That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis

[Toby Frost]

That Hideous Strength really is one of the weirdest books I've ever read. It's closer to a kind of horror fantasy than real SF, and contains several really unsettling scenes and a terrific cast of villains (who, I suspect, each embody something Lewis didn't like).

Interestingly, it was reviewed by George Orwell before he wrote 1984, and I wonder if it had some influence on him:

"It sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.

His description of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), with its world-wide ramifications, its private army, its secret torture chambers, and its inner ring of adepts ... is as exciting as any detective story."

It is a rather sloppy book, in that pretty much everything that could happen does happen, but it's got some great moments. Some elements - basically those involving women, which give the impression that Lewis had not met many - have dated very badly, and the religious element is hard to warm to. It doesn't help that there seem to be two versions, one of which is abridged. At points, it really is like reading a transcript of a scholar's nightmare.

 

[HareBrain]

I was quite impressed in THS with Lewis's use of a bear as a viewpoint character without anthropomorphising him.

 

[Hugh]

That Hideous Strength really is one of the weirdest books I've ever read. It's closer to a kind of horror fantasy than real SF, and contains several really unsettling scenes and a terrific cast of villains (who, I suspect, each embody something Lewis didn't like).

Interestingly, it was reviewed by George Orwell before he wrote 1984, and I wonder if it had some influence on him:

"It sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.

His description of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), with its world-wide ramifications, its private army, its secret torture chambers, and its inner ring of adepts ... is as exciting as any detective story."

It is a rather sloppy book, in that pretty much everything that could happen does happen, but it's got some great moments. Some elements - basically those involving women, which give the impression that Lewis had not met many - have dated very badly, and the religious element is hard to warm to. It doesn't help that there seem to be two versions, one of which is abridged. At points, it really is like reading a transcript of a scholar's nightmare.

Many thanks for taking the time to explain this. I have the longer/original version: while I have no immediate plans to read it, I may now get round to it in time.

 

[Extollager]

Toby Frost wrote, of C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, "It is a rather sloppy book, in that pretty much everything that could happen does happen, but it's got some great moments."

I could agree with you about a quality of "everythingness" in this book, which, for me, is one of the things that make it so appealing, in that it celebrates so many of the things that Lewis loved. Take the passage describing Jane's train ride, for example, her enjoyment of the terrain through which she passes and its Englishness, or the scene when she and the Dennistons are sitting in a car in the woods eating sandwiches (as I recall) on a damp day -- the enjoyment of weather. There's a quality in such passages that reminds me of the nostalgic sequences in Orwell's Coming Up for Air, and I think you are really on to something in suggesting affinities between these two authors despite the obvious difference of belief. I wonder if Lewis read that 1939 novel and was possibly influenced by it in writing THS -- I suppose not, though; there are passages in Lewis's letters from way back that are close in feeling to those passages.

Many people, on a first reading, are most affected by the material relating to evil (as the title itself suggests), but, as a veteran reader (something like a dozen readings), it may be more the material relating to the good that captivates me. By the way, the great Kentucky essayist Wendell Berry has admired THS for years. He refers to it now and again in his essays. In one of his letters to the poet Gary Snyder, Berry wrote, "The pagan deities have survived fairly blithely and usefully right through English Christian literary tradition, for instance -- a late and very moving instance of this being the reappearance of the classical gods is angels at the end of C. S. Lewis's fine novel That Hideous Strength. It could be very satisfactorily argued that the best Christian poets [e.g. Edmund Spenser, whose Faerie Queene is so important for THS!] in English have all been half pagan, and not necessarily for unchristian reasons" (Distant Neighbors, p. 118).

 

[Extollager]

In 1945, Lewis published this poem, which I think Orwell would have appreciated:

UNDER SENTENCE

There is a wildness still in England that will not feed
In cages; it shrinks away from touch of the trainer's hand;
Easy to kill, not easy to keep. It will not breed
in a zoo for the public pleasure. It will not be planned.

Do not blame us too much if we, being woodland folk,
Cannot swell the rejoicing at this new world you make;
We, hedge-hoggèd as Johnson, we unused to the yoke
As Landon, surly as Cobbett (that badger), birdlike as Blake.

A new scent troubles the air -- friendly to you perhaps --
But we with animal wisdom understand that smell.
To all our kind its message is guns, ferrets, traps,
And a Ministry gassing the little holes in which we dwell.

In its way of writing about human society and human private life under the guise of writing about animals, it's like Animal Farm, published the same year.

The second and fourth lines of the poem should be indented, but that doesn't seem to survive sending this posting.

 

[Toby Frost]

It's quite hard to reply to that without giving a lot away, which Hugh might not have read or remembered. But yes, there probably is quite an overlap between Lewis and Orwell here. Removing the overly religious elements, they both have the same enemies and seem to like roughly the same things (Orwell would be less fond of university life, I suppose). I think both of them are very taken by the rightness of normal life and normal sane people.

