Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

C.S. Lewis’s Discovery/ Recovery of Creativity, Magic and the Imagination in the Depths of Christianity

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C.S. Lewis’s Discovery/ Recovery of Creativity, Magic and the Imagination in the Depths of Christianity
Owen Barfield noted that there were three Lewises–Lewis, the scholar, whose critical books are still read today; Lewis, beloved children’s and science fiction writer;  and Lewis, the Christian writer and apologist. That is astonishing. Lewis also wrote a beloved memoir, Surprised by Joy which reveals all these aspects of his personality. 
In Surprised by Joy, we read that becoming a Christian for Lewis, was essentially a recovery of the imagination and creativity, a recovery of the child-like sense of wonder at beauty, a recovery of joy. He describes the cold wind which blew from the North, the “strange cold air” of Norse mythology that captivated him (and totally captivated me as a child.) 
 
    I had become fond of Longfellow’s “Saga of King Olaf”: fond of it in a casual, shallow way for its story and vigorous rhythms. But then, and quite different from such pleasures, and like a voice from far more distant regions, there came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of “Tegner’s Drapa”, and read:
        I heard a voice that cried
        Balder the beautiful
        Is dead, is dead,
    I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of the northern sky; I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote) and then…found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.
In becoming a Christian, he recovers the things which were most precious to him– imagination, creativity, wonder, beauty, poetry, literature, mythology—all enhanced.
                          All which I took from thee I did but take,
                         Not for thy harms.
                        But just that thou might’st seek it in my arms.
                       All which thy child’s mistake
                      Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home”
                                                                                Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven.
W.B. Yeats observes in his autobiography that when he wanted to know if a man could be trusted he watched to see if he associated with his betters (by which Yeats meant his intellectual and creative superiors). That is one yardstick I use to gauge people (do they surround themselves with people who challenge them, or those who uncritically admire them?). However, one of the things which most interests me about people is whether they believe in God—or not. And if so, to what extent and how it affects their lives. And also how they came to faith.
Lewis’s spiritual journey, as befits a bookish man, much of whose life was lived in, and mediated and refracted through books was through reading and other writers. What a melange of writers brought him to faith—Plotinius!!, Phantastes, by George Macdonald, which baptized his imagination, and introduced him to the feel of “holiness,” and G.K. Chesterton’s “The Everlasting Man” a portrait of the central position of Christ in human history, which baptized his intellect.  “In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. . . . God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.” Lewis comments.

And then, he was a man most blessed in his friends.  Owen Barfield, who rids him of his “chronological snobbery,” the “uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited;” Tolkein and Dyson convince him that Christianity had elements of the myths he loved, the God who died to redeem, except it was a true myth, the ultimate story in which alone the longings and tales of redemption in all great myths were historically realized.  “The story of Christ is simply a true myth,” he says he discovered that night, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”
As Adam Gopnik says in The New Yorker, “This was a new turn in the history of religious conversion. Where for millennia the cutting edge of faith had been the difference between pagan myth and Christian revelation, Lewis was drawn in by the likeness of the Christian revelation to pagan myth. Even Victorian conversions came, in the classic Augustinian manner, out of an overwhelming sense of sin. Cardinal Manning agonized over eating too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace Christianity because he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s own bakery.”
Faith for Lewis was a recovery of the sense of childlike joy and possibility, of infinite worlds within worlds. I must say it feels the same to me. As a believer, he can go back to the magical lands of his childhood, and in a sense see them for the first time. As he writes in “Surprised by Joy” “My first taste of Oxford was comical enough. I had made no arrangements about quarters and, having no more luggage than I could carry in my hand, I sallied out of the railway station on foot to find either a lodging-house or a cheap hotel; all agog for “dreaming spires” and “last enchantments.” My first disappointment at what I saw could be dealt with. Towns always show their worst face to the railway. But as I walked on and on I became more bewildered. Could this succession of mean shops really be Oxford? But I still went on, always expecting the next turn to reveal the beauties, and reflecting that it was a much larger town than I had been led to suppose.
Only when it became obvious that there was very little town left ahead of me, that I was in fact getting to open country, did I turn round and look. There behind me, far away, never more beautiful since, was the fabled cluster of spires and towers. I had come out of the station on the wrong side and been all this time walking into what was even then the mean and sprawling suburb of Botley. I did not see to what extent this little adventure was an allegory of my whole life.  
Gopnik goes on to say that his new-found faith got Lewis “to write inspired scholarship, and then inspired fairy tales. The two sides of his mind started working at the same time and together.” And that is always how it is when one finds a voice, or finds oneself as a writer. Things one has thought, and felt, and read, and learned, and suffered and dreamed suddenly coalesce in a magical amalgam.
And in his forties, Lewis begins to work in fantasy, first science fiction, and then in his late forties, he begins to write very quickly and “almost carelessly” about the magic world of Narnia, which, as Gopnik puts it, “includes, encyclopedically, everything he feels most passionate about: the nature of redemption, the problem of pain, the Passion and the Resurrection, all set in his favored mystical English winter-and-spring landscape.”
New writing, a new thing, in one’s late forties, forged through a combination of one’s natural intelligence, gifts and interests, touched and sanctified by religious faith and love. What a very, very inspiring story!

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His Conversion Made C.S. Lewis Come Alive Creatively & Baptised his Imagination

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 Owen Barfield noted that there were three Lewises–Lewis, the scholar, whose critical books are still read today; Lewis, beloved children’s and science fiction writer;  and Lewis, the Christian writer and apologist. So multi-sided a writer: it’s astonishing. Lewis also wrote a beloved memoir, Surprised by Joy entwining all these aspects of his personality.

In Surprised by Joy, we read that becoming a Christian for Lewis, was essentially a recovery of the imagination and creativity, a recovery of the child-like sense of wonder at beauty, a recovery of joy. He describes the cold wind which blew from the North, the “strange cold air” of Norse mythology that captivated him (and totally captivated me as a child.)

I had become fond of Longfellow’s “Saga of King Olaf”: fond of it in a casual, shallow way for its story and vigorous rhythms. But then, and quite different from such pleasures, and like a voice from far more distant regions, there came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of “Tegner’s Drapa”, and read:

        I heard a voice that cried
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead,

    I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of the northern sky; I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote) and then…found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.

* * *

In becoming a Christian, he recovers the things which were most precious to him– imagination, creativity, wonder, beauty, poetry, literature, mythology—all enhanced.

                          All which I took from thee I did but take,

                         Not for thy harms.

                        But just that thou might’st seek it in my arms.

                       All which thy child’s mistake

                      Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home”

                                Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven.

 W.B. Yeats observes in his autobiography that when he wanted to know if a man could be trusted he watched to see if he associated with his betters (his intellectual and creative superiors).

Lewis’s road to faith–as befits a bookish man, much of whose life was lived in, and mediated and refracted through books– was through the ivory tower of  reading and other writers. What a melange of writers brought him to faith—Plotinius!!, Phantastes by George Macdonald, which baptized his imagination, and introduced him to the feel of “holiness,” and G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, a portrait of the central position of Christ in human history, which baptized his intellect.  “In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. . . . God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.” Lewis comments.

