Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

Hello, welcome to Backlisted. We've got an episode coming up for you today, which we recorded in spring 2025 with the very reverend Dr. Rowan Williams about Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis. We hope you enjoy the episode. Before we get on to that, we've got some news for you. This will be the final episode of Backlisted for a while. We're taking a short break, aren't we? We are. We've decided we need to recharge our batteries and come back with some fresh ideas. But the good news is, although there won't be new episodes of Backlisted this year, there's all manner of exciting things happening over at our Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. 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Come and see us at the Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Batlisted. Oh, we forgot to say there's loads of people on there who just talk about books all the time. So if that's for you, if you're a bookish person who likes talking about books, come and join us. Enough of a plug. Yeah. As many of our lovely patrons have pointed out, although we're taking a break, it's very much a working holiday. So do come along and join us at the holiday camp behind the Patreon. Do enjoy this episode. It was a truly magical recording and it's a delight for me, finally, to share this with you all. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. The book featured in today's show is Till We Have Faces, the last and least well-known novel by the world-famous British writer, literary scholar and lay theologian C.S. Lewis. I'm John Mitchinson and I'm Andy Miller and today we are delighted and honoured to welcome a guest making his backlisted debut Dr Rowan Williams hello we have checked and we are allowed to refer to Dr Williams as Rowan which we are duly grateful to thank you so much for coming Dr Williams is a scholar theologian poet and translator and he's best known as the former Archbishop of Canterbury and the first Welshman to have held the position which he did for nine years from 2003 to 2012. As Baron Williams of Oystermouth that's that's good did they let you choose? They did. As Baron Williams of Oystermouth he served as a crossbencher in the House of Lords from 2013 until his retirement in 2020 the same year he stepped down as Master of Magdalen College in Cambridge. Dr Williams is the author of over 50 books including works on Saint Augustine and Dostoevsky and handily for us C.S. Lewis, a book entitled The Lion's World, A Journey into the Heart of Narnia which was published in 2012. In 2019 he published a highly acclaimed collaboration with fellow poet Gwyneth Lewis, the first new translation of the work of Welsh Bard Taliesin in over a century. In 2021, Carcanet published his collected poems and his latest book, Discovering Christianity, a Guide for the Curious, was published by SPCK in February this year. Dr. Williams reads nine or ten languages, but speaks a mere three, listeners. but never mind that I feel very warm towards him because firstly he has never learned to drive and secondly at school he had a permanent note excusing him from sports there you go anyway welcome to Backlisted Road thank you and did that note you used that note throughout your school days ruthlessly ruthlessly good I'm not going to waste good talking time Absolutely Well, wonderful to have you here and what a remarkable book you have chosen Till We Have Faces was first published by Collins in 1956 incidentally the same year that they published The Last Battle the final book in his Chronicles of Narnia Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche set in a vividly realistic pagan kingdom of gloam which Lewis would later describe as a barbarous little state on the borders of the Hellenistic world, with Greek culture just beginning to affect it. The narrator is Orwell, the ugly, possibly disfigured daughter of the King of Glom and Psyche's older sister. The first and longest section of the book is her memoir, which also serves as an extended complaint against the gods who she disparages for their aloofness and cruelty. When the beautiful Psyche is offered up as a blood sacrifice by the primitive local priesthood and left chained to a mountainside as prey for a shadowy beast. Orwell follows to try and find her remains. Instead, she finds Psyche alive, but in an enchanted state, believing herself in love with an amorous god who she's forbidden to see. Orwell persuades Psyche she must confront him, which leads to Psyche being cast out, condemned to weep and wander forever, separated from the ones she loves. This serves as further fuel for Orwell's animus against the gods. Although she goes on to become a highly respected queen of gloam, a warrior, a lawgiver, an architect, her resentment never abates. And she wears a veil she refuses to remove. Everyone she loves and who loves her, she loses. And her book is the record of that bitter truth. And that's just the first section. The second section of the book finds Arwell close to death, announcing that she was wrong about the gods. a remarkable vision follows in which Lewis shows his main character reaching a much deeper level of understanding of herself and a re-examination of all the different kinds of love she has experienced in her life obviously Till We Have Faces is not the only retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth some of us are familiar with in fact it was 40 years ago this year that Scritti Politti did the same on their record Cupid and Psyche 85. But this was published when? 56. 56. Cupid and Psyche 56. Perfect. A powerful account of the mysteries of love and religious faith. It was a book Lewis worked on all his adult life and the one he thought his best. In an afterword, he describes it as being about dark idolatry and pale enlightenment at war with each other and with vision, and the havoc which a vocation or even a faith works on human life. Intrigued? I hope so, because we're coming back after this break to discuss all this. Rowan, when did you first read this book? This book, or when did you first become aware of the work of C.S. Lewis? I became aware of C.S. Lewis' work, I suppose, as a teenager, as a schoolboy. It was in the 60s, and a lot of Lewis' works were the kind of thing that an imaginative vicar would give to an inquiring teenager. So I had the books on miracle and on prayer and pain, the screw tape letters, mere Christianity. Oddly enough, I didn't encounter the Narnia books until a bit later when I was a student. But I remember very vividly indeed when I first read this. I was making my first visit to the United States. I had to