There's a moment in THS where a villainous scientist talks crazily about replacing real trees with mechanical ones, and I think both Lewis and Orwell would have recoiled from this and the attack on the natural order that it entails. I'll have to have a look for Wendell Berry.

While many authors have described dictatorships (and totalitarianism) as completely evil, Lewis goes one step further and says that it's literally Satanic. The supernatural evil in That Hideous Strength feels much more convincing to me than most books featuring the occult.

I'm in two minds about the mystical good aspects, though. Much of it is very well-written and the moment where the beings descend into the characters' lives is very strong. However, the idea of surrender to a celestial hierarchy is unappealing, and might not have been uniformly appealing to Christian readers of the 1950s, either. The mix of Christian and pagan elements is very effective, though.

(Mods: I'm not sure whether this should be a new thread, perhaps in the Classic SF area.)

 

[Extollager]

(Mods: I'm not sure whether this should be a new thread, perhaps in the Classic SF area.)

That would be my suggestion. There's lots more to say about this novel, & I know I'd like to bring in some more from Wendell Berry.

 

[Hugh]

It's quite hard to reply to that without giving a lot away, which Hugh might not have read or remembered.

Not a concern, as far as I'm concerned.

But thanks for considering.

 

[The Judge]

(Mods: I'm not sure whether this should be a new thread, perhaps in the Classic SF area.)

That would be my suggestion. There's lots more to say about this novel, & I know I'd like to bring in some more from Wendell Berry.

Moved as requested. I think I've got all the relevant posts, but let me know if I've missed any. (I've left the very first one to refer to THS -- and therefore Hugh's response -- since it refers to another book and it doesn't add anything to this discussion.)

 

[Extollager]

Toby, you wrote, "the idea of surrender to a celestial hierarchy is unappealing."

I'm not going to pick up that "surrender," not now at least, but I thought I'd take a poke at the hierarchy idea. Wendell Berry's short book Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (Counterpoint, 2000) helps with that, I think. The key idea here is that -- over against the scientistic, technocratic reductionism that collapses meaningful differences -- "'everything that lives is holy'" (Wm. Blake) and we ought to feel and recognize an "affection for distinct beings" (citing Stephanie Mills on Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac).

Berry says that people have failed to see, in the Bible and best Christian tradition, a "delight in the variety and individuality of creatures and its insistence upon their holiness" (all this from page 102). Berry is largely concerned in this book to argue against Wilson's Consilience and "Mr. Wilson's goal of a cognitive unity produced by science [and characterized by] abstraction and reduction." Rather, Berry says, "Acceptance of the mystery of unitary truth in God leads to glorification of the multiplicity of His works." There is an "unknowable unity of truth" though God's works "are endlessly and countlessly various" (p. 103). I think that, as far as Lewis's notion of the topic is concerned, we misunderstand hierarchy when we think of it in terms of familiar unjust social structures, which at best are perversions and misleading caricatures. Again, the key is that one thing is not another thing. Each is gloriously different.

I would go so far as to say that we can't really understand, expose, and fight well against bad social hierarchies if we haven't first experienced, imaginatively and intellectually, hierarchy as a universal principle safeguarding distinctness. If we can't think of any type of "hierarcy" that isn't a matter of some entity having (unjust) power over another, then we need to work on that deficiency, and I think Lewis's novel, and the poetry he loved, etc. can help us to remedy it.

 

[Extollager]

Well, then how about sustainability (the household of St. Anne's) vs. an economy of plunder? This is something Lewis cottoned on to and, so far as I know, Orwell didn't really. Not that I mean to start a competition between the two, but rather to suggest there's a complementarity, maybe, between Orwell's vision and Lewis's that could be discussed, if anyone wants to.

They work well as contrasting novels, too, since pretty basically Orwell's novel is about how you break a human being down until he evidently cannot be healed; while Lewis focuses more on how Mark and Jane are, in their differing ways, set on the way to being healed. Mark had a long way to go; he was well on his way, before his turn, towards becoming a functionary who might have bossed around some Winston Smiths.

 

[Extollager]

Well, an anecdote: I seem to have read this book when I was in 9th grade, aged 14. My memory is that I was fascinated by Ransom and Merlin's bits of Latin. I told me English teacher that I wished I could learn Latin. His response: Why? It's a dead language.

Ah, but it wasn't dead to me, then! And, by the way, my best friend, in another town, was able to take Latin about that same time.

 

[Hugh]

Well, an anecdote: I seem to have read this book when I was in 9th grade, aged 14. My memory is that I was fascinated by Ransom and Merlin's bits of Latin. I told me English teacher that I wished I could learn Latin. His response: Why? It's a dead language.

Ah, but it wasn't dead to me, then! And, by the way, my best friend, in another town, was able to take Latin about that same time.

So did you get to learn Latin?

 

[Hugh]

Well, then how about sustainability (the household of St. Anne's) vs. an economy of plunder? This is something Lewis cottoned on to and, so far as I know, Orwell didn't really. Not that I mean to start a competition between the two, but rather to suggest there's a complementarity, maybe, between Orwell's vision and Lewis's that could be discussed, if anyone wants to.

