The Lion in the Waste Land

Fearsome Redemption in the Work of C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot

Janice Brown

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781631013072
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As bombs fell on London almost nightly from the autumn of 1940 through the summer of 1941, the lives of ordinary people were altered beyond recognition. A reclusive Oxford lecturer found himself speaking, not about Renaissance literature to a roomful of students but about Christian doctrine into a BBC microphone. A writer of popular fiction found herself exploring not the intricacies of the whodunit but the mysteries of suffering and grace. An erudite poet and literary critic found himself patrolling the dark streets and piecing together images of fire and redemption. C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot became something they had not been before the war: bearers of a terrible, yet triumphant, message that people could not expect to be spared from pain and suffering, but they would be re- deemed through pain and suffering.

The Lion in the Waste Land initially explores the personal dynamic between these three writers and their misgivings about taking on the role of Christian apologist. Brown goes on to examine the congruency in their depictions of the nature of Christ, of conversion, and of angelic beings; and she highlights the similarity in their views of war and suffering, their portrayals of life as a pilgrimage to heaven, and their arguments for the value of walking in the "old paths" described in Scripture.

Eliot depicted the world as a treacherous Waste Land where spiritual quests are fraught with disappointment and danger. Sayers recognized that the message of redemption through Christ is a thing of terror. Lewis's Narnia books depicted the nature of Christ through the lion Aslan, who is good but not safe. Brown contends that the works of these three authors also offer hope in the midst of adversity, because they recognize that although redemption is a fearsome thing—like the image of a lion—it is also glorious.

1

A Meeting of Minds

The image of traversing a Waste Land¹—a sterile, death-ridden landscape—appears most notably in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, a composite work written in the late 1400s. Malory recounts the myths of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table who, in their quest to find the Holy Grail, journey through a region blighted by “pestilence” in which all vegetation is “withered and [will] not grow again” and all water has become “empty of fish”—a region called “the Waste Lands” (Malory 410). The Waste Land image reappeared in T. S. Eliot’s iconic poem of 1922, in which the landscape is littered with “stony rubbish,” “broken images,” “withered stumps of time,” “bones” of the dead, “exhausted wells,” “tumbled graves,” and “falling towers.” The scene is peopled by haunting figures: shadows “striding behind you,” a “hanged man,” abused and demeaned women, a drowned sailor, and a mysterious “gliding…, hooded” figure (The Waste Land 37–55). The Waste Land depicts a world that is falling apart and lives that are blighted. Blending a variety of poetic forms, the poem is a collage of bits and pieces: scraps of conversation, fragments of scenes, and disparate images. Startling and contrasting impressions bombard the reader. The poem appeals to the senses and emotions, requiring the reader to respond to constantly shifting scenes and a bewildering array of vague characters that crowd in and then drop away again. The diverging and converging fragments that make up The Waste Land spoke for a whole culture in crisis in the early 1920s, and the poem was viewed both as an eloquent expression of the dismay that underlay modern consciousness and as the ultimate example of a modernist poem. Although written almost a century ago in a time of great anxiety, The Waste Land continues to speak powerfully to later generations. Writing of The Waste Land in 1994, Jewell Spears Brooker remarked that the crisis it addressed was an ongoing one (233). “We still,” Brooker observes, “live with the possibility that contemporary people will … literally annihilate themselves and their civilization” (233–34). The bleakness and uncertainty of the 1920s, and of the ensuing decades of the mid-twentieth century,² are paralleled by the bleakness and uncertainty of our own age.

