Yesterday Came Suddenly

Last night I had the strangest dream

I've ever had before

I dreamed the world had all agreed

To put an end to war...

The Tomorrow People's main power is that they are nice. A few years later, George Lucas would posit a universe bound together by the mystical forces of intuition and instinct. But for Roger Price, it was quite literally love which made the world go round. When Carol materializes by Steven's hospital bed and exposits the backstory, she explains the Tomorrow People first and foremost in terms of their outlook.

"We are man's only hope of survival. We're peaceful. We can't wage war. We can't kill. Well, not deliberately anyhow."

Violence and War seem to be the main points on which the Tomorrow People differ from the Saps: there is little talk about environmental issues or sharing the world's resources. The Sixth Commandment shall be the whole of the law. The rule is said at one point to be a mental block: not a moral principle, but an existential limitation. Much later, in Season Four or Five, it is said that if a Tomorrow Person ever did use lethal force, they would either lose their powers or simply go mad.

This taboo has no sooner been introduced than it is being fudged. For one thing, the Tomorrow People carry stun-guns, which seems a little like cheating. Big Bad Jedikiah is a robot: sentient, with a personality and personal agency, but still a robot, making it perfectly okay to teleport him onto the molten surface of the planet Mercury. This may have been part of a not unclever Writerly Plan: an on-going villain who can be played by a different actor each week -- he has Tardis like shape shifting powers -- and who the pacifist heroes are permitted to kill. But Jedikiah didn't appear again until the end of Season Three, when he was permanently but non-fatally written out. A human gets vaporised on Mercury along with the robot, but the guy who pushed the button (Peter the apprentice time guardian) is told that this is all right because he didn't really mean it.

It's a bit like Star Trek: in practice the Prime Directive says that you are not allowed to interfered with affairs of lessor civilisations unless you agonize about it first and feel awful afterwards. The code against killing is even referred to, once, as the Prime Barrier. But I suppose "Not killing anyone unless you really can't help it" is a considerable advance over "We come in peace, shoot to kill". Cuddly terrorist Roj Blake used to kill just as many people as the fascist Federation.

"But what if people make war on us?” asks Steven. Carol doesn't have an answer; and the series doesn't seem particularly interested in the question. The Prime Barrier is mostly there to give our heroes permission to be heroes and to draw a line between them and the grown-ups. But it is rarely a source of moral dilemmas. The series would have been a lot more interesting if the heroes had sometimes been pushed into situations which demanded lethal force, found themselves unable to use it, and had to live with the consequences.

In Marvel Comics, mutant is distinctly a status; a thing which you know about yourself and which other people know about you. People hate and shun Cyclops because he is a mutant; they admire the Human Torch because he is a superhero.

Being a Tomorrow Person is little like that. The fact that Telepaths can telepath is almost incidental. It's the status, the label, the race that counts. The Telepaths of the Galactic Federation could talk to the Saps, but they choose not to. The Guardians of Time choose to share their secret only with Telepathic apprentices. There is a Time Control Doohickey on the space ship which only Peter the time-child can operate: but that's because the guardians have chosen to put a telepathic lock on it; presumably because the Saps can't be trusted to use time travel responsibly.

It's this sense of being a member of an exclusive club or class which Carol emphasises when she first meets Steven. Telepathy is not represented as a Vulcan Mind Meld or a sinister way of knowing your mates’ deep desires and dreams. It's just a form of instant long distance communication: Mind-Speaking.

A Tomorrow Person, she says, is never alone

Did Salman Rushdie ever watch the Tomorrow People, I wonder? He was in his middle twenties in 1973, working as an advertising copywriter, so probably not. He was certainly interested in science fiction and references comic books fairly specifically in his novels. The protagonist of the Satanic Verses catches a few minutes of a Doctor Who story called (of all things) The Mutants and considers it racist -- suggesting that either he or Rushdie hadn't understood it.

But Rushdie's break-out novel, Midnight’s Children, is based on the premise that all the babies born in India at the exact moment of Independence are mentally linked, each with their own culturally appropriate superpower. (It's magical realism as opposed to science fiction, so their powers are heavily metaphorical: I seem to recall that one character can literally incorporate emotions into pickles.) The idea that people who have a common outlook should be literally linked; of telepathy as a metaphor for community, seems present in both the kids’ TV show and the Booker novel. In 2015 Rushdie was said to be working on a popular sci-fi themed TV screenplay but nothing seems to have come of it. It would have been called The Next People.

When TIM the computer is briefly switched off, Carol cannot make contact with John, so she jaunts into his bedroom. He sleeps under a duvet with no shirt on; mercifully he wears pyjama pants. But truthfully, girls jaunting into boy’s bedrooms doesn't seem to carry any innuendo. It's more like the Tomorrow People are engaged in an unending long distance sleepover. Carol says that John is nice and kind and clever when she introduces him to Steven, but there is no smidgeon of a hint of a romance between them.

It is the 1970s. Children have their own bedrooms. So far as we can tell, all the Tomorrow People are all  only-children: parents are mentioned, but not siblings. We see Steven's mother; she is notified when he explodes in the street and goes to the hospital. John appraises her of the situation: I think even in '73, keeping big secrets from your parents would have felt a little like grooming. A generation before, kids would have had to contend with bunk beds and younger brothers and sisters. John has a great big print of Neil Armstrong on the moon on his bedroom wall. Kenny has lots of football posters. I think they represent Chelsea players. He is briefly shocked when Ginge (the biker they adopt) mentions that he is Fulham supporter. When Kenny wakes up in his den, the first thing he does is say "good morning John; good morning Carol". When Carol and John don't answer him, he knows that something has gone very wrong.

A Tomorrow Person is never alone. They wake up and greet one another in their minds; they materialise in each other's bedrooms; and the elders of the universe talk exclusively to them.

And there you have it. The Long Chase and Timeslip and the Changes were good TV shows we quite liked. Star Trek and Doctor Who became huge, shared, cultural constructs. But The Tomorrow People was our own fantasy realm, belonging privately to each  of us. It took up residence in our heads and became part of the way we imagined ourselves. It's a cool disco precursor of J.K Rowling's cynical Millennial Enid Blyton throwback. 

I am special. 

Someday soon I will get the magic letter telling me how special I am. 

This will grant me membership of a special club which will allow me to treat anyone who is not special -- my parents, my teachers, my peer-group, anyone without an RP accent -- with a sort of amused disdain.

You could look it as a religious movement: with Breaking Out like being born again.

You could take it as being about consciousness raising; about getting switched on to a higher power. Steen (the grown up space cop) talks that language in the final story of the first season. "Every child is a telepath. All they have to do is find the key within themselves to unlock the special powers we telepaths possess."

You could take Breaking Out as a metaphor for Coming Out. The Tomorrow People has a certain reputation for being A Bit Gay or A Bit Camp. It is certainly true that the guys, at any rate, take their shirts off more than is strictly necessary. Season Two begins with John towelling himself down, presumably after going swimming, for no very good reason.

The X-Men were a club. The Fantastic Four were a family. The Tomorrow People have the best of both worlds. They are a friendship group; a gang, the most inner of all inner rings, four youths against the world. But what they have found at the other end of the psychic Hogwarts Express is clearly a family. John, serious and authoritarian is Dad; Carol, fussy and perpetually panicking, is Mum; Kenny, smiley and spunky is kid-brother and Steven, sensible and confused, on the cusp of adolescence, is big brother.

