The Inklings

C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien,

Charles Williams and their friends

Humphrey Carpenter

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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This edition 2006

First published in Great Britain by George Allen and Unwin 1978

Copyright © George Allen and Unwin (Publishers) Ltd 1978, 1981

Humphrey Carpenter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007748693

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Signatures of some of the Inklings, sent to Dr Warfield M. Firor in 1948, after he had given them a ham (by permission of the Trustees of C.S. Lewis)

DEDICATION

Dedicated to the memory of

the late Major W. H. Lewis

(‘Warnie’)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Part One

1 ‘Oh for the people who speak one’s own language’

2 ‘What? You too?’

3 Mythopoeia

4 ‘The sort of thing a man might say’

Part Two

1 C.W.

2 ‘A tremendous flow of words’

Part Three

1 ‘They are good for my mind’

2 ‘We had nothing to say to one another’

3 Thursday evenings

4 ‘A fox that isn’t there’

5 ‘Hwæt! we Inclinga’

Part Four

1 ‘No one turned up’

2 Till We Have Faces

Keep Reading

Appendices

A Biographical notes

B Bibliography

C Sources of quotations

D Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE

C. S. Lewis died in 1963, J. R. R. Tolkien in 1973, Charles Williams in 1945. In recent years the books of the first two have been immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, while Williams, though his name is far less well known, continues to exercise a considerable fascination to those who have encountered his writings.

These three men knew each other well. Lewis and Tolkien met in 1926 and soon achieved an intimacy which lasted for many years. Around them gathered a group of friends, many of them Oxford dons, who referred to themselves informally and half jestingly as ‘The Inklings’. When in 1939 Charles Williams found himself obliged to move from London to Oxford he was quickly taken into this circle, and was on close terms with Lewis and the others until his death.

The Inklings achieved a certain fame – or even notoriety, for they had their detractors – during the lifetime of the group. And when some years later it was noted that The Lord of the Rings, The Screwtape Letters, and All Hallows’ Eve (to name but three of many books) had this in common, that they were first read aloud to the Inklings, it became something of a fashion to study the writings of Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams on the assumption that they were members of a clearly defined literary group with a common aim. Such an assumption may or may not stand up to serious investigation. But in the meanwhile there has been no attempt to write any collective biography of the Inklings. This book tries to fill that gap.

It is based largely on unpublished material, and I am much in the debt of the various people who have made this material available to me. My acknowledgements to them and to the many others who have helped me will be found in Appendix D. As to quotations, their sources are fully identified in Appendix C, by a system which I feel is less intrusive than the conventional method of numerals referring to notes.

The book is largely concerned with C. S. Lewis; for, as I have argued in it, the Inklings owed their existence as a group almost entirely to him. I have also given an account, necessarily highly compressed, of the life and writings of Charles Williams. Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s life and work outside the Inklings I have said very little, because he has been the subject of an earlier book of mine, to which I have little to add.

I have tried to show the ways in which the ideas and interests of the Inklings contrasted sharply with the general intellectual and literary spirit of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. This has necessitated some discussion of their writings, particularly Lewis’s. In this sense the book sometimes strays from ‘pure’ biography into literary criticism. But I have deliberately avoided making any general judgement of these men’s achievement, for I think it is too early to try to do so. I have merely tried to tell their story.

H.C.

Oxford, 1978.

‘O my heart, it is all a very odd life.’

Charles Williams in a letter to his wife, 12 March 1940

PART ONE

1
‘Oh for the people who speak one’s own language’

From the nursery window of the big house there could be seen a line of long, low mountains. Often the view was blurred by a slight mist, for the weather was generally damp, and on many days the sight of the hills was shut out entirely by slanting rain. Then, all that the boy could see were the wet fields that sloped down towards Belfast, where the tall cranes marked the shipyards whose hum could be heard even at this distance.

Even on wet days there was plenty to be done. Outside the nursery door were long upstairs corridors, attics to be explored, games to be played among the gurgling water-tanks where the wind blew under the slates. Or if the boy tired of that, there were pictures to be drawn and stories to be invented, and his diary of the holiday to be written up.

‘My Life during the Exmas Holydays of 1907, by Jacks or Clive Lewis. Author of “Building of the promenad”, “Toyland”, “Living races of mouse-land” etc. I begin my life after my 9th birthday. On which I got a book from Papy and a post card album from Mamy. Warnie (my brother) was coming home and I was looking forward to him and the Xmas holydays.’

The boy had been christened Clive, but he always called himself Jacks or Jack. His brother Warnie, whose real name was Warren, was three years older than him, and went to a boarding-school in England. Jack always looked forward to Warnie’s return, because then they could paint pictures together or make up stories. Warnie liked stories about steamships and trains and India, while Jack liked to write about animals who did heroic deeds. But they usually managed to fit all this into the same story. While Warnie was away at school, Jack carried on with the stories by himself, when he was not learning things from Miss Harper, his governess, or from his mother, who taught him French and Latin.

‘Mamy is like most middle-aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectaciles, kniting her cheif industry etc. etc. Papy of course is the master of the house, and a man in whom you can see strong Lewis features, bad temper, very sensible, nice wen not in a temper. I am like most boys of 9 and I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin, and generaly weraing a jersey.’

His father, who worked as a solicitor in Belfast, was changeable in mood, and Jack felt more comfortable with his mother, who behaved in the same calm affectionate way all the time. On the other hand it was his father who had bought all the hundreds of books which lined the study and the drawing-room and the cloakroom, and were stacked two deep in the landing bookcase, and filled the corridors and the bedrooms. Jack turned the pages of most of them in turn. One day he found these lines in a book of poetry by Longfellow:

I heard a voice that cried

Balder the beautiful

Is dead, dead.

He had never heard of Balder, but the words gave him an extraordinary feeling, a notion of great cold expanses of northern sky. He could not understand exactly what he felt, and the more he tried to recapture the feeling the more it slipped away.

