Those of you who have read C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra may remember that Our Hero, in talking to the unfallen aliens he comes across, has tremendous difficulty translating 'evil' into Martian, because they, being innocent, have no word for it, and he eventually settles on 'bent.'
Obviously there are possible slang analogues. Looking at the usage references in the OED, it seems possible but unlikely that Lewis might have known the sense 'corrupt, crooked' (the latter being, of course, also a possible semantic source), as the pre-second world war reference seems to be American; the earliest British reference, from 1948, uses the term in inverted commas and glosses it, which suggests it wasn't current. However, there is an older slang sense, which includes 'spoiled' and 'mad'; unhelpfully, the OED lumps 'queer' in under this, but the oldest reference listed for that is AN Wilson in 1957, so I think it's unlikely that that's what Lewis is thinking of. On the other hand, apparently British army slang in the first world war used 'bent' to mean 'spoiled, ruined'; the compilers of a dictionary of slang note that you could use it of people or of tea(!) This looks like quite a good candidate for Lewis' adoption of the term - unfortunately, it's not clear to me from the dictionary references whether or not it had moral overtones. The next reference, incidentally, is an American dictionary of slang from 1942, when it is defined as meaning mad, followed by Isaac Asimov in 1957: He's gone crazy... He was always a little bent. Now he's broken. So that sounds to me as if the 'spoiled' man of the dictionary might be more a candidate for the neuranesthesia ward than the cell (of course, unfortunately, the categories were not that clear cut in practice...).
And here we come to where I actually started: I think I've found a source for Lewis' use for the term 'bent' as (an attempt at) a moral category, and it's a good mediaeval one, namely the theology of Augustine and, following him, Bernard of Clairvaux (and ultimately based on taking 'conversion' very literally). Augustine, in the Enarratio in Psalmum notes that the human will/ heart is 'bent' or 'distorted' compared with God's will: distorta tu es, ille rectus es (PL 36, 503-4); Bernard talks of the will as being bent or curved down (curvam) to earth without grace.
... This has nothing to do with what I was supposed to be reading about today, but my eye was caught by an article by Terry Sherwood in the Harvard Theological Review 71 on Donne's conversion imagery in "Good Friday. Riding Westwards" where he suggests that Donne's soul, 'bent westward' by work and pleasure, away from God, is inspired by Donne's familiarity with the Augustinian tradition (which Donne, being Donne, turns into an image of the soul bearing its back to God for purgatorial punishment); he also wants to link it to "Batter my heart" and "that I may rise and stand, o'er throw me and bend,", though I am less convinced by that.
Interesting, though; note, of course, that in "Out of the Silent Planet" there is a theological significance that Ransome can only name evil in terms of deformation - as Augustine and Bernard were trying to show, evil is the absence or perversion of good, not a power in its own right.
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