Peter Vaughan Clark -- Steven -- can't act. To be honest, none of them are very good at it. Steven Salman (Kenny) is the least worst: he is supposed to be the youngest, and he recites his lines by rote as if he doesn't quite understand them. "Saps-thats-you-it's-short-for-homo-sapiens-it-means-man-the-thinker." This gives him an endearingly other-worldly vibe. Sammie Winimill (Carol) had done some TV acting before the Tomorrow People, but her entire performance is two octaves too high, giving an impression of permanent hysteria. She is hamstrung by a script which expects her to say things like "But we've got to do something we've simply got too we can't just do nothing we simply can't." Only Nicholas Young (John) gives any sign of knowing what nuance means: he gets to be the Nice One who is also the Serious Authoritative One, perpetually telling the camera that the world is about to end, everyone is going to die, and that it's a long shot but it just might work. Vaughan Clark accompanies every line with a slightly too careful stage-school gesture, and his voice goes up slightly too much at the end of every question, until you want to throw him onto the molten surface of the planet Mercury. He improved considerably in the second season, and I believe made a decent career for himself on the other side of the camera. We are only five years away from Grange Hill, a school-based soap opera in which the kids looked and sounded like actual kids

But in a sense, Steven is what carries the programme. Reader response is a risky game, and I have claimed slightly too frequently that the limitations of creaky old TV shows are actually part of their strengths. But I do think that there is a blank, gormless absence at the centre of the Tomorrow People, at least to start with; on to which we all project ourselves. We are all Steven. We all have scars on our foreheads. We are all Chosen Ones.

The opening credits are perhaps more interesting than a lot of the actual episodes. The viewer is thrust forward down a kind of tunnel: images of the main character's faces and star-scapes zoom towards us, along with the titles and the credits. It rather resembles the Doctor Who opening sequence; in which the viewer is pulled through a split screen hyperspace time tunnel from which the Doctor and the TARDIS emerge. But that title sequence was only adopted in December '73: at this point the BBC was still using the wibbly-wobbly lines which had served them in various forms since Unearthly Child. 

The central image is of a fist opening up into a hand; and of a bud opening into a flower. And a man clinging to some kind of boxing punch-bag: I've never been quite sure what that means. This imagery is specifically evoked by Carol when she talks to Steven in the hospital: it's a kind of visual analogy to Breaking Out. The fist of violence becomes the open hand of friendship; but more widely and simply, the message is simply "Open Your Mind".

Open your mind.

I can remember, vividly, imagining a future in which a very old man with a long white beard told a large crowd of tomorrow babies that he was the first. And we viewers, who had been there at the beginning, knew that he was John. If Big Finish or someone want to make this story, they should get in touch. I believe that Nicholas Young is still working. That's how the far future looked in those days. The Blue Peter Annual spoke frivolously of a remote futurity when an old lady and two very old gentlemen would return to the BBC garden and dig up the millennium time capsule. Twenty nine years is a long time when you are a kid, but everyone took it for granted that Blue Peter would still be on BBC One in the Far Future, even if there would be different presenters and different pets. The final Planet of the Apes movie ended with a brief glimpse into a future world where the grandchildren of former apes and the grandchildren of former humans sit together at the table of brotherhood. I certainly had intimations of mortality at the age of seven. All Tomorrow People but one grow up. Seven is the beginning of the end.

Open your mind...

Did it come true? John would be pushing seventy now: not quite the grey-beard of my dream, but getting on that way. So far the earth has not joined the Galactic Federation: if we had a referendum the Saps would vote to Leave. War has not come to an end. Steven's generation elected Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. 

It is often said that William Gibson predicted the Internet, coining the word cyberspace in unreadable sci-fi noir novels composed on a manual typewriter. But todays digital natives have far more in common with Douglas Adams’s hitch-hikers than they do with Gibson's cyberjocks. They have an electronic book which contains everything; it has replaced the conventional sources of wisdom and knowledge, even though they know that it is completely unreliable.

But Roger Price saw the future first, in a silly forgotten TV show a few of us fell hopelessly in love with. 

The children who talk to each other from their bedrooms before saying good morning to their parents. The children who instantly know where their friends are and are never out of touch with them. Linked, not through cyberspace but through hyperspace.

A Tomorrow Person is never alone. Ever kid with a mobile is homo superior.

What was the Age of Aquarius?

About seven....

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Yesterday's Gone

No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

Salman Rushdie

So: let's talk about the Tomorrow People.

I look at it with the eye of love: I fear I am going to make it sound a lot more interesting than it ever was. I issue the same warning that I did when writing about Hugh Walters. If you don't already know and love the show, for god's sake don't go away and watch it on my say-so.

It's shockingly badly acted; some of the social attitudes make on feel a little queasy; and the sets and aliens are genuinely made out of tin foil and crepe paper.

So: what was it? 

It was a science fiction serial, shown after school on Monday evenings, on ITV, the less snooty of the two UK TV channels.

It was about four children, three boys and a girl, between the ages of twelve and seventeen. They had special telepathic powers which they kept secret from the rest of the world. They had a secret hide-out, full of scientific equipment, and a friendly voice-of-god computer. They kept the earth safe from space aliens and irresponsible time-travellers.

It was very British: indeed, very London-centric. The fortress of solitude is accessed via a disused Tube station near Tower Bridge. Commercial TV was regionalised in those days, and the Tomorrow People was made by the London franchise. The Thames Television ident, showing the Houses of Parliament and a cockney street cry is enough to set people of a certain age off on a Proustian reverie. It's as much a part of the Tomorrow People as the Twentieth Century Fox Fanfare is part of Star Wars: blessings on BritBox for leaving it intact.

The core premise is that every child is a latent Tomorrow Person. The first episode begins with the viewpoint character, a schoolboy named Steven, manifesting his psi-powers for the first time. It's an unpleasant, traumatic process. The other three characters (Kenny, Carol, and John: introduced in reverse order of seniority) are said to have been through it themselves. John says that it is harder for girls, which Carol takes exception to. They call the process Breaking Out, which is very much the kind of thing you might do after Tuning In and Turning On.

And there is the whole joy of the programme. So far there are only four Tomorrow People. But there will be others. Andrew Rilstone from Miss Bugden's class is not likely to be bitten by a radioactive spider or caught in a gamma bomb explosion. But it is only a matter of time before he Breaks Out.

It feels like we are jumping on board a narrative that is already well under way. There have been Break Out stories in the past, and doubtless there will be more Break Out stories in the future. John talks about what it was like to Break Out alone, with no-one to help him. It is possible that I didn't realise, in 1973, that I was watching the very first episode of a brand new programme: for all I knew I was coming in part way through a show that Magpie Children had been watching for years. I was well aware that there had been Doctors Who before Jon Pertwee and Assistants before Jo.

The format of the Tomorrow People encodes the idea of "emergence", much as the format of Doctor Who incapsulates the idea of "constant change". The first episode of the first season begins with Steven Breaking Out and joining a group which already exists; the final episode ends with a Space Policeman telling them that they need to be on the look out for other telepaths. "It will be good when there are more of us" says Steven.

"More of you lot?" says cockney human confident Ginge "I don't think we could stand it" and they all laugh. Every story ends with everyone laughing at something which is not particularly funny. The Tomorrow People is quite like Scooby Doo in that respect.

Season Two does indeed begin with a new Tomorrow Person emerging. I don't know if it was planned that way from the beginning, or if a new character, Elizabeth, had to be created when Sammie Winmill (Carol) and Stephen Salmon (Kenny) are let go, presumably because they are not very good at acting. Kenny was black and Carol was a girl so the new character, Elizabeth, is a black girl. This is never a plot point: Scotsmen wear kilts and working class people say “gor blimey” but the series is pretty good, for its time, at being inclusive and colour blind.

But whether foreseen or not, it creates a pattern, a kind of regularity. A new school year, a new pair of shoes, a new pencil case, a new season of the Tomorrow People, a new Break Out. We are witnessing a process; a process which will end when the old human race (you) becomes obsolete and the Tomorrow People (us) take over.