make a long train journey. And as you know, train journeys in the States are long ones by definition. And I'd picked up from the bookshelf, the place where I was staying, a copy of Tool We Have Faces thinking, never read this, time I did. And I read it going north from New York. you still see the Hudson River on the left out of the window and as soon as I'd finished it after a couple of hours I did what I've never done with any other book I think I started reading it again immediately so that initial encounter is very deeply fixed in my mind and so may I ask how old were you when you did that do you think I'd be 23 I think all right so yes this magical 10 years between the age of like 14 and 25 say when as we always say we're wet cement yes presumably the Chronicles of Narnia were published you wouldn't have read those because you were too old for them when they started being published no I think I could have read them it's just for some reason they didn't they didn't cross my radar and one last question before I hand over to John were you aware of Lewis's personality and reputation growing up, outside of reading him as a public figure? I was a bit, and that's partly because of the kind of teaching we had at school, which was really very good, especially in A-level English. So we were encouraged to read his lectures on Paradise Lost. I found his letters in the public library. They'd not long been published, edited by his brother. And the sense of somebody with an extraordinarily capacious, receptive mind, who'd sort of read almost everything, it seemed, and at the same time was producing these very idiosyncratic imaginative works for children and adults, I thought, well, you know, there's a mind and a half, which I still think. Yes. Yes, John, it's interesting, isn't it? Here we are in 2025, and my sense is that Lewis is now most known for being the author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Chronicles of Narnia. But in his lifetime, he was famous. I mean, really famous. And I think part of that was he was a famous convert. And he was, as Ronan said, he was a brilliant writer. My grandparents, who were high Anglican, working class parish, it was a classic story. A young priest came from Oxford, where he'd been in theological college to go and establish a kind of high church parish in a shipbuilding parish. Quite a lot of this happened in the 20s. And so they were very, they had been schooled in a very interesting form of Christianity. And Lewis was the right man in the right place at the right time. Mere Christianity, the Screwtape Letters in particular. I mean, I've still got some of their books on the shelves. as you say, the book on prayer. It was mere Christianity. He was better known as a Christian apologist, I think, than as a children's author until Narnia. And it's the golden age of radio as well, in the 40s, especially the wartime period. And Lewis really, I think, consolidated a national reputation as a wartime broadcaster, speaking about basic ethical questions on the radio to very popular, very diverse audiences. I know A.N. Wilson says in his biography that although in retrospect we would clearly see Churchill as the most well-loved voice of hope to the British people, actually in the era Lewis himself was as famous as Churchill, as someone who would steady the ship on air. Let me ask you then, Rowan, What we have with C.S. Lewis is an Irish author, beloved in his lifetime in Britain, who now, I sense, is more read in the States than here. I think almost it's been a malign fate that has consigned Lewis to being a sort of poster boy for a certain kind of evangelical Christianity, which he himself didn't really espouse. He wasn't culturally an evangelical. He liked rugby songs and beer and his pipe. And I don't think most evangelicals quite resonate. Did he drive? Did he have a sick note? Well, I suspect he had the equivalent. But yeah, the trouble is he's been corralled into a certain mould. People then read him looking for some of the, what you might call, the cultural markers in that kind of Christianity. And they find them up to a point. He's not brilliant on the women question. He's what we would regard as unenlightened about non-majority sexualities and all the rest of it. The fact is, read him in context, read him against his own cultural background, and he's much more idiosyncratic than that suggests. Compare what he says about homosexuality with what George Orwell says about it, and there's no doubt at all who is the more liberal one. Well, that's interesting as well, because his tone often, John, seems reasonable and friendly. Yep. Right? So that, I think, is part of the, as you say, Rowan, whatever, however extreme the views of readers in whatever part of the world, they come to Lewis and they think, of course. Yeah. Of course, this is so reasonable. Avuncular. What an avuncular chap. Yes. I think one of the things about his writing is that he is remarkable. His best critical work, T.S. Eliot, in that way that T.S. Eliot had of putting people down, said, your best book is your prefaces to Paradise Lost. But, I mean, if you read Milton, T.S. Eliot and Milton, you can see a lot of the heavy lifting, the understanding of Milton was done. He's a brilliant critic, very clear. But he's also a wonderful letter writer. You know, you feel that he was very good at finding the right, finding the right tone to adopt for whatever he was writing. It might even be you, Rowan, in your book on Narnia. So he channeled a lot of Edwardian children literature E Nesbitt You know when he was telling his Narnia books they don read like the Screwtape Letters and they certainly read nothing like Till We Have Faces So there was, I think, perhaps because he's become, he's kind of trapped a little bit in this bubble of, as you say, either being seen as a sort of slightly evangelical Christian writer or a children's writer, we don't fully understand the remarkable ability to tell the stories in different voices, as it were, in different mediums and for different audiences. He had a great sense of who he was talking to. And I think that's something to do with the fact that he was exposed in his own education and reading to such a dense variety of storytelling, the classical world, the Germanic world, the Celtic world. It's all there in his imagination. He writes about it with extraordinary empathy and interiority. he can give you a sense of what it felt like to look at the sky in the Middle Ages. It's not the same sky we see now in important respects. And he didn't have a terribly happy childhood. He lost his mother when he was quite young. That's a very young, difficult relation with his father. But