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. Rome Williams about 'Til we have faces by CS Lewis'. We hope you enjoy the episode. Before we get onto 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/backlisted. And I shall now hand over to my colleague Nikki Birch to let you know some, though not all of what's happening there. Yeah, we have a really, really active Patreon community. Thank you very much guys for supporting us. 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Yeah, so head over to our Patreon if you want more weekly book content at patreon.com/backlisted. For those of you who aren't subscribing, don't worry, we are putting out reruns in this feed from our 250 episodes that we've done in the past. So the feed won't be empty and we'll put new introductions on the top of each of those giving you a kind of heads up of what our book club book is going forward. So thank you so much for your support. Please look kindly on my colleagues' use of the phrase book content there. She's died in the world with some key attributes of a producer for which we thank her because otherwise there wouldn't be any backlisted. So please enjoy this episode. Come and see us at the Patreon.com/backlisted. 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-None, novel by the world famous British writer, literary scholar and laytheologian, CS 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 Roman Williams, hello, we have checked and we are allowed to refer to docu Williams as Roman, which we are, which we are truly grateful to. Thank you so much for coming. Dr Williams is a scholar, theologian poet and translator and is 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 good, did they let you choose? Did it? As Baron Williams of Oystermouth, he served as a cross-benture in the House of Lords from 2013 until his retirement in 2020, the same year he stepped down as a master of Mordland College in Cambridge. Dr Williams is the author of over 50 books, including works on St Augustine and Dostoyeski and Handley for us, CS 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 Winif Lewis, the first new translation of the work of Welsh Bard Tallyesson in over a century. In 2021, Culkinet published his collective 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. No, marvellous. Did that note, you used that note throughout your school, though? Rupertously. Rupertly. Quite a lot of ways, 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 as we're retelling of the story of Cupid and Syke, setting 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 Oroel, the ugly possibly disfigured daughter of the King of gloam and Syke's older sister. The first, 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 Syke's offered up as a blood sacrifice by the primitive local priesthood, an eff chain to a mountainside is prey for a shadowy beast. Oroel follows to try and find her remains. Instead, she finds Syke alive, but in an enchanted state believing herself in love with an amorous god, who she's forbidden to see. Oroel persuades Syke, she must confront him, which leads to Syke being cast out, condemned to weep and wander forever, separated from the ones she loves. This serves as further fuel for Oroel's animus against the gods. Although she goes on to become a highly respected queen of gloam, a warrior, a law-giver, an architect, her resentment never abates, and she was availed, 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 Oroel 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, until we have faces, is not the only retelling of the Cupid and Syke myth some of us are familiar with. In fact, it was 40 years ago this year at Scriti-Polite, it's going to sound green gut, so I could say the same on their record Cupid and Syke 85. But this was published when 56. 56. Cupid and Syke 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 afterward, 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's work as opposed to a teenager as a schoolboy. It was in the 60s and a lot of Lewis's works were the kind of thing that an imaginative vicar would give to an inquiring teenager. So I had had to confirm, so I had the books on Miracle and on Prayer and Pain, the Screwtable letters, the Christianity. Oddly enough, I didn't encounter the non-year books until a bit later, although I was a student. But I 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 walls by definition. And I'd picked up from the bookshelf for the place where I was staying. A copy of 'Tool We Have Face' is thinking, 'Never had this time I did.' And I read it going north from New York. I 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? By 23, I think. It's alright. So yes, this magical ten years between the age of light 14 and 25, so when we always say we're wet cement. Yes, yes. For as you may be, 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 cross my radar. And one last question before I hand over to John. Were you aware of Louis's personality and reputation growing up? If outside of reading him, he's 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 had not long been published, edited by his brother. And the sense of somebody with an extraordinary capacious receptive mind, who sort of read almost everything it seemed, and at the same time was producing these very idisyncratic imaginative works for children and adults. I thought, "Well, you know this, there's a mind and a half, but I still think." Yes, John, it's interesting, isn't it? Here we are in 2025. And my sense is that Louis 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 Rowan has 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 theological college, to go and establish a kind of high church parish, you know, in a shipbuilding parish, quite a lot of this happened in the 20s. So they were very, they had been schooled in a very interesting form of Christianity. And Louis was the right man in the right place at the right time, mere Christianity, the screw tape 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 Louis, really, I think consolidated a national reputation as a wartime broadcaster, speaking about basic, ethical questions. And the radio. And the radio. And the radio. And the radio. And 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 Louis himself was as famous as Churchill as someone who would steady, steady the ship on air. Let me ask you then, Rowan, what we have with C.S. Louis 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 Louis 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 are nice men. Quite impressive, right? He drove. Did he have a seat note? Well, I suspect. I mean, he had the equivalent. But yeah, the trouble is he's been corolled. People then read him looking for some of the, what do you call the cultural markers of 