There were lots of other books to read: the Beatrix Potter tales, Gulliver’s Travels in a big illustrated volume, and stories by Conan Doyle and Mark Twain and E. Nesbit. In the summer there were picnics on the hills and days by the sea, and there was always something to be done in the big house; so that the time passed quickly in a steady humdrum happiness.

Then one night not very long after his ninth birthday he woke with a headache, and when he cried, his mother did not come to him. There were lights in her room and a bustle of doctors and nurses. She had cancer. Jack prayed that God would make her better, but she went on being ill. On the day she died, the calendar in her room (which had a Shakespearian quotation for each day) bore the words: Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. After that, everything changed. Jack would still have moments of happiness, but the old unshakeable comfort had gone. As he himself said, ‘It was sea and islands now. The great continent had sunk like Atlantis.’

First came the discomfort of being crammed into Eton collar, knickerbockers and bowler hat; then the clop clop of the four-wheeler driving him and his brother to the quay in Belfast; then the sea crossing, followed by his first sight of England, which seemed a sadly flat landscape after the Irish hills; then school.

Wynyard School in Hertfordshire had been moderately good when Warnie was first sent there, but by the time Jack joined his elder brother it was deteriorating as its headmaster became insane. For the next two years Jack had to endure grossly incompetent teaching, bad food, stinking sanitation, arbitrarily inflicted beatings and perpetual fear. It was a terrible introduction to the outer world, and its only good result was to drive the two brothers closer together for mutual protection. By the time the school finally collapsed and the headmaster was certified mad, Warnie had already moved on to Malvern College; the younger boy was sent briefly to a school in Belfast, then to another in England.

Meanwhile Jack continued to read voraciously. He had discovered most of the English poets by the time he was fifteen. He found The Faerie Queene in a big illustrated edition and loved it. He was delighted by the romances of William Morris. Best of all, one day he chanced across an Arthur Rackham illustration to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, and felt the same sensation as he had known when he first read the Longfellow lines about Balder. ‘Pure “Northernness” engulfed me,’ he said; and he began a quest for everything ‘Northern’. Books of Norse myths, a synopsis of the Ring operas, Wagner’s music itself, all were food to his imagination. Soon he was writing his own poem on the Nibelung story, rhyming ‘Mime’ with ‘time’ and ‘Alberich’ with ‘ditch’ because he knew no better. He worked hard at his school-books, too, showing considerable aptitude for Latin and Greek. Yet there was no sense of stability, no ultimate feeling of safety, neither in the school term nor at home during the holidays, when even his brother’s companionship could not entirely lighten the oppressiveness of the big house, with its stuffy routine now dictated entirely by his father.

At the age of fourteen he won a classical scholarship to Malvern College.

*

‘Not only does this persecution get harder to bear as time goes on, but it is actually getting more severe.’ Fifteen-year-old Jack Lewis was writing home to his father from Malvern. ‘All the prefects detest me and lose no opportunity of venting their spite. Today, for not being able to find a cap which one gentleman wanted, I have been sentenced to clean his boots every day after breakfast for a week. It is after breakfast that the form goes through their translation together. From this I am cut off. When I asked if I might clean them in the evening (an arrangement which you observe would have made no difference to him), I received a refusal, strengthened by being kicked downstairs. So we go on.’

Malvern was no worse than most English public schools of the time, but it was no better. Warnie had been happy there – he left just as Jack arrived – but the elder boy was, at this stage in their lives, the more resilient. Jack almost immediately took a dislike to the place. It was not that the teaching was bad: far from it, for he was encouraged by a first-rate form master and was commended for excellent work. But academic study and the opportunity to read books seemed to play such a small part in the life of the place. Almost all the day it was bells ringing, feet running, shouted commands from older boys, little sleep and no privacy. Two things in particular alarmed him. One was homosexuality, especially the flirtations of the older boys with the younger. The other was the fact that Malvern, like many other public schools, was run not so much by the staff as by an unofficial clique of senior boys called ‘the Bloods’. Admission to this clique was not through formal qualification, but through being ‘the right sort of person’ and knowing ‘the right people’. Moreover once a senior boy became a Blood he had considerable power over his fellows. Bloods who had any tendency to be bullies would pick on those who showed resentment of their power. Jack Lewis did show such resentment. He was soon selected as an ideal victim, and after just two terms of persecution he had seen enough. What he was going through was no worse than what thousands of other boys at English public schools were enduring, but he had no intention of staying firm and enduring it. He was not that sort of person. When faced with something he hated, he did not tolerate it but went to war on it. And since he could not take on the Malvern Bloods single-handed he decided that he had better get away. He wrote to his father: ‘Please take me out of this, as soon as possible.’

His father, a man of peculiarly disjointed thinking, was usually notable for making the wrong decisions. But for once he did the right thing. He removed Jack from Malvern and sent him to the man who had been his own headmaster, and who was now retired in Surrey and taking one or two private pupils. W. T. Kirkpatrick, tall and muscularly lean, was a strict atheist who nevertheless put on his best suit to dig the garden on Sunday. This, however, was his only recorded piece of illogical behaviour: in every other particular his life was ruled by strictly rational principles. He was fearsome in conversation, for no sentence passed his lips that was not ruthlessly logical. When Jack Lewis first met his new teacher on arrival at the railway station, the boy attempted some small talk, remarking that the Surrey countryside was more wild than he had expected. ‘Stop!’ shouted Kirkpatrick. ‘What do you mean by wildness, and what grounds had you for not expecting it?’ Jack did his best, but answer after answer was rejected as being the product of inadequate thought. ‘Do you not see’, Kirkpatrick concluded, ‘that your remark was meaningless?’

Under the tuition of ‘Kirk’ in the two years that followed, the boy learnt to phrase all remarks as logical propositions and to defend his opinions by argument. Not that ‘opinion’ was a term admissible in that household. ‘I have’, Kirkpatrick would exclaim with raised hands, ‘no opinion on any subject whatsoever.’