he did have, as you say, the consolation of books because his father's library was enormous and he talks about, he said a wonderful thing, he said finding a fresh book was like wandering out into the garden to find a leaf of grass. They're just, if one was lucky enough to be a passionate reader, then that was the house to grow up in. And probably the era to grow up in as well, where there's a sense that you can sort of get your mind around the fundamental canon of the Western imagination, the Western mind. Do you think that was possible in the 1920s? 100 years ago? Not saying it was necessarily possible, but you would think it was. That's what we've been trying to do. And he was quite, I wouldn't say he's arrogant, but he's a tremendous assurance in Lewis. Oh, my word, yes. I mean, he's absolutely, you know, doesn't sort of suffer fools gladly. And at the same time, a kind of a blindness that, Surprised by Joy, which I reread for this, is quite an odd book. It's a very odd book. It's a really strange autobiography where he clearly is. He must know that he's you know, he basically says, oh, you know, he downplays. He downplays his father, because I think one of the suggestions which Andrew Wilson makes in his book is that he knows if he goes on too much about how terrible his father was to him, that the people who were looking for a reason for his conversion, who was famously a reluctant convert to Christianity would say, well, it's obviously he's got daddy issues. and so there's a kind of and yet always you'll find you know again he finds screw tape I think is so you go back to it is so fresh and grief observed is a remarkable the thing I really admire about Lewis is that he is a cat you can stroke him for a while but you can never own him He, right, this sense that he turned down a peerage because he didn't want to run the risk of showing any political affiliation, as indeed he had little to no interest in politics. He famously had no small talk. If you arrived, he wouldn't go, and you had a broken arm. He wouldn't go, say, how's your arm? He'd go, what do you think about the state of metaphysics? And off you'd go. And finally, a wonderful thing, Rowan, as the author yourself of 50 books he wouldn't have known what writer's block was he he he wrote in order to think yes yes rowan before we hear you read something from till we have faces would you talk to us about what it was that made you read the book twice and presumably many times since then. It reads very well simply as a vivid evocation of exactly what Lewis said, a barbaric kingdom on the edges of the Hellenistic world. And it's vivid. It's a page-turner. The dialogue is all right. It might feel dated now, the sort of mid-century historical novel, a few rather jarring archaisms. Nonetheless, it keeps you reading. And then it delivers this blow in the solar plexus. both, I think, with the drama of Orwell's confrontation with Psyche, and then in this deafening gear change at the end of the first section, which takes you into the, well, what do you call it? Is it a resolution of the plot in the last short section? Not in any very conventional sense. It's a difficult book. It's a baffling book, and an enormously inviting book. and I still find a book that moves me to tears, especially the last sections. So that sense of it being baffling, I have... We'll come on to that. I have some questions. But I wonder, though, on those first couple of readings, you said you picked it up and read it again. You picked it up and read it again because you didn't understand it or you understood just enough? I think I understood just enough. I wanted to let it marinate a bit. Yes. And, well, I just felt compelled to retrace the story. One last question. Honestly, did you like it the first time you read it? I loved it. Okay, absolutely loved it. I have had that feeling occasionally when seeing a film, of going in, seeing a film, absolutely hating it, thinking about it for three days, going back and watching it again and discovering, actually, no, I liked it. That's why I asked. Okay, that's really interesting. It is a genuinely baffling book. And I think baffling by design. I don't think so. I think the bafflement that you feel on first reading this book, I think is exactly the emotion that he wanted to. That he wants you to feel. That he wants you to feel. Because I feel this is a book that, with perhaps a bit there in grief observed, but this is the deepest book, the journey that Lewis takes you on. I think it is. And I think it's, as you say, he writes to think, and he writes imaginative literature to think with. He doesn't, whatever some people might think, he doesn't write his Narnia books or his science fiction books, or this book particularly, to illustrate a point he's already made. He's feeling his way into something which you can't otherwise express. And here he's feeling his way, I think, into how you communicate that faith in the divine is appalling, strange, overwhelming, exhilarating, wild. It's a bit like the wildness of Aslan in the Narnia books. There's something really, it's actually quite savage about it. Can I just ask then, before we hear you read something for us, Lewis rejected the idea didn't he, that the Narnia books could be read as direct allegory he said it's a means of exploring something rather than recounting something, is that true with Till We Have Faces as well allegorical without being an allegory or not? interesting question, he's starting from an allegorical classical story Eros and Psyche and there are moments in this where you can sense there's an allegorical element coming through but as you read I think you don't sense that. You begin to see at the end actually this is opening out onto a wider vista but that's something rather different from Malligary. You turn the pages and you point after point I. That means that. That means that. Lewis of course knew all about allegory. As you say so he's choosing not to. You made, I think, a brilliant point about Larnia. The criticism of Lewis is, oh, it's just thinly veiled Christian allegory. Your point was, no, what he's trying to make you do is to think differently and to clear out what was a brilliant sentence, to rinse out what is stale in our thinking about Christianity, which actually suddenly made me pivot quite dramatically to think that's what he sees. Yes, of course, it's a great moment when you suddenly figure out as a kid that Aslan is probably Jesus. But he's not really... It's not that straightforward. It really isn't that straightforward because Aslan is genuinely dangerous, threatening, wild and unnerving. And it strikes me that the... You talked about the grinding gear