Father Hunwicke's Thoughts on 'That Hideous Strength'

I had never made the connection between the character, Jules, and the atheist socialist H.G. Wells in the third volume of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength.

HOW CRUEL WAS C S LEWIS? (1)

Sir John Betjeman thought Lewis was cruel. Having messed lazily around at Oxford, and having sniggered about Lewis, his tutor, behind his back, B yet expected him to intervene when he failed an elementary examination in Divinity and faced being sent down. Lewis declined to help. I think most readers who have taught would feel a certain sympathy for him.

But Lewis must have been a sharpish tutor. Jane Studdock, he tells us, who wanted to write a doctoral thesis emphasising Donne's triumphant vindication of the body, "was, perhaps not a very original thinker". And there was Dr Dimble's dullest pupil, who turned up "to read an essay beginning Swift was born'".

And how about H G Wells? Lewis, writing in 1943, not long before Wells's death, hung him up to merciless ridicule. In That Hideous Strenth, the figure Horace Jules is clearly Wells; Lewis could hardly have devised a name more like Wells's name without calling the character Wells.

I think I can detect class-prejudice in this picture; Oxbridge elitism; mockery of undignified physical characteristics. Let us, er, enjoy for a moment some of the riper insults.

"Jules was a cockney. He was a very little man, whose legs were so short that he had unkindly been compared with a duck. He had a turned up nose and a face in wich some original bonhommie had been much interfered with by years of good living and conceit. His novels had first raised him to fame and affluence; later, as editor of a weekly called We Want To Know, he had become such a power in the country that his name was really necessary to the N.I.C.E."

Lewis does not scruple to resort to authorial disdain. Jules is "a spouting popinjay". But perhaps more interesting is the attitude of Lord Feverstone. This character is one of the story's baddies. He subscibes to the advanced Eugenicism which was the intellectual fashon of the interbellum years. His main ambition is his own advancement. So he is uninterested in the demonic forces at work in the N.I.C.E. He despises the practicioners of College Politics ("Curry and his wangling Machine"), and is aghast at the idea that he might be elected Warden of his College. And so his contempt for Jules adds a validity independant, in structural terms, to the authorial voice itself.

Lewis gives to Jules an anecdote which is documented as true of the actual Wells:

"'And as I said to the Archbishop, you may not know, my lord,', said I 'that modern research shows the temple at Jerusalem to have been about the size of an English village church.'"

Noticing in passing that this peasant does not know how to address, either formally or informally, an Archbishop, we observe that he is a victim of the But-Modern-Research-shows mode of debunking the past; and, moreover, that he considers the architecturally small dimensions of the Jerusalem Temple somehow to undermine 'religion'. Brilliantly, Lewis subverts Jules/Wells ex ore Feverstone:

"'God!' said Feverstone to himself where he stood silent on the Fringes of the group."

A few minutes later, Jules observes: 

"The whole question of our sex-life. What I always say is, that once you get the whole thing out into the open, you don't have any more trouble. It's all this Victorian secrecy which does the harm. Making a mystery of it. I want every boy and girl in the country--"

 With elegant economy, Lewis ridicules this nonsense:

"'God' said Feverstone to himself."

In other words, we don't need Lewis or anybody else to explain what nonsense this is, when even a crook like Feverstone despises it.

Lewis degrades Jules/Wells into the status of not even being a worthy intellectual adversary. He privileges his readers with the assumption that they share his contempt for the shallow nonsense of 'Modern Thought'.

C S Lewis and H G Wells (2)

I rather agree with the judgement of Dorothy Sayers, that Hideous Strength is crammed full of goodies but has its shortcomings as a novel. Do the Powers at Belbury want Mark and Jane because of her clairvoyance, or his PR skills, or because they are a "eugenically interesting couple" [a view apparently shared by Merlin]? I am never quite sure, and I rather suspect that Lewis was not quite sure either. Some links are, I suggest, weak: would operatives of as violent and lawless an organisation as N.I.C.E. refrain from following Mark on his visit to Dimble inside his College simply because, like the Oxford Proctors, they were forbidden to function within colleges? 

The point, I believe, is that there are things about which Lewis feels lazy. His first motive is not to write a flawlessly plotted novel, but to teach dogma ... which is a very important thing to do. 

So consider his description of Jules's mental landscape:

" ... since, in fact, any science he knew was that taught him at the University of London over fifty years ago, and any philosophy he knew had been acquired from writers like Haeckel and Joseph McCabe and Winwood Reade, it was not, in fact, possible to talk to him about most of the things the Institute was really doing. One was always engaged in inventing answers to questions which were actually meaningless and expressing enthusiasm for ideas which were out of date and had been crude even in their prime."

 It is not usual to 'footnote' novels in this sort of way; but Lewis does it again when Professor Frost is giving Mark a tutorial on the non-existence of Good and Evil. 

"On what ground henceforth [are] actions to be justified or condemned?

"'If one insists on putting the question in those terms,' said Frost, 'I think Waddington has given the best answer. Existence is its own justification ... The judgment you are trying to make turns out on inspection to be simply an expression of emotion. Huxley himself, could only express it by using emotive terms such as "gladiatorial" or "ruthless". I am referring to the famous Romanes lecture. When the so-called struggle for existence is seen simply as an actuarial theorem, we have, in Waddington's words, a "a concept as unemotional as a definite integral" and emotion disappears. With it disappears that preposterous idea of an external standard of value which the emotion produced.'"

Lewis was not writing an entertainment half as much as he was condemning what was, he was convinced, a profoundly dangerous error. He felt strongly because doctrine is something about which a serious Christian ought to feel strongly.

The authorial narrative voice, I am sure, approves of Mark's reaction that "his present instinctive desire to batter the Professor's face into a jelly would take a good deal of destroying."

Lewis felt strongly!

Readers of Lewis's Space Trilogy sometimes feel that he must have derived some sort of stimulus or inspiration from, or experienced sympathy with, Wells's Scifi writings. My own feeling is very different.

Wells, like many Scifi writers, depicted a God-free amd Theology-free  imaginary world. By so doing they witnessed their own rigid post-Christian dogma that such God-nonsense was generically inappropriate in the Scifi world. Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy to assert that whatever 'other worlds' might exist or could be plausibly imagined, would be God's worlds, and spheres in which Christian Dogma was a thoroughy natural, indeed, unavoidable, inhabitant.