He was a man most blessed in his friends.  Owen Barfield rids him of his “chronological snobbery,” the “uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”

During a now-famous all night walk, Tolkein and Dyson convince him that Christianity had elements of the myths he loved, the God who died to redeem, except it was a true myth, the ultimate story in which alone the longings and tales of redemption in all great myths were historically realized.  “The story of Christ is simply a true myth,” he says he discovered that night, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

As Adam Gopnik says in The New Yorker, “This was a new turn in the history of religious conversion. Where for millennia the cutting edge of faith had been the difference between pagan myth and Christian revelation, Lewis was drawn in by the likeness of the Christian revelation to pagan myth. Even Victorian conversions came, in the classic Augustinian manner, out of an overwhelming sense of sin. Cardinal Manning agonized over eating too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace Christianity because he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s own bakery.”

 Faith for Lewis was a recovery of the sense of childlike joy and possibility, of infinite worlds within worlds. I must say it feels the same to me.

As a believer, he can return to the magical lands of his childhood, and in a sense see them for the first time. As he writes in “Surprised by Joy” “My first taste of Oxford was comical enough. I had made no arrangements about quarters and, having no more luggage than I could carry in my hand, I sallied out of the railway station on foot to find either a lodging-house or a cheap hotel; all agog for “dreaming spires” and “last enchantments.” My first disappointment at what I saw could be dealt with. Towns always show their worst face to the railway. But as I walked on and on I became more bewildered. Could this succession of mean shops really be Oxford? But I still went on, always expecting the next turn to reveal the beauties, and reflecting that it was a much larger town than I had been led to suppose.

Only when it became obvious that there was very little town left ahead of me, that I was in fact getting to open country, did I turn round and look. There behind me, far away, never more beautiful since, was the fabled cluster of spires and towers. I had come out of the station on the wrong side and been all this time walking into what was even then the mean and sprawling suburb of Botley. I did not see to what extent this little adventure was an allegory of my whole life.  

He looks back and recovers joy. In fact, I believe the things we loved and which turned us on as children are treasure-hunt clues hidden in our childhood by a good God–clues to the destiny and life’s work he has planned for us.

Gopnik goes on to say that his new-found faith got Lewis “to write inspired scholarship, and then inspired fairy tales. The two sides of his mind started working at the same time and together.”

And that is always how it is when one finds a voice, or finds oneself as a writer. Things one has thought, and felt, and read, and learned, and suffered and dreamed suddenly coalesce in a magical amalgam.

And in his forties, Lewis begins to work in fantasy, first science fiction, and then in his late forties, he begins to write very quickly and “almost carelessly” about the magic world of Narnia, which, as Gopnik puts it, “includes, encyclopaedically, everything he feels most passionate about: the nature of redemption, the problem of pain, the Passion and the Resurrection, all set in his favoured mystical English winter-and-spring landscape.”

New writing, a new thing, in one’s late forties, forged through a combination of one’s natural intelligence, gifts and interests, touched and sanctified by religious faith and love. What a very, very inspiring story!

 

 

"Roots of Bitterness" and Water from the Sanctuary

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  “Roots of Bitterness” and Water from the Sanctuary



Hebrews 12 14-15
Make every effort to live in peace with all men
 and to be holy; 
without holiness no one will see the Lord.
 15See to it that no one misses the grace of God 
and that no bitter root grows up
 to cause trouble
 and defile many.


Here is a beautiful verse I have been thinking about for the last few weeks. 


Make every effort to live in peace with all men.


Interesting. Not “live in peace with all men,” but “make every effort to live in peace with all men.”


There is a time for confrontation when necessary. When? When someone else’s sin is affecting you, for one. What about on a larger sphere, in a church, for instance, or an organization? Sometimes–and one needs to make doubly sure that this is indeed the case–one is picked to be the one to say something. By and large, the prophets in the Old Testament who were picked to say something could have done without the responsibility: Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, for instance. They were scared. So make every effort to live in peace with all men. When something is patently wrong, and everyone seems to be silent, IF you hear the Lord’s voice telling you that you are the one to speak up, and see a change happen, then it would be disobedience not to speak.
                                                   * * * 




And to be HOLY. Without holiness, no one will see the Lord.
Holiness, a beautiful and old-fashioned word. Can one handle confrontation with holiness? Gosh, it’s difficult, it’s beautiful when one manages it, and one can only do with a lot of prayer.









 See to it that no bitter root grows up
 to cause trouble
 and defile many.

This is where we need to pray with David,
Search me, oh Lord,
And know my heart,
Try me and know my anxious thoughts,
See if there be any wicked way in me.
                                                   * * *

My strong emotions, where are they coming from? Is there a bitter root beneath my anger? What is it?

Is there an unforgiven injury? Then I need to stop, drop everything, and forgive those who hurled me into a pit (to use the metaphor from Joseph) because standing over them, looking at me with sad eyes of love, stood One who saw, who allowed this to happen, because He had lessons to teach me, that I could only learn in the silence, solitude, obscurity, time for concentrated thought and prayer and the sensory deprivation of the pit. The pit was part of the blueprint all along. He permitted it. So I forgive, tear up the You-Owe-Me cheque, owed me by those who wilfully hurled me into the pit of suffering, because I am turning my eyes from them to Him who stood and watched, with sad, tear-filled eyes, and let it happen, because it was the only way the beautiful story he had outlined for me could be written.
                                                    * * * 


Bitter roots of unforgiveness not dealt with defile many.
                                                
I have been thinking of bitter roots because of a sad unfolding situation I have been observing in a community I belong to, with little filaments of bitterness  spreading and spreading. Two leaders publicly wronged another leader. The community took sides, most on the side of the individual who was, as far as one can tell, patently wronged (this is England, after all, and there is the great British tradition of fair play, and sympathy for the underdog). People who had been friends for years found their relationships strained as they took opposite sides. “Those who take the sword will perish by the sword, those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind”–these scriptural principles will work themselves out, sooner or later. Suddenly, many stories of similar spiritual and emotional abuse on the part of this duo spread around the community–reaching people who had never guessed at them,  me including me. Defilement spreads, for we might never again listen to these individuals or read their words with the same innocent spirit.

What is the Spirit saying to the Church? What are we to learn from this? What am I to learn? One thing is to recognize and deal with bitterness within oneself immediately, so that it does not spread and defile many. Who knows what the roots were of this sad action which has divided the community. Bitterness?

                                                        * * *

                                                     
And how does one change a bitter heart? How does one uproot bitterness from the deep and secret places of one’s own heart?

I have one answer. Come with me to the sublime Ezekiel 47. The prophet, in a vision, sees water flowing from the sanctuary, steadily increasing in power, until it becomes a river that no one could cross. 

What is the water? Among other things, the Holy Spirit in an increasing revelation–both historically to the church, and individually in the lives of desperate seekers.

And it is magic water. It changes the chemical properties of the hearts it irrigates. When it empties into the Sea, the water there becomes fresh. Wow, the sea, the epitome of saltiness, becomes fresh and sweet again. The bitter heart, the world-weary heart, the angry heart, the disappointed heart, the frustrated heart can again become fresh and sweet and childlike. Wow!!

Swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows. There will be large numbers of fish, because this water flows there and makes the salt water fresh; so where the river flows, everything will live. 

I have read this passage so many times this year, and it still makes me cry. It is so beautiful and so full of promise. 

 Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing.” 

Creativity. Creativity that can only come from the Holy Spirit. < i>Every month they will bear. Creativity from the Creator,  freed from the normal cycles of the seasons (bud-flowers-fruit). Creativity of the  fruitful trees whose leaves never wither, but are always green, and who never fail to bear fruit because they are planted in streams of living water, trees described in Psalm 1, and Jeremiah 17. Creativity that is God’s gift, and the sign of his presence as in Aaron’s rod which budded, blossomed and bore fruit, all in a night.