Soon, Jack Lewis was learning to match his teacher’s mind with dialects of his own, especially in his letters to a Belfast friend, Arthur Greeves, who was prone to vague and illogical statements and who in consequence found himself on the receiving end of Kirk-like arguments. Greeves adhered to the religious beliefs of his childhood, and when he mentioned this in a letter to Lewis there came back a tirade. ‘I had thought that you were gradually being emancipated from the old beliefs,’ Lewis declared. ‘You know, I think, that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention – Christ as much as Loki.’ And Lewis offered his own interpretation of Christianity: ‘After the death of a Hebrew prophet Yesua (whose name we have corrupted into Jesus), he became regarded as a god, a cult sprang up, which was afterwards connected with the ancient Hebrew Jahweh-worship, and so Christianity came into being – one mythology among many.’

This atheism was in fact not the result of Kirkpatrick’s teaching. Knowledge of his tutor’s opinions and access to the rationalist books in the house did encourage Jack, but he had begun to abandon religious belief some years earlier, partly because he found it impossible to make his prayers sincere, partly because he did not think that Christianity had much relation to the largely unhappy world around him, and partly because the Bible did not appeal to him as a story. Or rather, it was when reading pagan stories, especially the myths of the Norsemen, that he experienced his most profound sensations of delight. He began to write a tragedy about the Norse gods. It was in Greek form, under the title ‘Loki Bound’, and it was an attempt to express both the appeal of Northern myth and his contempt for the Christian view of the universe; for in the play Loki sets himself in opposition to Odin the creator of the world, declaring that such creation was wanton cruelty. Lewis also wrote short poems on this theme, picturing God as a brutish force whose hatred has scarred men’s lives.

Yet his own life now was remarkably unscarred. Placid days succeeded one another. He read Homer under Kirkpatrick’s tuition, he walked in the Surrey countryside, he wrote poetry, and he sent for innumerable parcels of books from London shops. ‘How one does want to read everything,’ he remarked to Arthur Greeves, and soon there was little in English literature that he had not encountered. For an atheist, he found delight in unlikely places. Of Malory’s account of the Grail he remarked to Greeves, ‘Those mystic parts are very good to read late at night when you are drowsy and tired and get into a sort of “exalted” mood.’ And when he discovered George MacDonald’s ‘faery’ novel Phantastes on a station bookstall he declared that reading it was ‘a great literary experience’. Meanwhile his progress at academic work was good; indeed it was clear that he was suited for an academic career – and for that only. ‘While admirably adapted for excellence,’ Kirkpatrick wrote to Lewis’s father, ‘and probably for distinction in literary matters, he is adapted for nothing else. You may make up your mind on that.’

At the end of 1916 Jack Lewis won a scholarship to University College, Oxford.

*

It was the summer of 1917. Lewis’s first term as an Oxford undergraduate had been interrupted, not unexpectedly, by his call-up papers, and he was now a cadet in uniform. His battalion was quartered just down the road, in Keble College. Cadets were billeted two to a set of rooms, and the allocations were made in alphabetical order. As a result, Lewis C. S. found himself sharing sleeping quarters with Moore E. F. C. Many years later, Jack Lewis’s brother remarked in his diary, ‘Lewis and Moore: it might just as easily have been Lewis and Sergeant Muggins, or Lewis and Lord Molineux, and the very fact would have been forgotten by now – but it was Lewis and Moore, and when the clerk filled in the names he permanently and almost immediately altered the course of several lives.’

Jack Lewis did not particularly care for his room-mate; he found ‘Paddy’ Moore rather childish. But Paddy’s mother, an Irishwoman who had been separated from her husband for many years, was living in lodgings close by, so as to be near her son; and when they met she and Jack got on very well, so well that he was soon spending week-ends in her company. Later, when he got a month’s leave, he stayed for most of it with the Moores at their Bristol home, going home to his father in Belfast only for the final few days. His father was surprised and hurt at this division of Jack’s time.

Once or twice there had already been incipient romances in Jack’s life. During his Surrey days he had been attracted to a Belgian refugee girl who was staying in the neighbourhood, and had talked about her in his letters to Arthur Greeves – ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so bucked about anything in my life, she’s an awfully decent sort.’ Later, in his first few months at Oxford, he had been very friendly with a young woman from Belfast, who was in the city with her mother. But before any real romance could begin he met Mrs Janie Moore.

She was aged forty-five, Irish, and lively. She was poorly educated and her conversation was largely illogical nonsense, so in this respect she was a very odd friend for Jack; but something made him enjoy her company. Perhaps it was in large part simply the fact that she made him feel at home. He was never at ease at his real home in Belfast; his father lived according to an enervating daily routine, and was also perpetually inquisitive into his sons’ lives. This made Warnie and Jack draw apart from their parent. Now, when Jack’s military training was over and he was about to embark for the front line in France, he telegraphed to his father asking him to come over to England and say goodbye. His father, typically failing to understand the telegram, did not come. It was little wonder that Jack turned to Mrs Moore for affection.

By the time that Jack left for France he and Mrs Moore were behaving to each other like mother and son. As for the real son, Jack once remarked (years later, to his brother) that Mrs Moore and Paddy ‘hadn’t got on at all well’. In the spring of 1918, Paddy was reported missing in action, and when his death was officially confirmed Mrs Moore wrote to Lewis’s father that Paddy had asked Jack ‘to look after me if he did not come back’. This became the public explanation for what followed, but probably Jack would have looked after her whether Paddy had come back or not.

*

Jack Lewis’s time in the trenches was short, and though he found it horrific he was not deeply shaken by the experience. He had, after all, lived with the knowledge of the war for more than three years before going out to the front line himself. It was something he knew he would have to endure, and (unlike public school) nobody expected him to like it. When he finally reached the front line he found that it was as bad as he had anticipated, but no worse.

Certainly he would always remember what he described as ‘the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses’. And just once he put something of this into his poetry:

‘What, brother, brother,

Who groaned?’ – ‘I’m hit. I’m finished. Let me be.’

– ‘Put out your hand, then. Reach me. No, the other.’

