where's the bathroom?

[calimac]

Walter Hooper, literary executor of C.S. Lewis, has been going around for years telling a Lewis anecdote that strikes me as disturbingly uncharacteristic of the Lewis I've otherwise read and read about. (Actually, there are a lot of questions about Hooper's personal acquaintance with Lewis, but I'm not going to get into that now.) It's sometimes said of anecdotes that if they're not true, they ought to be, that they're ben trovato. This one is the opposite: if it is true, it ought not to be.

Hooper tells it in print in the preface to the 1980 reprint of Lewis's collection The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, giving it as an example of Lewis's talent for merriment; but if so, it's merriment at the expense of being intentionally rude to a guest in your home.

It took some time for an American, such as myself, to adapt to English "conveniences." I see, for instance, from my diary of 7 June 1963* that during a longish visit with Lewis we drank what seemed gallons of tea. After a while I asked to be shown the "bathroom," forgetting that in most homes the bathroom and the toilet are separate rooms. With a kind of mock formality, Lewis showed me to the bathroom, pointed to the tub, flung down a pile of towels, and closed the door behind me. I returned to his sitting-room to say that it was not a bath I wanted but .... "Well, sir, 'choose you this day,'" said Lewis, bursting with laughter as he quoted the prophet Joshua, "that will break you of these silly American euphemisms. And now, where is it you wanted to go?" (p. 8-9)

OK, maybe Lewis didn't know that in America the toilet usually is actually in the bathroom, whereas in England the bath and toilet are usually in separate rooms. But break him of euphemisms? Surely Lewis - author of a prodigiously erudite historical survey of word usage called Studies in Words (Cambridge University Press, 1960) - would have known that all the common English polite words for the item in question - toilet, lavatory, loo, W.C., restroom, men's room, even latrine or privy - are also euphemisms. Did Lewis expect his visitors to turn to French and ask for the pissoir?

"Bathroom" is a normal American word for the thing, as Lewis surely also knew, else he wouldn't have said "American euphemisms," and not a word adopted out of conscious delicacy. It would have been pretty silly for Lewis to have assumed that Americans were known for their dainty language, particularly about this subject. Lewis had been married to an American woman (by this time deceased), who was described by Lewis's brother Warren as "quite extraordinarily uninhibited. Our first meeting was at a lunch in Magdalen [College], where she turned to me in the presence of three or four men, and asked in the most natural tone in the world, 'Is there anywhere in this monastic establishment where a lady can relieve herself?'" (W.H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends, p. 244)

"Quite extraordinarily uninhibited," he says, over her use of "relieve oneself" - another euphemism.

Searching for records of this material online, I came across a very strange essay arguing that Lewis was obsessed with the urinary. Well, pick over a prolific author's oeuvre closely enough, you can find enough references to prove about anything. Rilstone contrasts Lewis with Tolkien, whom he claims never brings up the subject, but I once published a short article ("Natural Functions in Arda," by Donald O'Brien, Mythprint Feb. 1991, p. 8-9) identifying a couple of "earthy" (there's another euphemism for you) references hidden in the text of The Lord of the Rings. Actually, I think what's on display here is less Lewis's urinary obsession than Rilstone's anti-urinary one. Rilstone scoffs at Lewis's famous remark about how strong need can produce pleasure in contemplating otherwise neutral or obnoxious things, "have there not for most of us been moments (in a strange town) when the sight of the word GENTLEMEN over a door has roused a joy almost worthy of celebration in verse?"** (The Four Loves (Harcourt, 1960), p. 29) Rilstone replies, "Er...no, actually. Speaking for myself, there have not been."

Rilstone attributes all this to Lewis having a weak bladder, but I have a very strong bladder (Me Thog ... me have strong bladder), yet I can recall a couple searingly memorable instances where I felt exactly as Lewis describes - mostly because I had relied on my strong bladder a little longer than I should have. I should have remembered the Queen of England's rule, which is always to use the toilet when you have a chance, because you never know when you'll get another chance - or when the restroom you're relying on will be closed.

But for goodness' sake (euphemism), if you are in England, don't make your inquiries by asking for the bathroom.

*This was, though they'd corresponded before, the first time Hooper met Lewis, as revealed in Hooper's C.S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide (Harper, 1996), p. 116. This was less than 6 months before Lewis died, and prior to 1996 Hooper fudged the date of their first meeting, preferring to give the impression, as recorded in the blurb about the editor on the back cover of the posthumous collection God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970), that he was "a long-time friend and for some years personal secretary of C.S. Lewis." Well, I said I wasn't going to get into this.

