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A Teacher and a Gentleman

Sister M. Madeleva, looking back over her life in her delightfully titled My First Seventy Years, recalls her experience with C. S. Lewis during a brief stay in Oxford:

Oxford that Trinity term meant and continues to mean for me Mr. C. S. Lewis.  After attending his second lecture on the Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Poetry I said to some of the students at Cherwell Edge, “Mr. Lewis is the one person at Oxford with whom I should like to tutor.”  “But,” they exclaimed in amazement at my temerity, “Mr. Lewis refuses to tutor a woman.”  “That,” I replied stoutly, “does not change my statement in the least.”

You probably are not interested in a prolegomenon or preface to medieval poetry, or indeed in this archaic poetry itself.  I should like, however, to share with you two experiences from the class in which Mr. Lewis dug up medieval poetry by the roots and planted it in our minds, there to grow and flower as it might.

At the beginning of the course he announced by titles nineteen lectures.  Later in the term he missed three of these because of illness.  Returning to class, he stated that obviously some of the assigned lectures would have to be omitted.  He asked that if we had any preference for those to be retained we would write him a note saying so….

I had been anticipating impatiently the single lecture on Boethius.  I wrote as much to Mr. Lewis.  He gave in response three lectures on the author of The Consolation of Philosophy.  This was the graciousness of the teacher.

Later, I wrote to thank him and to ask if there was available a bibliography on his course.  He replied by writing out for me a history of the development of his study, a list of the books I should read relating to it, a list I might read, and a list to which I need pay no attention at all.  This was the gentleman.  Mr. Lewis had tutored me. — Sister M. Madeleva, My First Seventy Years, pp. 75-76.

By the way, in case you wish you could see that letter Lewis wrote, you both can and can’t.  The letter is in the second volume of C. S. Lewis’s Collected Letters.  But alas, the bibliography is not there.

It seems that what Lewis did was loan Sister Madeleva a notebook that contained the book lists she mentions here, which (judging by his letter) were the bibliography he worked with in particular when he was preparing The Allegory of Love.  But the notebook itself is not reprinted in the Collected Letters and may, in fact, no longer exist … although one wonders if it really was loaned (as Walter Hooper says in his footnote in Collected Letters), with the intention that she return it, or if it was given, since Lewis’s letter says nothing about returning it and it would have been laborious for her to copy it out.  In either case — whether it was loaned and she made a copy for herself or if it was given outright — one does wonder if it exists somewhere in Sister Madeleva’s papers.

Just So

Angela Thirkell describes how she used to play Cavaliers and Roundheads with her cousins.  She and her cousin Josephine Kipling were the Cavaliers, and the Roundhead was Josephine’s father, whom Thirkell calls “Cousin Ruddy”:

Josephine, very fair-haired and blue-eyed, was my bosom friend, and though we both adored her father, the stronger bond of patriotism drew us yet more firmly together as Cavaliers against Cousin Ruddy’s whole-hearted impersonation of an Arch-Roundhead….

The war between Cavaliers and Roundheads raged furiously every year as long as the Kiplings were at Rottingdean, Josephine and I leading forlorn hopes against the Regicide and being perpetually discomfited by his superior guile, or by the odious way in which the Nannies would overlook the fact that we were really six feet high with flowing locks, a hat with feathers, and huge jack-boots, and order us indoors to wash our hands or have an ignominious midday rest.

How would they have liked it if they were plotting to deliver King Charles from Carisbrooke and their Nannies had suddenly pounced upon them with a “Get up off the grass now Miss Angela and come and lie down before lunch, and there’s Lucy waiting for you Miss Josephine, so put those sticks down like a good girl and run along.”  Fools!  Couldn’t they see that these were no pea-sticks, but sword, dagger, and pistol, ready to flash out or be discharged in the service of the King?  But Nannies are by nature unromantic, so we had to submit and pretend to be little girls till we could meet again later (Three Houses, 83-84).

Later, when she talks about Josephine’s death at six years of age, Thirkell writes:

I still have a letter from Josephine, written in sprawly childish capitals.  “I will help you,” it ran, “in the war against the Roundhead.  He has a large army but we can beat him.  He is a horrible man let us do all the mischief we can to him.”  It must have been a very real game that made her call the father she loved a “horrible man.”  The world has known Josephine and her father as Taffimai and Tegumai in the Just So Stories and into one short poem he put his heart’s cry for the daughter that was all to him (86).