change in this. I was thinking, Andy, you know you could send the first half of this book or the first section of this book to a filmmaker and they say this would be great this is going to be great we've got a really good movie here we can get and then you send them the second bit and they're saying it's in development i'm sorry it's staying in development the american no yeah yes the phone the phone they never ring you back yeah okay yes well well rowan please would you um read us a section and then i will um borrow your copy and share the blurb with listeners. I talked about the vividness of the description and the early part of the book is about how the decision is made that Psyche is going to be a human sacrifice to avert plague and defeat in war and so forth and the priest of Ungit the goddess of this country turns up in the royal palace to say we've got to have a human sacrifice and it's got to be the princess. And the priest's arrival attended by the temple prostitutes with gilded eyelashes and false hair and makeup. Very vivid evocation of that. They attend the priest in. The temple girls led the priest into the pillar room, and a chair was set for him, and he was helped into it. He was out of breath and sat for a long time before he spoke, making a chewing motion with his gums as old men do. The girls stood stiffly at each side of his chair, their meaningless eyes looking always straight ahead out of the mask of their painting. The smell of old age and the smell of the oils and essences they put on those girls and the unget smell filled the room. It became very holy. Lewis is evoking for us a sense of the holy as the uncanny, the terrifying, the deep, the overwhelming, and of course the threatening here. And the priest, as he explains what the sacrifice is all about, is challenged by the king's Greek slave, Lysias the Fox, as he's called throughout this rather poignant, displaced Greek rationalist, almost like an Oxford don transferred to somewhere east of the... furred east of the Caucasus in something BCE, you know, and the fox protests. Master, master, let me speak. Speak on, said the king. Do you not see, master, said the fox, that the priest is talking nonsense? A shadow is to be an animal, which is also a goddess, which is also a god, and loving is to be eating. A child of six would talk more sense. And a moment ago, the victim of this abominable sacrifice was to be the accursed, the wickedest person in the whole land, offered as a punishment and now it has to be the best person in the whole land the perfect victim married to the god as a reward ask him which he means it can't be both and orwell the narrator says if any hope would put up its head within me when the fox began it was killed this sort of talk would do no good and that's that's a theme that runs through the the the mysteriousness of the archaic holy the terror of the holy, as we find later in the book, is sort of closer to the truth than the wonderfully heroic problem-solving clarity of the Greek slave, who is a lovely man. He's exactly the sort of person you'd want to have around in a crisis. And yet at the critical moments, he understands nothing of what's really going on. That's why it's poignant. That's interesting. So he's an emollient. And she is Oruel. This is the thing that I think did really strike me. I wasn't expecting a book. I don't know why. Well, perhaps I do know why. Narrated by a woman. Because, you know, Lewis, as you say, could be quite dismissive about the difference between men's talk and women's talk. But actually what he creates in this conflicted, difficult, unlikable, spiky, but also kind of incredibly capable character she becomes a great queen a lawgiver and as i said at the beginning you know an architect a transforming you know learns a lot from the and yet the the crisis her crisis is the is is the the heart of the book and it's the kind of strange mystical solution to that crisis or is it even a solution it's it's it is what it is that that gives the book i think it's that sets the book apart from as it were mary renault or uh the people who are people who are writing or peter green who who wrote achilles his armor there was quite a lot of uh of that kind of turning historical stuff into into into novels in the in the 1950s i ryan when you were reading there what struck me was the um eccentricity of combining such intense philosophical thought with such plainness of language. Yes. Was that a self-conscious choice on Lewis's part? Did he eschew the more ornate prose and the more difficult word because he wanted to either communicate or because he felt ideas were better expressed straightforwardly? He's got a great commitment, I think, to the plain style What the medieval sort of called the humble style By humble not meaning self-effacing, but the sort of earthy style And here he's, again, he's feeling his way into a particular voice This is a barbarian, inverted commas This is somebody who won't have a huge vocabulary But not having a huge vocabulary doesn't mean that you don't have a huge emotional vocabulary and emotional resource and imaginative, even intellectual resource. And it's interesting you have very near the center of the story, this figure of the Greek slave, who of course has had to forget his Greek and learn to reason in another language, a barbarous language, which for him is almost laughably inferior to Greek. He's got to think his thoughts again in a new language. may i ask both of you when you read this john is this the first time you've read this you hadn't read it before and um rowan as well were you terribly familiar with the myth of cupid and psyche you're laughing i'm laughing because i still haven't got my head around it okay i mean definitely not i i mean i think i was vaguely like most people are vaguely aware that it involved some kind of sacrifice and uh quite a lot of weeping some terrible tasks that psyche had to do cupid not cupid slipping into her bed and and and and sleeping with her in the carnal way but not saying you can't see who i am i was very vague but i had to go back and reread to try and remind myself of what what was the what was the myth that was being changed yes likewise i mean i i'd read the story I think probably as a teenager again I was very interested in Greek mythology and it's it's a story which is partly mythical but also quite self-conscious it's a literary story which depicts the soul and the divine love psyche and eros and the extraordinary demands which eros makes upon psyche including the demand of trust when you can see Eros face But what's fascinating in the book, if you know the details of the original text, how some of the detail of