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 unilightened about non-majority's 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 for a god-wired homosexuality with much order or wealth as about it. And there's no doubt at all who would have, who is the more liberal one. Well that's interesting as well because his tone often, John, seems, um. reasonable and friendly. Yep. Right. So, 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. Of course, this is so reasonable. So what a vancular chapter. Yes. I think one of the things about his writing is that he is remarkable, his best critical work. To hear Celia in that way that Celia had of putting people down, said, "Oh, your best book is your preface is to paradise lost." But I mean, if you read Milton, Celia and Milton, you can see a lot of the heavy lifting, the understanding of Milton was done. He's a brilliant critic, very clear. He's also a wonderful letter writer. You know, you feel that he was very good at finding the right tone to adopt for whatever he was writing. There's, I might even be you, Rowan, in your book on Narnia, say, he channeled a lot of Edward Wardian children's literature. He nesbit, he knows. Right. When he was telling his Narnia books, they don't read like the screw-take 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 a sort of seen as a sort of a slightly evangelical Christian writer or a children's writer. We don't fully understand the remarkable ability to tell stories in different voices, because 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. You know, it's not the same sky we see now in the Middle Ages. And he didn't have a terribly happy child, he lost his mother when he was quite young. Quite a young, 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. 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? That was 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 arrogant, but he's a tremendous assurance in Lewis. Absolutely. He doesn't sort of suffer fools gladly. 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. He clearly is, he must know that he's, you know, he basically says, "Oh, I mean, I'm going, he downplays his father because I think one of the suggestions which Andrew Wilson makes 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 around reluctant to convert to Christianity would say well it's obviously he's got daddy issues. So there's a kind of, and yet always you'll find, you know, again, you know, he finds scruetope I think is so, you go back to it, it's so fresh. And the grief observed is a remarkable thing. I really admire about Lewis is that he is a cat. He, you can stroke him for a while but you can never own him. Right? 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, Ron, as the author yourself for 50 books, he wouldn't have known what writer's block was. He wrote in order to think, yes. Ron, 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 about Barbaric Kingdom on the Edges of the Hoenistic 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 Syke. 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? In any very, 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 love. So that sense of it being baffling, I have, I have, we'll come on to that. I have some questions. Yes. 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 or I think I understood just enough. I wanted to, I wanted to let it marinate a bit. Yes. And well, I just felt compelled to retrace the story. One last question. Yeah. Honestly, did you like it the first time you read it? I loved it. OK, absolutely loved it. I have had that feeling occasionally when seeing a film, going in, seeing a film, absolutely hating it, thinking about it for three days, going back and watching it again and discovering it. Actually, no, I liked it. That's why I asked. OK, that's really interesting. It's genuinely baffling book. And I think baffling by design. I don't think so. Oh, I think the bafflement that you feel on first reading this book, I think is exactly the emotion that he wants you to feel. That he wants you to feel. Yes. Because I feel this is a book that, with perhaps a bit there in grief of Sir, but this is the deepest book that he, 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, his non-earbox 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 in Azeran and the non-earbox or something really. Yeah, yeah. It's actually quite savage of her. And it's, can I just ask then, before we, we hear you read something for us. Lewis rejected the idea, didn't he, that the non-earbox could be read as direct allegories. Yes, yes. He said it's a means of exploring something rather than recounting it, something. Is that true with, till we have faces as well? Alligorical without being an allegory or not? He's an inquestion, he's starting from an allegorical classical story, but 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. Maligre, yeah. And that's why you turn the pages and you point off to point out, "I, that means that, that means that." Lewis, of course, knew all about allegory. As you say, so he's choosing, he pointed his fingers at you. You made a brilliant point about not about non-ear. The criticism of Lewis is, "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 gave him, suddenly made me pivot quite dramatically to think, that's what he's. It's not. Yes, of course, it's a great moment when you suddenly figure out as a kid that, that Aslan is probably Jesus. But he's not really. You know, it's not that straightforward. It really isn't that straightforward because Aslan is genuinely dangerous threatening wild and unnerving. It strikes me that 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. They're saying, "This is going to be great. This is going to be great." I'm really. What? We've got a really good movie here. We can get brap. And then you send them the second bit and they're saying, "It's in development." I'm sorry. It's staining development. Yeah, the American know. Yeah, yes. They've found the phone that they never renew back. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Well, Rowan, please would you read us a section and then I will borrow your copy and share the. Right. The blurb with this. I talked about the. The vividness of the description. And the early part of the book is about how the decision is made that Siky is going to be a human sacrifice to avert plague and defeated 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 a human sacrifice and it's got to be the princess." And the priest's arrival attended by the temple prostitutes with gilded eye-mashes and false hair and makeup, a very vivid evocation of that. They attend the priest in. The temple girls led the priest into the pillar room, but a chair was set for him and he was helped into it. He was utter 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 all mistrate 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 Ungit 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, Lucius, the fox, throughout this, is some rather poignant, displaced Greek rationalist, almost like an oxfordon transferred to. Some were at least able to see all this nonsense. Exactly. Transferred east of the Caucasus and something BCE, and the fox protests. Master Master, let me speak on to the King. You are not seamasters at 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 sex would talk more since. At the moment to go the victim of this abominable sacrifice would be the accursed, but we could as person in the whole land offered as a punishment, and now it is the best person in the whole land, the perfect victim, married to the goddess of reward, ask him which he means, it can't be both. And Orwell, the narrator says, "If any hope would put out its head within me when the fox began, it was killed." This sort of talk would do no good. And that's a theme that runs through 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 one Herotic problem-solving clarity of the Greek slave who is a lovely man. He's exactly the sort of person he'd want to have around in a crisis. Yet at the critical moments, he understands nothing of what's really going on. That's an interesting point. That's interesting. So he's an emollient. She is or well. The thing that I think did really strike me. I don't know why. Well, perhaps I do know why. Narrated by a woman. Because Louis, 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 law-giver and as I said at the beginning, an architect, a transforming, learns a lot from thee. And yet the crisis, her crisis, is the heart of the book. And it's the kind of strange mystical solution to that crisis. Or is it even a solution? It is what it is that gives the book. It sets the book apart from, as it were, Mary Renault or the people who were writing, or Peter Green who wrote Achilles' his armor. There was quite a lot of that kind of turning historical stuff into novels in the 1950s. Roman, when you were reading there, what struck me was the 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 issue 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, the, 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, he's feeling his way into a particular voice. This is a barbarian in Vettacombs. 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, an emotional resource, and imagine to even to let 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, 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 your language. But may I ask both of you, when you read the, John, is this the first time you wrote this? You hadn't read it before, and Rowan as well, were you terribly familiar with the myth of Cupid and Sykip? You're laughing. I'm laughing because I still haven't got my head around it. Okay, I mean, definitely not. I mean, I think I was vaguely, like most people were vaguely aware that it involved some kind of sacrifice, and quite a lot of weeping, some terrible tasks that Sykip had to do. Cupid not, Cupid slipping into her bed and sleeping with her in the car all the way, but not saying you can't see me. I was very vague, but I had to go back and reread to try and remind myself of what was the myth that was being changed. Yes, likewise. I mean, I'd read the story, I think, because probably it was a teenager, again, I was very interested in Greek mythology. And 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, Sykip and Eros. And the extraordinary demands which Eros makes upon Sykip, including the demand of trust when you can't 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. Sykip has to go through an unmarble 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. Softing out grains of wheat and all of that, these things which come from the original story as ordeals for Sykip. Here they are Orwell, as it were bearing the burden with Sykip, sharing Sykip's journey and lifting the burden from Sykip in some ways as she shares. So, he's Lewis subverting the myth or adapting it. Both, I think he's suddenly adapting it, but adapting it entirely his purposes. This is not just about the Al-Qaeda, but the Al-Qaeda was saying in the Hellenistic period, it's about what you might say now, about the. 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 the writer's book doesn't need to be in the soon afterwards. The full letter is called The Full Love, all of whom are present in this. 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 realise 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, or all manipulates her emotions ruthlessly to try and draw her back into her own orbit. And you see, as the book unfolds, you see that becoming a pattern in other aspects of the narrative. Right, may I borrow your precious copy? Thank you so much. I'm not cheap. I was first editions, I think. This is such a good jacket though. 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, tells us something about who CS Lewis was perceived to be when the book was published. So on the back of this jacket, about this book. CS Lewis has based his novel, 'Til 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. Psychie 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 pull. That's the pull, a whole paragraph telling you the myth. So you're ready, so you're good to go. Then, new paragraph 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.' And on he goes, 'Rohan, 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 are the days. But so what, 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, in his, in his, period of his marriage, at the spot. 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, it's ter頓s like when he tries to get the ink things back together, she is the yoga partner. Of course she is. But of course she is. 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 for putting that in terms I can understand as well. John, talking Charles Williams, both of them, they all like doing, they did not understand what he saw in there. But, but his, his personal reputation and the upheaval in his private life. Yeah, he's coming together. Coming to terms of 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 Scrutite that has given us a very, very sharp, very, oh, 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 more fully, more positively without, without losing the eginus of his, his insights. And without becoming kind of, oh my god, love isn't love great. Isn't erotic love. I've suddenly discovered, you know, the joy of sex in my 60s, within a, you know, this book is, this book is so much not that. that's so much. So much not that, but Rhone 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 passions or romantic passions. Exactly that. I think he's, he's always had that sense that, that the divine is, you know, 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 effort, that is indeed a terrifying thing, is that 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 um, fulfilment, this is necessary to look straight into the heart of whatever scares you or whatever passion is or whatever religion. 