C.S. Lewis - A Grief Observed

It's that time of the year when publications put out their Best of 2010s. Because a lot of my energy in 2010 has gone into feeding Goodreads, I thought I'd share some of the highlights of my reading year as recorded originally on the site. This is the book that most moved me this year - C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed.

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"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing."

I don't think I've ever felt the prickle of tears over the first paragraph of a book.

'A Grief Observed' is barely a book - 70 small pages of short paragraphs - lancing, glancing thoughts. Lewis wrote as a way of coping after the death of his wife from bone cancer; he had no original intention to publish the contents of the four little notebooks, and when they were first published, they were released under a pseudonym. Although writing was how Lewis got through the period ('reading is not enough of a drug') he struggled with the connotations of the act:

"What would H. herself think of this terrible little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings morbid? I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: that fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief."

Later: "This is the fourth - and the last - empty MS. book I can find in the house, at least nearly empty, for there are some pages of very ancient arithmetic at the end by J. I resolve to let this limit my jottings. I will not start buying books for the purpose."

This slim volume is, I guess, about two things: Lewis's observation of his grief over the death of his wife, and the questions he had to ask of and about god as a result.

Lewis grapples with what Leibniz named as theodicy: the question of whether evil and pain in our world does not conflict with the essential goodness of god. His writing and thinking here is searingly honest. But his writing about his wife ... you realise that something late and precious and extraordinary happened between these two people. It is some of the most sweetly, sadly, realistically erotic writing I've ever read:

"Her mind was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard. ... How many bubbles of mine she pricked! I soon learned not to talk rot to her unless I did it for the sheer pleasure - and there's another red-hot jab - of being exposed and laughed at. I was never less silly than as H.'s love."

"I see I've described H. as being like a sword. That's true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have balanced it. I ought to have said, 'But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you entered.'"

I will buy a copy of this book today. But before I put it on the shelf, or begin pressing it upon friends, I shall tear out every page of Lewis's step-son's introduction. I cannot and I will not conscience statements like this:

"[Lewis] had written also about the great poets and songs of love, but somehow neither his learning nor his experiences had ever prepared him for the combination of both the great love, and the great loss which is its counterpoint; the soaring joy which is the finding and winning of the mate whom God has prepared for us and the crushing blow, the loss, which is Satan's corruption of that great gift of loving and being loved."

or

"I had yet to learn that all human relationships end in pain - it is the price that our imperfection has allowed Satan to exact from us for the privilege of love."

And instead, I will give the last word to Lewis

"If, as I can't help but suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of suffering (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings) then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. ...

I wrote the other night that bereavement is not the truncation of married life but one of its regular phases - like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage faithfully and well through that phase too. If it hurts (and it certainly will) we will accept the pains as a necessary part of this phase. we don't want to escape them at the price of desertion of divorce. Killing the dead a second time. We were one flesh. Now that it has been cut in two, we don't want to pretend that it is whole and complete. We will still be married, still in love. Therefore we shall still ache. But we are not at all - if we understand ourselves - seeking the aches for their own sake. The less of them the better, so long as the marriage is preserved. And the more joy there can be in the marriage between dead and living, the better."

Surrender: an experiment in looking

Last week I finished Laura Miller's The Magician's Book, an exploration of her "long, tumultuous relationship with C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia.". Yesterday, I finished off Lewis's 1961 extended essay on literary criticism, An Experiment in Criticism. Today I visited roundabout at City Gallery Wellington. This post seeks to draw together some threads between these experiences.

As a kid, I got my biblical language (rounded, rhythmical, intonational) from Kipling and my moral compass from King Arthur and Robin Hood, by way of T.H. White and Roger Lancelyn Green. By the time I was introduced to Christian mythology, the space in my imagination where God might have fit was already filled with Greek and Roman and Norse figures, before whom the Christian story paled into dull insignificance.

So it's not surprising that I was one of the legion of young readers - including Laura Miller - left disappointed, angered, even bereft when they discovered that the Chronicles of Narnia were in some ways a retelling of the Christian story. (In my case, the news was broken by a born-again uncle when I spotted a copy of The Screwtape Letters on his shelf).

In the Chronicles I had recognised and rejoiced in seeing Bacchus and dryads and fauns (dear old Mr Tumescent). I had been devastated and confused when Aslan gave himself up to the White Witch and overjoyed when he woke up, but I had no inkling that what I was reading was a version of the Passion Story. When I did unravel it all I was deeply offended that Lewis had tried to pull a fast one on me - to slip me something I didn't believe in by disguising it in things that I desperately wanted to.