From the late nineteenth century, the visibility and influence of the Church had declined steadily, yet during World War II there was an unexpected “re-appropriation of Christian faith as ‘the key to the meaning of life’ ”—a reappropriation that British historian Adrian Hastings attributes to the “Anglican lay literary and theological writers C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, [and] Dorothy L. Sayers” (388). Hastings connects this revival of Christian faith with the harsh realities of World War II, which prompted much “moral fumbling” but also “simple, almost crusade-like heroism” and a widespread return to rudimentary values. The work of Lewis, Eliot, and Sayers was, Hastings observes, surprisingly “of the same sort.” Through the literary output of these three writers during the 1940s, he argues, the “popular religious apologetic of modern Britain was … being composed almost at a stroke!” (389). Though they occupied very different niches, all three writers were well-known public figures by the early 1940s. Eliot, luminous among the cultural elite, had by 1925 become widely recognized as a leading poet and critic and was regarded as the quintessential representative of modernism. Sayers, more closely connected with popular culture, began writing detective fiction early in the twenties—that golden age of the whodunit—and within a few years had become one of the best-selling writers of the genre. Lewis, well respected as an eloquent Oxford academic, did not become widely known outside Oxford until the early 1940s, when his popular radio talks inspired renewed respect for Christian teaching.

The Christian message that Lewis, Sayers, and Eliot delivered was not, however, easy to embrace. The challenges it presented were enormous: the call to submit to the lordship of Christ, the invitation to forsake all and become a disciple, the disruption of ordinary life by the interference of the unexpected, the opportunity to endure great suffering with hope and peace, the prospect of arduous pilgrimage, the disquietude of finding oneself a stranger in a hostile age. In chapters 3 through 8, I will examine these six frightening but redemptive extremities as they are illuminated in the work of Lewis, Sayers, and Eliot. The overarching image in all six is that of Christ himself: the Lion³ in the Waste Land.

Three Voices, One Message

My focus in this book is not on what these three writers had in common as individuals, and my purpose is not to prove that the similarities among them were greater than the differences; the three were strikingly different in their natures and their literary output. Instead, my purpose is to explore the complementary nature of what Lewis, Sayers, and Eliot had to say on a number of important subjects—subjects connected with the central Christian doctrine of redemption through Christ. Although the universal Church includes much diversity, there is agreement on core issues. As St. Paul wrote, there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4.5). It is not surprising, therefore, that there is harmony in the view of these three writers on such subjects as the nature of Christ, the experience of conversion, the reality of angels, enduring suffering, struggling with time, and the failures of modernity. By the very nature of their differing backgrounds and perspectives, they bring to these subjects insight and clarity that, when viewed collectively, enhance one another. Eliot said that no writer “has his complete meaning alone,” because his significance lies in his relation to others. To fully value individual writers, he explains, we must set them, “for contrast and comparison,” among others (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” 15). This book will place three writers side by side: first by showing the ways in which their lives connected (ch. 1); next by showing the struggle that each experienced with the calling of poet-prophet (ch. 2): and then by examining their complementary convictions under six different headings (chs. 3 through 8).

Common Ground

Three things that Lewis, Eliot, and Sayers had in common were Christian faith rooted in conservative Anglicanism, higher education in the humanities, and searing power with words. While many writers exhibit these characteristics, they are particularly important to the work of Lewis, Sayers, and Eliot.

All three writers were members of the Church of England, but the flavor of their affinity to it differed, partly because of differences in their early religious experiences. Though Lewis’s parents faithfully attended the Church of Ireland⁴ and though he was regularly taken to church and taught to say his prayers, Lewis recalled taking no interest in religion in his early life, and regarded his childhood as devoid of significant “religious experiences” (Surprised by Joy 4). The insipidity of his early religious experiences bred no lasting animosity, however: it was the established Church and its traditions that he espoused when he became a Christian in 1931. Lewis particularly loved The Book of Common Prayer. Praising its sobriety, artistry, and strength, he described it as shining “with a white light hardly surpassed outside the pages of the New Testament itself” (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century 221). Lewis was not comfortable with the extremities of the Church of England: he was equally uneasy with extremes of High Church ritual and Low Church casualness. Even in the Anglican mainstream of his local parish church he felt somewhat detached from the paraphernalia of corporate worship. Nonetheless, he believed in the necessity of church attendance, observing that “the Church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ in which all members, however different … must share the common life, complementing and helping one another precisely by their differences” (Collected Letters of CSL 3: 224).