Come Holy Spirit, flood this heart. Let me walk in your ways. Let your waters make the salty waters of my heart fresh again. Let me bear fruit every month. And let the fruit serve for food, and the leaves for healing. Amen. 

Wikio: The top 20 UK literature blogs – October 2010

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Wikio: The top 20 UK literature blogs – October

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C.S Lewis, “Prisoner of Narnia” by Adam Gopnik,

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Here’s an interesting article!!

PRISONER OF NARNIA

How C. S. Lewis escaped.

by Adam GopnikNOVEMBER 21, 2005

he British literary scholar, Christian apologist, and children’s-book author C. S. Lewis is one of two figures—Churchill is the other—whose reputation in Britain is so different from their reputation in America that we might as well be talking about two (or is that four?) different men. A god to the right in America, Churchill is admired in England but hardly beatified—more often thought of as a willful man of sporadic accomplishment who was at last called upon to do the one thing in life that he was capable of doing supremely well. In America, Lewis is a figure who has been incised on stained glass—truly: there’s a stained-glass window with Lewis in it in a church in Monrovia, California—and remains, for the more intellectual and literate reaches of conservative religiosity, a saint revered and revealed, particularly in such books as “The Problem of Pain” and “The Screwtape Letters.” In England, he is commonly regarded as a slightly embarrassing polemicist, who made joke-vicar broadcasts on the BBC, but who also happened to write a few very good books about late-medieval poetry and inspire several good students. (A former Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, “couldn’t stand” Lewis, because of his bullying brand of religiosity, though John Paul II was said to be an admirer.) 
The British, of course, are capable of being embarrassed by anybody, and that they are embarrassed by Lewis does not prove that he is embarrassing. But the double vision of the man creates something of a transatlantic misunderstanding. If in England he is subject to condescension, his admirers here have made him hostage to a cult. “The Narnian” (HarperSanFrancisco; $25.95), a new life of Lewis by his disciple Alan Jacobs, is an instance of that sectarian enthusiasm. Lewis is defended, analyzed, protected, but always in the end vindicated, while his detractors are mocked at length: a kind of admiration not so different in its effects from derision. Praise a good writer too single-mindedly for too obviously ideological reasons for too long, and pretty soon you have him all to yourself. The same thing has happened to G. K. Chesterton: the enthusiasts are so busy chortling and snickering as their man throws another right hook at the rationalist that they don’t notice that the rationalist isn’t actually down on the canvas; he and his friends have long since left the building.
In England, the more representative biography of Lewis is the acidic though generally admiring life that A. N. Wilson published some fifteen years ago. It gives Lewis his due without forcing stained-glass spectacles on the reader. (Wilson is quite clear, for instance, about Lewis’s weird and complicated sex life.) While William Nicholson’s “Shadowlands,” in all its play, movie, and television versions, shows the priggish Lewis finally humanized by sex with an American Jewish matron, it actually reflects the British, rather than the American, view: Lewis as a prig to be saved from priggishness, rather than as a saint who saved others from their sins.
None of this would matter much if it weren’t for Narnia. The seven tales of the English children who cross over, through a wardrobe, into a land where animals speak and lions rule, which Lewis began in the late nineteen-forties, are classics in the only sense that matters—books that are read a full generation after their author is gone. They have become, to be sure, highly controversial classics: the wonderful British fantasist Philip Pullman has excoriated their racism (the ogres are dark-skinned and almond-eyed), their nasty little-Englandness, and their narrow-hearted religiosity. But they are part of the common imagination of childhood, and, with the release of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” as the first of a series of film adaptations, they are likely—if the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy is any indication—to become still more deeply implanted.
The two Lewises—the British bleeding don and the complacent American saint—do a kind of battle in the imagination of those who care as much about Narnia as they do about its author. Is Narnia a place of Christian faith or a place to get away from it? As one reads the enormous literature on Lewis’s life and thought—there are at least five biographies, and now a complete, three-volume set of his letters—the picture that emerges is of a very odd kind of fantasist and a very odd kind of Christian. The hidden truth that his faith was really of a fable-first kind kept his writing forever in tension between his desire to imagine and his responsibility to dogmatize. His works are a record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell of his own invention and staring through the barred windows at the stars beyond. That the door was open all the time, and that he held the key in his pocket, was something he discovered only at the end.
he early, appealing part of Lewis’s life is extremely well told in his own 1955 memoir, “Surprised by Joy.” He was born in 1898, into a rough and ready but pious Ulster Protestant family in Belfast; his father was dense and eccentric—a man with “more power of confusing an issue or taking up a fact wrongly than any man I have ever met,” his exasperated son wrote much later—and his mother, who died before Lewis turned ten, was warm and loving and simple. The key relation in his life was with his older brother, Warnie, with whom he shared a taste for reading and even a private language and mythology, and to whom he remained close throughout Warnie’s long, unhappy, and, later, alcoholic life.
Above all, the young Lewis, often in company with his brother, read and walked. He was the sort of kid who is moved to tears every day by poems and trees. He loved landscape and twilight, myth and fairy tale, particularly the Irish landscape near their suburban home, and the stories of George MacDonald. Now too easily overlooked in the history of fantasy, MacDonald’s stories (“At the Back of the North Wind,” “The Princess and the Goblin,” and, most of all, “Phantastes”) evoked in Lewis an emotion bigger than mere pleasure—a kind of shining sense of goodness and romance and light. Lewis called this emotion, simply, the “Joy.” With it came the feeling that both the world and the words were trying to tell him something—not just that there is something good out there but that there is something big out there. The young Lewis found this magic in things as different as Beatrix Potter and Longfellow, “Paradise Lost” and Norse myth. “They taught me longing,” he said, and made him a “votary of the Blue Flower,” after a story by the German poet Novalis, in which a youth dreams of a blue flower and spends his life searching for it. The Christianity he knew in childhood, by contrast, seemed the opposite of magic and joy: dull sermons and dry moral equations to be solved.
This loving and mother-deprived boy was sent to a series of nightmarish English boarding schools, where he was beaten and bullied and traumatized beyond even the normal expectations of English adolescence. Lewis’s own words about the places are practically Leninist. (One headmaster raced down the length of a room with his cane to beat a lower-middle-class boy, enraged by his social pretensions.) Lewis writes about his last school, Malvern, at such length, and with such horror—with far more intensity than he writes even about serving on the Western Front—that it’s clear that the trauma, coming at a time of sexual awakening, was deep and lasting. It seems to have had the usual result: Lewis developed and craved what even his Christian biographer, Jacobs, calls “mildly sadomasochistic fantasies”; in letters to a (homosexual) friend, he named the women he’d like to spank, and for a time signed his private letters “Philomastix”—“whip-lover.”
