The Devil, C.S.Lewis ....
with some hesitation and deviation, or digressions about Carry On Star, Kenneth Williams
Consider this letter from a senior devil - Screwtape - to his trainee, Wormwood. “The real value of the quiet, unobtrusive work which Glubose has been doing for years on this old woman can be gauged by the way in which her belly now dominates her whole life. The woman is in what may be called the ‘All-I-want’ state of mind. All she wants is a cup of tea properly made, or an egg properly boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted. But she never finds any servant or any friend who can do these simple things ‘properly’ - because her ‘properly’ conceals an insatiable demand for the exact, and almost impossible palatal pleasures which she imagines she remembers from the past; a past described by her as ‘the days when you could get good servants’ but known to us as the days when her senses were more easily pleased and she had pleasures of other kinds which made her less dependent on those of the table. Meanwhile the daily disappointment produces daily ill temper….
”
In an earlier letter - brilliant actually, - Lewis/Screwtape urges the younger, junior devil, to get to work increasing the domestic tension between the “patient” and his mother. “When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother’s eye-brows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy - if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption”.
That is a masterly as an analysis of domestic irritation, and the joke at the end is worthy of Jane Austen. But I am priggish enough to find something distasteful in the idea that a loving Redeemer would send a poor old woman to hell because she was fussy about how her boiled eggs were prepared, or damn her son to eternity because he was enraged by her moods. And one assumes - perhaps wrongly - these vignettes drew upon C.S.Lewis’s experience of sharing his life for decades with Mrs Moore at The Kilns, just outside Oxford.
When I was writing my C.S.Lewis book, one of the delightful and unexpected benefits was getting to know Jill Freud.
As a schoolgirl called June Flewett, she had been an evacuee from London and was sent to lodge at Mrs Moore’s house. There were two pipe-smoking bachelors who, as she supposed, were fellow-lodgers, though she noticed that one of them, Jack, was especially tender with Mrs Moore and would sometimes come up behind her and kiss the top of her head. June came to envy Mrs Moore, who, in her recollection was a jolly, chain-smoking Irish woman. She found herself falling in love with the man called Jack.
June was a passionate C.S.Lewis fan, and loved reading The Screwtape Letters, and it was only when she had been lodging for some weeks at the Kilns that she realized that Jack - the lodger/lover of Mrs Moore - what was the relationship? to the schoolgirl mind it was not clear - was none other than her favourite author.
June married the grandson of Sigmund Freud - Clement Freud, whom she called Cle, pronounced Cle. Lewis gave them a double bed as a wedding present, purchased at Heals in the Tottenham Court Road. You would not expect to see Clement Freud and C.S.Lewis in the same sentence. One was a reclusive don , known best as an author of the Narnia stories and as a Christian evangelist, the other as a Liberal Democrat MP who liked the races, was a well-known gastronome, and one of the star of a Radio Show called Just a Minute.
This is a parlour-game, in which each speaker had to speak for Just a Minute on a given subject, without deviation, repetition or hesitation. Sounds easy, but, as many a programme demonstrates, it is not so easy as it sounds. Cle was a highly competitive person and he longed to win this game, which he often did, by speaking slowly and deliberately and piling up epithets. He was not entertaining to listen to, partly because this lugubrious, slow vas unpleasing, and partly because the desire to win was too thrustingly obvious.
His most inspired competitor was the comedian Kenneth Williams, whose flights of fancy, encyclopedic memory for English poetry, range of different voices, all made him one of the best radio voices in history. When Cle invited me to attend recordings of Just a Minute in the BBC Radio Theatre, it was of course Williams I wanted to hear, Williams I wanted to see. Cle introduced us once, and Williams
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