It could easily have been sinister: I don't know if any of the remakes or the fan-fic ever made it sinister.

I don't think the series ever really identifies Breaking Out with the onset of puberty. Kenny is said to have powered-up when he was very young; certainly before his twelfth birthday. It would have been quite odd to construct a series in which children are the only hope for the human race, and then make it a plot point that they only get to do cool stuff once they turn into grown ups.

And at a thematic level -- even if it doesn't always make perfect narrative sense -- the conflict between The Young and The Old is what the Tomorrow People is about. "The Generation Gap" had ceased to be a social problem and become a cliche: in the 1970s, everyone took it for granted that kids and adults spoke a different language and didn't understand each other. Carol tells Steven that "we" are going to take over, stop wars, and put the world in order. "Us children?" says Steven.

The X-Men were the children of the atom; hippies were sometimes called the flower children. In 1973 "children" was still a magic word, representing wisdom and innocence and purity and a kind of enlightenment.

It's different from incantatory use of the word "boy" in 1950s American comics, where to be a man-child was to have a special quality of carefree abandon, rough and tumble violence, licensed naughtiness. And its very different from the quintessential English comics in which "kids" are anarchic rule-breakers who have to be literally beaten into submission by the adult world. The Beatles wrote nostalgically about the shopping streets and parks of their childhoods (a whole ten years ago), while evoking Alice in Wonderland and playground rhymes; the ghost of A.A Milne hangs over the Incredible String Band. We are sometimes inclined to look at old children's TV -- Bagpuss and the Clangers and the Magic Roundabout and Crystal Tips and Alistair and say (if we are kind) that they have a hippy vibe, and (if we are less kind) that the makers must have been smoking something. 

But what we now call psychedelia was simply part of the mainstream culture. Everyone was a little childish. Pastel shades and bright colours and giant symbols of flowers and anthropomorphised animals have always been part of the stock in trade of children's illustrations. In the retro future of the early 1970s, they had crossed over into your granny's wallpaper and John Craven's shirts. 

Tony Blair launched his 2005 election campaign from a school, with a choir singing a secular hymn that began "We are the children of tomorrow...". Some wag pointed out that it would have been more accurate to say that they were the children of today, and the grown ups of tomorrow, and, presumably, the babies of yesterday.

People of tomorrow is really just a convoluted way of spelling the world "child". The series is about potential; a thing which has not yet happened. Homo Superior are not called The Tomorrow Children 

Earth is a regarded as a minor backwater by the Galactic Federation. There is something quite exciting about this idea: the smallness of the Earth emphasises the bigness of space. The Galactic Federation treats us as a "closed world": respectable aliens are not allowed to communicate with planets where there aren't any telepaths. But they are permitted to talk to the Tomorrow People. From the Galactic point of view, these four kids are the only humans. When Steven Breaks Out, he joins the Tomorrow People; when the Earth Breaks Out, it joins the Federation. To be a kid is to be a member of an exclusive club with a secret den. You may get yelled at by policemen and scowled at by beefeaters but the adult world is literally irrelevant. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.

In The Medusa Strain (story two) we time travel into a future in which practically everyone is a Tomorrow Person. John, Carol, Steven and Kenny are mysterious historical figures; members of the Underground before telepaths declared themselves openly. But the only Tomorrow Person we actually encounter is Peter, a more than usually whiney kid. He's a kind of apprentice Time Lord and we are told that only  -- telepaths -- are taken on as trainees for this important job. Admittedly, in the Vanishing Earth (story three) the Galactic Policemen who sorts everything out a bit too quickly in the final episode is old and serious and played by Kevin Stoney. But that seems to spoil the metaphor: a grown up who is not a Sap.

Had I been writing it, I might have turned the Tomorrow People into Logans Run and said that your powers go away on your Thirtieth Birthday. Or that you cease to be Homo Superior if you show the slightest interest in lipstick, nylons or invitations. Or perhaps I would have allowed the heroes to run away to a never never land where they never grow up. Which, I suppose, is exactly what Carol and Kenny do. 

Gavin Burrows is currently comparing and contrasting the series with Stan Lee's X-Men. There is enough similarity between the two that Mark Miller called the first Ultimate X-Men Graphic novel The Tomorrow People.

The X-Men are also called Homo Superior. But they are MUTANTS. They are young people who developed super-powers because of all the RADIATION in the atmosphere. The Tomorrow People are not MUTANTS: they are simply the next inevitable, stage of evolution. 

 "The development of man hasn't just suddenly stopped" explains Carol "It's going on all the time. But in the last hundred everything has speeded up. The world has changed beyond recognition, and human beings have changed with it". When he talk about the pace of change accelerating between, say, 1870 and 1970 we can only be talking about technology and culture. Steam trains and women’s suffrage automatically give rise to psychic teenagers. Evolution is a metaphor for social change.

The Tomorrow People call everyone else "Saps". It is meant to be short for Homo Sapiens. Homo Sapiens is a perfectly cromulent bit of scientific jargon, distinguishing modern humans from ancestors such as Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus. I knew all about dinosaurs although my school was still relatively reticent about teaching evolution. But "Homo Sapiens" was a sci-fi word, a TV word, a Tomorrow People word. To me it will always have connotations of stupid, obsolete, boring and dull. It means Straight and Mundane and most particularly Muggle. There is an unexplored element of class snobbery here; even of racism. The Tomorrow People are better than the Saps because of what they are. Carol, Steven and John all speak BBC English: Kenny, admittedly, has a rather cute, Artful-Dodger style cockney accent. But the human bad guys are uniformly lower-class. The fairground barker who is in league with the alien conman in the Vanishing Earth sound like Del-Boy. Ginge and Lefty, the bike riding henchmen in the first story who become allies for the rest of the season, talk entirely in stage cockney aphorisms. ("Don't come the old fuzz bit with me mat, all I done was chat up a bird.") Alien bad guys, on the other hand, talk posh.

The Tomorrow People all have the same powers as each other. (The X-Men go in for a kind of genetic lottery which can result in growing wings, turning into a block of ice or shooting death rays from your eyes.) On one occasion their power set is described as the Three Ts, which is presumably meant to recall the old joke about the 3 R being Reading, Riting and Rithmatic. Telepathy, Teleportation and Telekinesis would have been fun powers to have. I wonder how many idle minutes I spent staring out of the windows of maths classrooms wishing I could Jaunt to the swimming pool or use TK to make all the pencils fall out of the cupboard as the teacher walks past? But the Tomorrow People rarely have much fun with their abilities.

Telepathy is a way of keeping in touch: a useful plot device when the characters are split up between, London, Clacton and an alien space ship in the far future; but quite a handicap for a writer trying to produce tension and jeopardy. Before Episode One is over, Jedikiah has strapped something called a Silencer to Steven's forehead to switch off his TP. The Medusa in the second story is a size changing alien psychic watchdog that removes the telepathic powers of anyone near it. 

Teleportation is mainly a way to get our heroes in and out of locations without the need for any tedious transitions. It's always called Jaunting, which the novel acknowledges is lifted from Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. There are a couple of scenes in Episode Two where the biker henchmen try to run our heroes down, and are left looking very silly and very wet when they teleport out of the way at the right moment. 

The first episode flirts with the idea that Kenny-the-youngest is the only one with Telekinesis. Carol tells him off for moving objects with his mind for fun, and warns him not to do it in school. It is briefly implied that he also has some sort of Psychometry and other “special gifts”. This would have been a good narrative idea, since it would have justified putting the character who is most consistently coded as a "kid" in jeopardy. But Kenny's uniqueness is forgotten by the end of the first story. His special power turns out to be being left in the Lab when the others go on adventures; and to be written out at the end of the first season.