A bright and sensitive British boy turned by public-school sadism into a warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert. It sounds like the usual story. What was special about Lewis was that, throughout it all, he kept an inner life. Joy kept him alive—and it is possible that the absence of happiness allowed an access of joy. When he served on the Western Front, in 1917, he got what every soldier wanted—an honest wound honestly come by but bad enough to send him home. Still, he saw the trenches as they really were, and though he chose largely to forget, and tried to deprecate the importance of “the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles,” he admitted, in later years, that he had had nightmares about it for the rest of his life.
Oxford always seemed like joy to escapees from public schools; add the Western Front, and it must have seemed like something close to paradise. After Lewis’s first long residence there, upon his departure from the Army, in 1918, he never left Oxford again, except, at the end, for Cambridge. He took a first in classics, and then made a decision, slightly daring in those days, when teaching English literature seemed as swinging as teaching media studies does now, to become a tutor in English; he soon became a fellow in English at Magdalen College. (He also took up with a much older married woman, with whom he had a long affair that may have had a sadomasochistic tinge.)
Jacobs is a bit touristy about Magdalen’s charms; Wilson is much better, tartly and accurately describing how the system of tutorials, seemingly so seductive—an essay delivered each week by the pupil, and analyzed and critiqued by the tutor—helps turn the tutors, from sheer exhaustion and self-protection, into caricatures of themselves, rather as the girls in a lap-dance club take on exotic names and characters. Lewis, the sensitive and soft-spoken young hiker, took on the part of a bluff, hearty Irishman, all tweed and pipe. It is this Lewis who became an Oxford legend, smoking in darkened rooms and holding “Beer and Beowulf” evenings in his rooms. He held to the narrow anti-modern curriculum then in place at Oxford, and befriended a young philologist named J. R. R. Tolkien, whose views on teaching English were even more severe than Lewis’s: Tolkien thought that literature ended at 1100.
Lewis had a reputation as a tough but inspiring teacher, and, reading his letters, one can see why. His literary judgments are full of discovery; his allegiance to a dry, historical approach in the university didn’t keep him from having bracingly clear critical opinions about modern books, all of them independent and most of them right. He got the greatness of Wodehouse long before it was fashionable to do so, appreciated Trollope over Thackeray, and could admire even writers as seemingly unsympathetic to him as Woolf and Kafka. He was a partisan without being a bigot.
It was through the intervention of the secretive and personally troubled Tolkien, however, that Lewis finally made the turn toward orthodox Christianity. In company with another friend, they took a long, and now famous, walk, on an autumn night in 1931, pacing and arguing from early evening to early morning. Tolkien was a genuinely eccentric character—in college, the inventor of Lothlorien played the part of the humorless pedant—who had been ready to convert Lewis for several years. Lewis was certainly ripe to be converted. The liberal humanism in which he had been raised as a thinker had come to seem far too narrowly Philistine and materialist to account for the intimations of transcendence that came to him on country walks and in pages of poetry. Tolkien, seizing on this vulnerability, said that the obvious-seeming distinction that Lewis made between myth and fact—between intimations of timeless joy and belief in a historically based religion—was a false one. Language, and the consciousness it reflected, was intrinsically magical. One had to become religious to save the magic, not to be saved from it. (It was, ironically, the same spirit in which the children of the nineteen-sixties felt that the liberal humanism in which they had been raised failed to account for the intensities of another kind of trip—and that led them, too, to magic, and to Lewis and Tolkien.) All existence, Tolkien insisted on that night ramble, was intrinsically mythical; the stars were the fires of gods if you chose to see them that way, just as the world was the stories you made up from it. If you were drawn to myth at all, as Lewis was, then you ought to accept the Christian myth just as you accepted the lovely Northern ones. By the end of the walk, Lewis was, or was about to become, a churchgoer.
This was a new turn in the history of religious conversion. Where for millennia the cutting edge of faith had been the difference between pagan myth and Christian revelation, Lewis was drawn in by the likeness of the Christian revelation to pagan myth. Even Victorian conversions came, in the classic Augustinian manner, out of an overwhelming sense of sin. Cardinal Manning agonized over eating too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace Christianity because he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s own bakery. “The story of Christ is simply a true myth,” he says he discovered that night, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”
It seemed like an odd kind of conversion to other people then, and it still does. It is perfectly possible, after all, to have a rich romantic and imaginative view of existence—to believe that the world is not exhausted by our physical descriptions of it, that the stories we make up about the world are an important part of the life of that world—without becoming an Anglican. In fact, it seems much easier to believe in the power of the Romantic numinous if you do not take a controversial incident in Jewish religious history as the pivot point of all existence, and a still more controversial one in British royal history as the pivot point of your daily practice. Converted to faith as the means of joy, however, Lewis never stops to ask very hard why this faith rather than some other. His favorite argument for the truth of Christianity is that either Jesus had to be crazy to say the things he did or what he said must be true, and since he doesn’t sound like someone who is crazy, he must be right. (He liked this argument so much that he repeats it in allegorical form in the Narnia books; either Lucy is lying about Narnia, or mad, or she must have seen what she claimed to see.) Lewis insists that the Anglican creed isn’t one spiritual path among others but the single cosmic truth that extends from the farthest reach of the universe to the house next door. He is never troubled by the funny coincidence that this one staggering cosmic truth also happens to be the established religion of his own tribe, supported by every institution of the state, and reinforced by the university he works in, the “God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford,” as Gladstone called it. But perhaps his leap from myth to Christian faith wasn’t a leap at all, more of a standing hop in place. Many of the elements that make Christianity numinous for Lewis are the pagan mythological elements that it long ago absorbed from its pre-Christian sources. His Christianity is local, English and Irish and Northern. Even Roman Catholicism remained alien to him, a fact that Tolkien much resented.
f believing shut Lewis off from writing well about belief, it did get him to write inspired scholarship, and then inspired fairy tales. The two sides of his mind started working at the same time and together. His first important book, and his best, is “The Allegory of Love,” a study of epic poetry that Lewis began writing soon after his conversion. It is full of enthusiasm for and appreciation of the allegorical epics of Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, et al.—but it also makes a profound historical argument about the literary imagination. Until the time of Tasso and Ariosto, he points out, writers had two worlds available to them: the actual world of experience and the world of their religion. Only since the Renaissance had writers had a third world, of the marvellous, of free mythological invention, which is serious but in which the author does not really believe or make an article of faith. In Ariosto, Lewis found the beginnings of that “free creation of the marvelous,” slipping in under the guise of allegory:


The probable, the marvelous-taken-as-fact, the marvelous-known-to-fiction—such is the triple equipment of the post-Renaissance poet. Such were the three worlds which Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were born to. . . . But this triple heritage is a late conquest. Go back to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find it. At the beginning the only marvels are the marvels which are taken for fact. . . . The old gods, when they ceased to be taken as gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils. . . . Only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they could wake again in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern Europe with its “third world” of romantic imagining. . . . The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvelous that knows itself as myth. 

When we sit down to write a romance, then, we make up elves and ghosts and wraiths and wizards, in whom we don’t believe but in whom we enclose our most urgent feelings, and we demand that the world they inhabit be consistent and serious.
Yet, if these words are a declaration of faith, they are also a document of bad conscience. For, throughout his own imaginative writing, Lewis is always trying to stuff the marvellous back into the allegorical—his conscience as a writer lets him see that the marvellous should be there for its own marvellous sake, just as imaginative myth, but his Christian duty insists that the marvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with belief. He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or, at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just what it’s supposed to say.
Marvellous writing in our culture has two homes, children’s literature and science fiction, and in his forties Lewis began to work in both. His first effort, the trilogy that begins with “Out of the Silent Planet,” is essentially science fiction written against science. What is really out there is not more machines but bigger mysteries. But these books are lacking in vitality, and seem worked out rather than lived in. They are filled with a kind of easy Blimpish polemics—the bad scientists are fat and smelly, or atheists. It was only in the late forties, when he began to write, quickly and almost carelessly, about the magic world of Narnia, that he began to find a deeper vein of feeling.
What is so moving about the Narnia stories is that, though Lewis began with a number of haunted images—a street lamp in the snow, the magic wardrobe itself, the gentle intelligent faun who meets Lucy—he never wrote down to, or even for, children, except to use them as characters, and to make his sentences one shade simpler than usual. He never tries to engineer an entertainment for kids. He writes, instead, as real writers must, a real book for a circle of readers large and small, and the result is a fairy tale that includes, encyclopedically, everything he feels most passionate about: the nature of redemption, the problem of pain, the Passion and the Resurrection, all set in his favored mystical English winter-and-spring landscape. Had he tried for less, the books would not have lasted so long. The trouble was that though he could encompass his obsessions, he could not entirely surrender to his imagination. The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least successfully, allegorized. Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol, who has exasperated generations of freethinking parents and delighted generations of worried Anglicans, is, after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son—not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure.
When “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (magical title!) opens, four children who have been sent to the countryside discover an enchanted land on the other side of an old wardrobe; this is Narnia, and it has been enslaved by a White Witch, who has turned the country to eternal winter. The talking animals who live in Narnia wait desperately for the return of Aslan, the lion-king, who might restore their freedom. At last, Aslan returns. Beautiful and brave and instantly attractive, he has a deep voice and a commanding presence, obviously kingly. The White Witch conspires to have him killed, and succeeds, in part because of the children’s errors. Miraculously, he returns to life, liberates Narnia, and returns the land to spring.
Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.
Tolkien hated the Narnia books, despite Lewis’s avid sponsorship of Tolkien’s own mythology, because he hated to see an imagination constrained by the allegorical impulse. Though Tolkien was certainly a devout Catholic, there is no way in which “The Lord of the Rings” is a Christian book, much less a Catholic allegory. The Blessed Land across the sea is a retreat for the already immortal, not, except for Frodo, a reward for the afflicted; dead is dead. The pathos of Aragorn and Arwen’s marriage is that, after Aragorn’s death, they will never meet again, in Valinor or elsewhere. It is the modernity of the existential arrangement, in tension with the archaicism of the material culture, that makes Tolkien’s myth haunting. In the final Narnia book, “The Last Battle,” the effort to key the fantasy to the Biblical themes of the Apocalypse is genuinely creepy, with an Aslan Antichrist. The best of the books are the ones, like “The Horse and His Boy,” where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow.
startling thing in Lewis’s letters to other believers is how much energy and practical advice is dispensed about how to keep your belief going: they are constantly writing to each other about the state of their beliefs, as chronic sinus sufferers might write to each other about the state of their noses. Keep your belief going, no matter what it takes—the thought not occurring that a belief that needs this much work to believe in isn’t really a belief but a very strong desire to believe. In his extended essay “The Problem of Pain,” which appeared, propitiously, in 1940, and in his novel “The Screwtape Letters,” two years later—these are written to a younger devil by an older one—Lewis takes as his presumed opponent a naïve materialist who believes in progress and in the realm of common sense and the factual and verifiable, and who relegates imagination and myth and ritual to a doomy past. Lewis has an easy time showing that progress is dubious, that evil persists, that imagination has a crucial role to play in life, that life without a shared ritual and some kind of sacred myth is hardly worth living. But, trying to explain why God makes good people suffer, Lewis can answer only that God doesn’t, bad people do, and God gave bad people free will to be bad because a world in which people could only be good would be a world peopled by robots. Anyway, God never gives people pain that isn’t good for them in the long run. This kind of apologetic is better at explaining colic than cancer, let alone concentration camps.
An old Oxford tradition claims that Bertrand Russell, on being asked why his concerns had turned so dramatically away from academic philosophy, replied, with great dignity, “Because I discovered fucking.” So did Lewis, only he was older. The story of how Lewis came to be seduced by a married woman named—for fate is a cornier screenwriter than even man is—Joy is so well told in the “Shadowlands” film that one is almost inclined to imagine it overdrawn. But, indeed, the real Joy Davidman, a spirited Jewish matron from Westchester who had been impressed by Lewis’s books, was not delicate and transcendent but foulmouthed, passionate, a little embarrassing. She drove away his more bearishly single-minded Oxford friends, including Tolkien. Fierce and independent-minded (she was played by Debra Winger in the movie but seems more Barbra Streisand in life), Davidman was a Christian convert who never lost her native oomph. After she Yokoishly insinuated herself into Lewis’s life, in the early fifties, she also brought him passion. They “feasted on love,” Lewis wrote. “No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied.” That’s a lot of crannies for a middle-aged don to be satisfying, but it had a happy effect on his mind and on his prose.
It is tempting to say that Lewis, in the dramatic retellings of this story, becomes hostage to another kind of cult, the American cult of salvation through love and sex and the warmth of parenting. (She had two kids for him to help take care of.) Yet this is exactly what seems to have happened. Lewis, to the dismay of his friends, went from being a private prig and common-room hearty to being a mensch—a C. of E. mensch, but a mensch. When Joy died, of bone cancer, a few years later, he was abject with sadness, and it produced “A Grief Portrayed,” one of the finest books written about mourning. Lewis, without abandoning his God, begins to treat him as something other than a dispenser of vacuous bromides. “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think,” he wrote, and his faith becomes less joblike and more Job-like: questioning, unsure—a dangerous quest rather than a querulous dogma. Lewis ended up in a state of uncertain personal faith that seems to the unbeliever comfortingly like doubt.
“Everything began with images,” Lewis wrote, admitting that he saw his faun before he got his message. He came to Bethlehem by way of Narnia, not the other way around. Whatever we think of the allegories it contains, the imaginary world that Lewis created is what matters. We go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward. We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery, and particularly for inexplicable sublime imagery that involves the collision of the urban and the natural, the city and the sea. The image of the street lamp in the snow in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”; the flock of crying white birds and the sleeping Narnian lords at the world’s end in “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”; the underground abode of the surviving Narnian animals in “Prince Caspian,” part “Wind in the Willows” badger hole and part French Resistance cellar; even the exiled horse’s description of his lost Northern home in “The Horse and His Boy,” called Narnia but so clearly a British composite (“Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, of the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests”)—these are why Lewis will be remembered.
For poetry and fantasy aren’t stimulants to a deeper spiritual appetite; they are what we have to fill the appetite. The experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual, is . . . an experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual. To hope that the conveyance will turn out to bring another message, beyond itself, is the futile hope of the mystic. Fairy stories are not rich because they are true, and they lose none of their light because someone lit the candle. It is here that the atheist and the believer meet, exactly in the realm of made-up magic. Atheists need ghosts and kings and magical uncles and strange coincidences, living fairies and thriving Lilliputians, just as much as the believers do, to register their understanding that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience, much less to our hopes.
The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images—the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse—are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew. ♦

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/11/21/051121crat_atlarge?currentPage=all#ixzz11akQMzso
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Finding Your Own Blogging Voice

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Finding Your Own Blogging Voice


I have been writing for a while and have definitely found my own distinctive writing voice. Blogging, on the other hand, was a different ball game–putting up your thoughts on the web, for friend and foe alike, raw, unprocessed, unedited. Wow!


How does one find the voice for that? Not too personal, not too boring, not too pompous or distant. Writing for unseen, anonymous readers.


I have been blogging for almost six months, with some success–top 20 in Wikio UK in both culture and literature, high ranks in technorati, and top blog sites. But I had not found my real voice, me. I was not sharing who I really was, just what I thought.