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 our identity with all the risks and the pain and the or will character wears a veil, wears a veil. So and she even fantasises about what people might think she looks like even though the reason she wears a veil is her, her shame at her own, 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 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 something 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 our pilot as his plane crashes in plane. That's difficult, I know. Can I try to give something not the same, but a bit like it? Suppose I'm writing a novel. I write. Nere laid down her book, next moment came a knock at the door. For Mary, who's 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 are creator. Between writing the first thought of that sentence and the second, they 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 lung. You're as much alone with him as if you are the only thing he's ever created. When Christ died, he died for you individually, just as much as it would be the only man in the world. And now I get back to my main subject. I can I just say how much I admire the slurry cunning of that enormous digression and then saying at the end, but I must get back to this subject. When you hear that row 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 this is an actual person talking to you. The little conversational touches, I know that sounds difficult. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's all deliberate but also apparently spontaneous, crafting it so that it can sound like somebody sitting on the other side of the pub table. You're inspiring the arm around the shoulder. Yep. And in spite of the the accent of the period, the the Donish tones, nonetheless, the language is absolutely lucid. There's there's not a single word but that's difficult or technical or jargonistic. And and John, we academia as ever and disgracing itself. So so he's pears at Oxford and then Cambridge really didn't like Lewis, did they? No. And I think he, I think it was partly because he was, he was, he was tremendously popular, which is always, that's fatal. The arguments are so vicious because the stakes are so low, because it's because it's 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, of the, you know, silver parts of the 17th, 16th, 17th century. He shouldn't be wasting his time on this. He also, he enjoyed, you know, beer and bear wolf, you know, he enjoyed, he enjoyed his pipe. He was, he was a, and he hated what he called the literary Puritans. He talks about the literary Puritans, which by which we kind of have talking about. He didn't like T.S. Eliot, he didn't like Lewis. He didn't like them either, but he think 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 accompanying from mill Lantern 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're 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 man stood in English Sherry Party, who takes all the compliments for declarations and all the banter for insult. Oh, you were that? That was in the 60s. I was going to say nothing. That's great, isn't it? Yeah, that's, but, A, it's beautifully written and funny. And he's funny. He's funny. He's funny. And that's, 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. Discuss. It works at a number of levels just a minute 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 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 "reeling against the human beings who have a gods are essentially poisonous to humanity, but 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've written with that 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 in the self. And then at the very end, it's as if all that's 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 of the realisation. 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, but actually, of course you were ignorant. Of course you got it wrong. People do get used to it. This is how that works. To be human is to air. It's struck 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 borrow from an Amazon reviewer of Muriel Spark. I wonder if this gentleman ever, and it was a gentleman who's ever heard this podcast because this is carried us through for years now. He said, "Spark does not suffer the lazy reader." 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 better 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 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 was a line 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 Suits Corner with this, but to those final sections in Paradee, so 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. You know, this is not a book to give somebody who's just finished the last battle, even though they were published in the same year. Of course, that's the whole mark of, you know, what we were called, a real writer. You pursue your idea and your muse. And it was sniffed it, there were some sniffing reviews, weren't there? There were, there were patronising reviews, and I think it's absolutely right that the real writer suspects what they're good at. You muster 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, Bob Dylan for you right there. Why 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, "Rone, would you read us a little more?" I think you have another section marked there. I just think it was summer towards the end. We hear Orwell making her, making her case against the gods, and it's a few pages of intense sort of protests. It's like the book of Job, "Mmm, Job, screaming at God." Why have you got me into this? What are you playing at? And what Orwell 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 be better if I'd seen the brute tear her in pieces before my eyes. You still hurt her to make her happy, did you? Why every weedling, smiling cat foot rogue who leures away another man's wife or slave or dog might say the same. Dog now, that's very much of the purpose. "I'll thank you to let me feed my own. It needed no tidbits from your table." Did you ever remember who's the girl? While she was mine, mine, do you not know what the word means? Mine! Your thieves, seduces. That's my wrong. I'll not complain that your blood drinkers and manitors I'm past that enough," said the judge. "It was utter silence. All right, me." 