of the word.
The Walshes visited the Kilns again in June 1958, after Jack and Joy were married. Lewis was in Cambridge at the time, but Joy proved to be an excellent hostess and tour guide. At that point, Joy was walking with a cane after surgery for bone cancer, but she had lost none of her energy or high spirits. She cooked dinner for the Walsh family and showed them around the grounds of the Kilns. Madeline described her as “stomping around” when she walked, adding that she was “rather an intimidating, a little bit of a fierce personality.”
Madeline recalls the two Gresham brothers during that visit. The oldest, David, 14, was physically small, but “horribly and impressively grown up.” He used extraordinary words during conversation, and Madeline was shocked when he and her father began discussing elements of the Turkish language. Douglas, according to Madeline, was at age 12 almost as tall as his brother, with “huge blue eyes and a winsome face.” He entertained the Walsh sisters by shooting a gun and bringing out his horse, Cobbler. Madeline observed that Douglas “was not as brainy as Davy, but much more down to earth and plenty smart.”
During that summer visit in 1958, the Walsh family accompanied Joy to Stratford-upon-Avon, where they toured Anne Hathaway’s cottage and other local sites. That evening, the Walsh parents stayed at the Eastgate Hotel in Oxford, while their daughters spent the night at the Kilns. At the end of their visit, the Walshes gave Joy a green Wedgewood tray to express their appreciation, and she gave Damaris Walsh, who was going to be married later that summer, a 20-pound note.
Madeline Walsh Hamblin revisited these memories during an oral history interview at the Wade Center with Crystal Downing and Bob Goldsborough, a Chicago Tribune writer, in February 2022. This meeting came about because Madeline’s close friend, Almarie Wagner, Wheaton ’66, read Crystal’s book Subversive, and wanted to meet Crystal personally at the Wade Center. She asked to bring along her friend, Madeline Walsh Hamblin, and so the interview took place almost as a serendipity. Madeline also provided the Wade Center with a color picture of C. S. Lewis, along with Joy Davidman, the two Gresham brothers, and the members of the Walsh family who made the visit to Oxford. (See the photo above, published here for the first time.) C. S. Lewis passed into glory sixty years ago this month, November 22, 1963. It is a great privilege after all these years to meet someone who met Lewis in person, who witnessed him playing charades (!), and who provided a rich time of conversation and fellowship to members of the Wade staff.
The interview recording with Hamblin is available for listening on-site at the Wade Center (call number: OH / SR-92), along with many other interviews in the Wade’s Oral History Collection.
Treebeard and Trolls: A New Source of Names in Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS
by David C. Downing
The Wade Center recently acquired C. S. Lewis’s personal copy of Heimskringla (Norse for “the round world,”), a collection of Scandinavian legends and historical biographies produced in about A. D. 1230. The book was originally compiled by Snorri Sturluson, the same author who produced The Prose Eddas, tales of Norse gods and heroes. It is illuminating to see Lewis’s underlinings and notes in his copy of the book, but it is also fascinating to see names in the text that Tolkien seems to have appropriated for his Lord of the Rings fantasy epic.
Heimskringla is named after the opening words of the book, which can be also translated as “the world orb” or “the earth’s disc.” Lewis twice referred to this classic Nordic text, once in The Discarded Image, where he says that the phrase “the world-disc” proves that medievals knew the earth to be a globe (pp. 140-141), and once in Studies in Words¸ where he calls Heimskringla “a great saga” (p. 217). Tolkien also knew this text, as he owned both the original Icelandic book as well as an English translation by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson (1893). [Lewis’s copy is a different English edition, translated by Eric Monsen and A. H. Smith (Cambridge, 1932).]
It has been already well established that Tolkien borrowed names such as Gandalf, Thorin Oakenshield, and the names of other dwarves from Snorri Sturluson’s work The Prose Eddas. But in turning to Sturluson’s lesser-known work Heimskringla, we find references to Treebeard, an adversary with a bushy beard (p. 63), as well as Durin the Dwarf and places called Westfold and Dale.
