Shadowlands

by Bruce Carlson

Thursday, March 31, 1994, The Grill, 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Saint Paul Hotel, Saint Paul Minnesota

Paul, it’s a little crowded in here today. Everyone apparently came over for lunch after the Minnesota Orchestra Coffee Concert at the Ordway Music Theatre this morning. Could I recommend the Pasta Primavera and a spinach salad?

That would be fine with me.

Did you like the movie Shadowlands?

Yes, I thought it was very effective. There were some historical inaccuracies. Joy Gresham had two sons, not just one. Both those boys had a somewhat tempestuous time, adjusting to Oxford. The older brother went to a school in London, which he didn’t like, and then eventually he went to a Jewish theological seminary. He was more in revolt. I don’t know what his status is now, but in his earlier years he didn’t like the fact that his mother had become Christian.

Paul, do you think that, in the movie when Lewis fell in love with this woman, it changed his idea of Christianity?

Oh, I don’t know, but I think it surprised Lewis as it surprised all of his friends. I think it surprised his friends, like Tolkien, because it seemed so out of character. Women had a fantastic interest in C.S. Lewis. Various women hung around him. A Jewish poet came to live in Oxford, and she was extremely concerned about C.S. Lewis. None of his friends knew the extent of the attraction that Joy Davidman Gresham had for Lewis. Furthermore, she was a rather brassy, American woman, very categorical and kind of crudely dogmatic.

But when she died, did it break his heart or severely test his faith?

His little book, A Grief Observed, is a book that shows you that after she died . . . this was really a time of testing for him. I don’t think he realized what intimacy between a man and a woman amounted to. He was a little slick on Christian things. After she died, he slowed that down a little.

What do you think is the best of his books? I think his best book was The Screwtape Letters on the one side, and then I think that his books on literary criticism are extraordinary. He doesn’t read the Scripture like a learned scholar of the twentieth century. He reads it like a person trained in literary crafts and literary appreciation.

Would a literary craft be the allegorical method?

All sorts of things like that — his whole picture of how literature works — and then he brings these methods to Scripture. And, that literary critical work, in the long run, is what Lewis’s fame is going to rest on rather than Christian apologetics. It’s good stuff.

What about a novel like Until We Have Faces? How does that measure up with works by Thomas Mann or Graham Greene, or other serious novelists?

I don’t think it’s on that level. I think it’s interesting partly because he takes up the Greek mythological scene.

Debra Winger played Joy Davidman Gresham. What did you think of her acting and her portrayal of that role?

I thought it was excellent. Claire Bloom played the role in a television version, and she was very good, too.

In your own personal experience with C.S. Lewis, had you corresponded with him or had you seen him at Oxford?

Oh, yes, I corresponded with him when I was a student at the University of Minnesota. I had taken some literature courses, and my professor, Cecil Moore, told me that I should write to this man, Lewis, at Oxford. He didn’t know anything about him particularly, except that he had written some essays. He told me to write to him from my point of view — I didn’t like the way Moore interpreted Paradise Lost.

Did he say, like some scholars, that Satan is the hero?

He didn’t do that.

Lewis didn’t do that either, I bet.

Oh, no. Anyway, I wrote to Lewis — in the late 1930s — I don’t remember the exact year. Lewis wrote me back a very interesting letter. In fact, I had criticized him. I read his essays and I criticized him, and he thanked me so much for the criticism. Then he proceeded to correct me on my point of view, and I felt like I’d been sort of spanked. He was so just, so kind, so appreciative. Really overwhelming. Anyway, we had about three or four exchanges of letters about how to read Milton. That was before his book was published. Later, he put those things together.

What was the name of that book?

It was called Preface to Paradise Lost. It was mostly essays that had appeared in periodicals.

Paul, what did you think of Anthony Hopkins playing Lewis?

I don’t think it could be improved. I thought it was just excellent.

Paul, The New Yorker magazine didn’t really review Shadowlands in full, but they gave it a couple of paragraphs. They said that Hopkins realized that he had to put up some real emotional capital or else get blown off the screen (by Debra Winger, I presume), and he comes through with the most impassioned acting of his career. That’s pretty good, in’t it?

Hmmmm.