T. S. Eliot was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, in a Unitarian family. Though Eliot remained devoted to his parents and siblings, by the time of his public confession of faith at the age of thirty-nine,⁵ he had moved a long way from the religious position of his family. As Eliot knew it in his early life, Unitarianism had strong liberal and rationalist leanings and placed so little emphasis on the core doctrines of Christianity that he described himself as being brought up “outside the Christian fold” (letter to Bertrand Russell, qtd. in Gordon, Imperfect Life 19). The blandness and coldness of Unitarianism offered nothing that Eliot wanted or respected. In a 1934 lecture, he spoke with disapproval of the liberalism in the American Episcopal Church reflected in the Church’s wish to have “Unitarian infidels recognized as fellow-believers” (After Strange Gods 22). He saw orthodox Anglican doctrine as the essence of Christianity and was instinctively drawn to the living tradition of the Church of England that had begun in Canterbury in AD 597. This tradition was, as Russell Kirk points out, especially appealing for being “interwoven with the great body of literature [Eliot] knew so well” (120). Kirk observes that “the preachers and scholars of the Church of England, from the reign of Elizabeth onward, had filled [Eliot’s] mind” for many years before he was baptized into the Church (120). From the time of his first confession in March 1928, Eliot practiced Anglicanism devoutly, meeting regularly with his spiritual director and receiving Holy Communion at least three times a week (Gordon, Imperfect Life 224).

Dorothy L. Sayers was also a regular communicant, but unlike Eliot she was a “cradle Anglican.” The daughter of a Church of England clergyman and an only child, she continued in the faith of her parents and remained closely associated with Anglicanism throughout her life.⁶ In her later years, she was actively involved in parish life in central London, serving for a time as church warden of St. Anne’s Church in Soho. Like Lewis and Eliot, Sayers found in The Book of Common Prayer the structure that defined her faith. Indeed, she spoke and wrote much on the BCP, recognizing it as the bedrock of Christian orthodoxy and particularly emphasizing the importance of the creeds.⁷

Lewis, Eliot, and Sayers had similar educational backgrounds and academic interests. All three were scholars. Lewis’s achievement as an undergraduate at University College, Oxford, led to his being made a fellow (i.e., a faculty member) at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925. He continued to hold this post as a tutor and lecturer in English literature for the next twenty-nine years, until his Cambridge University appointment in 1954. Eliot’s initial academic focus was philosophy, which he studied at Harvard University, in Boston, between 1906 and 1914, as both an undergraduate and a graduate student. He also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and at Merton College, Oxford. Superbly trained as an academic, Eliot did not take up an academic profession, but distinguished himself as one of the most scholarly and widely read men of his generation. Dorothy L. Sayers was also a scholar. She studied medieval French Literature at Somerville, Oxford, between 1913 and 1915, and throughout her life she was a voracious reader in a wide range of subjects. Her scholarly gifts were most fully exercised in the last decade of her life when she immersed herself in Dante, producing a new English translation of The Divine Comedy and lecturing extensively on it.

In addition to their commonly held faith and devotion to scholarship, the three were all highly gifted writers, sharing a talent that was, to use a phrase from Lewis’s description of Mercury in his poem “The Planets,” “the spark of speech from spirit’s tinder” (Poems 12). Eliot’s power with words—the “tinder” that sparked some of the greatest poetry of the twentieth century—was first apparent in 1915 with the publication of the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and then in 1917 with the volume of poetry Prufrock and Other Observations. Five years later, The Waste Land became the “poem that fired the imagination of the ‘lost’ generation” (Gordon, Imperfect Life 146). The first readers of Eliot’s early poetry, Kathleen Raine records, found that it, “more than the work of any other poet,” enabled them to “know [their] world imaginatively” (78). Other high points in Eliot’s career as a writer were Murder in the Cathedral (1935), perhaps the greatest of Christian plays, and Four Quartets (1944), regarded by many as “the greatest twentieth-century achievement in the poetry of philosophy and religion” (Kirk 240).