Characters in old Norse texts are often named after their prominent attributes, external or internal, such as Tore Treebeard, Olav the Tree Feller, Swein Forkbeard, Sigrid the Strong-minded, and Haldor the Unchristian. When Treebeard dies in battle, the text explains that “Treebeard was sent to the trolls.” Readers of Heimskringla also can’t help but notice a mighty king named Frode, a magnificent horse named Faxi, and evil spirits called wights.
Of course, Tolkien drew upon many Norse texts, but it also interesting to find passages in Heimskringla that refer to burial mounds called hows, to warriors called berserkers, and to causes of death called banes. Tolkien also drew upon old Nordic traditions such as sending out arrows to one’s allies in times of war, as well as references to dwarves and dragons as a part of the world we inhabit, not just fantasy beings.
In Lewis’s personal copy of Heimskringla, the first thing one notices are drawings of ancient ships with a dragon’s head at their prow. Lewis even underlined a sentence calling a Viking ship “The Long Serpent” (p. 186).
In general, Lewis’s underlinings of this classic Norse text have less to do with names and social customs than with ethics. For example, Lewis’s markings in his copy of Heimskringla underscore his rejection of magic. He highlighted a sentence saying that the practice of magic was unmanly (p. 5) and another one that saying that those of noble blood should not stoop to engage in casting spells (68). Lewis also marked another line about the general dangers to the soul of practicing magic (p. 68)
In all of his books, Lewis generally used the word magic with sinister connotations. In That Hideous Strength (1946), the character Merlin is described as “not evil; yet he’s a magician” (31), implying, of course, that by definition magicians are generally evil. For Lewis, their sin is not just that they dabble in occult arts; more seriously, they have been ensnared by the serpent’s old temptation, “Ye shall be as gods.”
Lewis explained in The Abolition of Man that magic and technology sprung from the same source:
There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique. (87-88)
Here Lewis touches on one of his recurring themes: learning to accept what is given and to conform one’s will to reality, rather than demanding one’s own way and trying to bend reality to one’s will. Apart from the intrinsic dangers of the occult, the practice of magic also reveals an underlying attitude of not accepting one’s creatureliness, of trying to escape the intractable vulnerability of being human. Lewis expresses this thought most succinctly in “The Inner Ring,” where he observes, “It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had” (63).
In general, it is fascinating to examine a text familiar to both Tolkien and Lewis, and to see how each author assimilated their ancient sources. Tolkien’s borrowings seem to have more to do with actual words, a lifelong stimulus to his imagination, while Lewis focused more on pictorial elements, such as dragon-prowed ships, or thematic elements such as the dangers of magic. We invite our Wade Center readers to come examine Lewis’s copy of Heimskringla for themselves and to draw their own conclusions!
We wish to thank Dr. Ben Weber, Assistant Professor of English at Wheaton College, as well as Sophie Smith (2022), Tim Lumsdaine (2022), and Emily Brabec (2023) for their assistance in researching this article. The passage on Lewis’s view of magic is adapted from David C. Downing, “The Discarded Mage,” Christian Scholars Review (Summer 1998), 406-415.
C. S. Lewis’s Annotations in Charles Williams’s WAR IN HEAVEN
by David C. Downing
The Wade Center recently acquired C. S. Lewis’s personal copy of War in Heaven (1930), one of the “supernatural thrillers” written by his friend and fellow Inkling Charles Williams. The front flyleaf of the book includes Lewis’s distinctive signature and the back flyleaf includes Lewis’s brief, handwritten index to passages in the novel that caught his attention. Like many of the more than 2,400 other books from Lewis’s personal library housed at the Wade, Lewis’s markings in the novel reveal as much about his mind as they do about the mind of the author Lewis is reading.
Charles Williams moved to Oxford in the autumn of 1939 and quickly became a regular at Inklings meetings. He worked for the London branch of Oxford University Press, which moved out of the capital during World War II, to avoid the German bombing raids. The two men met when they first exchanged letters and lauded each other’s work. Lewis had read Williams’s fantasy novel The Place of the Lion in 1936 and sent him a congratulatory note, just as Williams was getting ready to write Lewis to tell him how much he admired Lewis’s scholarly insight in The Allegory of Love. When Williams later moved to Oxford, he and Lewis became fast friends.