An accident helped me find my own blogging voice. I wrote a post of great interest to the large Christian community to which I belong. I had 1400 page views within a week, 852 of them unique page views (the rest were repeats because of the 60 or so comments.) 


And as always happens when you have a sudden spike in page views, most dropped off, but not all. My graph of page views was suddenly on another level.




I suddenly had a real audience–people I knew, whom I worshipped with every Sunday, and met mid-week every week. True, I did not know which individuals, but I suddenly felt I had real people reading my blogs, who somewhat knew me, and were interested in what I had to say.


There is nothing like that for finding one’s real writing or blogging voice.




I have now found my own distinctive blogging voice on two of my blogs, theoxfordchristian.blogspot.com and wanderingbetweentwoworlds.blogspot.com. I still need to find my own voice, who I really am, on my third blog, a literary blog called thegoodbooksblog.blogspot.com.


I think of the pop psychology book popular when I was a teen, “Why am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am.” It goes on to say, “I am afraid to tell you who I am because you may not like who I am, and who I am is all I have.”


So, a truly good blog, a truly interesting one, is written by someone who is not afraid to tell you who she really is. 




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Choosing Our Own Address: In Christ

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 Choosing Our Own Address: In Christ
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.
 John 6:56


4Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.
 5“I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. 6If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. 7If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. 8This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. John 15


These passages suddenly struck me forcibly a few years ago with the thought that I could choose my own address. 


I was free. If I felt angered by people, misunderstood, misused, I didn’t have to dwell in that country–of anger, bitterness, grievance and grudge.


I could choose my own address. I could choose to live in Christ, to dwell there.


I can choose to live in Christ,
Like a fish in the ocean,
An anemone in a tidal pool.
A pea in a pod,
A corpuscle in a bloodstream
Sap in the vine
A molecule in a tear-drop
Marrow in the bone
A baby in the womb
I can choose to live in Christ.


Thank you! 

The Art of Parody

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Craig Brown: The Lost Diaries

How do you out-snob Virginia Woolf, out-raunch DH Lawrence and out-rant Germaine Greer? Craig Brown explains the parodist’s art
Craig Brown
Parodist Craig Brown. Photograph: BBC
Some authors appreciate being parodied . . .
  1. The Lost Diaries
  2. by Craig Brown
  4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

