That Hideous Strength: Chapter 1

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. If you don't want me ruining the experience for you, put this post down and go read That Hideous Strength now. I promise I won't be offended.

Two weekends ago, I finished a readthrough of Perelandra, the second book in C. S. Lewis's classic Space Trilogy (aka the Cosmic Trilogy or the Ransom Trilogy). Today we continue the series with the third book: That Hideous Strength.

An up-front confession: This was always my least favourite of the three, as indicated by the fact that I have probably read Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra four times, and That Hideous Strength only twice: the first time in 1992 when I read the trilogy for the first time, and the second around 1998 when I bought my own copy. I particularly enjoyed the style of the first two books, which were a deliberate homage to early science fiction by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Wells's The First Men in the Moon was a novel I read frequently as a teenager—I remain a fan to this day—and I have no doubt Lewis borrowed Weston's spherical spaceship from Professor Cavor. But the third book was remarkably different, being more of an earthbound supernatural thriller than a Wellsian or Vernian space fantasy.

That said, it's been nearly 30 years since I last read That Hideous Strength, so this is effectively a blind readthrough. I might very well change my mind about it by the end.

I lacked a proper adjective for That Hideous Strength until three years ago, when I read Charles Williams's first novel, War in Heaven. Lewis was a tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1929 to 1954; Williams worked for Oxford University Press, which moved from London when World War II broke out. He and Lewis quickly became friends. Williams is best known as the author of several supernatural horror novels; he also wrote literary criticism, theology, and poetry. (I've been reading through Tennyson's The Idylls of the King recently; I should add some of Williams's Arthurian poetry to my list.) Along with Lewis. J. R. R. Tolkien, and others, Williams was a member of the Inklings, the informal literary discussion group that met regularly to read each other's manuscripts.

In university, I read War in Heaven and All Hallows' Eve on the recommendation of one of my professors. I enjoyed them well enough, but later I put Williams out of my mind; he became little more than a name associated with Lewis and the Inklings. I re-read War in Heaven in 2023, with no recollection of the story from the 1990s.¹ However, I recognized the story immediately as reminiscent of That Hideous Strength—or, really, the other way around, as Williams's novel was published in 1930, 15 years earlier.² In War in Heaven, the Holy Grail is discovered in a country church, leading to a chase between the local churchmen and a Satanic cult. The Grail is protected by the legendary Christian patriarch, Prester John. That Hideous Strength, by comparison, is about a young academic couple dragged into a spiritual war with a dystopian technocratic think tank with a dark agenda involving eugenics and manipulation of the media. Both sides are searching for the burial site of the legendary wizard, Merlin. Lewis and Williams both blend legend with urban fantasy; That Hideous Strength is remarkably Williamsesque.

That Hideous Strength is longer than Perelandra by about 150 pages, and also has 17 chapters, also longer. Accordingly, these posts will also be longer, and hopefully not less frequent, although I might re-assess that later. The chapters are also subdivided into sections, which make breaking them down easier.

The novel's epigraph, from which it gets its name, is:

The Shadow of that hyddeous strength
Sax [six] myle and more it is of length.

It comes from Sir David Lindsay, a 16th-century Scottish poet and knight, from his 1555 poem Ane Dialog betuix Experience and ane Courteour (A Dialogue between Experience and a Courtier). This couplet is describing the immensity of the Tower of Babel, which symbolizes the corrupt state of Britain and the church. Coincidentally, another David Lindsay, this time a 20th-century Scottish novelist, was an influence on the Space Trilogy: his novel A Voyage to Arcturus was an inspiration for Out of the Silent Planet.