Laura Miller had a similar experience (as did Neil Gaiman, and hearing him talk about this earlier this year was wonderful). She writes:

Lewis, Carter explained, was famously Christian, a fact I'd somehow managed to miss. I was shocked, almost nauseated. I'd been tricked, cheated, betrayed. I went over the rest of the Chronicles, and in almost every one found some element that lined up with this unwelcome and, to me, ulterior meaning. I felt like a character in one of those surreal, existential 1960s TV dramas, like The Prisoner or The Twilight Zone, a captive who pulled off a daring escape from his cell only to find himself inside another, another cell identical to the first.

I'm sure my uncle thought he was giving me a greater understanding of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when he explained the Christian symbolism. But rather than gaining something, I felt loss. All the potential had been taken away, and instead I had an explanation of what the book was ultimately 'about'. It closed the book down, rather than opening it up.

Turning to An Experiment in Criticism. In this book, Lewis tests out another way of writing literary criticism:

In this essay, I propose to try an experiment. Literary criticism is traditionally employed in judging books. Any judgement it implies about men's reading of books is a corollary from its judgement on the books themselves. Bad taste is, as it were by definition, a taste for bad books. I want to find out what sort of picture we shall get by reversing the process. Let us make our distinction between readers or types of reading the basis, and our distinction between books the corollary. Let us try to discover how far it might be plausible to define a good book as a book which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read in another.

Lewis defines two kinds of reader: the few and the many, the literary and the unliterary. He characterises them thus:

1. The majority never re-read a book. Once they've finished it, they've 'used' it all up. "The sure mark of a unliterary man is that he considers 'I've read it already' to be a conclusive argument against reading a work."

2. The majority don't see reading as anything special. They read when there's nothing better to do, and abandon the book as soon as something better comes along. "But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.

3. The many are generally unmoved by what they read - when they reach the end "nothing much, or nothing at all, seems to have happened to them." But for the literary, the first reading of a work can be "an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison."

4. Finally, for the literary, what they read is constantly in their minds and made part of their lives. They talk incessantly about it when they're with others, and they savour it when they're alone. "Scenes and characters from books provide them with a sort of iconography by which they interpret or sum up their own experiences."

When I read this passage, I felt - well, I felt understood. I didn't like the connotations of 'few' and 'many', although Lewis is quick to deny any kind of value judgment in the following chapter. But these four points so well summed up my own life experience of reading. They explain my confusion at why people would not read a wonderful book again, the puzzlement I feel when I visit a house without bookshelves, the reason why I get up an hour earlier than I need to in the morning (to squeeze in some reading before I start my work day) and the way that I constantly use the books I've read and ideas I've gleaned from them to explain the world around me to myself.

I'm ready to admit that I didn't follow all of Lewis' arguments, and I found some of the passages either howlingly sexist or unconscionably classist. And yet time and time again I found passages that gave shape to the way I feel about books and reading, but have never had the follow-through to articulate.

It was the final page that undid me though:

Those of us who have been true readers all our lives seldom fully realise the enormous extension or our being that we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk to an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly I would learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with the information and emotion it carries for a dog.

In the book Lewis also talks about different ways of looking at art. One way is to look at it, figure out what it is ‘of’ or ‘about’, decide whether it’s a good, faithful, even skilful representation of what it’s ‘about’ or ‘of’, and then move on. He describes it as ‘using’ a picture – you’ve got what you need from it and you don’t need to go back.

The other way of looking is to ‘receive’. You try to put aside all your preconceptions and instead try to let the artwork work on you. The word Lewis uses is ‘surrender’.

I thought about that idea this afternoon when I was at City Gallery. I was drawn back several times to Shane Cotton's 2007 painting The Hanging Sky, which is hung in the new gallery formed by knocking out the old auditorium.

Shane Cotton, The Hanging Sky, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 265cm x 265 cm. Image from the Anna Schwartz Gallery website.

Cotton is an artist I find easy to 'surrender' to. It is easy to say what is ‘in’ The Hanging Sky – there are dark clouds, overlaid by the falling figures of birds, shadows of foliage, and in the centre a carved face, like one you would find in a wharenui. It's tempting to try to explain what all the elements mean - indeed, assessments of Cotton's works often read like art history as puzzle-solving: post-modern, post-colonial iconography.

But to seek to explain what Cotton's painting is 'about' is to deny it its action as a painting, and Cotton's power as an artist. I went home and re-read that chapter from Lewis's book:

We must not let loose our own subjectivity upon the pictures and make them its vehicles. We must begin by laying aside as completely as we can all our preconceptions, interests and associations. ... We must use our eyes. We must look, and go on looking till we have certainly seen exactly what is there. We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand that any work makes of us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out).

Whenever I see one of Cotton's paintings that really works on me, I can't explain why. It's like he's trying to show me something I can't see yet. But I'm willing to go on looking until I can see it - and hopefully beyond.