Lewis and Williams valued each other’s company partly because the two of them had few intellectual peers. But they also shared the same vivid sense of spiritual realities just beyond the doors of perception. T. S. Eliot, who said he considered Williams very nearly a saint, commented that “he makes our everyday world much more exciting because of the supernatural which he always finds active in it.” (Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p. 109) This sounds very much like George Sayer describing Lewis: “The most precious moments to Jack in his ordinary life were those . . . when he was aware of the spiritual quality of material things, of the infusion of the supernatural into the workaday world.” (George Sayer, Jack, p. 192)
Several of the passages in War in Heaven that Lewis marked and indexed are the ones in which the spiritual dimension of reality seems as palpable as the physical dimension. In this novel, the Holy Grail turns up in England, being used as the communion chalice in a humble village north of London. Three occultists seek to obtain the grail and to channel its powers for evil purposes. But the grail also has three defenders, the local archdeacon, a duke, and a book editor. At the end of the story, the legendary patriarch Prester John appears, traditionally seen as the protector of the grail, making sure that good prevails over evil.
Lewis noted two passages in the book in which the mystical-minded archdeacon ponders the grail chalice and says to himself: “This is also Thou; neither is this Thou.” Both Williams and Lewis were keenly aware of the tension between the Affirmative Way, finding metaphors or analogies for God (such as a king, shepherd, or a sacrificial lamb), and the Negative Way, the realization that all pictures of God must ultimately prove inadequate. Lewis discussed this problem in Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer (1964), referring directly to the phrase he found in Charles Williams:
“This talk of ‘meeting’ is, no doubt, anthropomorphic; as if God and I could be face to face, like two fellow-creatures, when in reality He is above me and within me and below me and all about me. That is why it must be balanced by all manner of metaphysical and theological abstractions. But never, here or anywhere else, let us think that while anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the abstractions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions; each singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective. Unless you sit to it very tightly, continually murmuring ‘Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou’, the abstraction is fatal. It will make the lives inanimate and the love of loves impersonal. The naïve image is mischievous chiefly in so far as it holds unbelievers back from conversion. It does believers, even at its crudest, no harm. What soul ever perished for believing that God the Father really has a beard?” (21-22)
Lewis also marked and indexed passages in the novel in which Williams offers some lay theology for his readers. For example, he noted a passage in which the Archdeacon offers a new interpretation of the ancient commandment “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.” The Archdeacon, Julian Davenant, argues in his homily that our neighbor is God himself:
“Not His creation, not His manifestations, not even His qualities, but Him. . . This should be our covetousness and our desire; for this only no greed is too great, as this only can satisfy the greatest greed. The whole universe is His house, the soul of thy mortal neighbour. Him only thou shalt covet with all thy heart, with all thy mind, with all thy soul, and with all thy strength.” (115-116)
This was a theme close to Lewis’s heart. In at least a half dozen of his books, he stresses that we should have an “appetite for God,” that we should seek Him for who He is, the fountain of life and light, not for gifts in this life such as health or good fortune, nor for gifts in the next life, jeweled crowns or streets of gold. Lewis’s great mentor George MacDonald observed that “It is not what God can give us but God that we want.” Lewis wholeheartedly agreed, as seen not only in his own books, but in the passages he underlined in other books, such as War in Heaven.
Image: Charles Williams, 1935, CW / P-3
Marion E. Wade Center photo collection. Not to be used without permission.
Williams could also portray the dark side of spirituality, the power of evil that has haunted our world since the loss of Eden. In describing the sinister neighborhood where one of the occultists keeps his chemist shop, Williams conjures up an almost Dantean sense of palpable depravity:
“It was not actually quite so respectable [as he had expected]. It had been once, no doubt, and was now half-way to another kind of respectability, being in the disreputable valley between two heights of decency. . . . Squalor was leering from the windows and not yet contending frankly and vainly with grossness. It was one of those sudden terraces of slime which hang over the pit of hell, and for which beastliness is too dignified a name. But the slime was still only oozing over it, and a thin cloud of musty pretense expanded over the depths below.” (73)
Lewis may have noted this passage perhaps because he too had a vivid sense of spiritual warfare, of light ever contending with darkness. Lewis opens The Great Divorce by describing a “long, mean street . . . with only dingy lodging houses, small tobacconists, hoardings from which posters hung in rags, windowless warehouses, goods stations without trains, and bookshops of the sort that sell The Works of Aristotle.” (11) This neighborhood in the precincts of hell sounds very much like the one Williams described as the abode of his hellish characters.