that myth is then recreated in the form of dreams in the very last section. Psyche has to go through a number of ordeals in the original story. We don't have those front and center in the story, but we have them reimagined, re-experienced in the dreams of Orwell, her sister. And the final reveal is that Orwell's nightmares as she begins to enter the process of her dying, Orwell's nightmares about endless journeys through the desert and ants sorting out grains of wheat and all of that these things which come from the original story as ordeals for Psyche here they are orwell as it were bearing the burden with Psyche sharing Psyche's journey and lifting the burden from Psyche in some ways as she shares so is Lewis subverting the myth or adapting it? Both, I think. He's certainly adapting it, but adapting it entirely to his purposes. This is not just about what Apollius was saying in the Hellenistic period. It's about what you might say now about the difficulties, the dead ends, the temptations, the distortions of love human and divine and you can certainly read the entire story as a very taxing a very demanding meditation on love because he writes a book doesn't he soon afterwards before that's called the four loves all of whom are present in this yeah because in a way the arc of the story is from one kind of love to another orwell begins by passionately loving her younger sister wanting to protect her. And you realize that as that unfolds, what she really wants to do is to own her. And so when Psyche accepts her fate, goes forward to the sacrifice, and then turns out to be still alive and committed to this god who is supposed to be eating her alive, Aruil manipulates her emotions ruthlessly to try and draw her back into her own orbit. And you see, as the book unfolds, you'll see that becoming a pattern in other aspects of the narrative. Ryan, may I borrow your precious copy? Thank you so much. Yeah, they're not cheap, those first editions, are they? This is such a good jacket, though. Yeah, I know. I'll just read the... I may not get to the end of this because I think it'll take too long, but I will observe something after I read it because I think it tells us something about who C.S. Lewis was perceived to be when the book was published. So, on the back of this jacket, about this book. C.S. Lewis has based his novel, Till We Have Faces, on the classical myth of Psyche and Cupid. In this, Psyche's great beauty incurs the wrath of the goddess Venus, who sends her son Cupid to punish her. Cupid falls in love with Psyche and has her carried off to a stately palace where he visits her secretly by night. He tells her she must never see his face, but, urged on by her sisters who envy her happiness, Psyche looks upon his face one night and is filled with insatiable love for him. Cupid awakes and vanishes, leaving Psyche to wander broken-hearted over the earth. she accomplishes a number of impossible tasks devised by venus and eventually cupid returns marries her and she is turned into a goddess now i will read a bit more i'm just saying and that's the that's the pull that's the pull a whole paragraph telling you the myth so you're ready so you're good to go then new para of the changes he has made in the myth Dr. Lewis writes, and then the remainder of this is Dr. Lewis telling you what he's going to do. Quote, the central alteration in my own version consists in making Psyche's palace invisible to normal mortal eyes. If making is not the wrong word for something, which forced itself upon me, almost at my first reading of the story, as the way the thing must have been. I mean, and on he goes, Rowan, I have, you know, I don't know what all the jackets of all of your books are like, But do you interrupt the marketing department to have a word with people? No, no, those were the days. Yeah. So this idea of Lewis as a personality, his work is inextricably linked then, when he's alive, with why we might read him. Does that seem correct? I think so. And he's in his period of his marriage at this point. And that extraordinary final episode in his career where he marries this wildly unlikely person, a divorced Jewish-American poet with a communist background. Clearly somebody who was an absolute pain in the backside for a lot of his friends. Yeah. it's it's it's like when he tries to get the inklings back together she is the yoko of course she is but of course she is well we can't we can't get the magic back with her in the room wow that's right that's right i mean they thank you thank you thank you for putting that in terms i can understand as well john talking charles williams barfield they're all they did not understand what he saw in her but his personal reputation and the upheaval in his private life feed together he's coming to terms with all that he's coming to terms with as he said to one of his friends encountering in his 50s or 60s what had eluded him as a young man which is an absolutely fulfilled personal relationship. That's at work. That makes him think about love as he's already thought about it and it's as if having in some of his earlier work like The Screwtape Letters given us a very, very sharp, very, what's the word, a critical diagnosis of the possibilities of deep self-deception in love and the selfishness that lurks in love he wants to he wants to lay it out more fully more positively without without losing the edginess of his his insights and without becoming kind of oh my god love isn't love great that isn't erotic love i've suddenly discovered you know the joy of sex in my 60s with you know he this book is this book is so much not that so much not that but but is there a sense in which you were talking about oral um acknowledging the terror of love you feel maybe lewis is working through a similar um not i mean a sense of what what putting oneself humbly in front of passion, be it religious passion or romantic passion. Exactly that. I think he's always had that sense that the divine is feral in some very important way and that therefore giving oneself in love to the divine, not just in religion but also in art, in eros and all the rest of it, giving yourself after that is indeed a terrifying thing. It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. That is why the book is called Till We Have Faces for one reason. We'll explore this idea in the second half of the show that in order to achieve fulfillment, it is necessary to look straight into the heart of whatever scares you or whatever passion is or whatever religion is. Yes, you've got to decide to be where you are. So that if you're like, you can be in God's crosshairs. You've got to be there to be seen. So you've got to grow into your