Thirkell was one of the first to hear these stories:

During those long warm summers Cousin Ruddy used to try out the Just So Stories on a nursery audience.  Sometimes Josephine and I would be invited into the study….  Or sometimes we all adjourned on a wet day to the Drill Hall where the horse and parallel bars made splendid forts and camping grounds, and when the battle was over and the Roundhead had been unmercifully rolled upon and pommelled by small fists he would be allowed by way of ransom to tell us about the mariner of infinite resource and sagacity and the suspenders–you must not forget the suspenders, Best Beloved.

The Just So Stories are a poor thing in print compared with the fun of hearing them told in Cousin Ruddy’s deep unhesitating voice.  There was a ritual about them, each phrase having its special intonation which had to be exactly the same each time and without which the stories are dried husks.  There was an inimitable cadence, an emphasis of certain words, an exaggeration of certain phrases, a kind of intoning here and there which made his telling unforgettable (87-88).

Mrs. Burne-Jones

Angela Thirkell talks about how her grandmother — the wife and, later, widow of the painter, Edward Burne-Jones — used to have workingmen into her home to read to them about Pre-Raphaelitism and socialism: “All the snobbishness latent in children came to the fore as we watched the honoured but unhappy workman sitting stiffly on the edge of his chair in his horrible best clothes while my grandmother’s lovely earnest voice preached William Morris to him.”

In spite of her wide affections and deep understanding she was curiously removed from real life and I think she honestly believed that The Seven Lamps of Architecture on every working-man’s table would go far to ameliorate the world.  She was absolutely fearless, morally and physically.  During the South African War her sympathies were with the Boers, and though she was at that time a widow, living alone, she never hesitated to bear witness, without a single sympathizer.  When peace was declared she hung out of her window a large blue cloth on which she had been stitching the words: ‘We have killed and also taken possession.’  For some time there was considerable personal danger to her from a populace in Mafeking mood, till her nephew, Rudyard Kipling, coming over from The Elms, pacified the people and sent them away.  Single-minded people can be a little alarming to live with and we children had a nervous feeling that we never knew where our grandmother might break out next. — Angela Thirkell, Three Houses, pp. 78-79, 79-80.

Pitter on Narnia

One of Lewis’s female friends (and yes, he did have some!) was the poet Ruth Pitter.  Largely unknown today, Pitter was the first woman to win the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.  She and Lewis met on occasion and exchanged a number of letters.  I expect that she found it rather tiresome, after Lewis’s death, to have quoted to her and to be asked about what Lewis allegedly said to his friend Hugo Dyson: “I am not a man for marriage; but if I were, I would ask R.P.”

She writes about one meeting with Lewis and his brother, Major “Warnie” Lewis.  Pitter had asked if she “might query him about the first of his children’s books,” and Lewis consented.  She reports that the conversation went like this (Ruth Pitter, “Poet to Poet,” in In Search of C. S. Lewis, ed. Stephen Schofield, 113):

PITTER: In the land of Narnia, the witch makes it always winter and never Christmas?

LEWIS: Yes.

PITTER: Does she allow any foreign trade?

LEWIS: She does not.

PITTER: Am I allowed to postulate on the lines of Santa Claus with the tea tray?

LEWIS: You are not.

PITTER: Then where did all the materials for the good dinner the beavers gave came from?

LEWIS: The beavers caught fish through holes in the ice.

PITTER: Yes, the potatoes to go with them, the flour and sugar and oranges and milk for the children?

LEWIS: I must refer you to a further study of the text.

MAJOR LEWIS: Nonsense, Jack!  You’re stumped.  And you know it.

C. S. Lewis’s Full Household

When you think of C. S. Lewis, do you think of a somewhat crusty bachelor who would, of course, have little experience of women, let alone of children, least of all of female children?  If your image of Lewis comes from the movie Shadowlands, you might be forgiven for thinking that Lewis had no friends.  There isn’t a Coghill, a Williams, a Tolkien, a Barfield, or even a Warnie hanging out with Lewis in that film.  He’s a loner until the Joy Davidman character appears.