Paul, this review goes on to say that the film chronicles the relationship between “the shy scholar C.S. Lewis, played by Anthony Hopkins, and an American woman played by Debra Winger.” Then the review says that the picture isn’t actually very good. It says it’s just a tear jerker with clumsy interpolations of theology.

I think it’s more than a tear jerker. That’s kind of cheap. That’s not quite right. Furthermore, Lewis isn’t shy. Lewis was very gregarious, outgoing, not shy in the least. He was a British academic, reticent, and would speak only when appropriate. He just wasn’t garrulous.

The New Yorker review stresses Debra Winger’s American nature.

I think the American-ness comes through. Lewis never liked American students, and he felt they were curious before they knew the terms. She tends to fit that stereotype.

She had been a Communist poet, hadn’t she?

She was influenced by the Communist movement in the United States, then converted to Christianity.

I wonder if the film has made money for the family or the boys, and who has the rights?

I don’t know, but Lewis’s books have been selling very well and have been translated in many different languages, especially the Narnia Chronicles. Over a million copies have been sold since his death. The royalties for the Narnia Chronicles went to the two sons of Joy Gresham and, I think, have made them very well off. Literary criticism is going back toward the Lewis approach. His specialty, of course, was early English literature, from Chaucer to Shakespeare; that whole period he seems to be very good at. His Oxford history of sixteenth-century English literature is the standard work in this field.

Wasn’t Lewis one of the first people to write about the beginnings of romantic love, the courtly troubadors and so on — their roots and history?

He makes a big thing of that. That’s a big component in his restitution of English literature, around courtly love. Every human being is capable of many voices because there are many aspects of human life, and what literature does is to give you instances of this human polyphony. We’re all contemporary with that; he doesn’t want to do the typical historical studies, thinking you have to be a thirteenth-century person to read thirteenth-century literature. What you have to become aware of are the polyphonic aspects of your own life, and you’ll see that the literature gives an instance of that. That’s why he doesn’t want to say that literature only documents the past; what it does is graph the life of the living individual. That’s the way to read Scripture, too. That’s what makes his Christian writing so impressive. He looks at New Testament themes, and he finds that there is a kind of correlative component in everybody’s life. The world’s literature is your clue to a rich appreciation of what it is to be a human being now.

Do you think it’s possible to read The Fairy Queen now and find things in it that illuminate your own life? I read excerpts of it when I was in college; isn’t it an important book for Lewis?

Yes, very important. There again, he characterizes literature of a certain period around a style. There is epic poetry. In another period you have lyric poetry. Then the novel dominates the literature of a given period. The periodization around styles, he wants to say, is interesting historically, but more interesting because what is writ large in an epic poem is also the epic character of a personal life. So, now when he reads The Fairy Queen, and when he lectured about it, it’s as if the Fairy Queen is about the possibility of an enlargement of the reader’s consciousness. Now, he doesn’t think all literature will do that. Literature is too topical to do this; it belongs too much to the century. But great literature does that. Like The Divine Comedy. I heard him lecture at Oxford and he talks about literary topics as if they were written yesterday here in the local press.

Did you hear him lecture? Did you know him personally?

The first time I ever met him was when another man, Edward Dirks, who was teaching at Columbia, and myself were asked by the Faculty Christian Fellowship to go over and extend an invitation to Lewis to come to the United States to lecture. And we had been promised a thousand dollars each from ten different liberal arts colleges. That was in the 1950s — 1954 or some thing like that.

Anyway, Dirks and I made an appointment with Lewis and went up to Oxford. He asked us to come for tea. We had this firm offer of $10,000 for him to come to the United States to give these lectures on whatever he chose. And he listened to us and said, “Well, what do you want me to talk about?” And we said we would like to hear something about what it’s like to be a Christian in an academic world. And he said that would be appropriate for him. But then he said, “You know, anything I have to say on the subject I’ve already put in my books.” And so we just let that pass. Then he turned to us and said, “Does anyone in America ever think of the problem of the carpenter?” And Dirks and I said, “Carpenters?” “Yes, you know, carpenters also have problems with faith.” And I remember I said, “I’m sure that’s so.” Then Lewis said, “You know my impression of Christian academics in the twentieth century is that they’re all so tender minded, unable to cope with the world that they’re in. I don’t have any regard for that. They’ll have to strengthen their own life and stand firm.” And he said, “That’s what the academic life is for. Academics have all the tools to do that, but the poor carpenters, they don’t have the tools for that.”