– ‘Don’t touch. Fool! Damn you! Leave me.’ – ‘I can’t see.

Where are you?’ Then more groans. ‘They’ve done for me.

I’ve no hands. Don’t come near me. No, but stay,

Don’t leave me … O my God! Is it near day?’

(These lines are from his narrative poem Dymer, written not long after the war.) Lewis himself was wounded by a shell a few months after going into the front line. But when he came to write an autobiography he devoted three heated chapters to the horrors of public school and only part of one – entitled ‘Guns and Good Company’ – to his war experiences. Two remarks about the war, in that book, sum up his attitude. After recording his memories of the animal horror of the trenches, he says: ‘It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else.’ The other remark describes his response to hearing for the first time the whine of a bullet: ‘At that moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less like indifference: a little quavering signal that said, “This is War. This is what Homer wrote about.”’

*

When Jack Lewis was sent home wounded from the trenches in the spring of 1918, Mrs Moore came to London to be near his hospital. Later, he chose to convalesce in Bristol where she lived. After he had recovered and had re-entered army life, she spent the rest of the war following him from camp to camp, setting up temporary homes as near to him as possible. And when in the autumn of 1918 the war ended and he went back to Oxford as an undergraduate, she packed up her house in Bristol and came too.

They found a furnished house in Warneford Road in east Oxford, and shared the rent between them, Jack making use of an allowance from his father and Mrs Moore depending chiefly on money from her estranged husband, whom she called ‘the Beast’. Officially, Jack was living in University College where he was an undergraduate reading Classics, but in reality he spent as much time as possible in ‘our hired house’, as he described it. ‘After lunch,’ he told Arthur Greeves, ‘I work until tea, then work again until dinner. After that, a little more work, talk and laziness and sometimes bridge, then bicycle back to College at 11.I then light my fire and work or read till 12 o’clock when I retire to sleep the sleep of the just.’ This may have been his routine on an ideal day, but more often his time at Warneford Road was occupied with one of the innumerable domestic chores which Mrs Moore was in the habit of devising for him: helping her to make jam and marmalade, scrubbing the floors, washing up, walking the dog, mending broken furniture, taking messages and doing shopping errands. It was not that she did not try to do any of these things herself, but she was easily exhausted – or at least Jack believed that she was – and, though they were generally able to afford a maid, Mrs Moore was suspicious of servants and did not like to trust the girl with these tasks. She used to say of Jack, ‘He is as good as an extra maid.’ As for Jack, he developed the ability to work at his desk in the middle of domestic mayhem. Only a few minutes would pass in an afternoon at Warneford Road without Mrs Moore’s strident voice summoning him to some job or other; he would lay down his pen patiently, go and do what was wanted (however trivial) and then come back and resume work as if nothing had happened. He called this ‘the hopeless business of trying to save D. from overwork’. ‘D.’ was how he referred to Mrs Moore in his diary; to other people he called her ‘Minto’. Both names are inexplicable.

Remarkably, this disturbed way of life did no harm to his studies. Long before, in Surrey days, his tutor Kirkpatrick had reported to Jack’s father, ‘He has read more classics than any boy I ever had – or indeed I might add than any I ever heard of, unless it be an Addison or Landor or Macaulay.’ Kirkpatrick had also said of Jack’s enthusiasm for his work, ‘He is a student who has no interest except in reading and study. The very idea of urging him or stimulating him to increased exertion makes me smile.’ Nevertheless, given the distractions of life with ‘Minto’, Jack Lewis did very well to take a First Class in Classical Moderations in March 1920.

Meanwhile his friends and relatives were puzzling over his strange involvement with Mrs Moore. It was easy to explain the mother—son element in it by the losses of real mother and real son which they had suffered. But was that all? Some people perhaps suspected a romantic-sexual element in the liaison, and possibly this was what Jack’s father had in mind when he referred to it as ‘Jack’s affair’. This sort of speculation was, if anything, fostered by the silence of Jack himself, who refused to discuss the matter with any of his close friends. On the only occasion Warnie Lewis asked his brother about the relationship he was told to mind his own business. In particular Jack tried to keep his father as much in the dark about it as possible, pretending to him that he was living in ordinary ‘digs’ with other undergraduates, and disguising a holiday spent with ‘Minto’ as a walking tour with a college friend. None of this helped to make it seem entirely respectable.¹

On the other hand nobody who knew Jack Lewis supposed seriously that Mrs Moore was his mistress. Certainly he discussed sex in his letters to Arthur Greeves, but only in relation to masturbation, and this was probably all that he meant by the rather veiled and arch references he made (in the books he was later to write) to his sexual experience as a young man. On the practical level, a sexual relationship with Mrs Moore would have been difficult without servants’ gossip, let alone the fact that another member of the household was Mrs Moore’s daughter Maureen, who was eight years younger than Paddy and still a child.

After this strange ménage had been established in Oxford for a little over a year, Jack was able to move out of college and make the home with ‘Minto’ his official lodgings. But they were obliged to leave the Warneford Road house, and there began a long search for a permanent home in which they could use Mrs Moore’s own furniture. Unfurnished houses at a moderate rent seemed impossible to find, and for two long years they moved from one place to another, renting furnished rooms or being lent the use of a house for a few weeks while the owner was away. Between 1918 and 1923 they lived at nine different addresses, ‘most of them vile’, as Jack remarked in his diary. At one time during this period Mrs Moore told him that ‘she was quite convinced that she would never again live in a house of her own’.

*

Until 1918 Jack Lewis had gone on writing poems that were deeply pessimistic, flinging accusations at a cruel God. They were not particularly good as poetry, so he was lucky to have a volume of them published by Heinemann in 1918 under the title Spirits in Bondage. They attracted almost no attention, and Lewis brought no reputation as a poet when he came up to Oxford. Indeed, tastes were already changing, and he discovered that many of his fellow undergraduates who were interested in poetry admired T. S. Eliot and other exponents of modern verse. ‘I’m afraid I shall never be an orthodox modern,’ Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves in October 1918. ‘I like lines that will scan and do not care for descriptions of sea-sickness.’

