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JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
solved, but has been translated from theological terms to historical
or sociological or psychological terms; and that the arguments for
free will, even after a hundred and fifty years of determinism, are
still persuasive, if not conclusive. I should hasten to add that the
author scrupulously avoids-with one exception-any such specula–
tions. I am talking rather about one reader's reactions to the method
of narration. A thread of destiny runs through it all, but the destiny is
in Lewis' character. Like Oedipus, he is both cursed by forces over
which he has no real control and is at the same time responsible for
what happens to him. But worse, Oedipus finds he has at least
done
something, while Lewis finds, only, zero, trapped, as he was, by
himself. He never even had the illusion of freedom. Again it's all
in James, in Strether's declaration and admonition in the garden in
The Ambassadors:
The affair-I mean the affair of life-couldn't, no doubt, have been
different for me; for it's, at the best, a tin mould, either fluted or
embossed, with ornamental excrecences, or else smooth and dreadfully
plain, into which a helpless jelly, our consciousness, is poured-so that
one "takes" the form, as the great cook says, and is more or less
compactly held by it; one lives in fine, as one can. Still, one has the
illusion of freedom; therefore don't be, like me, without the memory
of that illusion.
The only time the web of destiny for Lewis is broken is when
Professor Schorer speculates that perhaps he would have been dif–
ferent if he had not gone to Yale. This, it seems to me, is placing an
undue and unearned burden on Yale, all its sins on its snobbish old
head. Further, he could have done worse. He could have gone to
Princeton, at that time, as the saying went, "the Southern University
furthest North," and "the Lepidus of the Triumvirate." It is pre–
cisely one of the signal differences between this biography and Ell–
man's great biography of Joyce that Joyce inhabits an "open" universe.
It wouldn't be hard to imagine him becoming, as Bloom does in a
revery, the Pope himself.
If
it was Joyce's fate to write, it was in his
character to be anything. But Lewis inhabited a "closed" universe:
minute by minute, inching, year by year, galloping, to his own doom.
Likewise this is one of the real differences between Joyce's fictional
world and Lewis'. Joyce's world despite the "nightmare of history,"
is "open" and Bloom, as cursed in his way as Lewis was in his, escapes.
But Lewis' characters usually-Arrowsmith and some others excepted–
are either trapped or driven. It is for
this
reason that
in
the
later