In the preface, C. S. Lewis describes says his novel makes the same point as his essay The Abolition of Man. In this essay, presented in 1943, Lewis argues,

what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.… [I]f any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them.… The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise the least power upon the future.³

By "power over Nature," Lewis is not reacting to technological advances like agriculture and medicine, by which we have made the world more hospitable, but the eugenics movements of the early 20th century. He first gave this lecture in the midst of World War II. People had seen firsthand the monstrosity of the Nazi "racial hygiene" program, where the disabled, the mentally ill, certain ethnic groups, and other "life unworthy of life" were exterminated so they would not pass on their negative traits to the future. But outside of Nazi Germany, eugenics had its respectable movements. For example, Tommy Douglas, the Canadian politician sometimes regarded as the "greatest Canadian" for introducing universal health care to Canada, endorsed eugenics in his MA thesis in 1933. He argued that the mentally and morally unfit should be forbidden to marry, and the severely mentally disabled sterilized. But by the time he became premier of Saskatchewan in 1944, he had completely rejected his thesis and refused to pass eugenics legislation when it was proposed. The Nazi experiment had shown him that eugenics was a tool of totalitarianism. This was what Lewis was seeing, at about the same time: taking "power over Nature" resulted in dystopia, not utopia.

Lewis also makes mention of ideas that he gained from the works of Olaf Stapledon. Stapledon was another science-fiction author, contemporary with Lewis. He was a believer in scientism and what today we would call transhumanism (using technologies to enhance humans beyond their current limitations, such as extending life). This is the first time Lewis mentions him by name, but he is one of the philosophers whom the Space Trilogy was intended to critique. Lewis had read his novels Last and First Men and Star Maker and found them interesting, though he abhorred the philosophy behind them. He once wrote to Arthur C. Clarke that he thought the end of Star Maker was "sheer devil worship".⁴

Finally, he commends the (as yet unpublished) work of his friend Tolkien to those who wanted to learn more about "Numinor and the True West.' Note the misspelling: by now Lewis would not have read Tolkien's fantasy; he had only heard Tolkien read his manuscripts at Inklings meetings. So he had to guess at the spelling of Númenor.

Chapter 1: "Sale of College Property"

Chapter 1 introduces protagonist Jane Studdock. She is a newlywed, married to Mark for six months, and already the marriage is starting to have troubles. Jane is a doctoral student in literature, though married life has stalled her enthusiasm for her thesis on 17th-century poet John Donne's "triumphant vindication of the body," for which the narrator describes her as "not perhaps a very original thinker." Lewis himself was well known for disliking Donne.⁵ Though now considered a master of English poetry, he remained obscure until T. S. Eliot published an appreciation of him in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets." So John Donne was fertile ground in the early 20th century for fashionable graduate theses. Jane also gets Donne wrong. Rather than vindicate the body alone, Donne's poetry explores the harmony between body and soul. Jane attempts to write intellectually about John Donne's love poetry; meanwhile, ironically, her young marriage is already far from intimate.

Jane has recently been plagued by a nightmare: a man with a foreign, bearded face and a frightening expression. Another man unscrews his head and takes it away. She then dreams of another head, this one of a man resembling a druid, dug up from a churchyard. When she awakes and sees a newspaper, she recognizes the first face as Alcasan, also known as "Bluebeard," a scientist recently guillotined for murdering his wife. Distracted from her thesis, Jane goes out.

Our second protagonist is Mark Studdock. He is a sociologist and a Fellow of Bracton University in Edgestow (both fictional), having recently been elected to that position thanks to the influence of another Fellow, Lord Feverstone, also known as Dick Devine. (Devine, eh? Hmmm.) He is walking with Curry, the sub-warden of the college, to a meeting of the Fellows, where the main item on the agenda is the sale of Bragdon Wood. This wood is an ancient forest notably containing an ancient well named Merlin's Well. Folklore has it that the wizard Merlin is buried there: not dead, but only sleeping,⁶ as the [fictional] poem Balacthon by Strabo has it:

In Bragdon bricht this ende dai
Herde ich Merlin ther he lai
Singende woo and welawai.

Which being interpreted means, "In Bragdon bright this past day / I heard Merlin where he lay / Singing "woe" and "alas!" There was a ninth-century German monk named Walafrid Strabo, but clearly he was not writing 14th-century Middle English poetry. Presumably the author, like the poem, is fictional.

The potential buyer for the wood is the National Institute of Co-Ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E. for short). The N.I.C.E. is a sort of scientific think tank, government-funded, with nearly bottomless pockets. They want a piece of land to erect a huge building, and the Senate of Edgestow has lured them away from Cambridge or Oxford to Bracton.

