I’ve always loved going to the cinema, but it’s getting harder to find films I want to see. When I worked in one myself, I hoped for late-night film discussions with my colleagues and free screenings of indie classics, just like in Grudova’s great novel Children of Paradise. In reality, I sold endless tickets to superhero movies and other children’s fare, warned people that the film they insisted on going into had already been on for forty minutes, and made a lot of bad nachos.
I go to the cinema not just because I enjoy it, but as a demonstration of support. I figure that they won’t make different films if we don’t go, and if we don’t go, we can’t complain about what they make. Recently I saw a film for this reason and responded to it unexpectedly strongly. despite it being by all accounts fairly mediocre. I will start by admitting that Freud’s Last Session is flawed. It’s not a cinematic masterpiece, and you can tell it originated as a stage play. In this it contrasts sharply with the film I saw in the cinema just before it, La Chimera. That had confidence, all lingering beautiful shots of Italy and unfinished dialogue. Freud’s Last Session is largely actors in a room, talking. It’s also very expositional, and I’m sure would be unbearably dull to many. Nevertheless, I had a great time because it was a film for people who are interested in ideas, rather than just action.
The genesis of Freud’s Last Session is intriguing. It started with a simple idea; what if C.S. Lewis had visited Sigmund Freud in London? We know a young Oxford don did visit Freud shortly before his death, but there is no evidence that it was Lewis. This doesn’t matter, the idea exists. What would they have talked about? How would they have debated each other? This hypothetical meeting of minds is not so much a counterfactual, but a mechanism to explore ideas. This imagined meeting was inspired by a book (more on which later), which Mark St. Germain turned into a play, which then became this film. I love that this can still happen, in an age of superhero blockbusters someone can read a book and be inspired to make a creative leap. What if..?
One of my favourite things about art is how it can send you to more art. After watching Freud’s Last Session I immediately turned to books. First I tracked down a second-hand copy of the book that originally inspired the idea that inspired the play that inspired the film, The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand Nicholi. This joint biography started its life as a lecture series about Freud at Harvard University. Finding his students were half religious and half atheist, Nicholi added Lewis as a believing counterweight to Freud’s atheism and discovered that presenting both perspectives made the students more receptive.
I then ordered up the London Library’s hefty copy of All My Road Before Me: The Diaries of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927 which is Lewis' only autobiographical work other than Surprised by Joy, his account of becoming a Christian. The diary begins when Lewis is a 23-year-old undergraduate, and still an atheist. The scribblings of a young man gadding about Oxford might seem unbearable, but there is a domestic charm to these diaries. He sounds young but by this point Lewis had already fought and been injured in the Great War, and seen many of his comrades fall. He could have got an exemption from military service on account of being born in Ireland, but chose to fight and arrived at the trenches on his nineteenth birthday.
This diary covers five years of Lewis adapting to post-war life, building an academic career and living with his found family, which is probably why he comes across as such a serious young man. Most days Lewis describes himself as working very hard. This work is reading and memorising for Oxford University, and this is a world where books are taken tremendously seriously.
When most scholars describe this time in Lewis’ life they do so in terms of poverty. That is inaccurate. Throughout these diaries Lewis’ household had domestic servants, and Lewis does not leap at paid work when the opportunity arises. It’s not a brilliantly edited diary, a large cast of friends and associates come and go without clarity or explanation, and I could have done with more of the domestic details which have been jettisoned. The most striking thing about All My Road Before Me is how little of the interior life there is. This diary is not a record of Lewis’ innermost thoughts but a catalogue of the many people he sees. This was an era and a place of community, with friends and colleagues walking round to pop in on each other and discuss what they’d been reading. It feels almost as fantastical today as Narnia. Mentions of the Great War are rare but one has stuck with me. On attending a public baths, Lewis observes how few injuries and scars there are to be seen now, when only a few years prior every man would have had one. It’s the disappearance of an entire generation happening before his eyes.
Women don’t usually feature in art about ideas, unless those ideas revolve around motherhood or care in some way (see Art Monsters / Acts of Creation etc.) Yet in Freud’s Last Session Anna Freud is depicted with sensitivity. After learning from her father, Anna Freud went on to have an illustrious career as a child psychologist, and a relationship over many decades with another woman. She first met the fabulously named Dorothy Trimble Tiffany Burlingham, granddaughter of the founder of Tiffany & Co., in Vienna, where Burlingham sought psycho-analysis. When the Freuds fled to England to escape the Nazi regime, as recounted in Nagorski’s book Saving Freud, Burlingham also moved to London. Their devotion to each other is depicted simply and tenderly in the film, which I appreciated.
Women are also prominent in the Lewis diaries, where ‘D’ and Maureen are the most vivid characters. ‘D’ is Janie King Moore, the Irishwoman, 26 years Lewis’ senior, who he secretly set up home with. She was the mother of his best friend who died in the trenches, and Lewis had promised to take care of her, which he certainly does. Maureen was Moore’s daughter, a sixteen-year-old at the start of the diaries, who lived with them in Oxford. Seeing Lewis worrying about this teenage girls’ schooling and future is very endearing.
As I started down this path, I quickly discovered that modern Lewis scholarship is fairly murky, characterised by accusations and counter-claims (who knew?!). In part this seems to have been exacerbated by the outsized role played by Lewis’ literary executor, and the editor of these diaries, Walter Hooper. The woman Lewis calls ‘D’ is typically referred to as ‘Mrs Moore’ by scholars, but that’s about all they’re consistent on. Key facts about her life are disputed or entirely unacknowledged, and even her age is recorded varyingly. It remains a question as to the exact nature of her relationship with Lewis, and that’s impossible to determine from these diaries, given their abridgement. A lot of the scholarly attention Lewis receives now is from Christian academics, which could explain some of the reticence around Moore. It seems telling that All My Road Before Me, an intimate account of daily life, of an atheist co-habiting out of wedlock and striving to secure his academic position, is out of print, but Lewis’ later, loftier religious books are not.
A week ago I had never heard of these books, and certainly hadn’t expected to write about any of this. All that changed when I went to the cinema one rainy evening and that’s the joy of it. Art can lead you down unexpected roads, if only you let it.
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