The cast of Rentaghost have a great deal more fun disappearing and reappearing in unlikely and surprising places than the Tomorrow People do. The first episode ends with a stooge being taken to hospital because he's got a birdcage teleported onto his head. Being dead is quite a lot like being a Tomorrow Person, come to think of it: it gets you some new friends and some cool powers, but you have to keep it a secret from the silly still-alive people. The Medusa is not a great deal more convincing than the pantomime horse.

(continues)

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All Our Yesterdays

--There must be a word for it… the thing that lets you know time is happening. Is there a word?

--Change.

--I was afraid of that.

Sandman

I am going to write about the first science fiction TV show I ever truly loved.

No. Not that one.

Monday 28 April 1973. Around 5pm. I don't know how I came to be watching ITV.

We weren't one of those houses where ITV was prohibited. My parents rarely prohibited anything. I watched ITV often enough to have favourite adverts, to own a model Smash Martian, to desire the Klondike Pete free gifts in packets of Golden Nuggets. But we were certainly a BBC One family: ITV programmes were "on the other side".

We rigorously divided TV programmes into the ones we "watched" and the ones we "didn't watch", in the same way that there were magazines and comics that we "took" and ones that we didn't "take". A television programme was a weekly appointment, to be broken only reluctantly. ("The school concert is on Thursday evening" "Oh, that means we will have to miss the Six Million Dollar Man.") Some of the things we "didn't watch" were, if not forbidden, at any rate, strongly discouraged. We "didn't watch" anything with guns in it. We didn't even watch Dad's Army, because war is not funny and some of Daddy's friends were killed in it. But most of the things we "didn't watch" just happened not to have made it on to our list of weekly appointments. Mummy must have been one of the few middle-aged ladies who "didn't watch" Coronation Street, although she did sometimes watch Crossroads.

I am quite certain that the first Doctor Who story I "watched" was Carnival of Monsters. It may not have been the first episode I ever saw; but after Carnival of Monsters, Doctor Who became a weekly appointment, as much a part of the structure of my life as Sunday School or Boys Brigade.

I was about to say "I never missed an episode"'; but for a particular reason that turns out not to be true.

I think I may have been off school for some reason. We were slightly more inclined to watch ITV on non-school day, if only because they had slightly more, and slightly more interesting, day time schedules than the BBC. BBC stopped altogether after lunch, or else flipped to educational programmes or "something for our viewers in Wales". Maybe I was freer than usual to select channels than I would have been on a normal day. Jackonory was doing an uninspiring Helen Cresswell story that week, so maybe I simply "switched over". 

To the other side.

I think I was probably off sick. If I hear the theme music I can taste Lucozade and the series is suffused with a prevailing sense of the colour orange. There was an orange visual effect when the characters teleported; an orange light in their secret base; the main character's body glowed orange at the end of the pre-credit sequence. But of course, I would have been watching in black and white. These were the years when the Clangers and Bagpuss were still grey.

A boy in school uniform -- a teenager, much older than me, although he now comes across as embarrassingly pre-pubescent -- is walking through a market. A weird, sprite-like Artful Dodger is observing him from Tower Bridge. Somewhere, in a space ship or a TARDIS or a secret base, lit with what appears to be a lava lamp, older children are also watching him. They talk about the noise he is making, even though he is some miles away from them. Suddenly, the fashion of his countenance is altered: the picture shifts to negative, and the frame freezes. Colour negative was a popular special effect in those days: the Jackson Five could rarely get to the end of a song without at least one of them flaring into a strange reverse filter view. Strange music kicks in. It owes something to the Doctor Who theme: it has an endless beat rather than a melody; but it sounds more disco than electronic. Bom-bom ba-ba-ba-bom. Bom-Bom ba-ba-ba-Bom. A few years later, Dudley Simpson would compose the mighty heroic Blakes' Seven march. Neon lettering: and a title, more Biblical than science fictional.  

"The Slaves of Jedikiah."

For the next two years, The Tomorrow People was my secret vice. No-one talked about it in the playground. We didn't "take" TV Times or Look-In, so I never saw it mentioned in print. It was on at the same time as Blue Peter, and skipping Blue Peter felt a bit like opting out of Sunday School. I remember a girl in my class, Helen, admitting that she watched it some time during the second series. (I can picture her, on the wooden steps outside Miss Beale's prefab classroom. She had very bad eczema on her face.) I felt pleased that someone else shared the thing I loved, but also ashamed, as if someone else had discovered a slightly embarrassing secret. 

And anyway: John, Carol, Steven and Kenny had been my special friends.

There was a tie-in novelisation. It had pictures of my friends on the cover, so they continued to exist when the show was off-air. It turns out to have been a write-up of a rejected pilot episode, and includes back-story that was omitted (and somewhat contradicted) in the TV show. I only found out about the book because it was plugged on Magpie. Magpie was Blue Peter for kids with lower-class accents: I must have been going through a rebellious phase. 

I got a copy of the book for my -- dear god -- eighth birthday.

And suddenly everything slips into place.

We have talked, possibly more than is healthy, about Spider-Man: specifically about the 1970s British reprints of Spider-Man. My grandfather brought me a copy of Spider-Man Comics Weekly Issue Five out of the blue, one Saturday afternoon. He generally brought a small present, some chocolate or a comic or a little pocket money, when he came to tea. It contained a reprint of the first Ditko/Lee Mysterio story (Amazing Spider-Man #13) along with some early Kirby Thor, and I was smitten. 

But we have not talked as much about The Wombles, a series of children's books, an animated TV show and then a novelty pop group. (What is the British equivalent of bubblegum pop, do you think? Gobstopper Pop? Sherbet Dib Dab Rock and Roll?) But my primary-school bedroom was as much a shrine to Uncle Bulgaria and Orinoco as it was to Spider-Man and Doctor Who. Posters, badges, tiny figurines, and, ironically, the wrappers of Womble chocolate bars... I tried to create a replica of the Wombles burrow out of cardboard and cartridge paper. That went about as well as you'd think. 

I said I was given that copy of the first Tomorrow People paperback for my eight birthday. But I have suddenly remembered that it was specifically given to me by my father. I am sure that my parents colluded on all the other entirely forgotten presents I got that year; but the book was definitely said to have come from Daddy: because Daddy was in hospital at the time and therefore not at home on my big day. He had rheumatoid arthritis which impeded his mobility and often made him very ill indeed. Modern disease modifying drugs didn't exist then, so there were only steroids. He died in 1980 when I was 15.

Now, I know that Daddy went into hospital for the first time in May 1973 because -- and I am deeply ashamed that I recall this fact -- I missed the entirety of The Green Death because we had to visit him on Saturday afternoons. He was in a big teaching hospital in central London: the trek by train to see him became part of the structure of my childhood: part chore, part outing. We were usually allowed some sort of sweet treat in a cafe on the way, and sometimes even got to stop off in a big London shop or one of the museums. When you are seven you do not question this stuff: Daddy is sometimes around and sometimes not around; when he is not around, what you do on Saturday is go and visit him. 

"The one with the Maggots" is one of the ones which people who are not specially Doctor Who fans remember; but it has always been filed in my head as "the one I missed".

But this, unfortunately, generates a very clear chronology:

27 January, 1973: I watch Doctor Who for the first time.

5 Feb, 1973: I watch the Wombles for the first time.

10 March 1973: I read Spider-Man for the first time

30 April 1973: I watch the Tomorrow People for the first time.

19 May 1973: I miss the Green Death

11 July 1973: My eighth birthday.

We make fun of the Baby Boomers because they think that the popular music which was in the charts when they were teenagers is the best popular music; and who expect today's teenagers to agree with them. But in fairness, if you were born in 1950 then you really did turn thirteen during the heyday of the Beatles. so the popular music of your teenaged years really was some of the best there has ever been. The day of my thirteenth birthday You're The One That I Want by John Travolta and Olivia Newton John was number one in the UK charts. (The Smurf Song was number two.) But I genuinely did live through the golden age of children's television.