Lewis and the other Inklings sometimes chided Williams for the obscurity of expression. Williams could often be evocative without being clear, as in another passage Lewis marked in War in Heaven. At the end of the story, the champion of the Grail, Prester John, asks the world-weary, and even otherworld-weary, Lionel Rackstraw what gift he can offer him:
“‘But I bring the desire of all men, and what will you ask of me?’
‘Annihilation,’ Lionel answered. ‘I have not asked for life, and I should be content now to know that soon I should not be. Do you think I desire the heaven they talk of?’
‘Death you shall have at least,’ the other said. ‘But God only gives, and He has only Himself to give, and He, even He, can give it only in those conditions which are Himself. Wait but a few years, and He shall give you the death you desire. But do not grudge too much if you find that death and heaven are one.’ He pointed towards Cully. ‘This man desired greatly the God of all sacrifice and sacrifice itself, and he finds Him now. But you shall find another way, for the door that opens on annihilation opens only on the annihilation which is God.'”
Lewis may have marked this passage because it stresses once again that our greatest desire, whether we know it or not, is God Himself, not anything He has created, not even life itself. Talk about “the annihilation which is God” verges on the mystical, suggesting that ultimately all will pass away, even that part of ourselves which cannot bear to be in the blazing presence of the eternal divine.
Of course, one can never say for certain why Lewis marked or indexed certain passages in the books that he owned. In some cases, he offers plentiful marginal notes, which help the reader understand what Lewis had on his mind as he was reading. In other books Lewis owned, such as Williams’s War in Heaven, one can only speculate as to what he was drawing out of the text. Suffice to say, however, that Lewis’s markings in this novel are certainly in accord with the sense of vivid spiritual realities that Lewis shared with his good friend Charles Williams.
Note: Paragraphs about Lewis’s personal relationship with Charles Williams are adapted from David C. Downing, Into the Region of Awe (InterVarsity, 2005).
Judging King Kong by its Cover: The Aping of Beauty — by Crystal Downing
Enjoy this post by Wade Center Co-Director, Crystal Downing, that first appeared on the Christian Scholar’s Review blog on November 17, 2021.
When visitors enter the museum at Wheaton College’s Marion E. Wade Center, which archives work about and by C.S. Lewis and six of his British influencers, they are treated to an eye-popping display of 53 book covers from famous works: The Two Towers from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Lewis’s Perelandra, Sayers’s first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, and more. For each book, covers are arranged clockwise by decades, beginning with the first edition and on into the twenty-first century. It is a fascinating survey in cultural values, covers differing dramatically as marketers seek to sell the exact same content to new audiences. Titled “Judging a Book by its Cover,” the display makes clear that astute observers judge historical contexts as much as narrative contents through changing book covers.
The same might be said about remakes of the same film content. The King Kong franchise provides a great example. The 2021 release of King Kong versus Godzilla reflects profound changes in historical contexts. The original King Kong, one of the few movies seen by C.S. Lewis, set records for film attendance when it was released in 1933. In it, a film crew travels to an isolated South Seas island where a 25-foot ape proceeds to kidnap the film’s starlet, Ann. Sailors and film crew conquer the beast, shipping it back to Manhattan to put on display. When King Kong breaks his chains, he escapes to the top of the Empire State Building with Ann in tow. On top of the skyscraper, he swats at biplanes reminiscent of flying pterodactyls he had battled from the summit of his island lair. When bullets finally bring him down, the film ends with the iconic line, “It wasn’t the airplanes; it was beauty killed the beast.”