He was not alone in disliking modern verse: he soon made friends with several other undergraduates who shared his views, and who (like him) wanted to go on writing poetry uninfluenced by the new movement. Among these was a young man at Wadham College, Owen Barfield. He and Lewis and several others conceived the rather grand idea of issuing a yearly collection of their verses; but this idea petered out. However, they continued to read each other’s poetry with interest, and to offer criticisms.

By the time that Lewis began to read for the second part of the Classics course, ‘Greats’ (Ancient History and Philosophy), he had abandoned the pessimistic viewpoint of his early poems. He also decided to turn his back on the sensations of delight that he had received from Norse mythology, Malory, George MacDonald, and many other books. Privately he still sometimes felt such sensations, though not so often as before; but these he now labelled ‘aesthetic experience’ and said that they were valuable but not really informative. As to the existence of God, he adopted the attitude that ‘it really made no difference whatever whether there was such a person or no’. All this he called his New Look. It certainly harmonised with the Oxford approach to philosophy at the time; the ruthlessly analytical Logical Positivism had not yet made its appearance, but there was a prevailing tone of scepticism which Lewis gladly adopted.

In 1922 he took a First Class in ‘Greats’.

*

Shortly after this, he and Mrs Moore finally found a house that offered a hope of permanence, ‘Hillsboro’, a villa in the Oxford suburb of Headington which was available as an unfurnished letting. Out came Mrs Moore’s furniture from store; Jack spent endless days painting and laying linoleum; and they moved in. This, however, did not mean domestic tranquillity, for ‘Minto’ still found more than enough for Jack to do, partly thanks to her habit of quarrelling with servants. Jack noted in his diary that the incompetence of one maid had become ‘the exclusive subject of conversation’ with Mrs Moore, remarking, ‘I do not blame D. for this in the least, but of course it makes things very miserable.’

Jack now hoped for a teaching appointment at Oxford. But there were no university jobs available in Philosophy, his strong subject in ‘Greats’; so, as his father was good-naturedly prepared to continue financial support for a time, he decided to read English Language and Literature, tackling the full course in just one year, a mere third of the time that most undergraduates devoted to it. This meant learning Anglo-Saxon and studying the principles of philology, besides reading literature from the medieval period to the nineteenth century. He was, of course, far from ignorant in this field already, but there was still a lot of ground to cover, and it was amazing that he managed to do it in the moments he could spare from domestic life. During the months while he was racing through the English syllabus he was teaching Latin to Mrs Moore’s daughter Maureen and to her music-mistress in lieu of Maureen’s fees, tutoring a neighbour’s child in return for Maureen’s lessons with its mother, and washing up after almost every meal. For two weeks he was, by day and night, looking after Mrs Moore’s brother, who was having a severe nervous breakdown in the house. He was also coping with a perpetual series of what he called ‘Minto’s mare’s nests’ – imaginary crises of every conceivable kind – and with a stream of visitors and paying guests. The most remarkable thing was that he did this with almost unvarying good humour. This was perhaps partly because he knew that the whole thing was very nearly his fault anyway, and if he complained it could be justly retorted that the household owed its existence to him. But really it was his immense fund of good nature that kept him going. He was already practised at coping with domestic oddities, thanks to the strangeness of family life with his father in Belfast; and in any case he was not a complainer by nature. Far from it: he derived immense amusement from the odd visitors who came to the house, to whom he and Mrs Moore gave nicknames: ‘the Blackguard’ for a grotesque French lodger, and ‘Smudge’ for the inoffensive and rather indistinct music teacher. Only when the question was raised of his brother Warnie coming to live with them did Jack warn him openly of ‘the perpetual interruptions of family life – the partial loss of liberty’. And even then he qualified it by adding: ‘This sounds as if I were either sick of it myself or else trying to make you sick of it: but neither is the case. I have definitely chosen and don’t regret the choice. Whether I was right or wrong, wise or foolish, to have done so originally, is now only an historical question: once having created expectations, one naturally fulfils them.’

*

He was not very impressed by his first experiences when reading English Language and Literature at Oxford. ‘The atmosphere of the English school’, he wrote in his diary after attending a lecture, ‘is very different from that of Greats. Women, Indians, and Americans predominate and – I can’t say how – one feels a certain amateurishness in the talk and look of the people.’ He thought poorly of many of the lectures, and felt no enthusiasm for the study of philological niceties such as glottal stops and vowel shifts, of which he remarked, ‘Very good stuff in its way, but why physiology should form part of the English school I really don’t know.’ He was comfortable, however, in the company of the Martlets, the literary society of University College, which met to listen to papers read by its members. Lewis often contributed monographs on his favourite authors. He gave a talk on William Morris and another on Spenser. After the paper there would be a discussion, which sometimes turned into intellectual pyrotechnics; for like Lewis many of the Martlets were well read in philosophy. They enjoyed showing off their command of logic, as did Lewis, for he believed that his mind was well trained in argument. He was always in the forefront of any dialectical battle that concluded a Martlets evening, and he also liked to go for brisk walks with fellow members, during which they would continue an intricate argument from the previous Martlets meeting. This kind of talk was often an intellectual duel for the sake of the sport, and Lewis judged his and his opponent’s performance as much on method as on content. ‘In spite of many well contested points I was gravelled in the end,’ he recorded after one such contest which was conducted while he and a friend strode across the meadows on the edge of Oxford, adding, ‘We were neither of us in really good dialectical form.’

It was not only among the Martlets that he engaged in logical argument. It was indeed a form of conversation that he sought wherever it could be found, not least perhaps because it was a relief from Mrs Moore’s illogical chatter; and he judged his acquaintances by their capacity for it, despising men who talked only in anecdotes or merely peddled facts. Nor did he care for men who were flippant or cynical. To get on with Lewis you had to argue with feeling as well as with your brain; you had to hold your opinions passionately and be prepared to defend them with logic. Not surprisingly, few people came up to the mark.