("Doesn't everyone think that their country's poets are the wisest, their nation's soldiers are the bravest, and their homeland's women are the most beautiful?" 

"Yes: but in England it's true.")

I know I have said before that the crucial year was 1978: Star Wars, Tom Baker, Dungeons and Dragons and not entirely un-coincidentally, the BBC television Shakespeare.  

But here I am: obsessing about TV and comic books that I encountered in a twelve-week period between my seventh and eighth birthdays. February 1973 to April 1973. 

And almost immediately afterwards, everything else started to go to shit.

Last month, when the news started to come through from the Ukraine, and people started to talk, admittedly not very seriously, about the possibility of nuclear war, I experienced a memory of a memory of the 1980s: Threads and the Day After and the War Game and Protect and Survive. The years when all the grown-ups talked as if our annihilation in a nuclear fireball was a foregone conclusion.

I think we underestimate the effect that CND and Greenham Common and the Peace Movement had on my generation. We lived the first maybe twenty years of our lives in a state of low-level nihilism. The world was almost definitely going to end and there was almost definitely nothing we could do about it. Mrs Thatcher was keeping unemployment artificially high as part of an (entirely successful) plot to de-power the Trades Unions and destroy the Labour Party. So even if the human race somehow survived, there were never again going to be any actual jobs for us to do. If we were going to be unemployed anyway, we felt we might as well spend out time playing Dungeons & Dragons and studying English Literature. That nihilism fed into Punk, and 2000AD and the comic-book revival, I suppose. 

I see now that this is why my life has been that of a very happy but very unsuccessful drifter. Something in my head still tells me that I was not really meant to be here. This time line was not meant to happen. I am walking down a road that we were promised would never exist. No wonder we are all a little directionless.

But the slight, the very slight, possibility that Mr Putin might make the whole thing kick off again, brought those feelings back. And the thought that perhaps I and everyone else in the world might die the week after next triggered, at the back of my mind, just below the level of perception, a strange thought.

"What would you do if you knew you only had four minutes to live?"

"Re-read Winnie-the-Pooh. Obviously."

I have tried to articulate this before. I think that certain books function in our lives as pseudo-places: as symbols of or replacements for home. I think that reading takes on an almost religious -- am I allowed to say sacramental? -- aspect. In some non-rational space, The Hundred Acre Wood is where I am from. So if I am going to die, that is the place I want to go back to.

Moorcock was right on the money when he called Lord of the Rings Epic Pooh. I could build a theology, if I wanted to. A.A. Milne's forest is pretty obviously an image of Eden or Innocence or the Earthly Paradise, so in longing for pooh sticks and honey I am really longing for God, which is all any human being ever longs for. (Have you noticed how all my essays link up if you wait long enough?)

But I could just as easily make a psychological explanation. A great man once said that there was a place he could go when he felt low, when he felt blue: and it was his mind. The imaginary happy places are just symbols for that internal place. Strawberry Fields forever. 

This is why I cannot help feeling a certain amount of sympathy for Harry Potter fans. Of course, the books are a load of rubbish: but then, they always were. But that's really not the point. In the cold light of day, Doctor Who is probably a load of rubbish, and the Tomorrow People certainly is. But Hogwarts occupies a special place in the imaginative life of anyone born in or around 1986. If you turned eleven the same year Harry did, then Hogwarts is where you spent you childhood. It is your home, or your image of home, or your symbol of heaven. The happy place. Part of a network of shared meaning that you are enmeshed in.

Maybe imaginary places should not take on that kind of importance in our lives: but they do. I have never really understood why ball games can seem important to adults: how the state of English Cricket can be the subject of a serious leading article in a broadsheet newspaper; how two young men can come to blows over the colour of a shirt. But clearly sport does have that kind of importance in the lives of very many people. Geek culture matters in a way that mainstream culture simply doesn't. 

Oh, we may read proper books. We probably agree that the grown up books are better. God knows I would never defend Stan Lee as a writer. I am at this very moment trying to re-educate myself about poetry. Some of it I enjoy. Some of it, not so much. But there is no danger that I will start to define myself as a Wilfred Owen fan, or display a small collection of A.E Houseman action figurines on my shelves.

Good books are what we read. The Tomorrow People and Harry Potter is who we are.

We can't rewrite our own history. We can't pretend that Star Trek is just a TV show, that Winnie-the-Pooh is just a fairy tale, that Harry Potter is just a book. Maybe we should have grown past them, but we haven't. 

It may be that a particular writer's political views are so objectionable that their books can no longer be read, no longer distributed, no longer even thought about. It may be that some people must be exiled from their imaginary homeland; it may be that an angel with a fiery sword will have to be installed by the entrance of Platform 9 3/4. But before we send out the eviction notice, let's be quite sure that we understand what we are asking them to give up.

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Happy Clappy, Joy, Joy (2)

Once in a stately passion I cried with desperate grief
'Oh Lord, my heart is black with guile, of sinners I am chief'
Then stooped my guardian angel and whispered from behind
'Vanity my little man, you're nothing of the kind'

In the Screwtape Letters, C.S Lewis famously depicts a devil trying and failing to tempt a Christian convert to turn away from his faith. 

Lewis really believed in the Devil: but I don't think he really believed in Screwtape. I don't think he thought that actual spiritual beings literally tried to persuade young men not to go on nice country walks (because real innocent pleasures would make them less inclined to waste time with their vulgar and snobby friends). I don't think he literally believed that bad angels corresponded with one another about whether it would be better to direct a particular young man towards extreme pacifism or extreme patriotism (because zealous attachment to any secular cause is likely to impede simple day-to-day obedience to God). I don't think that many theologians, even conservative ones, visualise Satan in those terms. Screwtape is a literary device, allowing Lewis to talk wittily and delightfully about the psychology of sin.

Lewis didn't think that he was clever enough or pious enough to write a mirror Screwtape from the angel's point of view. But in Surprised by Joy he visualises a personal God intervening directly to secure the conversion of a particular human being. 

Of course he really believes in God. But does he really believe in the God of Surprised by Joy? 

Lewis visualises God as an adversary or an opponent, and he describes the final stages of his conversion as a series of chess moves, culminating in Check (when he started to believe that there was a god) and Checkmate (when he accepted that the God of philosophy was the same as the God of religion).

"My Adversary began to make his final moves...The first Move annihilated what remained of the New Look...The next Move was intellectual and consolidated the first Move...God closed in on me....My adversary waived the point..."

Lewis said that medieval allegory had been a way of representing very subtle psychological states in vivid and concrete terms. The single moment at which a man falls in love might be portrayed as a hero creeping over the wall of a garden and stealing a rose; a second's hesitation between slapping your enemy and turning the other cheek, as a jousting tournament between two champions called Meekness and Wrath. "How a clever man kept searching for final and clinching proofs of the non-existence of God, realised there weren't any, and became a believer" can certainly be imagined as "God forcing a man's chess king into checkmate." Other people have depicted the same experience as a journey, a voyage, or a quest. The experience suggests the metaphor: but your choice of metaphor must affect how you describe the experience. It might even inform which events you think come into the story and which have nothing to do with it. 

Is Lewis using a teaching-metaphor to help us see how finding a particular book of fairy tales on a particular day; deciding to re-read a particular Greek tragedy when he wasn't particularly studying it; and coming across a complicated argument about perception in an obscure philosophical text book all led up to the moment when he had to admit that God was God? Or does he really think that God was specially active in those particular events?