**Rilstone also notes, more fairly, that this leaves out 50% of Lewis's potential audience - including the lady in the monastic establishment.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

"There are dozens of ways of giving people a bad time when you are in your own house and they are only visitors." CSL was no Eustace Scrubb, but while that anecdote certainly wouldn't show Lewis at his most generous spirited, I'm not sure it's totally out of character either. Diana Wynne Jones once told me how Lewis made a fairly lighthearted but rather thoughtless joke at the expense of a friend of hers when she was a student. This man had a limp, and Lewis assumed I think that he'd simply twisted his ankle, and made a facetious remark about his halting gait. In fact the man had had polio. When Lewis discovered his mistake he was mortified, and I think rather embarrassed the young man with the depth of his abasement.

I find that quite revealing. CSL was no cold-hearted Oxford sneerer, but it seems he was quite capable of the lesser vulgarity of making inconsiderate remarks for the sake of a momentary jest, and perhaps he was more likely to do so when meeting a stranger, especially a foreign stranger, and feeling a little out of his element. Perhaps he felt uneasy at the intensity of Hooper's interest?

On the other hand, the elaboration of showing him into the bathroom with mock formality and leaving him there seems maybe too calculatedly unpleasant. And there is the question of the linguistic ignorance, as you say. And - yes, Hooper's determination to be Boswell to Lewis's Johnson might well have tempted him to buff up the story. So - well, in short, I don't know!

[jane-dennis.livejournal.com]

Autre temps, autre whatnots - I have a vague recollection of Tolkien mentioning something Lewis did that pained him but that he did not think Lewis meant meanly. In Letters probably, as I don't have that many sources. (And none here in California.)

Otoh, possibly the tale has grown in Hooper's telling?

[jane-dennis.livejournal.com]

These days, one seems to ask for the Toilet. They look at you really funny if you ask for something like the Lav (which of course is what you want on a plane), or Ladies, so Toilet it is. I always been amused by Bog (Yorkshire), but don't think it's, um, polite.

I guess the point really wasn't Davidman's [dredging name out of long filed away memory, may not be right] choice of words, but the meta fact that she *a Woman* brought the subject up so directly to a *Man* who was a new acquaintance.

Sorry if I'm being chatty and not scholarly here (and in comment above); it's been 25 or 30 yrs since I've read much of Lewis or about him. Did read Hooper's bio when it came out. Always thought some of it was a bit squicky, and was never sure how much squick came from CSL and how much was Hooper.

I'd rather have a link to the essay in Mythprint than the Rilstone person's thing. Since I have the world's smallest bladder, that attitude is truly offensive.

There are certainly refs to orc "waste" as it were. Harder to think of covert references related to more central characters, but it wouldn't surprise me.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The Mythprint essay isn't online, unfortunately.

One of the references O'Brien found was to the "filth" which the orcs have left around Mordor; he asks, quite reasonably, what this might be.

The other is in chapter 3, when Frodo, Pippin, and Sam are walking through the Shire. They awake (this is just after the infamous sapient fox sees them asleep), and Frodo "walked off to the edge of the wood." A couple sentences of nature description later, he comes back. There's no explanation of what he was doing, but O'Brien has a good supposition.

[jane-dennis.livejournal.com]

I gathered if you hadn't linked it, it wasn't online. (Is Nudge reasonable?)

Found the bit about Frodo walking off. What I opened it to was Pippin also walking off to leave Frodo alone to sit and think the next morning. And then running about on the greensward singing. Uh... let's not go there. Or to the Barrow Downs where at least 3 of them run about on the grass naked. Woo woo!

I am now laughing. I am pretty glad I've avoided the Lit Critty side of Tolkien for these umpty years (I don't normally admit it, but I have an MA in English, and that's one of those things you bear the scars of all your life). On the plus side, it was a sercon Tolkien Conference that set me on the road to SF Fandom. Undoubtedly I've missed some good stuff since I resolved to avoid Lit Crit if humanly possible.

[(Anonymous)]

What a clever idea, about that moment in "Three is Company"!

In addition to several references to "filth" in LOTR, does O'Brien also note the appearance of "cesspool", "dung", "dunghill", and "muck-rakers"? For me, the last brings to mind Humphrey Carpenter's biography, where he quotes George Brewerton, one of Tolkien's teachers at King Edward's, as telling his charges: "Manure? Call it muck! Say it three times! Muck, muck, muck!"

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm so allergic to what normally passes for Lit Crit that I determined when still in high school that I would never take an English class in college, and I kept to that.

Since then, however, I've guest-taught one ... in Tolkien.

And also despite that allergy, I've had a job for the last five years writing an annual round-up of Tolkien criticism for this journal. Which means I have to read everything written about him each year. And I'm here to tell you ... a lot of the Tolkien criticism is very good. And even that which isn't, fails interestingly. The kind of meaningless blither that infects even a lot of SF criticism is mostly absent from Tolkien studies. Tolkien criticism is mostly written either by people who love him, which means they have good taste and know how to write, or who can't stand him, which gives them an incentive to attempt to be incisive.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The key word in your story is "thoughtless". Lewis didn't set out to hurt anyone deliberately, and was mortified on finding that he had. The Hooper story is of a deliberate, elaborate put-down of an innocent guest. That's what makes it sound uncharacteristic.