Attentive viewers cannot help wondering if the giant ape symbolizes the cumulative gaze of moviegoers who habitually see beauty primarily in the sexualized female body. Indeed, in a scene cut from the movie when the Hays Code came into effect the following year, Kong smells his fingers after fiddling with Ann’s clothing. As famous film theorist Laura Mulvey put it in 1975, women on screen have tended to be coded as “objects of the gaze,” hairy or otherwise. In the 1976 King Kong, Jessica Lange plays the object of the gaze in a contemporary setting, Kong’s remote island discovered during a search for oil, clearly reflecting the 1970s oil crisis. In this movie, Lange actually returns Kong’s gaze, as though acknowledging a 1970s emphasis on women controlling their sexuality. (The fact that Jessica Lange was a fashion model who had never acted on screen before tells us about the producers’ actual object of the film.)
In 2005, Peter Jackson, famous for his Lord of the Rings movies, returned to a 1930s setting for King Kong in order to redirect the gaze altogether. In addition to highlighting the beautiful art deco architecture of Manhattan, he turns Driscoll, a sailor smitten with Ann’s beauty, into someone impressed much more with the beauty of words. Hired to write a screenplay, his Driscoll is called “Shakespeare” while on board ship due to his passion for literary art. Jackson also adds a young sailor, Jimmy, who quotes from Joseph Conrad’s 1901 novel, The Heart of Darkness. A liberal arts education comes in handy when watching Jackson’s three-hour film.
Jackson even changes Kong’s fascination with beauty. Entranced more by the actress’s vaudeville routines—her craft—than her beauty, the ape takes Ann to the apex of his mountain lair, ignoring her to watch the sun shed garments of red and orange as it sinks into the ocean. Enchanted as well, Ann repeats “It’s beautiful,” while patting her heart with her hand. The creature taps his own breast while wistfully watching an azure sea extinguish the flame that keeps at bay the heart of darkness.
At the end of the film, when Kong carries Ann to the Empire State Building, he stops climbing when he notices the sun rising over the waters surrounding Manhattan. Sitting down, Kong forgets not only the army chasing him but also Ann, who so wants to participate in his reverie that she yells up to him “Beautiful!” while tapping her heart. Not wanting to give up on one moment of beauty, Kong keeps watching the gorgeous skies while tapping his breast in reply.
At this moment, gun-toting biplanes rip through the russet-mantled dawn, and bullets pierce Kong’s heart. As his body falls in slow motion to the street below, a soft requiem accompanies his descent until we hear the iconic closing statement, “It wasn’t the airplanes; it was beauty killed the beast.” By keeping the 1933 framing device of a film crew making a movie, Jackson implies that the beauty of film is located not in human bodies but in artistic cinematography and editing, reflecting an era when film programs were flourishing at colleges and universities. *
Jackson and his co-writers finished drafting their new King Kong script in February of 2004, the exact same month that Facebook was launched. After receiving numerous award nominations, the film was available on DVD by March 2006, four months before the launch of Twitter. And that sea-change may explain the narrative of the recent Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), which highlights our contemporary dependence on technology. Rather than beauty generating action, either for good or ill, this film presents a visually ugly culture that Kong and Godzilla attack. C.S. Lewis would have been fascinated by this radically different film, wherein a tech firm named Apex seeks to establish control by accessing the neural networks of a severed head: a plot point echoing the severed head in Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength (1945). Significantly, like the hairy bear and other animals that overrun the hideous technology at the end of Lewis’s novel, King Kong and Godzilla come to the rescue at the end of the 2021 film, defying the Apex of nature-destroying technology.
To understand that destruction, watch the superbly crafted documentary The Social Dilemma (2020), which shows how young people today are being remotely controlled by the seemingly disembodied heads of social media. Tap your breast if you agree.
* Some of the sentences above were borrowed from my essay “The Ape(x) of Beauty,” Cresset 69.5 (June 2006): 25-29.
“My Imagination Seems to Have Gone on Strike” by Kathryn Wehr, guest writer
Since the pandemic started, I have often been strengthened by reading Dorothy L. Sayers’s World War II letters, with their mentions of everyday shortages, inconveniences, and blocks in getting her writing work done. People throughout history have faced challenges – we’re not the first and we won’t be the last. Recently, I was at the Wade Center and came across a 1945 Sayers letter that struck me as something many of us today may be feeling about our own work.
A bit of context for the letter: before World War II began, Sayers wrote two plays for a festival put on by the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral – The Zeal of Thy House and The Devil to Pay – and she worked closely with Margaret Babington, the Steward of the Friends and organizer of the festival. As the war came to a close, the festival committee began to think about staging a full-scale festival again, with fundraising focused on repairing damage by German bombs to Cathedral precinct buildings (including, it appears from earlier letters, Babington’s office). Babington asked Sayers to write a new play for the 1946 festival.
Sayers replied that she would not be able to do so, as she was already engaged in writing one for a similar festival at Lichfield Cathedral – a project which became her play The Just Vengeance. She wrote,
“…I also have to admit that I am finding the Lichfield show very difficult, because what with the War, and one thing and the other, my imagination seems to have gone on strike and I can only dig up ideas with appalling difficulty. This is one reason why I was very thankful to get a publisher for the Dante, which being a translation does not call for the same kind of creative effort as an original work.”
Unpublished Letter from Dorothy L. Sayers to Margaret Babington, October 8, 1945, Dorothy L. Sayers Papers, Folder 294/21, Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.
I love this little window into Sayers’s work as a writer. She had had a particularly fruitful period of writing during the war (1939-1945) including two of her best-known works: the non-fiction theology of the artist The Mind of the Maker, and the mammoth twelve-part radio series on the life of Christ for the BBC, The Man Born to be King. Her imagination had been hard at work but suddenly now it had “gone on strike.” I find it very heartening that Sayers too sometimes had creative blocks and could “only dig up ideas with appalling difficulty.”
This gives a helpful point of reflection for us today. Many of us sprang into action at the start of the pandemic, but are now wearied by the ups and downs, the confused messaging, and political polarization. We feel stuck and unable to draw upon our old inner resources. The news sites are full of talk of the “Great Resignation” as people feel they cannot continue as they have been. Perhaps a change can be as good as a rest.
For Sayers, that meant a sudden shift in work toward Dante’s Divine Comedy. Inspired by Charles Williams’s book about Dante, The Figure of Beatrice, she grabbed Dante’s Inferno, on the way to the bomb shelter in August 1944 and fell in love with it. It was a love that would fuel her work in translation of the medieval poem itself, articles, and speeches for the rest of her life – until her death in 1957 just before she finished translating the Paradiso.
Sayers underplays her creative work with translating Divine Comedy in the letter above, but it is interesting that she notes how it uses a different area of her brain and therefore a new work was able to flow. We see she had found gratitude for finding a good publisher (Penguin Books).
Hers was a ground-breaking translation in contemporary language that introduced Dante to a wider English-reading audience than ever before. But, of course, she did not know that yet.
The end of this 1945 letter also holds a timely reminder for patience and gratitude in our current supply-chain hold-up, which pales in comparison with wartime rationing, especially in Britain, which lasted until 1954 (6 years of war plus 9 years afterward!). Babington had mentioned she was about to leave by boat for America for several weeks and Sayers’s mind jumped to the lighter food and clothing rationing restriction in the United States. She wrote,
“How exciting for you to be going to America. I hope you will have a good time there. I expect you will find everybody looking shockingly overdressed, and sitting down to meals which will strike you as almost sinful abundance…”
Ibid.
Where do you feel stuck in your work today? You are not alone. Sometimes everyone’s creativity goes on strike and the old ways of working become like stirring molasses. Perhaps you can follow Sayers’s lead and try something new, to find a new type of productivity and creativity. Her Dante work called upon Sayers to dust off her Oxford training, her skills in translation, her first love of poetry, her skill and playfulness with vernacular language, her years of giving addresses to groups, and writing articles – it was arguably the most integrated and satisfying work of her life. Perhaps your next move might even be yours.
Kathryn Wehr is a Dorothy L. Sayers scholar and the editor of a forthcoming Wade Annotated Edition of Sayers’s The Man Born to be King (forthcoming 2022, IVP Academic). She holds a PhD in Divinity from the University of St Andrews’ Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts. She has also started a YouTube series with highlights of Sayers’s wartime writing.
Permission for use of excerpts from Sayers’s letters was granted by the Trustees of the Estate of Dorothy L. Sayers/David Higham Associates.
Off the Shelf 