The Idler: A Truly Gracious World

It is rather common, I suppose, for reviewers to be acquainted with the authors they review. Less commonly does the acquaintance turn to friendship. The very natures of the crafts of writing and reviewing create between the two practitioners a sort of wariness, and modern critical theories intent on ignoring all that an author means hardly help to over-come the tension. So it was with a mixture of surprise and delight that I received the hospitality of Dr. Thomas Howard, a hospitality I can describe only as supremely gracious in a sense that exhausts all the possible meanings of the term.

A good friend of mine had secured an invitation, and braving the ice of January, we drove out to the Howard home. The weather that day was truly treacherous, but our excitement about the visit easily conquered our fear of slippery roads. Besides, once we got up the Howard driveway we were safe. An assortment of cloths and mats had been laid for us like stepping stones on the path to the door. We received the red carpet treatment, if not the fact.

After weaving our way through the scaffolding in the foyer, which was being renovated, we were ushered into a sitting room. My friend and I were awed, and a bit daunted. The house had formerly belonged to the Cabots of Boston, and the sitting room recalled to its Brahmin past. A portrait of some august family father stared reprovingly from the wall. More intimidating were the snapshots on a coffee table that showed the Howard family hosting and toasting the luminaries of our age: husband and wife strolled along a beach with Malcolm Muggeridge; a son shook hands with an amiable Bush.

Yet soon we two daunted guests were feeling as comfortable as the vaunted ones. Professor Howard’s free-flowing sherry relaxed us, loosed our tongues; it induced in us that convivial bonhomie that dissolves differences, enables us to make our complaints, commiserate, and praise our common loves. But it was something more than the wine that warmed us—a something embodied in the flowing sherry and the ready “carpet,” in the whole elaborate ritual of greeting and seating that played in the little sitting room.

Still, in some houses the rituals and courtesies would have further chilled us and been instead a coldly ironic way of keeping us in our place. If they warmed us here, it was because they were no act. They were, rather, an enactment, the very way in which Professor Howard’s charity was made palpable; his flourishes flowed from and were rooted in his heart. Amazingly, two rather undistinguished college students were welcomed into the same intimacy the President and Muggeridge had shared. For once, the Howard scion was content to ignore the disapproval of his pictured sire.

Normally it would not be considered appropriate for a re-viewer to record such visits. Besides falling outside of his readers’ interests, such an account could indicate a loss of critical distance, and I must confess it was hard to remain impartial after being marshalled into such a world. Still, I think this case warrants an exception. In C.S. Lewis: Man of Letters (Ignatius), Professor Howard’s main concern is to show us the cosmos presupposed by all of Lewis’s fiction, a cosmos, Howard argues, acknowledged and affirmed by all ages past, though modern authors and critics ignore it and all its inklings. Professor Howard would have us once again explore this abandoned universe. Through his home as well as through his book, I was let inside.

Howard’s book is divided into chapters examining each of Lewis’s fictional works: the Narnia series, the Deep Heaven trilogy, and Till We Have Faces. We are soon made to see that these different stories unfold in a common world. Most striking among all the shared features is how, in all the stories, everyday things loom large with importance; the ordinary opens onto the grand.

Even infrequent visitors to Lewis’s world will be familiar with the idea. Narnia is entered by means of, of all things, a wardrobe, and Howard reminds us that the St. Anne’s of That Hideous Strength—a School of Charity visited by supernatural teachers—is still composed of “a rather dumpy collection of odd types.” What is true of Narnia is true of all of Lewis’s worlds, and perhaps the real one: the very highest pleasures are mediated to us “under the lowly species of tea and   cakes and laughter and fondling” (and, we could add, sherry and ritual courtesies, too). Again and again, stately parlors are entered only through stripped foyers, and royal carpets are made largely from assorted mats.

The fact of the ordinary opening onto the grand has its sterner aspects. Howard constantly reminds us how in Lewis’s world the most mundane choices are often weighted with a cosmic import; in this vein, his analysis of the beginning of Perelandra is particularly good. Here Howard forces us to see how a mere prosaic departure from duty and decency can have liter-ally universal consequences—a fact not nearly as comfortable as tea and cakes in Narnia.

In the end, however, this grand ordinariness that Howard shows us is quite refreshing, not least in the way it spills into and informs his prose. C.S. Lewis: Man of Letters is eminently readable, even colloquial, but it recalls to us towering figures and works, and it introduced me at least to some royal words. It is difficult to impress upon those outside of our troubled academies how different this is from most modern criticism. Deconstructionists, for example, seem often to deal not with the ordinary, but with the merely bland; though they try to hide this with a vocabulary and syntax which is labyrinthine, if not grandiose.

Even in a universe where the ordinary is so exalted, there remains ample room for the extraordinary. Lewis’s is an eminently hierarchical world, chock-full of beings whom we must dread or adore. The modern prejudice is to see this as oppressive; Howard succeeds in showing us that far from stifling, this type of ordered world enlivens. Lewis, Howard argues, produces his vastly creative works in obedience to the authority and tradition of the old masters; in the works themselves it is hierarchy that provides excitement, adventure, romance. Precisely because there are illustrious persons to serve and to meet, all kinds of journeys are under-taken, all sorts of dangers braved: the immensities of Deep Heaven, the uncharted seas of Narnia, the for-bidding landscape of Malacandra—even (on an ordinary but still grand scale) slippery roads.

Yet the hierarchy provides more than adventure. The gods in this universe not only excite us; they desire us, long to lavish upon us their agape even as they claim our eros. Of course this agape can be a dreadful thing. Charity shoots from the faces of the gods like barbed lightning. Asian is not tame. The gods re-main awesome, and their very positions demand our reverence. Yet if they are awesome, they are not aloof. In the end the cosmos exists not only that we may be their oblates but, beyond all worth, their intimates.

It is this freely given love that is the root and center of Lewis’s cosmos. Howard has shown us how it spills into and floods the least part of creation, how it secretly looms over even our smallest choices, how it scatters and strews ranks and choirs to lure us to adore. Only the core of love makes all of this possible, even desirable; above all Professor Howard shows us a truly gracious world.

Professor Howard’s world was in fact so gracious that it easily accepted a small disagreement between us. C.S. Lewis: Man of Letters is concerned not only with showing us Lewis’s cosmos, but with linking it to that of the wisemen of ages past, to the great democracy of the dead.   Yet I am somewhat discomfited in linking Lewis so completely with the past (though he would, of course, relish the connection himself). For one thing, the grandeur of the ordinary, and especially of the domestic, seems to me a largely modern idea, not greatly emphasized by the classical sages (though Professor Howard did recall to me the Scriptures, with Stories such as the humble stable which once contained the whole world). Then again, the rigid order of the older world succeeded in only a few special cases in being exciting rather than exploitative. For every Milton or Shakespeare who transformed servitude into an expression of heroic love, a hundred others merely kept it as a form of cheap labor. Though it can teach us to dance, in this world hierarchy has all too often forced us to drudge.

Even in the more heroic ages, it was a rare person who enjoyed Lewis’s vision of the cosmos, and I am not sure that these persons are significantly less common today. You will not find many of them in our English departments, of course, but thankfully, English departments do not yet define the world. In the Howard household I was lucky enough to see Lewis’s world in full and glorious health and vigor. Those who are not fortunate enough to secure an invitation to it may yet sneak in through this book.

Author

  • Richard Rotondi

    At the time this article was published, Richard Rotondi was an occasionally overzealous Lewis enthusiast and recent graduate of Georgetown University.

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