John Crowley's LJ (RSS Feed)
08-14-2008, 04:14 PM
A quote in my endless copybook (actually drawing to an end) started a thread of comments on C.S. Lewis that can be found in the comments to that entry, the previous. I wanted to add something but it wouldn;t fit in the Comment space so here it is:
In regard to all the above on C.S. Lewis: Growing up Catholic around the University of Notre Dame (most of my father's business friends were priests) I absorbed a lot of the then current admiration for a small number of writers who were Catholic (or Anglo-Catholic) and who stood for a mature intellectual sophistication that distinguished them from the smarmy our-lady-of fatima stuff and knee-jerk popery. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Mauriac, Teilhard de Chardin -- and C.S. Lewis. Maybe it was because of my growing need to shake off or divorce myself from the Catholic stuff, but I hated all these writers even as I read and in some sense admired them. What I didn't like -- in Greene and in Lewis particularly -- was a kind of pretense that their stories were, like all stories, undetermined at the start: that what was right and who was right and what was at stake would take shape as the story and people evolved. But (I couldn't have put it this way at age 14 or 16) that was fake: they knew very well who was right and who was wrong, who was good and WHAT was good. The fix was in. It was sophisticated propaganda. The Screwtape Letters the worst because supposedly funny. (The Don Camillo stories by Giovanni Guareschi, if anyone ever read those, were much subtler and sweeter.) I read the planetary romances (Perelandra, Out of the Silent Planet) with a growing resentment that I was being given this supposedly open-ended but actually closed religion lesson. I never read the Narnia books out of a (it seems now not unreasonable) suspicion they were the same. Graham Greene I came to like better as he slid farther from orthodoxy, but The Power and the Glory annoyed me profoundly.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/94597.html)
In regard to all the above on C.S. Lewis: Growing up Catholic around the University of Notre Dame (most of my father's business friends were priests) I absorbed a lot of the then current admiration for a small number of writers who were Catholic (or Anglo-Catholic) and who stood for a mature intellectual sophistication that distinguished them from the smarmy our-lady-of fatima stuff and knee-jerk popery. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Mauriac, Teilhard de Chardin -- and C.S. Lewis. Maybe it was because of my growing need to shake off or divorce myself from the Catholic stuff, but I hated all these writers even as I read and in some sense admired them. What I didn't like -- in Greene and in Lewis particularly -- was a kind of pretense that their stories were, like all stories, undetermined at the start: that what was right and who was right and what was at stake would take shape as the story and people evolved. But (I couldn't have put it this way at age 14 or 16) that was fake: they knew very well who was right and who was wrong, who was good and WHAT was good. The fix was in. It was sophisticated propaganda. The Screwtape Letters the worst because supposedly funny. (The Don Camillo stories by Giovanni Guareschi, if anyone ever read those, were much subtler and sweeter.) I read the planetary romances (Perelandra, Out of the Silent Planet) with a growing resentment that I was being given this supposedly open-ended but actually closed religion lesson. I never read the Narnia books out of a (it seems now not unreasonable) suspicion they were the same. Graham Greene I came to like better as he slid farther from orthodoxy, but The Power and the Glory annoyed me profoundly.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/94597.html)