face. You've got to grow into your identity with all the risks and the pain. And the Orwell character wears a veil. She wears a veil. And she even fantasizes about what people might think she looks like, even though the reason she wears a veil is her shame at her own disfigurement, her own ugliness. I mean which is you know as they would say plenty for Dr Freud to get on with there Right well listen that seems speaking of which we're going to take a little break now to hear from our sponsors and we've tapped the table and when we come back we will hear I believe what is the only extant recording of the voice of C.S. Lewis from one of his wartime addresses I think it was the theologians who first started the idea that some things are not in time at all. Later the philosophers took it over, and now some of the scientists are doing the same. Almost certainly, God is not in time. His life doesn't consist of moments following one another. if a million people are praying to him at 10.30 tonight he hasn't got to listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call 10.30 10.30 and every other moment from the beginning to the end of the world is always the present for him if you like to put it that way he has infinity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames. That's difficult, I know. And I try to give something not the same, but a bit like it. Suppose I'm writing a novel. I write, Mary laid down her book. Next moment came a knock at the door. For Mary, who got to live in the imaginary time of the story, there's no interval between putting down the book and hearing the knock. But I, her creator, between writing the first part of that sentence and the second, may have gone out for an hour's walk and spent the whole hour thinking about Mary. I know that's not a perfect example, but it may just give a glimpse of what I mean. The point I want to drive home is that God has infinite attention, infinite leisure to spare for each one of us. He doesn't have to take us in the lump. You're as much alone with him as if you were the only thing he'd ever created. When Christ died, he died for you individually, just as much as it would have been the only man in the world. And now I'll get back to my main subject. Can I just say how much I admire the sly cunning of that enormous digression and then saying at the end, but I must get back to the subject. When you hear that, Rowan, and you have many years experience of public speaking and communicating with people. What is the essential thing that Lewis had, do you think, that made him so loved by listeners? A conversational ease, a sense that this is an actual person talking to you. The little conversational touches, I know that sounds difficult. Yeah, yeah, yeah. deliberate but also apparently spontaneous crafting of it so that it can sound like somebody sitting on the other side of the pub table. Reinsuring the arm around the shoulder. And in spite of the accent of the period the Donnish tones nonetheless the language is absolutely lucid there's not a single word that's difficult or technical or jargonistic And John, academia as ever, disgracing itself. So his peers at Oxford and then Cambridge really didn't like Lewis, did they? No. And I think it was partly because he was, A, he was tremendously popular, which is always fatal. The arguments are so vicious because the stakes are so low. Kissinger famously said but also I think it was this I think it was this kind of common touch as well I think they you know what is he doing writing these Christian homilies he's a scholar of the silver poets of the 16th and 17th century he shouldn't be wasting his time on this he also he enjoyed beer and Beowulf he enjoyed his pipes and he hated what he called the literary Puritans he talks about the literary Puritans, by which we kind of have talked about. He didn't like T.S. Eliot, didn't like Leavis. I mean, he didn't like them either, but he thinks the literary puritans are too serious as men to be seriously receptive as readers. Ouch. I've listened to an undergraduate's paper on Jane Austen from which if I had not read them, I should never have discovered that there was the least hint of comedy in her novels. After a lecture of my own, I've been accompanied from Mill Lane to Mordland by a young man protesting with real anguish and horror against my wounding, my vulgar, my irreverent suggestion that the Miller's tale was written to make people laugh. We are braiding up a race of young people who are as solemn as the brutes, smiles from reason flow, as solemn as a 19-year-old Scottish son of the manse at an English sherry party who takes all the compliments for declarations and all the banter for insult. I thought, what year was that? That was in the 60s. I was going to say, nothing changes. But that's great, isn't it? But A, it's beautifully written and funny. and he's funny. He's funny. And that's rare in academia, let's be honest. Let me ask you both a question. Is Orwell an unreliable narrator to the extent that even though she is beginning to understand that she must show her true face to God or the gods, she cannot show her true face to the reader. Disgust. Disgust. It works at a number of levels, doesn't it? Because the first bit of the story, the long bit of the book, is written, as it were, without irony. She looks back on her interaction with Psyche and she says, but I did that because I loved her. I manipulated and controlled her because I loved her. and the gods seem quite unable to understand that I loved her and they're punishing me for loving her, which is why the gods are essentially poisonous to humanity. That's wonderful. But at the end of the first section, nothing is so poisonous to humanity as the divine, really powerful language. And as I said, written without irony, then in the second part, after the series of shocks that kind of disrupt that picture of herself. She's coming to terms with the inner ugliness, which is like the outer ugliness, the ambivalence, the tyranny of the love that she's been living with. And it's misery and tension and a sort of deep dissociation from the self And then at the very end it as if all that got to be brought back again and say but actually no you did love her Of course, you loved her wrongly. You loved her stupidly. You loved her. And something in that gave life. It's the beginning, isn't it? It's the beginning of a realization. Don't try to scrub it out. Don't say, oh, it's all wrong. Everything's got to start again and I must be annihilated. It's as if the divine is saying through the figure of psyche there, look, actually, of course you were ignorant. Of course you got it wrong. People do. Get used to it. This