If you believe in God, then it is not at all unreasonable to think in terms of God intending to convert C.S Lewis. Lewis talks interestingly about the idea of Special Providence in his book on Miracles. Undoubtedly very many people were praying on D-Day; and a lot of people think that the weather on June 6th was so perfect for the Allied plan that it must have been directly caused by God. Well, yes, says Lewis; but only in so far as every other bit of weather, like every other event in the universe, is directly caused by God. We just happen to be able to see it a little bit more clearly at that point. He applies a similar line of thought to the actual Miracles of Jesus: in one sense Jesus turning water into wine at Cana is no more miraculous than God turning water into wine every day in every vineyard in France.

Lewis certainly says that finding a second-hand copy of George MacDonald's Phantastes at a particular station book shop on a particular day was at one level a piece of random good luck or good fortune, and at another the result of a "superabundance of mercy". He came to see it as a crucial move in the divine game, putting him into Check for the first time. Devin Brown in his biography presses the point rather harder than Lewis himself does. Such a spiritually significant find could not have been a matter of mere chance:

"Did Jack happen on the book by hazard on that frosty March evening in 1916, as he claimed in his letter to Arthur...Looking back the adult Lewis suggest that this event in his life was more like part of the careful strategy of a chess player than a random accident....Who put the book in his way and in doing so put Jack's plan to be a strict materialist in check? Not chance or hazard, as Jack first thought, but a strategic opponent whose every move was made with intention -- the intention to help and avail."

I remember reading about a very old man in the 1970s who displayed his unused ticket for the Titanic in his home, alongside a Bible quote about God rescuing people from the storm. Good for him: I am sure that is what missing the boat must have felt like. But that kind of implies that the thousand people who caught Titanic were directly drowned by God. Which might be true. If you believe in God, you have to say that at some level it is true. But unless all the victims were noticeably evil and all the survivors were noticeably saintly, you have to file it under Inscrutable.

Was Lewis's finding Phantastes a special kind of event: or should we say that God decides every piece of reading matter on every train journey? Was it part of the Divine Plan that I should pick up a copy of Private Eye before my day trip to Bath Spa? If the truest biography of C.S Lewis is nothing more or less than an account of how God checkmated him, does it follow that a true biography of Isembard Kingdom Brunell or Gracie Fields or Zayn Malik would tell the (doubtless equally fascinating) story of how they (so far as I know) evaded God's gambits and stalemated him? 

Or is C.S Lewis a special case? Not everyone is told by a burning bush that they have to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt. Not everyone gets approached by the Angel Gabriel and asked to become the Mother of God. So perhaps not everyone finds a copy of a Victorian fantasy novel on a bookstall which forces them to understand the Hegelian Absolute in terms of a personal Deity. Should we perhaps take an instrumental view of Lewis's conversion: God specially wanted him, because he specially wanted there to be some intellectual rigorous Thought For the Day broadcasts on the Wartime Home Service.

Some evangelicals really do think this way. I can recall being told that God had arranged grants and bursaries for foreign students to study in the UK in order that the Christian Union should get a shot at converting them -- because they were by definition going to be the leaders and captains of industry in their own countries when they got home.

I do wonder whether Devin Brown, and indeed Douglas Gresham, are inclined to see Lewis in this way: not as an important Christian intellectual, but as a full-on Prophet. Certainly Brown's biography is inclined to over-praise the subject. The Inklings produced "some of the best writing of the century -- some would say of any century." During the Second World War his radio broadcasts made Lewis's "the most widely recognised voice after Churchill's". (Really? More widely recognised than Uncle Mac, Arthur Askey, Vera Lynne, Tommy Handley, Lord Haw-Haw?). If Lewis really was this important, and if he was really so determined not to be converted, then we can see why God kept dropping books of poetry into his lap at opportune moments.We might have to reimagine Surprised by Joy as a retelling of the book of Jonah, with a copy of Space, Time and Deity standing in for the gigantic fish.

I don't buy it as a piece of theology. I think "God arranged for me to find a copy of Phantastes in a second hand bookshop, and thus put me in spiritual Check" has to be taken to mean "In retrospect, reading this book was a crucial moment in my journey to faith." Lewis might have said that it was like crossing a bridge, or like a light coming on, or like scales falling from his eyes. But he chose to say it was like a devastatingly clever move in an intellectual game. 

Lewis was an apologist: he is quite open about the fact that he sometimes selects arguments because they give him a tactical advantage over his opponent. He is very aware that the centrality of Joy in his book opens him up to the charge that his faith is a matter of wish fulfilment. So he choses to emphasise that, from an intellectual standpoint, he did not want to believe in God, and worked very hard to avoid doing so.

I very much enjoy Ian Mills and Laura Robinson's podcast about New Testament scholarship. I particularly enjoyed the one about Wrede's interpretation of Mark's Gospel. (Wrede came up with the theory of the Secret Messiah, but that's not important right now.) They said that hardly any modern critic would fully accept Wrede's theory. But, they said, it was still a landmark in scholarship, because it moved the question on from "Why did it happen that way?" to "Why did Saint Mark choose to tell it that way?"

"Why did C.S. Lewis's conversion happen this way?" is a perfectly good question. "Why did C.S Lewis choose to tell the story of his conversion in this way?" is one we ought to be prepared to ask. 

Lewis married a lady named Joy. And Brown points out that the ceremony to welcome a new Fellow to the Magdalene college involved all the other academics shaking hands with him and saying "I wish you joy". Of course they didn't mean joy in the same sense, but it's a pleasing connection. Joy is what Lewis was surprised by; Joy is what the story of his life is about.

Let's take him at his word. He experienced Joy through his brother's toy garden, and through a few lines of Longfellow and the title of an opera by Wagner, and then through George MacDonald and William Morris and lots of poets we probably have not heard of. He did not exactly say "Because I wish for there to be a God, God must exist." But he did find that the experience of Joy sent him down a path that led him to believe that there was a Mind behind the universe. The existence of Joy was powerful evidence that God existed: at any rate, that human beings were not "just" clouds of atoms. 

But couldn't the aesthetic experience have led him in a quite different direction? Might someone else not have argued like this: 

"I have an experience that I might call Joy, or transcendence, or merely Spirituality. This Transcendence or Spirituality is the core of religion: the most real thing there is. Some people experience it when they sit very quietly and respect everyone in the room; other people experience it when they sit cross-legged and recite a mantra; I experienced it through my big brother's miniature garden. I think that when you pay attention to it, you are paying attention to the most important thing in the universe. And I think that if you do attend to it, and attend to other people who are attending to it, you will become better and happier people, and the world would become a better and happier place. In our tradition, we call it God. Our religious mythology is a way of talking about that Transcendence: of making maps of the God territory. Other people might well call it something else. Some of us think that when we are experiencing the God/Joy/Spirit thing, we are actually in touch with something outside of the normal world of Time and Space. Some people think we are talking about something inside ourselves. Some people don't think it matters."

I think that this is how many Quakers and Hindus would argue; I think it is probably what Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung believed. It may be the kind of thing that the Bishop of Woolworths had in mind when he said that God was within us rather than outside us. 

Lewis says that he experienced Joy. And he says that Joy was a longing for something outside the universe -- and can therefore be taken as evidence that there must be an outside for humans to long for. Is a biographer not entitled to ask "Was the experience really what he said it was? And is Lewis's understanding of the experience the only way in which that experience can be understood?"

The fictional student at the end of Shadowlands tells Jack that he has read about being in love, but hasn't ever really been in love, so doesn't have the personal experience. The rather corny implication is that until Lewis met Joy Davidman, the expert in love poetry had never experienced the thing itself. Lewis never said "We read to know that we are not alone" (that's a line from the film) but the real Lewis certainly drew a distinction between intellectual knowledge and first hand experience. 

Douglas Gresham, understandably, doesn't like it when people who never knew his step-father purport to be experts in his life. His complaint about even factually accurate works of scholarship is that "Jack is not in them". Devin Brown, says that "If you are looking for Lewis, the best place to find him is at the Kilns" --- the cottage he lived in for thirty years, which is now a Christian retreat centre. 

"Everyone I have talked to who has visited has found that a genuine sense of Lewis fills the rooms and the lovely garden as well."

"A genuine sense of Lewis." Of course, one can feel someone's presence in a building, particularly if it is laid out more or less as they left it. Everyone who visits the terrible annex near the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam is deeply moved. I myself have written about visiting 151 Menlove Avenue in Liverpool. It was certainly possible to imagine John Lennon in that tiny bedroom, fantasising about the Bridget Bardot poster on the ceiling and listening to the Goon Show on an old-fashioned radio. Imagining him in that way made me feel closer to the man who wrote all those great songs. But was I in any real sense, close to John Lennon? Could I honestly say that Lennon was in some way present in that very ordinary little bedroom? 

People go on pilgrimages: sometimes because they think that touching a thing which a holy person has touched has supernatural powers; but often because seeing the river Jordan or lake Galilee helps them imagine Jesus as he was in his earthly life. And "imagining Jesus" brings them closer to Jesus in a spiritual sense, or feels as if it does. It may even spark joy. So of course you might imagine or feel or get a sense of the presence of C.S Lewis when sitting on his old pew or sleeping in his old bedroom. But is this imaginative buzz spiritually significant? Some Muslims, not illogically, think that venerating places where Mohammed happens to have lived comes close to idolatry and have actually destroyed some of the ancient sites associated with him.

Lewis talks about encountering the personalities of dead historical figures by reading books about them. There are historical figures who we know to be real, but who we don't have any sense of as human beings: people like Henry II and Alexander the Great. But there are also fictional people who we know to have been made up, who we nevertheless feel that we have got to know personally: people like David Copperfield and Hamlet. But there are only three people of whom we feel we have both knowledge-of and knowledge-by-acquaintance: Doctor Johnson, Socrates and the historical Jesus. We feel we know them because of the way Boswell, Plato and St Mark wrote about them.

Those of us who are interested in C.S Lewis would very much like Douglas Gresham to play the role of Boswell: to take up his pen and write down everything that he remembered about him. Not what a holy man he was an how great a writer he was: we kind of take that for granted. But the trivial information which is what we call a personality: what he said that morning when he stubbed his toe on the corner of his bed; that funny joke that Warnie made that Jack didn't quite get; the conversation he had with the postman who kept bringing letters to the wrong house. Lewis, after all, said that the essence of a place, real or imaginary, is in its atmosphere: the cumulative effect of lots of tiny details. The Londoness of London and the Donegality of Donegal. 

And that, to me, is what is left out of these hagiographical books. Any sense of the Lewisness of Lewis. 

I don't think that story is going to be told. I think that Lewis the writer and thinker; Lewis the witty poet who could put a difficult idea just so; Lewis the insufferable old Tory and Lewis the pedantic tutor is going to vanish. Some hundreds of people claim to have had posthumous visions of Our Lady, and zillions of people pray to her every day. But the first century teenager with a particular colour of hair and a particular shoe size who sang particular lullabies and baked a particular kind of challah is entirely lost to history.

 

Theologically, that is as it should be. But I wish we could rescue the C.S Lewis of history from the incense of sanctification before it is too late.

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Owed To Joy (1)

When C.S Lewis was a pupil at one of the many very nasty prep schools that were dotted around England in the Edwardian era he started to take religion seriously. He started to say his prayers and read his bible and obey his conscience. But he soon gave it up and became a schoolboy skeptic. He was, he said, "In that state of mind in which a boy thinks it extremely telling to call God Jahveh and Jesus Yeshua".

There were two reasons, he says, for his loss of faith. He was studying the Greek and Roman classics at school, and becoming fascinated with Norse mythology on his own time. All his tutors and peers took it absolutely for granted that Zeus and Thor were at best pretty stories made up by poets or at worst wicked deceptions forced on the credulous by priests. So why he asked, should it just so happen that, while all the other gods were rubbish, that God worshipped by white English people was the literal truth?

The second reason was this: Young Lewis understood that words without thoughts never to heaven go: so he tried, very hard, to concentrate on his prayers; to believe what he was saying; and not to let his mind wander. This meant that praying could take hours and hours: every time he got to the Amen, a little voice would tell him that he hadn't been doing it properly and ought to start again.

A.N Wilson -- in what with all its flaws is still the only grown-up biography of C.S Lewis -- is inclined to believe the first explanation but not the second. The first is the kind of thing that might occur to a very clever school boy; the second is too much the kind of thing that a middle aged moralist might project back into his boyhood.

Devin Brown does not have much time for that kind of skepticism. His book, A Life Observed is subtitled a Spiritual Biography of C.S Lewis. It carries a recommendation and an introduction by no less a person than Douglas Gresham.

"There is a kind of biography that claims to understand Lewis's life better than Lewis himself did" writes Brown "There is a kind of biography that looks at what Lewis tells us in his autobiography and, following the biographer's own set of presuppositions, claims to understand Lewis's life in a way that Lewis himself could not. This is not that kind of biography."

and again:

"Before leaving this stage in Lewis's life we might again look, as we did earlier, at a biographer who claims to know Lewis better than he knew himself.... As we noted earlier, there is a type of biography that takes the details Lewis gives us about his own life, and using a secular lens, claims to be able to see through them to what really lies behind them in a way that Lewis himself could not. There is a type of biography that sees this practice as its proper foundation and purpose. This is not that kind of biography."

So: the right kind of biographer is one who leaves his presuppositions at the door, and presents value-free facts about his subject without skepticism or interpretation. This sounds like what C.S Lewis might have called dryasdust scholarship: the kind of thing which tells you that a biscuit tin is a container for cookies (p21) and that when Lewis talks about queuing in rationing-era England, he means waiting in a line (p118). But Devin Brown does not really approve of that kind of biography either:

"There is a kind of C.S Lewis biography which is lengthy and definitive. In it, readers find our when Lewis's great great grand-father was born and what Richard Lewis, for that was his name, did for a living. This is not that kind of biography."

He was born in 1775 and was a farmer. His son Joseph was a methodist minister, and his son Richard was a boiler maker. Lewis's own father, Albert, was a lawyer. It's not that hard.

Douglas Gresham in his introduction says that books of that kind are too dry:

"The pages crackle with facts, faces, places, dates and history. Some of them are very good books about Jack, but -- here's the rub -- Jack is not in them."

We will come back to what it means for a person to be "in" a book. 

So, in one sense a biography should not really be interested in the authors life at all. What we should really be interested in is the subject's real and ongoing existence, in heaven (or, presumably, and depending who you are writing about, in hell):

"This book is different" writes Douglas again "It is the story of Jack's real and true life -- not the mere flash of the firefly in the infinite darkness of time that is our momentary life in this world, but the one he left this world to begin -- and how he came to attain it."

"What Winston Churchill is doing in Heaven" or "How John Lennon is getting on in Purgatory" would be rather odd books. I suppose you could fill several volumes with the officially recognised activities of the Virgin Mary in the millennia since her Assumption. One of the four most important biographers in human history said that if he included everything that his Subject did, the whole world could not contain all the books that would be written. But for Brown and Gresham writing about the subject's real, spiritual life seems simply to mean writing about how the subject's heavenly existence intersected with their material one.

"My goal" (writes Brown) "is to focus closely on the story of Lewis's spiritual journey and his search for the object of that mysterious longing that he called Joy."

So: the best kind of biography is the spiritual biography, the one which pays attention to the subject's faith and inner life and ignores nearly everything else. Very conveniently, C.S Lewis has already written this kind of autobiography: Surprised by Joy. 