Even in his life, Lewis had something of a reputation as a misogynist, it seems.  In a really rather awful interview with Stephen Schofield, who actually eggs him on, Malcolm Muggeridge proposes that there is some mystery about Lewis, something to do “with his attitude toward women and sex,” and Schofield responds by saying that he was told that “whenever a woman came on the College grounds, Lewis would run as fast as his legs would take him to his room and lock the door” (Schofield, ed., In Search of C. S. Lewis, 128).  Sheldon Vanauken responded to this interview when it was first published and calls this a “rather silly story,” refuting it by pointing to Lewis’s female students (Schofield 164-165), but, while including Vanauken’s response, Schofield still seems to have thought highly enough of the original interview to publish it unedited, thereby perpetuating the legend of Lewis’s dislike of women.

If you read Lewis’s letters, however, you get a very different picture.  Though Lewis did spend weeknights at the College, his weekends were spent at his house, The Kilns.  And what a crowded house that must have been.  For most of his life, Lewis lived with an older woman, the mother of one of Lewis’s army friends who died in World War I.  Lewis regarded her as a sort of surrogate mother and called her his mother in his letters.  He also cared for her teenaged daughter, providing for her education out of his own salary.  His brother Warnie also lived in that house.  And during the war, when children and young people were evacuated from London, several of them stayed at the Kilns.

While I disapprove of Schofield’s interview with Muggeridge, I most heartily approve of his including material from a couple of these girls.  Patricia Heidelberger describes living at Lewis’s house with another evacuee, Marie Jose Bosc.  She says that they were “extremely lively, noisy and giggly.  He never reproached us” (53).  Lewis helped them with their homework, encouraged Patricia to go to Oxford.  She says, he “coached me in Latin, and even taught me a little Greek” (54).  And then he provided financial assistance to both girls to help Patricia with her university dues and Marie with the costs of her nurses training.

June Flewett (better known as Jill Freud) also lived for about two years at Lewis’s house.  She says that Lewis loaned her books. “He told me to go to Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford, anytime, and buy any book I wanted on his account” (57).  She writes:

Lewis was the first person who made me believe that I was an intelligent human being and the whole of the time I was there he built up my confidence in myself and in my ability to think and understand.  He never put me down.  He never made me feel foolish, no matter how small my contribution towards any conversation might be (57).

She recalls Lewis’s attempts to help the houseboy:

For some months we had a young man living at the Kilns.  He worked as a houseboy and general helper.  He was probably introduced by the Social Services Department, and he was what we would now call educationally subnormal.  He had the mentality of a child of eight.  Every evening Jack Lewis taught him to read.  Lewis made drawings and letter cards for him; he went through the alphabet with him and tried to teach him small words, and so on.  I don’t think he had a great deal of success because the young man found it hard to retain anything.  But for more than two months Jack Lewis went through the alphabet with him every evening (57-58).

Misogynist?  Freud quotes the poem Lewis wrote in her copy of The Screwtape Letters (59):

Beauty and brains and virtue never dwell
Together in one place, the critics say.
Yet we have known a case
You must not ask her name
But seek it ‘twixt July and May.

As for female students, Rosamond Cowan, who was one of the first two women students Lewis had, writes,

At first we were a bit frightened as he had a reputation of being a “man’s man.”  We rather thought he would be a bit down on women.  Actually he was delightful.  He told me I reminded him of a Shakespearean heroine — a compliment I’ve always cherished. He certainly treated me like one (62).

At the beginning of chapter 14 of Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost, he credits a Miss Muriel Bentley for the thoughts he develops in that chapter.  Who was she?  A Milton scholar?  No, says Schofield.  “She was nothing of the sort.  She was a student, aged twenty-one, of Somerville College” (74), which means she didn’t study under Lewis or write anything for him, nor had she even published an essay on Paradise Lost.  “All he had from me,” she says, “were examination papers” (74).  That’s all — and yet Lewis gave her credit for an insight that opened his eyes to something he might otherwise not have noticed.

Far from the loner-Lewis stuck in a lot of people’s imaginations, then, the real Lewis had a full household — brother, surrogate mother (often and increasingly sick), and a bunch of young women, to say nothing of a houseboy — all of whom he tried to help in various ways.  Far from being a woman-hater, the real Lewis, who may indeed have preferred the company of men to that of women, gave himself courteously in service to a great number of women in his household and in his classes and, as a glance at his letters reveals, in his correspondence.