Lewis’s power with words is as indisputable as Eliot’s. His works of Christian fiction and apologetics had unprecedented appeal, and his prowess as a speaker was widely recognized. Harry Blamires, an Oxford student in the late 1930s, reported that he was the most popular lecturer in the English faculty: “He could fill the largest lecture rooms … his lectures were meaty … arguments beautifully articulated; illustrations richly chosen” (qtd. in W. Lewis 38).⁸ Outside the formal lecture room, his fame as a rhetorician was equally great. “When I was a student at Oxford between 1942 and 45,” one student recalls, “Lewis was the uncrowned king, not only of the English faculty, but of the whole university.…We made our way through the blackout to hear this extraordinary man … in his element, the apologist, and popularizer, ‘the true wayfaring Christian’ in Milton’s phrase” (Trickett 61–62).⁹

Lewis’s radio broadcasts in the early 1940s drew enormous listening audiences. His “Broadcast Talks” were published first as several separate groups of essays and later as Mere Christianity. In October 1944, the Times Literary Supplement wrote of them, “Mr. Lewis has a quite unique power of making theology attractive, exciting and (one might almost say) uproariously funny” (Review of “Beyond Personality” 513). Another reviewer commented that because of “his clarity of thought and simplicity of expression [the talks had] a magic about them which makes plain the most abstruse problems of theological speculation” (Homes 12).¹⁰

Dorothy L. Sayers’s skill as a wordsmith has been less well known than that of Lewis and Eliot, particularly in America. Yet in England in the 1940s and 1950s her name was a household word. In the tribute C. S. Lewis wrote for Sayers’s memorial service,¹¹ he thanked “the Author who invented her” for the “delight and instruction” her work brought to so many and praised her enormous success as both “a popular entertainer and a conscientious craftsman” (“A Panegyric for Dorothy L. Sayers” 91–95). The Rev. James Welch, the BBC’s director of religious broadcasting, acknowledged the success of her radio plays on the life of Christ, saying she “put the Christian Church in her debt by making Our Lord … ‘really real’ for so many” (16).¹² By 1940 Sayers’s popularity as a speaker almost equaled her fame as a writer; she was flooded with demands to lecture on religious themes in person and on the radio. Her eloquence in this media pulpit was praised by a columnist in the BBC magazine the Listener, who said, “In the way of accomplished exposition I have seldom heard anything more admirable than Dorothy L. Sayers on the essentials of Christian belief.…In one of his moods of elephantine obstinacy Dr. [Samuel] Johnson ridiculed the notion of a woman in the pulpit. I’d back Dorothy Sayers to put the case for Christianity better than many of our wireless padres … I will gladly listen to her for a month of Sundays” (Williams 248).

Increased literacy in the first half of the twentieth century produced a much larger reading public, and the spoken word, via radio, was just coming into its own. From the 1920s through the 1950s the world was reeling in the aftermath of the Great War, suffering through the Great Depression, and enduring the horrors of yet another war. In this bleak Waste Land, Lewis, Sayers, and Eliot emerged as three eloquent communicators who offered hope. Their message was redemptive.

The Tension between Lewis and Eliot

Lewis and Eliot eventually came to hold each other in great esteem, but a distinctly negative feeling existed between them early in their careers. The negativity seems to have been largely on Lewis’s side. During the 1920s and 1930s Lewis clearly expressed his intense dislike of Eliot’s poetry, but the dislike—largely arising from differences in literary perspective and literary taste—does not seem to have lasted beyond that time period. Lewis was an Oxford academic of the old school and Eliot was part of a modernist avant-garde milieu. The initial difference in what each viewed as good poetry arose, for the most part, from the divide between the traditional and the modern in literature. As the years went on, however, the divide between their positions as literary figures greatly diminished. It became increasingly apparent that Eliot was not in the truest sense a modernist in h...