The thrust of Lewis's book is that he came to faith through a highly subjective experience which he calls Joy. Brown glosses this as: "an unsatisfied desire which was more desirable than any other kind of satisfaction" which pointed to "something which hovered just beyond what his consciousness could grasp--- something unattainable but wonderful." 

Lewis doesn't quite say that what he was longing for was straightforwardly God; and he doesn't quite resort to the kind of syllogism sometimes attributed to him by very clever schoolboy skeptics.

The Proof From Joy

Mr C.S Lewis would like God to exist

Therefore, God exists.

But he does indeed say that "in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else". And unless we are writing that sort of biography, we have to take him at his word. 

So a biography of C.S. Lewis can really only be a retelling of Surprised by Joy; and that's what Devin Brown gives us: a pretty uncontroversial summary of the book, with a few sidelong glances into the admittedly obscure Pilgrim's Regress; and a canter through Lewis's post-conversion life -- Inkling, Tolkien, BBC, Narnia, marriage, bereavement.

But Surprised by Joy is a very strange book. A.N Wilson praises it as a piece of unintentional comedy. Lewis sets out to explain how he came back to faith in early middle-age and omits from the book anything which is not relevant to that story. Fair enough. Writing is all about selecting material. No-one tries to put every incident and every fact into their book. (Well, no-one apart from Karl Ove Knausgaard.) But can we take it on trust that Lewis knows what events were relevant to his conversion and which were irrelevant? He says that the endless physical abuse at the hands of a literally psychopathic schoolteacher did him "in the long run...little harm." Surely we are permitted to reply "Says who?" (Can Lewis be unaware that "it never did me any harm" is a shocking cliche in talking about that kind of thing?) He spends a lot of time painting a picture of his eccentric Irish father, and then kills him off in a half a sentence because his death "does not really come into the story which I am telling", to which, again, one feels the need to say "Oh yeah?" Even his experiences in the First World War "have little to do with this story." Really?

A detailed, critical, close-reading of Surprised by Joy from a sympathetic theological perspective would be well worth attempting. In fact, if I knew anything about research grants and footnotes I might have a go at writing it myself. My Masters thesis was called What Chaucer Didn't Write. (It was about spurious additions to the Canterbury Tales: medieval fan-fiction.) "What C.S Lewis Didn't Say" might be a very good title.

We could start by talking about omissions which Lewis himself draws attention to. The thing that happened at Prep school that was even worse than the psychotic beatings. The World War I experiences that are not worth talking about, except as a joke. The enormous emotional episode which everyone (including Brown) assumes has something to do with Mrs Moore, his semi adoptive mother. 

And the demon-possessed man. I think the demon-possessed man is probably quite important.

But we could also spend many a happy hour tracking down all the people he name checks. Maybe John Garth or someone could identify the Irishman called Johnson who would have been a life-long friend if he hadn't died in the trenches? It's an odd approach. Lewis's story, he tells us, is about nothing apart from the experience of Joy, and written for the benefit of strangers who know him only from his books. But he spends a lot of time telling us the names of the dead old men he's not going to tell us about. At times, Surprised By Joy feels more like an Oscar acceptance speech than a spiritual autobiography.

"The worst is that I must leave undescribed many men whom I love and to whom I am deeply in debt: G. H. Stevenson and E. F. Carritt, my tutors, the Fark (but who could paint him anyway?), and five great Magdalen men who enlarged my very idea of what a learned life should be - P. V. M. Benecke, C. C. J. Webb, J. A. Smith, F. E. Brightman, and C. T. Onions."

Another possible title for the book would be Who The Fark?

I'd also want to look up the texts of the many poems Lewis he quotes and alludes to. The Greek quotes and the literary allusions make me suspect that Surprised by Joy is really directed at his academic colleagues, not his thousands of radio-listeners -- unless, I suppose, he is disingenuously presenting an oblique argument from authority to the plebs. I have heard of Trollop, Conan-Doyle and Beatrix Potter, but struggle with Lummuck, Trahern and W.W. Jacobs. After finishing Yeats, Lewis plunged into Maeterlinck and Bergonson, which is nice to know. And what, for goodness sake, is a Votary of the Blue Flower?

One of the key moments in the story is when he is leafing through a volume of Longfellow's poems and accidentally stumbles on the line:

"I heard a voice that cried,

Balder the beautiful

Is dead, is dead——"

Lewis says that the line struck him completely out of context.

"I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it."

"It is safe to say that not many Lewis fans will be moved in the same way that Lewis was by these lines" says Brown, although he thinks they might have been moved by the rallying cry "Narnia and the North!" in the Horse and His Boy in a similar way. 

But I think that I can see what it means to experience a weird stab of joy from a line of poetry you don't understand. If words didn't carry force regardless of context, poetry would be an impossibility. Lin Carter, the disciple and populariser of Bob Howard, includes Robert Browning's Childe Rowland in a 1969 anthology of fantasy stories. The poem, he says, is based on one single line ("Childe Rowland to the dark tower came") from King Lear: "but the line, it seems, haunted Browning as the poem he built out of that nagging ghost has haunted me."

Lewis made a bit of a thing out of not understanding T.S Eliot. I hope someone told him that "like a patient etherised upon a table" strikes some people the way "Balder the Beautiful is dead" struck him. Poetry communicates without being understood, as the fellow says. The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of his face.

Lewis says that it was the phrase, and not the imagery or the argument of the Balder poem which triggered him. Tegner’s Drapa is Longfellow's 1850 translation of an 1820 Swedish poem based on the poetic Edda. It is quite striking: and the fact that it is a translation I think gives it a slightly alien, unearthly air:

They laid him in his ship,

With horse and harness,

As on a funeral pyre.

Odin placed

A ring upon his finger,

And whispered in his ear.

Some time later, he says that the phrase "Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods" set him off on one, even though he had no idea who Siegfried was and what Gotterdamerung meant. But of course, Wagner's epic ends with the cremation of Siegfried and the suicide of Brünnhilde. Isn't it slightly suspicious that Lewis was desperately moved by two isolated lines of poetry both of which came out of poems about funeral pyres? Two poems which both involve rings, and in which the cremation of a dead hero precipitates the end of the gods? 

In the Poetic Edda, Wotan whispers the word "rebirth" into Balder's ear. This seems to signify an endless cycle of death and rebirth. The gods of Asgard will be destroyed in the battle of Ragnorak, but from the the ashes New Gods will arise and the story will start all over again. But for Tegner it means that the new, more cuddly religion of Christianity is going to replace the savagery of the Norse world.

The law of force is dead!

The law of love prevails!

Thor, the thunderer,

Shall rule the earth no more,

No more, with threats,

Challenge the meek Christ.

Lewis was deeply interested in the idea of pagan precursors to Christ; and in the idea that Christianity not only replaced what was evil about paganism, but also preserved what was good in it. This was, indeed, how he resolved the problem that had occurred to that very clever little boy: it wasn't that Christianity happened to be true; and that Balder happened to be false: Balder and John Barleycorn and Osiris were prefigurations of the death and resurrection of Jesus: good dreams. This is why he remarked (to the horror of some evangelicals) that it would probably have been okay, as a Christian, to say a prayer to Apollo the healer at Delphi.

Longfellow's line opened Lewis up to Joy; Joy opened Lewis up to God and then to Christianity. But the lines cone from a poem which contain -- prefigure -- a lot of the idea which would be absolutely central to C.S Lewis is a mature thinker. 

Isn't it at least possible that what affected him was not the lines, but the myth: that he is remembering the intellectual and emotional response to the whole poem and locating those feelings in the first three lines?

Isn't this the sort of thing which, when reading books about the lives of famous dead writers, we have a right to think about? 

Or does even asking the question mark us out as the Wrong Kind of Biographer?

(.....continues.....)

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