“Hope” in Pandora’s Jar (2)

A couple of weeks ago, I summarized Jean-Pierre Vernant’s thoughts on the “hope” (elpis: anticipation, expectation) left in Pandora’s jar when all the evils flew out.  While some have presented the safekeeping of elpis in the jar as if it means that, in spite of all the evils in the world, man still has hope, Vernant sees the elpis as something closely associated with the emergence of the evils, something ambiguous.  As he explains in his essay “The Myth of Prometheus in Hesiod” (in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece):

If in the Golden Age, human life held nothing but good things, if all the evils were still far away, shut up inside the jar (Works, 115-16), there would be no grounds to hope for anything different from what one has.  If life was delivered up entirely and irremediably to evil and misfortune (Works, 200-1), there would be no place even for Elpis.  But since the evils are henceforth inextricably intermingled with the good things (Theog., 603-10; Works, 178, to be compared with Works, 102) and it is impossible for us to foresee exactly how tomorrow will turn out for us, we are always hoping for the best.  If men possessed the infallible foreknowledge of Zeus, they would have no use for Elpis.  And if their lives were confined to the present with no knowledge or concern at all regarding the future, they would equally know nothing of Elpis.  However, caught between the lucid forethought of Prometheus and the thoughtless blindness of Epimetheus, oscillating between the two without ever being able to separate them, they know in advance that suffering, sickness, and death is bound to be their lot, and, being ignorant of the form their misfortune will take, they only recognize it too late when it has already struck them.

Whoever is immortal, as the gods are, has no need of Elpis.  Nor is there any Elpis for those who, like the beasts, are ignorant of their mortality.  If man who is mortal like the beasts could foresee the whole future as the gods can, if he was altogether like Prometheus, he would no longer have the strength to go on living, for he could not bear to contemplate his own death directly.  But, knowing himself to be mortal, though ignorant of when and how he will die, hope, which is a kind of foresight, although a blind one (Aeschylus, Prometheus, 250; cf. also Plato, Gorgias, 523d ae), and blessed illusion, both a good and a bad thing at one and the same time–hope alone makes it possible for him to live out this ambiguous, two-sided life.  Henceforward, there is a reverse aspect to everything: Contact can only be made with the gods through sacrifice, which at the same time consecrates the impassable barrier between mortals and immortals; there can be no happiness without unhappiness, no birth without death, no abundance without toil, no Prometheus without Epimetheus–in a word, no Man without Pandora (200-201).

That’s Vernant’s view.  Elpis is not a purely good thing; it is ambiguous, both the anticipation of good and the certain knowledge that–somehow, sometime–evil will come.

But what surprises me is that Vernant, at least in what I’ve read, doesn’t seem to see the elpis in Pandora’s jar in connection with the other parallels he so carefully works out in Hesiod’s accounts of Prometheus’s rivalry with Zeus:

* Prometheus tricks Zeus into accepting the worse part of the sacrifices and letting man have the best.  He does so by taking the bones of the sacrifice and covering them up with lovely white fat.  When Zeus sees them, he thinks they’re going to be especially delicious and so he chooses them as his portion, leaving man with the good meat, the better part, as his portion of the sacrifices.

* Zeus responds by refusing to let man have fire and by hiding man’s life (bios, here a reference to grain) in the ground so that now man has to work hard to get it.  Bones hidden in fat correspond to bios hidden in the ground.

* Prometheus steals fire from Zeus and gives it to man.

* Zeus responds by making a “beautiful evil” (kalon kakon) for man that corresponds in some way to fire, namely, woman.  In the Theogony, the woman isn’t named but is described as being the equivalent of drones who eat the honey the worker bees produce.  A woman has a beautiful face and figure, but it hides a hungry stomach that gobbles up all a man’s earnings.  In Works, Hesiod describes the woman, now called Pandora, as a beautiful woman who has a jar which, when opened, disperses evils among men.  Once again, however, there is a correspondence: bones hidden in fat to look attractive to Zeus correspond, not only to grain hidden in the ground, but also now to an evil heart and a hungry stomach hidden inside a beautiful face and figure.