One who did was a fellow Irishman, Nevill Coghill, who like Lewis was reading the English course in one year, having previously graduated in History. Each found the other a good companion for energetic country walks, and while striding together over Hinksey Hill they would talk excitedly about what they had been reading that week. Coghill never forgot how on one such walk Lewis, who had just encountered the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Maldon, boomed out some lines from the end of the poem:

‘Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,

mod sceal þe mare, þe ure maegen lytlað.’

‘Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.’

In the summer of 1923 Lewis was awarded a First Class in the English School He now had three Firsts to his name, and was determined to get an academic job, but the days were over when a clever young man could walk out of examinations into a college fellowship. There was plenty of competition and few jobs. Certainly Lewis had a wider choice than some men, for he could teach Philosophy as well as English Literature, but even so there were not many opportunities. For a year he could find nothing at all and, though his father generously continued to pay an allowance despite his suspicions (or perhaps because of his ignorance) about Jack’s life with Mrs Moore, it was a worrying time. Jack occupied himself by reading and by writing poetry. He was now at work on a long narrative poem which he called Dymer, about a young man who escapes from a totalitarian society, begets a monster on an unseen and mysterious bride, and is eventually killed by the monster, which becomes a god. Lewis declared that he had no idea what its meaning might be. ‘Everyone may allegorise or psychoanalyse it as he pleases,’ he said; and certainly one episode in the poem does seem to relate closely to his own life at the time of its composition. When Dymer wakes after his night of love in the dark room with the unseen girl, he wanders out into the daylight and explores the mysterious palace in which he has found her. After a few moments he returns to seek her, but the way to the room is now blocked by the witch-like shape of an old woman squatting on the threshold. Whichever way Dymer takes through the corridors, still the way is barred by this ‘old, old matriarchal dreadfulness’, so that in the end he is forced to leave the palace and abandon his lover, whom he never sees again. When Lewis began to write Dymer in 1922 he had been living with Mrs Moore for three years, and now that she had come into his life he took no further romantic interest in girls of his own age.

Dymer was more contemporary in tone than Lewis’s 1918 anthology, being rather in the style of John Masefield. While Lewis was working on it, he often showed the manuscript to his undergraduate friend Owen Barfield. Barfield was generally very complimentary about the poem, and when he showed his own verse to Lewis he received equal praise.

Barfield, too, graduated with a First in English, and then tried to earn a living by contributing to London literary journals. Meanwhile Nevill Coghill, was awarded a fellowship at Exeter College, where he had been an undergraduate. Lewis himself continued to wait, applying for several jobs without success. After a year the position improved when he was given some part-time work teaching Philosophy at University College for a don who was temporarily in America. Then in the spring of 1925 a fellowship in English Language and Literature was advertised at Magdalen College. Lewis applied, though without much hope.

The weeks that followed were anxious. He continued to give tutorials and lectures at University College, generally walking home afterwards to save the bus fares. His afternoons spent striding across the Oxfordshire countryside with friends like Coghill had made him a practised walker, and the mere mile and a quarter from the town to Headington was nothing to him. He could be seen on most days, coming down the steps from the main entrance of his college, a heavily built young man with a florid face and a flop of dark hair, dressed in baggy flannel trousers and an old blazer with a University College badge, and wearing a battered hat and a shabby mackintosh if the weather was not warm. ‘Several Univ. people whom I don’t know passed me,’ he noted one morning. ‘One of them, noticing my blazer, must have asked another who I was, for I heard him answer “Heavy Lewis”.’

On 22 May 1925 The Times announced that ‘The President and Fellows of Magdalen College have elected to an official Fellowship in the College as Tutor in English Language and Literature, for five years as from next June 25, Mr Clive Staples Lewis.’

*

Lewis settled into his new college during the Long Vacation of 1925. He had been allocated rooms in the eighteenth-century New Buildings, with windows overlooking the tower and lawns on one side and the Grove with its herd of deer on the other. Few people in Oxford had a finer view. Lewis reported to his father that it was ‘beautiful beyond compare’.

By the time the Michaelmas term began he had bought the few pieces of furniture necessary for his rooms, choosing the very plainest because he did not think that such things mattered much. In fact he could have afforded a few extravagances, had they been to his taste, for he would have a good income from the fellowship and plenty of security. The appointment at Magdalen was nominally for five years only, but fellows were almost always re-elected when that period was over. It would only be necessary to keep on good terms with the other Magdalen dons and to do his job fairly conscientiously to be secure for the rest of his working days.

The snag was that one of these conditions – keeping on good terms with his colleagues – did not look as if it was going to be particularly easy. Some of them seemed pleasant enough; he liked and admired Frank Hardie, a don of about the same age as himself;¹ but he could not come to the same opinion about many of the others. ‘I am beginning to be rather disillusioned about my colleagues,’ he told his father. ‘There is a good deal more intrigue and mutual back-scratching and even direct lying than I ever suspected possible: and what worries me most of all is that the decent men seem to be all the old ones (who will die) and the rotters seem to be all the young ones (who will last my time).’ Among the older men were P. V. M. Benecke, the Ancient History tutor, and J. A. Smith, the moral philosopher, both of them Victorians in ideas as well as appearance. Lewis took to having his breakfast with them, partly as a way of avoiding the younger dons. To a couple of these he responded with horrified fascination. Of one, the historian H. M. D. Parker, he wrote in his diary: ‘He thinks of himself as a plain man with no nonsense about him, and hopes that even his enemies regard him as an honest fellow at bottom. The desire to be always exercising this shrewd practical commonsense leads him to endless discussions on everything that happens: he will draw anyone who listens into a corner and stand there exchanging husky confidences about his pupils and colleagues. He always implies that “we two (or three or four) are the only people in College who understand this matter and we must hold together”. The very same people against whom he marshals his confidants on Wednesday will themselves be taken into council on Thursday. He believes all that he says for the moment, but being weak as water, takes a new colour from every group that he falls into.’ In sharp contrast was another of the younger dons at Magdalen, T. D. (‘Harry’) Weldon, the Philosophy tutor, who was a militant atheist and who soon became the leader of the more radical dons. Of him, Lewis wrote: ‘He has great abilities, but would despise himself if he wasted them on disinterested undertakings. He would be capable of treachery and would think the victim a fool for being betrayed. He preaches what he practises: tells you openly that anyone who believes another is a fool, and holds that Hobbes alone saw the truth: tells me I am an incurable romantic and is insolent to old men and servants. He is very pale, this man, good-looking, and drinks a great deal without getting drunk. I think he is the best of our younger fellows and I would sign his death-warrant to-morrow, or he mine, without turning a hair.’