With a name like N.I.C.E., you just know they're up to no good.

The sale of Bragdon Wood is controversial. The more conservative faction wants to retain it, because of its antiquity and the folklore. But the Progressive Element, to which Mark, Curry, and Lord Feverstone belong, want to go ahead with the sale. When it is made clear that only part of the Wood is to be sold, the Well will be preserved, and the sale would solve certain of the University's financial difficulties; but if the deal fell through, the Institute would go instead to Cambridge, the motion passes—in part thanks to the persuasive skills of Feverstone, over the protests of the traditional faction.

Mark had been an outsider and longed to be "in" on the group that made the decisions. He and the sub-warden, Curry, seem to be on friendly and familiar terms. In Lewis's essay "The Inner Ring,"⁷, he talks about the desire to be "in." The problem with this desire, he writes, is that too often the desire is to belong for the sake of belonging, to distinguish oneself as a elite from the "outside"; there is always another inner, Inner Ring to covet belonging to; and membership tends to corrupt morals. "From inside…it may be called 'you and Tony and me.'" But, he adds, "When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership, it calls itself 'we.'" Mark is reserved while talking to Curry, and "you would never have guessed…what intense pleasure he derived from Curry’s use of the pronoun 'we.'"

Meanwhile, Jane has gone to visit her tutor and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Dimble (a wonderfully Dickensian name!). There she learns that the Dimbles have been evicted thanks to the land sale. They have an interesting discussion of Arthurian legend in which Mr. Dimble describes it as a conflict between Roman-like Christian aristocrats such as Guinevere and Lancelot on one side, and dark, very British pagans like Morgan and Morgawse, Arthur's relatives, on the other. Arthur himself is a Briton converted to Christianity. There's something to this, insofar as the legends are set in the post-Roman Britain of the fifth or sixth centuries, and Arthur himself is portrayed as the Briton king who fought off several Anglo-Saxon invasions. It would be interesting to know how much of this is Lewis's own invention, and how much he gleaned from Charles Williams's take on King Arthur. I am again reminded that I ought to read Taliessin through Logres before this readthrough is done.

Jane talks about her disturbing dreams with Mr. Dimble, and he offers her the address of someone whom he thinks she should talk to.

Though he is not directly part of the story, the narrator breaks in once or twice. As with Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, he is again a fictionalized C. S. Lewis. He describes himself as "Oxford bred and very fond of Cambridge." The real Lewis was educated at Oxford; when he wrote That Hideous Strength, he couldn't have known that a decade later, he would accept a chair at Cambridge created specifically for him. As a philosophy and literature tutor as well as a Fellow of Magdalen College, he would have been acquainted with the cliques and politics of the Inner Ring of college administration. Between the machinations of the Fellows, Jane's uninspired thesis, and Mr. Dimble's dull-witted student who starts a paper on Swift by noting he was born, clearly Lewis is satirizing an academia with which he was personally all too familiar.

As first chapters tend to do, this one sets up the story without advancing it too much. So we'll see what happens in chapter 2, next Sunday.

Footnotes

1. But I couldn't forget the opening line: "The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse." It's probably my favourite opening line in all literature.

2. I had a similar experience reading Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness all the way through, 20-odd years ago (I had tried in high school, shortly after it was published, but thought it practically unreadable). This time, I recognized Peretti's book right away as a bargain-bin knockoff. At least I read them in the proper order that time.

3. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Touchstone, 1996) , 67, 68–69.

4. Lewis to Arthur C. Clarke, December 7, 1943, in From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: The War of Ideas Between Arthur C. Clarke and C. S. Lewis, ed. Ryder W. Miller, (New York: ibooks, 2003), 40. Speaking of devil worship, Clarke was acquainted with Lewis's future wife, Joy Gresham, and had encouraged her to pass on his novel Childhood's End to Lewis. He was quite impressed. Childhood's End itself was favourably compared to Stapledon, Lewis, and Wells.

5. See, for example, "Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century," in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

6. 'E's pinin' for the fjords.

7. Lewis, "The Inner Ring," in The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 141–57.