But right here I expected Vernant to say something about elpis.  He notes that in the Theogony, “men are presented with a choice: either not to marry, and to enjoy a sufficiency of grain (since the female gaster [belly] does not take it from them) but not to have any children (since a female gaster is necessary to give birth) — the evil thus counterbalancing the good; or to marry and, even with a good wife, the evil again counterbalances the good” (Myth and Society 187).  Elsewhere, Vernant puts it this way:

This is the dilemma now: If a man marries, his life will pretty certainly be hell, unless he happens on a very good wife, which is extremely rare.  Conjugal life is thus an inferno–misery after misery.  On the other hand, if a man does not marry, his life could be a happy one: He would have his fill of everything, he would never lack for anything–but at this death, who will get his accumulated wealth?  It will be scattered, into the hands of relatives for whom he has no particular affection.  If he marries it is a catastrophe, and if he doesn’t, it’s another kind of catastrophe.

Woman is two different things at once: She is the paunch, the belly devouring everything her husband has laboriously gathered at the cost of his effort, his toil, his fatigue; but that belly is also the only one that can produce the thing that extends a man’s life–a child (The Universe, the Gods, and Men 61-62).

Now we can put it together: It is only in Works that Hesiod tells us about Pandora’s jar; in Theogony, the “beautiful evil” is the woman herself.  In fact, we could put it this way: woman herself is Pandora’s jar, a nice-looking vessel full of all kinds of evils.  She is Zeus’s victory in his rivalry with Prometheus.  She is the source of all evils in a man’s life, and in Works, she is the gift Prometheus warned Epimetheus not to accept from Zeus.

And yet, though the evils rush out from her, still elpis (hope, expectation, anticipation of the future) resides inside her.  From the woman evils come into man’s life, but in the woman is the only hope the man has for the future, the hope of an heir–assuming that her all-devouring belly is also a fruitful belly and that the fruit it bears is a male child who lives and grows up to inherit a man’s property.  And so the ambiguity of elpis that Vernant points out is maintained: a man gets married in the hope of an heir, and yet that hope is blind and uncertain (will she be fruitful? will she have a male heir?), so that elpis is both good and bad.

“Hope” in Pandora’s Jar

In the Greek myth of Pandora, she opens the jar  and all the evils that were in it rush out into the world. By the time she gets the stopper back in, only one thing is left inside: elpis, which is often translated “hope.”  And so, as the story is sometimes told, even though there are all kinds of evils and hardships in the world, we still always have hope. It’s kind of a positive ending to a sad story.

Or is it?

After all, what was this jar full of? Evils. Not evils and one good thing (hope). It was full of evils, full down to that last drop, elpis.

But how could hope be an evil?

In his essay “At Man’s Table,” Jean-Pierre Vernant takes a stab at an explanation. In Hesiod’s view, man has undergone a change from the way things used to be. Where men used to eat in fellowship with the gods, now there is sacrifice which not only provides some communion with the gods but also emphasizes the distance between them. Where food used to be free for the taking and the least effort could get you a year’s supply, now Zeus has hidden bios (life = grain) in the ground and you have to sweat to get it. Where there once were only men, now there are women (“beautiful evils,” as Hesiod describes them), who are like drones and dogs, gobbling up all that men produce and bring home. And where once everything was the same, day after day, now there is change.

And with change comes elpis: not hope (which for us is always positive) but, more broadly, expectation or anticipation.  A man labors to plant his field and he cherishes the expectation (hope) of a good harvest.  He labors during harvest in the expectation (hope) that he will have enough grain saved up that he and his family will be able to eat all winter and have enough to plant in the spring.  His life is full of that sort of elpis, but he has that elpis only because he also knows that misfortune is coming.  It’s not just that trouble might come: bad weather might destroy his crops; a fire might destroy his barn and all the grain he saved.  Rather, it’s that he knows trouble is coming.  Pandora let those evils out into the world and they’re roaming around, alighting on one person after another. You never know what’s coming.  You never know when it’s going to be your turn.  But you know one thing for certain: While things might go well for you for a while, trouble is coming.  That’s elpis, and unlike those other evils that roam the world, striking here and there, elpis stays in the jar at home, because it’s something you have every day, all day long.  It’s your constant but blind expectation: While you’re always hoping for good, evil will come and you never know when or how.