Wow.

So, he really chided us. Then he proceeded to say that he didn’t have much regard for all these academics worrying about their faith all the time, acting as if the universities are such alien places; yet they are no different than the rest of the world. So, we were both kind of chastened. Then he said, “Well, let’s get back to that offer.” So we reiterated what we had to say about the ten appearances. But he wouldn’t come over. He never came to the United States. That was the end of it. He wasn’t about to sit around and suffer fools gladly. He stood up, and we had to stand up; and that was the end. I thought that I’d never see him again. He wasn’t cruel or anything, but that was that.

So, Paul, later did you go back to Oxford?

He was always interested in philosophy in his early years. He would have gone into philosophy if he could have gotten jobs there. But the field of literature was open when he was about to start his teaching. It was just an accident that he went into literature. He was equally qualified as a philosopher. He moved with the whole philosophy crowd of the 1920s — Gilbert Rile, H. A. Smith, and various others. But, anyway, in later years he used to occasionally go to the Aristotelian Society. And I met him at one of their dinner meetings. I was at the same table with him, the High Table.

Did you read the recent biography by Wilson?

Yes, I didn’t like it.

I didn’t either, Paul. I had good expectations but I got bogged down in it. I didn’t think it was a good book.

Wilson just assumes that a man can’t be distinctive. He thinks that Lewis’s relationship with Mrs. Moore, the woman with whom he lived all those years, had to have something sexual about it. He assumes that, on general grounds, that’s the way people are. He assumes a kind of profile of what normal human beings are, and he thinks Lewis should conform to that.

Paul, in that book he wrote Surprised by Joy, does the word “Joy” refer to this woman, or was it just an accident that his wife’s name was Joy?

He wrote the book before he met her.

Could you say anything about what the phrase “Surprised by Joy” means? Is he referring to epiphanies or experiences that happen, like joy breaking into his life — did that prove to him that there was truth in the Christian life?

It didn’t really prove it, but he had this notion of human beings seeking a happiness — the intended roles that we have. Sometimes, the episodes we go through provide more than our expectations. And they work out differently. And, I think that’s the way he thinks of his own life, a series of things that occurred. Nothing is very dramatic. The book is very disappointing to someone who expects some massive religious testimony. There isn’t any. Rather, the whole tenor of life has allowed some fruition of human satisfaction and happiness, rather than a big moment.

When he was a young person, was he a member of the Church of England, and then he lapsed into atheism and came back?

Yes, he was influenced by that private teacher he had in the south of England who was preparing him for the University. This man wasn’t a believer, and he was exceedingly logical. Lewis quoted him a lot. He had forced Lewis to have a precise definition of everything he said, and Lewis claimed he owed him everything. This man taught him all the good habits that served him so well. It was probably more important than his education at Oxford.

Who was the teacher?

He was called “The Great Knock.” I can’t remember his name just at this moment.

But, wasn’t there a specific moment in his life when he reached a certainty about Christianity? I read once that Bertrand Russell was riding a bicycle and all of a sudden he said, “Zounds the ontological argument is true.”

Yes, there were a couple. Lewis became a believer in God, but more or less in an idealistic philosophical sense. So, he began as a Theist first; then, in Surprised by Joy, he describes going to the zoo and while he is at the zoo he suddenly decides that Jesus is God.

Paul, have you had experiences like that in your own life? Is your own life parallel to Lewis in some sense?

I wouldn’t say so, but I empathize deeply with his experience. I read a little book when I was in graduate school at Yale. I was sitting outside one day in the old Puritan Cemetery and was reading Thomas a Kempis’s book, The Garden of the Soul, which isn’t a very popular book, and suddenly — I don’t know why I was reading it; I was reading it by chance — I just concluded that very noon hour that I was going to make good on a Christian commitment. I had sort of pushed it away. I was thinking of other things. I then decided I was going to make the Christian life the center of my life, and I went back to my room and wrote out a couple of pages. For me, it meant something, because I wasn’t going to keep these two domains in my life separate — the religious on the one side and academic on the other. I was going to integrate them, forge them together in a better way.

Do you remember when you bought that book?

Oh, yes, I remember; I paid ten cents for it. And I was so surprised when I found it.

Do you still have it?

Oh, yes, I still have it. It’s a nice little leather-bound, nineteenth-century edition.

Paul, your own ideas about literature and novels, they seem like Lewis’s — how literature can illuminate your idea of human nature.

Yeah, I found him helpful.

I’ve heard you preach, and you mention Thomas Wolfe and other writers.

Oh, yes, yes. That’s the way I’ve read literature. I’ve read it for personal nourishment. Not to fill out periods of literary history. I read for nutrition.

Is another parallel with Lewis that you, too, are a sort of apologist?

Yes, I think so. A guy from Carleton College told me once, “You know, Paul, I think you’re a Billy Graham to the intellectuals.” I think that the doors are always being closed by the intellectual life, closing down, and the aesthetic life, too. I think people were always closing down the access to Christianity on the grounds that it was immature or it was untrue. My task has not been to show that it is true, but just to open the door a little again. It’s been slammed shut by so many. So, it’s like a preparation for the other evangel. I’ve never felt an obligation like an ordained man to proclaim it. But to just open the door a little.

Paul, is Shadowlands one of the top ten movies that you’ve seen? How do you rank it?

I wouldn’t rank it that way. Movies don’t mean that much to me in the same way as literature does. I’m always disappointed with the movies anyway, because they always seem to me to be less than the book.

What about C.S. Lewis? Is he one of the finest scholars or writers you’ve encountered?

For me, it would be more like Kant, and certainly Kirkegaard and Wittgenstein; these people really move me. And Dostoevsky when I was a student — The Brothers Karamazov. And the same with Tolstoy, especially his short stories. But Lewis comes along, and he teaches something else about literature. He provides a kind of clue to escape the mode in which literature becomes pedagogical. I resonated to that. I’ve had a lot of my life spoiled by the history of scholarship. The history of scholarship has destroyed, for me, first-hand access to literature. I want to recover that access, that first-hand access, as if the writer is writing for me.

Is that what reading Lewis has done for you?

Yes. That’s why I value him so much. Restoring that kind of primitivity to yourself. And he says that about himself. He says the best reading is what you’ve read as a boy; and you read something surreptitiously, and you don’t want anyone to know about it, and you’re just thrilled. He’s just waiting for that to happen as an adult again.

Paul, in my own case — I’m not in the scholarly world, I’m in management and business. When I read a novel, I don’t think about its place in some historical continuum, I just read it.

Well, when you’re a teacher, that whole pedagogical style can ruin first-rate literature. It can ruin Kirkegaard, Wittgenstein. And Lewis, in a way, that happened to him; and he uses his own literary critical skill to establish himself in opposition to that other pattern.

Paul, there is a movie called Wittgenstein. Have you seen it?

No, I’ve read reviews, and it sounds like a bad movie. Say, if you want to read a book that’s really startling, there is a new thing written by Norman Malcolm just before he died in 1990. It’s an analysis of Wittgenstein who says he’s not a religious man but still views everything from a religious point of view. So, Malcolm starts the whole book by asking himself what it means for a person to say he’s not religious, yet sees the world from a religious point of view. The first chapter really touched me. It’s from Cornell University Press. I’m really sorry I didn’t write that book before Norman Malcolm did, because that’s the way I’ve been reading Wittgenstein for years.

I know you gave your wonderful collection of Kirkegaard material to the University of Minnesota Library. What have you done with your Lewis letters?

I still have some of them. I’m going to give them to some library.

Do you have any aimed at North Park?

I’d like to have them go some place where they’ll be useful.

Paul, thank you for coming over to this restaurant with me today. I hope this little tape recorder worked. If it did, I’d like to edit and put our conversation into that increasingly popular navigational periodical, Pietisten. We are very close to the printing deadline, so if I misquote you or misinterpreted anything, maybe you could straighten it out in the “Letters to the Editor” section in the next issue. Okay?

Would you like a cup of coffee or a cappuccino?