C.S. Lewis on the exaltation of self in writing
I am undertaking a little C.S. Lewis "research" at the moment, purely for fun. I feel like my brain is rotting lately, from lack of many avenues for any great stimulation (outside of what I choose to read, save one or two), so the aim is to do more to keep it alive. I do like learning, and if I am learning something I enjoy, in and on my own time (with no deadlines or testing looming) then it's in the category of leisure.
So, I have been following trails of ideas about the web and reading various articles, and one book I am reading at the moment, and finding quite fascinating is C.S. Lewis, Poet - The Legacy of his Poetic Impulse by Don W. King. Something that is not so widely known about C.S. Lewis is that his greatest aspiration, at least in his early years, was to be known as a poet, or how many years he laboured over some of his poems, particularly the narrative works. At one point he notes in his diary "I am very dispirited about my work at present ... I have leaned much too much on the idea of being able to write poetry and if this is all a frost I shall be rather stranded" (laughable now really, given the vast number of other works he went on produce).
The book reveals his passion for, and knowledge of, prosody, which is really only for the die-hards of poetry (it's a crash course in such things as dactylic hexameter and catalectic trochaic meter), but he says some interesting things about the process of writing and the desire for acknowledgment along the way. After stating that "I desire that my value as a poet should be acknowledged by others" he writes (and all of this is happening before his conversion):
"As far as I can see both these are manifestations of the single desire for what may be called mental or spiritual rank. I have flattered myself with the idea of being among my own people when I was reading the poets and it is unpleasing to have to stand down and take my place in the crowd ... The completion of the poem, Coghill's praise of it, and the sending off to a publishers [sic] (after so many years) threw me back into a tumult of self-love that I thought I had escaped ... Worst of all I have used the belief in such secret pre-eminence as a compensation for things that wearied or humiliated me in real life ... The cure of this disease is not easy to find ... I was free from it at times when writing Dymer. Then I was interested in the object, not in my own privileged position as seer of the object. But whenever I stopped writing or thought of publication or showed the MS. to friends I contemplated not that of which I had been writing, but my writing about it: I passed from looking at the macrocosm to looking at a little historical event inside the "Me." The only healthy or happy or eternal life is to look so steadily on the World that the representation "Me" fades away. Its appearance at all in the field of consciousness is a mark of inferiority in the state where it appears. Its claiming a central position is disease."*1
Lewis went on to say the only way to cure this disease was to look away from self to the greater world so that thoughts of self would fade. What is so striking here is his brutal self-assessment. He confessed that his desire for fame as a poet was nothing less than spiritual pride, a key theme he explored later in prose fiction and apologetics. Equally, he noted that poetry per se, even his poetry, had not been nearly as interesting to him in this process as he had been. Additionally, we see that his hopes for literary fame had been a kind of sop for other disappointments. Indeed, he was clearly embarrassed by the recognition that his desire to be a poet veiled an intense self-absorption. Although this realisation was certainly a watershed in the life of Lewis the poet, it did not mark the end of his desire for fame as a poet. Instead, it provided Lewis with a point in time for occasions later in life when his thirst for fame as a poet or more broadly as a writer was tempered by the realisation that such a desire was an unhealthy exaltation of self.
And later in the chapter:
Yet he did not totally dismiss the significance of the poet's personality. Instead he articulated effectively how a poet's personality may affect the reading of a poem: "[However, when reading a poem], let it be granted that I do approach the poet; at least I do it by sharing his consciousness, not by studying it. I look with his eyes, not at him ... The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says 'look at that' and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him" (11, Lewis's emphasis). Later, he adds that while looking to where the poet points, "I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles ... I must enjoy him and not contemplate him" (12, Lewis's emphasis). Throughout, Lewis argued that poetry was not a private matter, but instead a public one: "[In a poem] it is absolutely essential that each word should suggest not what is private and personal to the poet but what is public, common, impersonal, objective".*2
1. This is quoted from They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963). Ed by Walter Hooper. New York: Macmillan, 1979.
2. It would seem he didn't always agree with this, but that is too complicated for here (read the book).