is how it works. To err is to be human, and to be human is to err, it strikes me as one of the conclusions. I was really intrigued. There was one throwaway line. We have a famous, we also have a phrase, don't we, John, that we borrowed from an Amazon reviewer of Muriel Spark. I wonder if this gentleman ever, and it was a gentleman, has ever heard this podcast because this has carried us through for years now. He said, Spark does not suffer the lazy reader. Hmm. Very nice. And Lewis, whilst appearing to be terribly approachable, I put it to you, Johnny, he doesn't really suffer a lazy reader either. There's a line in here, a throwaway line, which made me think about all sorts of things I was being told by the narrator that I thought, well, maybe, hang on. One throwaway line. I had batter hanged. Yes, yes. Four words only. And suddenly you think, wait a minute. What? I'm hearing from you that you have been a great leader, that you have won battles, that you have behaved... Built a library. Built a library, behaved in a proper way. Perhaps I can't trust you. Perhaps self-deception is one of the other things rolling around in the novel. That also is a line that I underlined, but I think what happens at the end is he moves into I mean there's not much that I can compare it to and I realise I'm hurtling towards Sud's corner with this but to those final sections in Paradiso in Dante this is untethered this writing towards the end of the book the visions that he's seeing and then that sense of the divine I am psyche you know you are psyche that interpenetration of the human and the divine and the flowing together of things. I don't think I've really read anything in a 20th century novel. Perhaps, again, it was you who said this, this isn't really like realist fiction at all by the end of the book. It's grounded in it to begin with, I guess. The other thing we should say, this book was not very successful. This book didn't work for the evangelicals who were looking for Christian homilies, and it didn't work for the fans of the science fiction because it was too weird. This is not a book to give somebody who's just finished The Last Battle, even though they were published in the same year. But of course that's the hallmark of what we would call a real writer. You pursue your idea and your muse. And it was sniffy, there were some sniffy reviews. There were patronising reviews. And I think it's absolutely right that the real writer suspects what they're good at. you master a certain technique you produce these brilliant children's books and you think, damn it, I've got to stop writing books I can write easily I've got to find something that's difficult That's, if I may draw a traditional point of comparison That's Bob Dylan for you right there Bob Dylan stopped wanting to make records that sounded like Bob Dylan The famous phrase, the artist in a constant state of becoming You know, that Rowan, would you read us a little more? I think you have another section marked there. I was thinking of somewhere. It's towards the end. We hear Orwell making her case against the gods. It's a few pages of intense protests. It's like the book of Job. Job screaming at God. Why have you got me into this? What are you playing at? and what Oral tells us is that this great rant about the divine is actually what the whole of her first book is about. It's a hidden rant against the divine. What should I care for some horrible new happiness which I hadn't given her and which separated her from me? Do you think I wanted her to be happy that way? It would have been better if I'd seen the brute tear her in pieces before my eyes. You stole her to make her happy, did you? Why, every wheedling, smiling, cat-foot rogue who lures away another man's wife or slave or dog might say the same. Dog, now, that's very much to the purpose. I'll thank you to let me feed my own. It needed no tidbits from your table. Did you ever remember whose the girl was? She was mine. Mine. Do you not know what the word means? Mine. Your thieves, seducers. That's my wrong. I'll not complain that you're blood drinkers and man-eaters. I'm past that. Enough, said the judge. There was utter silence, all rightly. And now for the first time, I knew what I had been doing. And she goes on from that moment of actually recognizing, this is what it's all about. This is, you know, I'm exposed for what I am. That desperate clinging on to the mineness of me. And something's got to give. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer, till that word can be dug out of us. why should they hear the babble that we think we mean how can they meet us face to face till we have faces I want to reassure people that's not the last line of the book because again there's a running joke about how all great novels should end with their own title to think how this all happened in middle march etc but but that is that is I I found in my reading of this um the whole book the whole novel transformed by that second section and actually improved i will be so bold as to say i i i felt like the the unexpected disruption of the second section made me realize that whoever had been writing the first section had more um wiles about them than i had initially given them credit for which i love with that in books where they wrong foot you you said it's a they wrong foot you um like um i know you're a great fan of ridley walker um where again you don't really know what's happening you you you can you can intuit up to a certain point but certain things remain remain beyond our our ken um may i ask you both one of the things that also occurred to me when i was reading this john you mentioned 20th century you said you hadn't read a book from the 20th century that reminded you of this, or words to that effect. It reminded me of Jung, that Jung's belief that it was only through self-realization and it was better to live an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable lie, and that one's goal in life was to move towards a sense of non-artificial self is quite similar to Lewis, in this book at least. Yeah, up to a point, Lord Cupper. Yes. In that, the self-realisation is not so much drawing out a kind of given selfhood that's always already there, a secret true self. It's a recognition of a whole accumulation of experience about which you've learned to tell a certain kind of story. And somehow that story's got to find a way out of the traps it's created for itself. It's got to break its own bars. And that can only be done by, well, I think Lewis would have said, by grace, revelation. Somebody else's face has to impact upon you. Yes. And remember in the scene early on where Orwell very fleetingly, just