“Beautiful Evils”?

What did the ancient Greeks think about women?

Jean-Pierre Vernant, in a brilliant essay on Hesiod’s Theogony, explains.  According to Hesiod, Zeus created the first woman to be a “beautiful evil” (kalon kakon) to afflict men.  She would be a trap from which men could not escape.   Though she appears beautiful on the outside, on the inside she has “the spirit of a bitch and the temperament of a thief” (kuneon te noon kai epiklopon ethos).  You might be able to find a good wife, Hesiod admits, but even so, in and through her, “evil will come to balance out the good” (kakon esthloi antipherizei).

Women, according to Hesiod, are like drones: the men do all the work, and women sit at home and feed on the honey.  Women are like flaming fire, burning and consuming but never satisfied.  Women are stomachs, disguised by outward beauty, gulping down the food the man works so hard to provide.  Women are like dogs, gobbling up the scraps.

That’s not just Hesiod.  Vernant compares two passages in Homer’s Odyssey: “Is there anything more like a dog than the odious belly?” asks Odysseus, when he’s hungry.  Elsewhere, Agamemnon says the same thing, but changes one word: “Is there anything more like a dog than a woman?”

Nevertheless, for the ancient Greeks, men are now stuck having to get married to women.  On the one hand, they consume everything you’ve earned.  On the other, you need them in order to have a (male) heir.  They’re a trap, but one you can’t do without.

It is no wonder, then, that this first woman — whose name Hesiod gives in his Works and Days as Pandora — is the one who opens the jar that contains all the evils in the world and releases them on mankind (on males, that is).

What a difference there is when you turn from the ancient Greeks to the Bible, where the woman, far from being a “beautiful evil” is called “glory,” where the blame for the sin that brought death and misery into the world is attributed to Adam, even though Eve ate the forbidden fruit first, and where men are called, as co-heirs with them of glory, to show honor to their wives.

The Family Table

We take it for granted, perhaps, that families ought to eat together.  The rule may be more honored in the breach than in the observance these days, but it still seems to be understood as the norm.  But it certainly wasn’t always that way.  The family meal wasn’t a feature of Roman society.

Wives and children were not necessarily excluded from every meal, but their involvement — if they were involved at all — was certainly secondary.  Keith Bradley explains:

The overriding impression … which the sources leave — the prevailing ideology one might say — is that no matter whether modest or elaborate, dinner was a meal about which the individual male made an individual decision — to entertain, to eat alone, to respond to an invitation — in a world in which ties of amicitia and hospitium were paramount.  Other household members, wives for example, responded to such decisions as appropriate.  Dinner was not a meal at which the company of family members was automatically and invariably assumed essential or even desirable.  Within innumerable elite households, therefore, many wives and children must have eaten completely apart, in time and place, from their husbands and fathers, and from one another … and when husbands, wives and children did dine together, they did so in ways that continually reinscribed the subordination of the two latter to the former (“The Roman Family at Dinner,” in Inge Nielsen and Hanne Sigismund Nielsen, Meals in a Social Context: Aspects of the Communal Meal in the Hellenistic and Roman World [Aarhus University Press, 1998], 49).

As he puts it elsewhere, “The fact is that for the Roman family at dinner, there was no common table” (48).  Hanne Sigismund Nielsen agrees: “It is … evident from the literature that meals with spouses and children were of no importance or at least of minor importance….  There is no evidence that the common meal of parents and children played any role at all in constituting them as a family group, a nuclear family in our sense of the word” (“Roman Children at Mealtimes,” 58, 59).

As with mothers nursing their own children instead of giving them to wet nurses (see here), the family meal appears to be another fruit of the gospel in Roman society.  Augustine writes about Psalm 127 (“Like newly planted olives your sons sit around the table”), one passage in Scripture where we see the idea of the family together at a meal.  Nielsen says,  “In his commentaries on the Psalms of David, Augustine makes mention of the family dinner table even though this is not referred to in the text on which he is commenting” (62).

Nielsen sums up his findings: “In pagan Latin literature it is difficult to find any mention of children at mealtimes.  Children begin to be mentioned in early Christian literature, and it was not before that time that the ideal of the parents and children unit became established and cherished” (63).

Nutrix Natorum