In 1912, Max Beerbohm published “The Mote in the Middle Distance”, his parody of Henry James. It begins: “It was with a sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively left it. But just where the deuce had he left it?”
Beerbohm was understandably anxious about James’s reaction. As well he might, since it so slyly captures James’s oblique, elliptical style, a style compared by HG Wells to “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den”.
But after dinner with Henry James, Edmund Gosse was able to reassure Beerbohm that James “desired me to let you know at once that no one can have read it with more wonder and delight than he”.
Later that year, James and Beerbohm were guests at the same party. When an admirer asked James his opinion on something-or-other, James pointed across the room to Beerbohm and said: “Ask that young man. He is in full possession of my innermost thoughts.”
On my own, more modest level, the roster of those who have enjoyed my parodies of them is wholly unpredictable. Marianne Faithfull sent me a thankyou letter, as did Roy Jenkins (his widow found it on his desk after his death, and kindly passed it on to me). WG Sebald also enjoyed my parody of his trip to the seaside (“High above me in the air, the seagull continued upon its vacuous and erratic journey through a sky still glowering in fury at the ceaseless intrusion of the crazed sun”), though, again, I only discovered this after he had died, having spent one shared lunch-party sheepishly trying to avoid him.
. . . while others do not.
Seven or eight years ago, I was at a large party consisting of perhaps a couple of hundred people. At one point, I glanced across the sea of heads to the other side of the room, only to be confronted by the terrifying sight of Harold Pinter staring back at me, his face set in a gargoylish grimace, each thumb stuck to the side of his head while his fingers waggled about in the traditional schoolboy gesture of derision.
It was a scary sight, at one and the same time daft and threatening, not to mention weirdly psychic (how did he know that I would glance over at that moment, or had he been pulling faces for some time, on the off-chance?)
The next day, I heard that he had said to our hostess: “Is that who I think it is?” “Yes. Are you going to punch him?” she said, to which he replied, “I wouldn’t dirty my fists.”
Parody is a remarkably libel-proof mode of abuse.
If you call someone a liar or a crook in print, the next day you are likely to be showered with letters from Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Runne. If, on the other hand, you demonstrate what you are getting at in parodic form, you will probably get off scot-free. Parody is read between the lines. It is as though lawyers, denied humour’s x-ray specs, are unable to see what everyone else can see. A parody gets at the truth by parading truth’s opposite: the reader is left to put two and two together. So as the former royal butler Paul Burrell fondly reminisces about his life at Buckingham Palace, he simultaneously by-passes legal objections:
“Her Majesty was a lovely lady. She thought the world of me. She would often call by on her nights off. I got used to that tell-tale knock on the door. She would drum out the opening bars of the National Anthem with her clenched fist. That way, I knew it was her. I’d open the door, and there she’d be, dressed in casual clothes – a pair of designer denims and a favourite kaftan. Often she’d let her hair hang down, so it flowed over her creamy shoulders. It gave her the more relaxed and carefree look she had always craved. ‘You know, you should keep it like that, ma’am – you look truly fabulous!’ I once ventured, but she looked downcast. ‘My public would never accept me like that, Paul!’ she said. ‘They like me with it up!’ At that point, she got out her guitar and sang me one of my all-time favourite songs – Ralph McTell’s Streets of London. It was a very private moment.”
A parody can be both unfair and funny or fair and funny. But it should never be either unfunny and fair, or unfair and unfunny.
Edward Lear was, I think, one of the great Victorian originals, but at the same time I consider this parody of his nonsense verse by John Clarke, reproduced in John Gross’s recent Oxford Book of Parodies, is indisputably accurate:
There was an old man with a beard,
A funny old man with a beard
He had a big beard
A great big old beard
That amusing old man with a beard.
Often it is the addition of a single, unassuming word that jolts the humdrum into the humorous. In the above case, I think it is the word “amusing”.
Many funny writers don’t have a sense of humour.
Instead of laughing at someone else’s joke, they tend to say: “That’s funny,” and then squirrel the joke away, ready for a crafty respray at some time in the future.
Just as most fishermen don’t like the taste of fish, many humorists don’t have a sense of humour. Jonathan Swift claimed to have only ever laughed twice in his entire life; Alexander Pope couldn’t remember ever having laughed. Like many professional humorists, Keith Waterhouse would never tell jokes in company, saying it was the closest thing to throwing gold coins down the drain.
To make some parodies more credible, the parodist must first make their originals less ridiculous.
I remember reading this passage by Germaine Greer against, of all things, teddy bears, in the Guardian a year or two ago, and feeling bewildered as to how I might parody it:
“Teddies and bunnies are taken into exams and sat on the desks, as if to be without them for three hours would induce hysteria and fainting spells. Soft toys are left along with the flowers at the scenes of fatalities. Wherever they are, they are truly hideous, beyond kitsch. By making our children fall in love with such ugliness, we are preparing them for a life without taste.
. . . I have certainly seen a two-year-old humping her teddy bear. If we persist in decoying children away from demanding relationships with humans by providing them with undemanding animal fetish objects, we should not be surprised if they end up like Big Brother housemate Jonty Stern, who, at the age of 36, is still a virgin.”
It struck me then, and still strikes me now, as a perfect example of self-parody, a condensed lampoon of all that writer’s worst tendencies towards needless iconoclasm, exasperation, sensationalism, exaggeration and the hoovering up of current news items: like so many opinionistas, Greer can never see the wrong end of a stick without trying to grab it with both hands.
The trouble for the parodist, though, is that Greer leaves no room for improvement: it’s perfect as it is. The same goes for Edwina Currie’s diaries, Tracey Emin’s meanderings, John Prescott’s splutterings and Harold Pinter’s poems. In my new collection of parodies, The Lost Diaries, which is arranged along the lines of a calendar, with one or two entries for each day of the year, I have placed a number of such pieces under April 1st, with the asterisked caution to the reader that they are, alas, real.
Every child is born a parodist.
Children learn to speak by parodying their parents. When grown-ups roll their eyes in amusement at children’s remarks and exclaim “The things they come up with!” they are in fact laughing at a skewed version of themselves. The process continues as life goes on: most political speeches, for instance, are parodies of earlier political speeches. President Obama’s oratory has the same rhythms as Dr Martin Luther King’s, and it sometimes seems that every speaker at a British political party conference has come as Winston Churchill.
The more accurate the parody, the more likely it is to be confused with the real thing.
Terence Blacker and the late William Donaldson, aka Henry Root, once published a spoof of tabloid journalism called “101 Things You Didn’t Know About the Royal Love-Birds” by “Talbot Church, The Man the Royals Trust”, to tie in with the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. It revealed that the Ferguson family motto is “Full steam ahead” and included items such as “Fergie wore braces on her teeth until she was 16. When these were removed she blossomed overnight into the flame-haired beauty with an hour-glass figure we see today – but their removal left her with a slight speech impediment and she was unable to say the word ‘solicitor’ until she was 21.”
It was such an accurate parody of tabloid journalism that it was lifted without a by-your-leave by the Sun, who did not realise it was a spoof, and later by the American biographer Kitty Kelley, who inserted Talbot Church jokes into her book about the royal family, presumably in the belief they were hard facts.
To appreciate parody, you must be capable of holding two contradictory ideas in your head simultaneously.
For some years, I wrote the parodic Bel Littlejohn column in the Guardian. It seemed to me that only about half the readers twigged that it was a spoof; the others, whether they liked her or loathed her, believed Bel to be the real thing. In 1997, she was given her own entry in Who’s Who (as was my spoof Spectator columnist Wallace Arnold). After writing a Why-Oh-Why piece on the need for correct grammar, Wallace Arnold received a letter from the chairman of the government’s new Good English Campaign, Sir Trevor McDonald, asking him to join them.
I was reliably informed that the historian Eric Hobsbawm once told someone that he had known Bel in the 70s, but that her writing had gone off a bit. When she mentioned in one column that she had been a student at Leeds University with Jack Straw in the 1960s, she received a letter inviting her to join the Leeds University Old Alumni Association. She once wrote a piece in support of the progressive school Summerhill, which was threatened with closure. “Okay so maybe the kids can’t read and write – but when’s that ever been the point of school? Last year, two of those so-called ‘uneducated kids achieved a Grade C, thank you very much, and an under-matron gained her black belt in karate . . . The school budgerigar, Tarantino, won the underwater swimming competition, for which he was awarded a posthumous trophy.”
A couple of days later, I received a letter from the chair of the Centre for Self-Managed Learning. “Absolutely spot-on – wonderful . . .” he wrote. “We are 100% with the sentiments in your article and are keen to do something practical to address the issue.” I realised with a start that he was not being ironic.
But it was never my intention to fool people. What would be the point? A parody only works if, with one side of his brain, the reader knows that it is a joke but with the other side is able to entertain the idea that it is real. To someone who thought she was real, Dame Edna Everage would just be a bossy, self-promoting Australian vulgarian. To someone who could only see her as an artificial construct, she would just be a man dressed up as a woman saying deliberately provocative things. For the joke to emerge, the brain must be capable of holding both ideas at once. The same is true of all parody and impersonation, and perhaps of all art: those who look at a painting of apples by Cézanne and see a real bunch of apples are as blind to the art within as those who can see only strokes of paint, representing nothing.
Parody represents a collaboration, however unwilling, between the parodist and his victim.
It is sometimes said that the best parodies are affectionate. I don’t think this is always true. Max Beerbohm had a deep loathing of Rudyard Kipling, but his Kipling parody (“An’ it’s trunch trunch truncheon does the trick”) is a thing of joy. The Mary Ann Bighead column in Private Eye is manifestly not enamoured of its real-life target, but remains sublimely funny.
On the other hand, parody is a pas-de-deux, in that the parodist must inhabit the language and speech-rhythms of the parodied while subverting them for his own ends. Thus a certain strange empathy is called for, no matter how cold-hearted.