for an instant, sees what Psyche sees. She also sees a face. And she's not angry, not menacing, just infinitely distant. She's sort of closed off so much this face of absolute beauty and welcome. She knows she cannot engage with. She's locked herself up in her own language. and something has to break through and it's the long history of suffering and travel and travail that breaks it open that tears the veil from her own face it's not that God is veiled, she's veiled it's not that God is not there, she's not there I think it's terribly good as well that what you've just described is encoded in the structure of the novel John, here's the question, in that respect is this a book about books? Is that a regular question? It is. But is it a book about books? Because to some extent you're given a coherent, rewarding, smoothed out narrative and then it's torn up in front of your eyes. I'm tempted to say it is. She makes a small kind of library with not terribly many books in it in the book when she's queen of gloom but by the time you get to the end I'm yeah it's funny I had exactly the same thought this morning it's you know at the end of St John's gospel what is the great line if if there were to be books written about what the world could not contain the world could not contain them it's it's it's kind of saying that there you know all books are about this ultimately you know and I think what's fascinating is why why wasn't that not palatable, still not palatable. And if you were trying to talk as a theologian about, I think you like this book because as a theologian it challenges you. Oh, yes, yes. It's not comfortable. It's not comfortable. It's like the book of Job, as I've said. And it's also, in some ways, very interestingly, like Lewis's A Grief Observed, the book he wrote after his wife's death from cancer, which is another amazing book, yes, because it's doing what Dusty Evsky was trying to do in his novels, to say, I will make you the case for atheism better than you atheists can make it. That's brilliant. I will tell you just how absolutely bloody impossible it is to be a religious believer, just so you know. That's very interesting. But the motivation is what? Is playful because he comes over as a vuncula or mischievous or iconoclastic? I think there's a degree of mischief in it, but very serious mischief, saying just in case you think that we religious believers go around in a kind of cloud of... Smug certainty. Smug certainty and kind of scented birthday cards. Let me just remind you where this comes from and how it works and what it feels like and what it looks like. Blood sacrifice in caves. Yeah. Yeah, and again, in case you think that religion is just, as people would like to say, the spiritual, sort of improving and edifying and wellness-inducing, well, let's go back and look at this lump of stone in the temple, Samara, east of the Caucasus, with the blood of sacrificed people and animals coagulating all over it, and the smell and the dark. and I think, well, you know, that takes you to, the image here is Augustine rather than Freud, the caves inside which somehow have to be explored and mapped and illuminated before you know where you really are. Your love of Dostoevsky, presumably, comes from a similar sense of speaking the stuff we would prefer not to speak. speaking the truth that's uncomfortable, speaking it not just to make things awkward, but to say the gospel is not that life is nicer than you thought. The gospel, oddly, is that life is infinitely worse than you thought, but that grace is greater. That's a large claim. It's a very bold claim, a very tough claim. well and and you know i found this so fascinating to talk about we haven't read any of the reviews out and then frankly there wasn't much need because as this makes clear the it's one of those books that the mechanisms of sunday newspaper reviews really don't have aren't able to cope with such an idiosyncratic, sui generis book. You know, they tended to say things just along the lines of, well, it's a retelling of the myth, and for those who like this sort of thing, they'll like it. And there's a bit of religion in there, which is... Nervous laughter. But, I mean, it feels to me like it's a book that you would... I mean, if you know that somebody is a fan of this book, you're going to be more interested in having a conversation with them. Oh, very much so. Do you meet many people who are fans of this novel? Quite a few. My wife among them. Well, that's great. One of the things that helped us in the early days. That's fantastic. But yes, you're quite right. I can think of a handful of people who would immediately say, ah, yes, seriously, until we have faces. Best thing ever, then you know you can. Well, I hope lots of people as a result of listening to this will join their number. John, we have to wrap up now. We do, unfortunately. It's time for us to forsake the kingdom of Aglombe and leave behind the new gods and the old. Huge thanks to Rome Williams for encouraging and challenging us to join him. To our producer, Tess Davidson, for making us all sound even better. Thanks, Tess. If you want show notes with clips, links, and suggestions for further reading for this show, and the more than 240 we've already recorded, please visit our website at backlisted.fm if you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows please visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop yes, backlisted.fm you can also sign up for our new newsletter where we preview each show share our own and other guests book recommendations and news about events and giveaways and don't forget our Patreon patreon.com forward slash backlisted before we go, Rowan Is there anything you would like to say about Lewis or about Till We Have Faces that you feel we haven't covered in the show? Why should people here in 2025 with so many distractions pick that book off a shelf? What is it, do you think, that it gives us? It's that fundamental image. How do we learn to be here? That, I think, is one of the questions that religious faith poses. How do we learn to be here? Because we are always constructing worlds to suit ourselves elsewhere. And some are getting back to where we are, who we are, what we are, and learning what it is we really confront in this world and beyond. That's a task which is more than ever important, I think, in an age when we're almost encouraged to fantasize our way out of trouble. Perfect. No further questions, Your Honor. Thank you, Rowan. Thank you so much. thanks john thanks everybody for listening this has been the most stimulating and fascinating discussion thank you so much see you next time everybody bye bye Thank you.