When term began, Lewis’s duties in Magdalen consisted of giving an hour’s tutorial each week, together with any extra teaching he thought necessary, to those undergraduates in the college who were reading English In his first years as a tutor he rarely had more than half a dozen pupils; and as they came to him either singly or in pairs for their tutorials, this meant some six or eight hours of teaching a week. In addition to this he gave courses of lectures to the University as a whole, which meant another hour or two’s work each week, plus the time taken to prepare the lectures. In some academic years he would also be required to serve as an examiner, which occupied a good deal of time. But much of his day was still his own, to use as he liked for private research, for helping Mrs Moore with domestic chores (which he continued to do each afternoon), and for meeting his friends.

Lewis did not find the Magdalen undergraduates much more attractive than many of the dons. He told his father that in his opinion the college was no more than ‘a country club for all the idlest “bloods” of Eton and Charterhouse’, adding, ‘I really don’t know what gifts the public schools bestow on their nurslings, beyond the mere surface of good manners: unless contempt of the things of the intellect, extravagance, insolence, self-sufficiency, and sexual perversion are to be called gifts.’ Certainly there was a Magdalen tradition of recruiting undergraduates from the smarter public schools; but here again, Lewis’s own schooling had left him sensitive to such things, particularly to homosexuality.

As to the undergraduates, this is how one Magdalen freshman responded to his surroundings in that Michaelmas term of 1925:

Balkan Sobranies in a wooden box,

The college arms upon the lid; Tokay

And sherry in the cupboard; on the shelves

The University Statutes bound in blue,

Crome Yellow, Prancing Nigger, Blunden, Keats …

Privacy after years of public school;

First college rooms, a kingdom of my own:

What words of mine can tell my gratitude?

No wonder, looking back, I never worked.

The undergraduate who wrote these lines was among Lewis’s first pupils that term, and they did not get on well. ‘Betjeman and Valentin came for Old English,’ Lewis wrote in his diary. ‘Betjeman appeared in a pair of eccentric bedroom slippers and said he hoped I didn’t mind them as he had a blister. He seemed so pleased with himself that I couldn’t help saying that I should mind them very much myself but that I had no objection to his wearing them – a view which I believe surprised him. Both had been very idle over the O.E. and I told them it wouldn’t do.’

John Betjeman found Magdalen a blessed relief after schooldays at Marlborough, where he had endured just as much discomfort as Lewis at Malvern. He was certainly prepared to pay a little desultory attention to English literature, but he had not bargained for Old English (Anglo-Saxon), nor for such a tutor. Lewis, who was going to be responsible for teaching his pupils the whole English School syllabus from The Battle of Maldon to Blake, had decided to do his best to make the early part of the course palatable by organising evenings of ‘Beer and Beowulf’ and by inventing mnemonics to teach his pupils the laws of sound-changes. Betjeman, whose taste was for Swinburne, Firbank and the Gothic Revival, could scarcely be expected to respond enthusiastically to Lewis chanting over the beer-jug:

Thus Æ to E they soon were fetchin’,

Compare such forms as þÆC and þECCEAN.

(The last word is pronounced approximately as thetchen and so provides a rhyme.) Betjeman absented himself from this ordeal whenever possible, slipping away to friends who had an exotic country house at Sezincote near Moreton-in-Marsh:

I cut tutorials with wild excuse,

For life was luncheons, luncheons all the way.

‘While in College,’ Lewis wrote in his diary, ‘I was rung up on the telephone by Betjeman speaking from Moreton-in-Marsh, to say that he hadn’t been able to read the Old English, as he was suspected for measles and forbidden to read a book. Probably a lie, but what can one do?’

When Betjeman was not lunching at Sezincote he could usually be found at the George Restaurant in Oxford with Harold Acton and the Etonian set from Christ Church, or at Wadham College in the group of young men who gathered around Maurice Bowra. But if Bowra’s hospitality and wit showed Betjeman that dons were sometimes prepared to treat undergraduates as more than pupils, Betjeman found nothing of this reflected in his relationship with his tutor. The instant the tutorial hour was over, Lewis showed Betjeman to the door, generally with a fierce admonition to work harder. It was not that Lewis behaved in this way to all his pupils: he began to make friends with one or two who liked brisk walks and whose ideas interested him. But most undergraduates found him formal and fierce, and certainly he kept his distance from those whose behaviour had overtones of homosexuality – a fashionable mannerism among Oxford undergraduates at the time. Lewis’s own attitude to homosexuality is hard to define; it was perhaps a mixture of revulsion, due to his Ulster upbringing which encouraged an Old Testament severity towards sexual deviation, and fear, even suppression, due to the fact that his own feelings for his male friends were so warmly affectionate. At all events, while many of the ‘Georgoisie’ (as Betjeman named his friends) ate their dinners in loose-knotted shantung ties and pastel shirts, Lewis seemed to be taking almost exaggerated care to be shabby, with his regular uniform of dung-coloured mackintosh and old cloth hat.

John Betjeman was sent down from Magdalen after only a few terms for failing the obligatory University examination in Divinity. He sought out Lewis ‘in his arid room’, but was told bluntly, ‘You’d have only got a Third.’

Some years later, Betjeman turned the tables on his tutor. In his volume of poems Continual Dew (1937), he wrote in the preface that he was ‘indebted to Mr C. S. Lewis for the fact on page 256’. The book consisted of only forty-five pages. And in one of the poems contained in it, ‘A Hike on the Downs’ – which might indeed be a deliberate parody of Lewis’s whole way of life – there is this stanza, supposedly spoken by a young don:

‘Objectively, our Common Room

Is like a small Athenian State –

Except for Lewis: he’s all right

But do you think he’s quite first rate?’

*

Betjeman and his set were enthusiastic about modern poetry. Lewis was becoming less and less sympathetic to it. In fact he was now thoroughly vehement about T. S. Eliot.

In the early months of 1926, while Betjeman was still his pupil, he borrowed a volume of Eliot’s verse from him, and after studying it began to organise an anti-Eliot campaign among his friends. It was to take the form of a parody of modern verse which would be sent to the Criterion, which Eliot edited, in the hope that it would be mistaken for serious poetry and published as such. Lewis acquired several collaborators: his Magdalen colleague Frank Hardie, his pupil Henry Yorke (who had already published his first novel as ‘Henry Green’), and Nevill Coghill. They wrote some appropriate verses and agreed to send them to Eliot under the names of a brother and sister, Rollo and Bridget Considine. ‘Bridget is the elder,’ wrote Lewis in his diary, ‘and they are united by an affection so tender as to be almost incestuous. Bridget will presently write a letter to Eliot (if we get a foothold) telling him about her own and her brother’s life. She is incredibly dowdy and about thirty-five. We rolled about in laughter as we pictured a tea party where the Considines should meet Eliot: Yorke would dress up for Bridget and perhaps bring a baby. The poems are to be sent from Vienna where Hardie has a friend. We think Vienna will decrease suspicion and is a likely place for the Considines to live in. Hardie and Coghill are in it for pure fun, I from burning indignation, Yorke chiefly for love of mischief.’ The venture gained momentum when Lewis’s acquaintance William Force Stead, the American clergyman and man of letters who knew Eliot and in 1927 baptised him a member of the Anglican Church, was shown one of the parodies without being told that it was parody, and expressed a serious enthusiasm for it. But this seemed to indicate not so much that the parody was good poetry as that Stead was a hopeless judge, and shortly after this the prank petered out.

*

Lewis’s long narrative poem Dymer was now finished. It was offered to Heinemann, who had published his 1918 volume of verse, and Lewis was badly shaken when they rejected it. He asked Nevill Coghill for an opinion of the poem. Coghill was quite enthusiastic, liking Dymer enough to pass it to a friend who worked for J. M. Dent; and he and Lewis were delighted when Dent’s expressed admiration and agreed to publish it. When it was issued in 1926 it earned some good reviews. But almost nobody bought it, and Lewis now doubted whether he would achieve success as a poet. He still believed that poetry was his ‘only real line’, but though he went on writing verse it took up a smaller part of his attention. Another factor in this was that old friends from undergraduate days, such as Owen Barfield, were no longer at hand to give advice and criticism. Indeed there were many ways in which Lewis felt the need for more companionship. In a letter to another friend from undergraduate days who had now left the University, A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, Lewis described the idyllic setting of his college rooms and went on: ‘I wish there was anyone here childish enough (or permanent enough, not the slave of his particular and outward age) to share it with me. Is it that no man makes real friends after he has passed the undergraduate age? Because I get no forr’arder, since the old days. I go to Barfield for sheer wisdom and a sort of richness of spirit. I go to you for some smaller and yet more intimate connexion with the feel of Things. But the question I am asking is why I meet no such men now. Is it that I am blind? Some of the older men are delightful: the younger fellows are none of them men of understanding. Oh for the people who speak one’s own language.’

*

Professors and college tutors at Oxford do not necessarily meet often in the course of duty, even if they are members of the same faculty. It was not until Tuesday 11 May 1926, after he had been in residence at Magdalen for two terms, that Lewis had a chance to talk at any length to the new Professor of Anglo-Saxon, who had started work in the University at the same time as himself. On that day he went to an ‘English Tea’ at Merton College for a discussion of faculty business.

At the tea there was some discussion of the General Strike, but not much was said about it, for Oxford had scarcely been affected. Then came some business involving the lecture lists. After that (Lewis recorded in his diary) ‘Tolkien managed to get the discussion round to the proposed English Prelim. I had a talk with him afterwards. He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap – can’t read Spenser because of the forms – thinks the language is the real thing in the school – thinks all literature is written for the amusement of men between thirty and forty – we ought to vote ourselves out of existence if we were honest – still the sound changes and the gobbets are great fun for the dons. His pet abomination is the idea of “liberal studies”. Technical hobbies are more in his line. No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.’

2
‘What? You too?’

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was aged thirty-four, young by the standard of Oxford professors. He had been an Oxford undergraduate between 1911 and 1915, reading Classical Moderations and then English, specialising in the ‘language’ side of the course; that is, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and philology. After marrying, serving in France during the war, and working briefly in Oxford on the New English Dictionary, he had been appointed Reader in English Language at Leeds University. While teaching in Leeds he had built up a ‘language’ side to the English syllabus that was notable for its imagination and liveliness. Now that he was back in Oxford, he was determined to remodel the Oxford English School’s ‘language’ side on the lines that had been successful in Leeds.

He put his proposals to the Faculty not long after Lewis’s first conversation with him. Lewis was among those who voted against him.

*

In declaring to Lewis that ‘the language is the real thing in the school’, Tolkien was in fact reviving an old Oxford quarrel, which had split the Honour School of English Language and Literature ever since its foundation at the end of the nineteenth century.

It was a quarrel about what a university course in ‘English’ should consist of. One faction believed that it ought to be based on ancient and medieval texts and their language, with at most only a brief excursion into ‘modern’ literature – by ‘modern’ they meant anything later than Chaucer. These people wanted an English course that was as severe a discipline as a study of the classics. On the other side were those who thought the most important thing was to study the whole range of English literature up to the present day.

The two factions had different ancestors. The people who were in favour of ancient and medieval studies and philology (all known familiarly as ