Dalya Alberge reports for the Guardian on an amusing literary find:
CS Lewis loathed one of his fellow Oxford academics so much that he satirised him in a series of seven previously unpublished poems that have been discovered. The Chronicles of Narnia author simply could not stand HC Wyld, deriding his lectures as elementary and dismissing his snobbery and his bullying of students, referring to him in his diary as “the cad”.
It has now emerged that Lewis even inscribed derogatory verses about him across the blank pages of his own copy of Wyld’s 1921 textbook A Short History of English. One poem begins: “Loud-mouthed, a bully, publicly professing / The impartial, scientific attitude, / Yet, on the point of dialects, confessing / How pruriently class-conscious was his mood.”
Wyld was the author of several influential textbooks on the history of the English language, but he was so pernickety that he censured pronunciations such as “waistcoat” instead of “weskit”. Lewis ridiculed his obsession with analysing sounds at the expense of texts themselves: “He opens and closes his glottis at pleasure,/ Explosives and stops he is able to measure,/ No grunt and no gurgle escapes his attention,/ Religiously marking each slackness and tension”.
The poems were discovered by Simon Horobin, a professor of English language and literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, where Lewis himself taught. […] Joking that an infuriated Lewis had perhaps composed them during one of Wyld’s lectures, Horobin noted that one of them identifies Wyld through an acrostic with the initial letters spelling out the name “Henry Cecil Wyld”.
He added: “On the remaining blank pages he penned a series of additional satirical verses lampooning Wyld – one in English, alongside others in Latin, Greek, French and even Old English. It’s exciting to see Lewis composing poetry in a range of languages at this early stage of his academic career.”
You can see images and more of the texts at the link; thanks, Jack! (Wyld got a rap on the knuckles here from Piotr Gąsiorowski in 2017.)
Lewis was one of the foremost writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his children’s fantasy classic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first of a series of masterpieces
A bit over the top, there …
I read `That Hideous Strength’ as a kid before I read the Narnia stories and was on guard. `Perelandra’ had already set my teeth on edge. Similarly I was a fan of early James Blish but not of his religious/horror pulp.
Yeah, I like the Cities in Flight continuity, but have only a sort of abstract admiration for the cleverness of the religious-adjacent stuff. It reminds me (a little) of Evelyn Waugh’s complaint that the Catholicism in Graham Greene’s “serious” novels is too often just a sort of McGuffin.
I think you need a lot more subtlety to really pull off Christian themes artistically in SF. Cordwainer Smith and (especially) Gene Wolfe were a lot better at it.
An old friend of ours is a moderately successful Christian-SF writer; mostly popular in the US, I think (not too surprisingly.) He is erudite and literate, but it really isn’t my sort of thing at all.
When I read Out of the Silent Planet, the blurb on the back started with: “C. S. Lewis is best known as the author of The Screwtape Letters.” I was like, “Yeah, no.”
I think the Instrumentality of Mankind may benefit from the fact that it did not quite start out as an attempt to write Christian science fiction. Christian influences were present pretty much from the start; the name Instrumentalality is already there in “Scanners Live in Vain.” However, the stories after the first few became more Christian as Linebarger himself did.
I suppose fiction with virtually any overt propaganda line is likely to be hobbled artistically by the “message”, even for readers who actually are all in favour of said message. Better if the author can keep it subtle, of course, but only really likely to work if the author wants to tell a good story (in whatever genre) more than they want to convert the reader.
This (moving sideways a bit) probably accounts for the great success of Frank Peretti’s awful novels*: he’s not actually trying to convert his readers, but preaching to the choir, so he just gets on with writing schlock-horror stuff for those who already share his, erm, worldview. He does a perfectly workmanlike job of that. (I’ve previously shared the sad story of how I was exposed to this literary phenomenon myself.)
I suppose things like How the Steel was Tempered may have occupied a parallel ecological niche … different ideology, similar dynamic.
* His WP page compares him to CS Lewis, John Bunyan and John Milton, which shows that there are people out there who can read whole books without any pictures in them, but still can’t tell crap from caviar.
I wonder if Frank Peretti knew there was already a better science fiction novel named after the exact same Biblical passage he took as the title of his first book.
“This Present Darkness”? It would more or less be bound to be better, but I can’t say I’ve heard of it myself.
The Peretti novel is really pretty sinister. Among much else, it features one of his favourite tropes, a false sexual abuse allegation made against a holy hero by a (literally) demon-possessed woman.
These novels sell to people who think all this is realism.
If I myself were written into a Peretti novel as a character, I would certainly be represented as Satanic. At least, I devoutly hope so …
I was elliptical, because the two books do not, in fact, have the same title. I was referring to This Time of Darkness by H. M. Hoover, which is named after the same noun phrase from Ephesians 6:12, but using a different translation. As science fiction novels for children go, This Time of Darkness is reasonably effective. It’s not a masterpiece like A Wrinkle in Time, The City of Gold and Lead, Galactic Warlord, or The Giver; but it’s not a disaster like End of Exile, When the Tripods Came, or Allegiant.
Diolch.
On the specific point, nothing about the novels suggests an author given to wide reading. (Which, in a way, I suppose, makes his achievement all the more remarkable. Primitive art … of enormous anthropological interest, if any anthropologists can get research visas.)
When my father was sufficiently advanced in his career that he was becoming an attractive recruit to the Illuminati, a fervently Christian friend gave him a copy of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_Visible_(Hannah_book)
I recall reading his (discarded) copy as a teenager, though I don’t think I made much sense of it. (My father resisted the blandishments of the Lizard People, though I think it was more from an ingrained aversion to flummery than religious scruple. Also, by that stage he already had the codes for the Space Lasers.)
it features one of his favourite tropes, a false sexual abuse allegation made against a holy hero …
That seems particularly likely not to age well. I’m of a generation when at first accusations of sexual abuse against authority figures would ipso facto be taken as evidence of the accuser being demon-possessed. Such accusations got so frequent they could no longer be dismissed/indeed became something of a commonplace (Mary Coughlan frequently worked the Bishop of Mayo into her act.)
Peretti’s double-double trope smacks to me of re-abusing the genuine victims.
Absolutely.
The existence of this trope unfortunately accounts for the astonishing indifference of the US Peretti-appreciating demographic to well-substantiated accusations of sexual assault against their heroes.
(My own – legally-mandated – official role in my own church is as one of the people to contact with any concerns about such things (among others), designedly outside the church hierarchy itself. Our training makes it crystal clear that we must neither brush allegations aside nor just refer them to the regular pastoral care people – who could, of course, be the actual problem. Mainstream UK churches have at least learnt something from past egregious failures. In Peretti’s books, people who take rape allegations seriously are presented as in league with Satan, so that’s me damned to eternal torment …)
I have pulled up on my screen about 40 different English translations of Eph 6:12 and do not see the string “time of darkness” in any of them, although even a set of 40-odd translations isn’t exhaustive. I wonder if Brett has a specific cite?
The vaguely poetic/portentious “this present darkness” option is interesting, because “present” doesn’t obviously seem traceable to any lexeme in the Greek. My tentative theory is as follows: there is variation in the Greek text, which is in the relevant phrase τοῦ σκότους [τοῦ αἰῶνος] τούτου, with the bracketed words found in the so-called Majority Text (and related editions like the Textus Receptus and Patriarchal Text) but generally omitted in modern “critical” texts generated by Very Smart Professors. One modern English translation assuming the presence of the bracketed words would be “of the darkness of this age” (NKJV); one ignoring the bracketed words would be “of this darkness” (HCSB).
The “this present darkness” translation (I believe originally in the RSV but also followed by some more recent ones) seems to assume that τοῦ αἰῶνος was added by later copyists to make explicit what was already believed to be implicit in the Greek text and then treats that as a motivation to do something parallel in English to resolve the ambiguity of “this darkness? just which darkness are you referring to?” Significantly the so-called Amplified Bible has “of this [present] darkness,” with the brackets signifying “word that’s not in the Greek but that we’ve put here to help explain the Greek.”
Yes, I wondered about that, too.
Fairly desultory searching on “this present darkness” seems just to turn up multiple references to the ghastly book itself.
Although backing up just a little, the point of the passage is not so much the existence of the darkness, however specified, but the omnipresence of spiritual struggle/confict against the κοσμοκράτορας (cosmos-rulers, if Englished a bit overliterally) of that particular darkness. English translations vary quite a bit in how they handle that Greek lexeme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthly_Powers
@J.W. Brewer: I remember reading (on a jacket blurb or in an interview with her printed somewhere) that Hoover took the title from the Bible, and I think it was specifically linked to that epistle. Maybe it was her own translation or paraphrase? Or maybe I misremembered the specific Biblical source, and it was actually from somewhere else, such as Isaiah 9:1.
@Brett: it’s easy enough to find the string “time of darkness” in discussions/commentaries/etc. on various parts of the New Testament, including that general section (not necessarily that exact verse) of Ephesians. Not sure I’d call that a “paraphrase” as much as “thematic analysis” or something like that, but obviously one can have a Biblically-inspired title without it being a direct word-for-word quote, although some may feel a direct-quotes-are-better cultural norm more strongly than others. I think I was also particularly puzzled because “darkness of this time” (instead of “this age”) would be a reasonable direct translation of one Greek version of the phrasing in that exact verse, but that four-word phrase means something rather different than the same words reordered as “this time of darkness.”
Re David E’s desultory search results: the above-mentioned phrase “That Hideous Strength” that Lewis himself used as a title is taken directly from a line in a 16th-century poem but I daresay if you just google the phrase you’re going to get lots of references to Lewis’ book but virtually none to the poem-of-origin unless you focus your search pretty specifically on where Lewis got the title from. Now, that 16th-century Scottish poet (wiki calls him David Lyndsay, but his surname seems extant in a variety of spellings …) is himself rather more obscure than St. Paul, but OTOH “this present darkness” is not from the traditional KJV translation of that bit by St. Paul and is not even standard among more recent translations versus simply being one option competing in the Bible-translation marketplace against a cacophony of others.
Lots of people are more obscure than St Paul, but Lindsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis has been mentioned here before.
I keep wanting to read the title of this as ‘all grunt and no gurgle’, as in fur coats and knickers and other such pairs.
“All hat and no cattle” has the same meter.
I found this comic illustrating the point. As a cultural point, it’s a New Yorker cartoon, but I’m surprised it actually appeared there; the humor seems a little too broad.
Anglice: All mouth and no trousers.
/ɔ:mɑ:fənəʊtʃɑ:zɪz/
τοῦ σκότους [τοῦ αἰῶνος] τούτου, with the bracketed words found in the so-called Majority Text (and related editions like the Textus Receptus and Patriarchal Text) but generally omitted in modern “critical” texts
I’m looking in my Nestle edition, and this seems to be the case.
Jen: I keep wanting to read the title of this as ‘all grunt and no gurgle’
Hey, I came here to say that!
All Lewis and no Wyld.
Recte ɔ:mɑ:fəntʃɑ:zɪz
Simply as a matter of poetic diction and even non-poetic syntax, I do think “no grunt and no gurgle escapes” sounds a bit off. Why not “Neither grunt nor gurgle,” or the even more poetic-register “Nor grunt nor gurgle escapeth”? I know the obvious answer is that he enslaved to a particular metrical pattern that drove him to inelegant phrasing but, come on man, it was the 20th century. You didn’t have to do it that way anymore. And you could have done “nor grunting nor gurgle” to find the extra syllable you were looking for.
@mollymooly:
Ah, but as my transcription reveals, I was citing the Metropolitan Perversion, not the True Northern Original.
I am surprised and saddened to find a fellow-Hatter indulging in what I can only describe as prescriptivism.
Perhaps, as JiE suggests, we can agree (in an ecumenical spirit) to use “All fur coat and no knickers” (a locution which can be traced back to Beowulf)?
(I believe that a certain Bianca Censori was recently spotted attired in honour of this ancient Anglo-Saxon motif. Who could say that our treasured traditions are no longer relevant in this grey Machine Age?)
I myself say “weskit”; this Olde Worlde pronunciation seems appropriate to the character of the actual garment itself. Iconic, as it were.
“All grunt and no gurgle” is the traditional cry of a plumber failing to unclog a blocked drain.
Curious. I have heard a quite different cry.
I’m not 100% on the reliability of these memories, but I feel like I might have somehow learned the “weskit” pronunciation in childhood in the context of reading and/or being read Beatrix Potter’s _The Tailor of Gloucester_, which certainly (if implicitly) stressed the importance of avoiding a naive spelling pronunciation of “Gloucester.”
@David Eddyshaw: I don’t know about Beowulf,* but all fur coat and no knickers can definitely be found in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.**
* it doesn’t really seem like the mother’s*** thing, does it?
** Okay, actually it’s:
*** But my impressions of her are probably not worth much. When Beowulf was first read to us when I was in kindergarten,**** I came away with the impression that she was a tentacled monster.
**** Yes.