They work well as contrasting novels, too, since pretty basically Orwell's novel is about how you break a human being down until he evidently cannot be healed; while Lewis focuses more on how Mark and Jane are, in their differing ways, set on the way to being healed. Mark had a long way to go; he was well on his way, before his turn, towards becoming a functionary who might have bossed around some Winston Smiths.

Thank you for these comments on THS. I'm fairly certain now that I'll get round to reading it in a few weeks' time. It's also thought-provoking to read your juxtaposition with Orwell.

 

[Extollager]

So did you get to learn Latin?

Nope. It wasn't offered where I went to school. I doubt that I'd have stuck with it, I admit. I was "The Cartoonist" (comic art) of my class, basically, but never applied myself really to learn perspective, to the frustration of my art teacher.

 

[Toby Frost]

I’m not saying that the hierarchy is unjust, either in the sense that Lewis thinks it is or that it genuinely is*, just that it seems a rather stern and perhaps Victorian view of the world, especially against the strange and slightly New Age feel of the rest of the novel. I might be remembering this wrong, but there is a sense that the beasts look to the humans, the women look to the men, and the men look to Ransome as their leader, and that is cosmically right. I think this sense of cosmic rightness is very important to THS, and in a less overt way to Orwell’s writing. The 1984 world, even when it isn’t being downright violent and cruel, is deeply awkward and uncomfortable. Nothing really works, everything is second-rate, all the people are stunted, perhaps because it has gone off the “natural” rails. Many of Orwell’s books involve positive scenes in the countryside (and several include outdoor sex).

I don’t really want to go very far down this route but, as an aside, Lewis’ revulsion towards Hardcastle is a lot like Orwell’s dislike of homosexuals (one of the very few points where, to us, Orwell doesn’t look like the “decent” person he is generally seen as being). I suspect that for both she represents a step away from the natural order.

Incidentally, Lewis' use of names (Hardcastle, Wither, Straik, Frost) reminds me of Peake. Some of Peake's comments about the "Factory" in Titus Alone (which I found to be a jumbled and unsatisfactory book) remind me of the NICE.

The point about sustainability is an interesting one. Did Lewis have any interest in conservation and the like? I’m also wondering about how close these tough-minded moralists, with their links to serious Christianity, were to New Age-type ideas – the appeal The Lord of the Rings had for the 1960s generation springs to mind.


*Well, actually, I do think it is. But I find it easier than some to go along with oddities like this in a novel whilst I’m reading it, and then disagree with it later.

 

[Toby Frost]

Incidentally, Extollager, this may be a bit niche but you might be interested in a book called A Paradise Lost: the Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1933-1955. It was published relating to an exhibition of paintings, so a lot of it is about art, but there is some interesting stuff in there about novels, including an article about Wyndham as a sort of SF interpretation of pagan wildness.

 

[Joshua Jones]

I never got around to THS. Lewis' first SF book, Out of the Silent Planet, was pretty interesting, but I got bogged down in Perelandra. The latter was too much of a straight allegory for me, but the first was very good and I recommend it to others.

I think I need to finish up Perelandra at some point and check out THS...

 

[Extollager]

Hi, Joshua! Would it help, with Perelandra, to reconsider whether it is allegory? In an allegorical story such as The Faerie Queene, we may be given an enjoyable story on the level of a literal adventure, something that, before TV, comic books, and smartphones, even youngsters would read, but in which an older reader may perceive also that some figurative level is at work. The youngster enjoys perhaps a retelling (like Hodges and Hyman's) of St. George vs. the Dragon. An older reader can relate the characters and incidents to timeless "abstractions" such as holiness, spiritual integrity, temptation, worldly pride, etc.

Well, I don't think Perelandra is working on an allegorical level, that is, we're not supposed to look for an abstract message hovering over the tale (however entertaining in its own right the tale is). For example, the Lady isn't an "allegory" of, say, Innocence; she is an innocent person. Perelandra is "mythological," but also "historical." Maybe these thoughts will help? Anyway, I hope you can read and enjoy the book. It's a wise, exciting, and beautiful thing, with one of the best imaginary planets ever.

 

[Extollager]

Toby, my hunch is that the "slightly New Age feel" you detect relates to Lewis's deep imaginative and intellectual involvement -- though an orthodox Christian -- with Romanticism, Classical myth and its new life in the late Middle Ages-Renaissance, and to his friendship with Owen Barfield, etc. You might find this piece

Scientific Integrity: The Empty Universe

interesting also.

On hierarchy and (in)equality, the essay below is a popular-level distillation by Lewis of some thoughts on the subject, if you'd like to check into that. Note his remark on economic and legal equality, btw. I'm not sure, in practical terms, exactly what he had in mind in that regard. It would have been interesting to get him and Orwell together to talk it over. That could even have happened, since they both broadcast for the BBC in London during the war.

Present Concerns -- Two Essays by C.S. Lewis -- Equality and Democratic Education