There is no place with so few good books as the parodist’s library.
Among the books on my shelves are Barbara Cartland’s Love at the Helm; The Crossroads Cookbook; My Tune by Simon Bates; all four volumes of Katie Price’s autobiography; The Duchess of York’s Budgie: The Little Helicopter; the autobiographies of Edward Du Cann, Anthea Turner, Norman Fowler, Tim Rice, George Carey, Max Clifford and Peter Purves; Reg Kray’s Thoughts, Philosophy and Poetry; The Wit of Prince Philip; Enoch Powell’s Collected Poems; My Friends’ Secrets by Joan Collins; Inspired and Outspoken: The Collected Speeches of Ann Widdecombe; and Doris Stokes’s Voices of Love.
They are all heavily annotated, with the most gruesome passages all dutifully underlined. For instance, my copy of Prezza: The Autobiography of John Prescott has multiple markings beneath the regurgitation passages, and my copy of Tony Blair’s autobiography carries heavy underlinings beneath his night of passion with Cherie. In Simon Heffer’s new book, horribly titled Strictly English: The Correct Way to Write . . . and Why it Matters, I have put a double ring around “I once got a job by finding 24 mistakes in a piece of prose in which I had been told I would find 20, and which had been given to me as part of a test during an interview: this was because the person who had set the test, good though his English was, did not know about gerunds.” A double ring tends to mean that a passage can go straight into my parody of it, completely unaltered.
It is the task of the regular writer to pick exactly the right word. The task of the parodist is different: he must pick exactly the wrong word.
“To Chatsworth. Poky.” This was my Woodrow Wyatt diary; at three words, it is probably the shortest parody I have written.
. . . But occasionally the two aims coincide.
“Suicide mass-murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism,” wrote Martin Amis in The Second Plane.
Topical humour lasts only as long as its victims . . .
Like a particularly giggly form of parasite, parody can expect to live only as long as its host. “Who’s Nancy dell’Olio?” a teenager asked me the other day, while browsing through the The Lost Diaries. For a second, I struggled to remember. “The ex-girlfriend of Sven-Goran Eriksson!” I explained. “Who’s Sven-Goran Eriksson?” came the reply.
The book is already 400 pages long, but in 50 years time, the book will require a further 400 pages of explanatory notes by a learned academic. Take the “F”‘s, for instance: Faithfull, Marianne, Fayed, Mohamed; Feltz, Vanessa; Fergusson, Major Ronald; Fermoy, Ruth, Lady”. I suspect Review readers may already be struggling. I can give them just the briefest rest-stop – “Flaubert, Gustave” – before plunging back in with “Fletcher, Cyril; Follett, Barbara; Follett, Ken; Ford, Tom and Fowler, Sir Norman” et cetera.
Like so many things these days, the book is vulnerable to built-in obsolescence – particularly as I have a perverse interest in already-ghostly figures such as Cyril Fletcher and Ruth, Lady Fermoy (whose name, for some reason, always makes me titter). Her full index-entry is “Fermoy, Ruth, Lady: rejoices at the Queen Mother breaking wind 112 (and footnote); begs like dog 182; plays ‘Any Old Iron’ 212-13.” Needless to say, all those jokes are based around the idea of their unlikelihood – but who, in a few years time, will be able to recollect that Ruth, Lady Fermoy would have taken a fierce pride in not breaking wind, or begging like a dog, or leading cockney sing-songs?
Among my Fs, the only entry with an odds-on hope of being known in 100 years time is Lucian Freud, who pops up in Queen Elizabeth II’s diary when he is painting her portrait (“Freud: not a name you hear very often,” she reflects). His closest runner is Lady Antonia Fraser. “Orders Château d’Yquem on behalf of the sugar plantation workers of East Timor; tips the Kinnocks; quizzes Castro about Joanna Trollope; finds Paris ‘very French'”, reads her entry: yet more explanatory toil for our poor, exhausted footnoter.
. . . though there are one or two who get away, and long outlive their host.
Some of the most notable classics of English humour – Diary of a Nobody, Three Men in a Boat, parts of Alice in Wonderland, Cold Comfort Farm – began life as parodies of works that are now forgotten. In the reverse of the normal process, they now ensure their victims a ghostly kind of immortality.
There is no avoiding parody . . .
The greatest writers may also be the most parodiable, as their style and vision are necessarily singular. Alan Bennett, John Updike, Philip Roth are all exceptional writers, and it is this idiosyncrasy that makes them susceptible to parody. God Himself is peculiarly easy to ape: I remember sailing through the Old Testament section of my Theology A-level by making up all the rumbling, hoity-toity and frequently bad-tempered quotes from God and his prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel and Hosea. It was so much easier than remembering the real ones.
In the introduction to his endlessly enjoyable Oxford Book of Parodies, John Gross explains the way in which parodists often rejoice in their subjects. “They are not telling us that we should not write like Robert Browning (or George Crabbe or Henry James or Muriel Spark), still less that Browning should not write like Browning – that he should choose to apprehend the universe in this one peculiar fashion. And how gratifying that he should keep it up – that he can always be relied on to be Browningesque.”
. . . Unless you are a bore. But even bores can be parodied, just as long as they are boring enough.
The only way to be truly beyond parody is to be run-of-the-mill. But you should be careful to be just interesting enough, as excessive tedium becomes a joke in itself. When I read Margaret Drabble’s memoir The Pattern in the Carpet I realised that I had struck gold. One sentence, about her tiresome “dotty” aunt (could editors please declare a moratorium on dotty aunts?), reads: “I maintain (though she queried this) that it was I who usefully introduced her to scampi and chips, at an excellent but now defunct hostelry overlooking the Bristol Channel at Linton.” Indeed, I kicked off my parody with it, and then added some more, for good measure:
“I maintain (though she might, in truth, query this) that it was I who usefully introduced my Aunt Phyl to scampi and chips, at an excellent but now defunct castellated hostelry overlooking the Bristol Channel at Linton in 1973. Or was it 1974? Conceivably (and here I am, metaphorically speaking, sticking my neck out) it was 1972, or even 1971, though if it was 1971, then it might not have been the castellated hostelry that we ate in, as a useful visit to my local library yesterday afternoon between 3.30pm and 4.23pm confirmed me in my suspicion that the hostelry in question was in fact closed for the greater part of 1971, owing to a refurbishment programme. In that case, and if it really was 1971, which, frankly, seems increasingly unlikely given the other dates available, then it is within the realms of possibility that we ate at another hostelry entirely, possibly one overlooking the North Sea, and, if so, it is equally possible that we feasted not on scampi and chips but on shepherd’s pie. Did we also consume a side-order of vegetables? Memory is, I have found, a fickle servant, so I am unable to recall whether, on this occasion, we indulged in a side-order of vegetables, if we were there at all.”
Extracts from The Lost Diaries:
Virginia Woolf
May 7th
Am I merely snobbish in thinking that the lower classes have no aptitude or instinct for great literature or indeed literature of any kind? This morning I went into the kitchen & found Nelly sitting down reading a cookery book. How will you ever improve your lower-class mind if you spend your days simply reading receipts? I asked her, kindly.
Her reply was intolerable. She said that she was reading her cookery book for my benefit & if I did not want her to read it then fine, she would gladly seek employment elsewhere among people who would appreciate her & would not seek to undermine her every move, & do not call me lower class when I am lower middle class than you very much – and you are not much higher if truth be told.
I could take no more & so lashed out at her with a tea-towel, flipping it again & again in her odious fat face screaming at her, You have made me the most miserable person in the whole of Sussex and I shall not forgive you for it.
Unbeknownst to me, Nelly was carrying her own tea-towel about her unduly bulging person as plump as a ptarmigan & as I paused to regain my breath she whipped it out from its hiding place & struck me with it once twice three no four times in quick & brutal succession. She persists; brutally tramples. I asked myself: am I forever doomed to let every worry, spite, irritation & obsession scratch and claw at my brain?
It was at this point that I recalled the disciplines taught so fortuitously at the unarmed combat course at Rodmell village hall in which Vita & I enrolled last year. I set my fingers in a V and, leaping up from the kitchen floor, I poked them into Nelly’s ill-formed, damp & porcine eyes. She howled her lower-class howl & fell to the ground, begging for a mercy which, in my present state, I had little inclination to offer. I remarked upon how underbred, illiterate, insistent, raw & ultimately nauseating she was before retiring from the room to my bed, therewith to restore myself with a little George Eliot.
DH Lawrence,
Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell
November 29th, 1922
Dear Lady Ottoline,
I cannot tell you how thoroughly we both enjoyed staying with you last weekend. Everything was so perfect – the scintillating conversation, the delicious food, the excellent wine, and all miraculously brought together to perfection by the finest hostess in the country!
By the way, I do hope I didn’t cause any undue offence at dinner with your guests on Saturday evening when, just as that lovely soup was being served, I tore off my trousers, pulled out my aroused member and began to chase your buxom serving wench around the dining-room table.
I noticed that your first thought was that the tomato soup in the wench’s great bowl was being tossed hither and thither over your well-dressed guests. How typical of you and your feeble servility towards the pathetic silliness of propriety that you should care more for the laundering of clothes – those absurd chains that keep man from his true self – than for the sex-flow that keeps man alive and is the only honest expression of animal energy that exists on this miserable globe.
And when I eventually caught up with her, and managed to grapple her to the ground, and was struggling to grasp her bountiful delights within my needy palms – then you implored me to forbear, you rang your bell and insisted in your cheap and degraded voice that there was ‘a time and a place for everything’.
Do you realise what a loathsome thing you are? You make me ill. I wanted to light a flame, to warm my body against the heat of a real woman’s naked form, to worship the sun-god of the sex-flow – and all you could think of to do was beg me hysterically to desist! You and your sort have a disgusting attitude towards sex, a disgusting desire to stop it and insult it. You are like a worm cut in half, with one half discarded in a bin while the other half wriggles around in a kind of grey hell.
Nevertheless, the main course was absolutely delicious, and I know that everyone also thoroughly enjoyed the pudding. And the rest of the weekend was every bit as heavenly! You were really extremely kind to entertain us all so extravagantly. Once again, thank you so much for a really wonderful weekend.
Yours ever,
David

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