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 onto the mindness of me and something's out of give. I saw well why the gods did not speak to us openly and all that is 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?" "J'ai 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 that is what I found in my reading of this. The whole book, the whole novel transformed by that second section and actually improved. I will be so bold as to say. I felt like the unexpected disruption of the second section made me realise that whoever had been writing the first section had more "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, so they wrong foot you. I know you're a great fan of Ridley Walker. Again, you don't really know what's happening. You can you can even chew it up to a certain point but certain things remain beyond our Ken. 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. Reminded you of this or words to that fact. It reminded me of Jung. That Jung's belief that it was only through self-realisation and it was better to live an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable lie and that it one's goal in life was to move towards a sense of non-artificial self. He's quite similar to Lewis in this book at least. Yeah, up to a point, Lord Copper. Yes. In that, the self-realisation is not so much drawing out kind of given selfhood that's already there as a secret true self. It's a recognition of a whole accumulation of experience about which you have 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 Elizabeth has said, by grace, revelation, somebody else's face has to impact upon you. Yes. And remember in the scene early on where Oral very fleetingly just for an instant sees what psyche sees. Yes, she also sees a face. And she says 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 travel that breaks it over the 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 but that what you've just described is encoded in the structure of the novel. Yeah. It's all you know, John is the here's the question. In that respect, is this a book about books? I think 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 in that it's you know there's a small, she makes a small kind of in book library with nothing not terribly many books in it in the book when she's queen of Rome. 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 there were to be books written about what the world could not contain. The world could not contain them. It's kind of saying that there are you know all books are about this ultimately you know and I think what's fascinating is why why was that not palatable still not palatable? I mean if you were trying to talk as a theologian about I think you're you like this book because there's a theologian it challenges you. Oh yes yes it's not comfortable it's not comfortable it's it's like the book of Joe 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 how they're amazing book yes because it's it's doing what it's or dusty f ski was trying to do in his novels to say I will make you the case for atheism better than u atheists can make it. I will tell you just how absolutely bloody impossible it is to be a religious believer just just you just say you know that's very interesting but the motivation is what he's playful because he comes over as a vancular or or mischievous or iconoclastic or I think there's a there's a degree of of mischief in it but very serious mischief saying just in case you think that we religious believers go round in a kind of cloud of smug certainty smug certainty and god 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 sacrificing caves it's sat yeah and again in case you think that religion is is just as people would like to say these are the spiritual sort of improving and edifying and and wellness inducing well let's go back and look at this lump of stone in the temple Samara and east of the Caucasus with the blood of sacrifice people and animals coagulating all over it and the smell and the dark and I think well you know that that takes you to the image here is a gust in rather than Freud the caves inside which somehow have to be explored and and mapped and illuminated before before you know where you really are your love of Dostoyesky presumably has comes from a similar sense of speaking the weep stuff we would prefer now to speak speaking the the truth that's that's uncomfortable speaking speaking it not just to make things awkward but to say the gospel it's not that life is nicer than you thought the gospel oddly is that life is infinitely worse than you thought but that grace is is greater and that that's a large claim it's a very bold claim a very tough claim well and and you know and I've found this so fast nicely 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 I'm able to cope with such an idiosyncratic Sui generis book you know they they tended to say things just along the lines of well it's a retelling of the myth and for those who like this or something they'll like it so you know and there's a bit of religion in there which is all yeah no no this laughter no this laughter but I mean it feels to me like it's a book that you that you would I mean if you know that somebody's a fan of this book you're going to be more interested in having a conversation with them very much so yes do you meet many people who have fans of this novel quite a few my wife among them well that's great that's great one of the things that helped us in the early days and that's wonderful okay but yes I you're quite right I can I can think of a handful of people who would immediately say yes seriously this until we have faces this thing ever out and 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 we do what's so to say yeah it's time for us to forsake the kingdom of the globe and leave behind the new gods and the old huge thanks to Roman Williams for encouraging and challenging us to join him to upreduce a test Davidson for making us all sound even better thanks test if you want show notes with clips links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the more than 240 we're 240 we've already recorded please visit our website at batlisted.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 batlisted as your bookshop yes batlisted.fm you can also sign up for a new newsletter where we preview each show share our own another guest book recommendations and news about events and giveaways and don't forget our patreon patreon.com/batlisted before we go Roman 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 that why should people here in 2025 with so many distractions pick that book off the 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 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 be 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 you're on thank you Roman 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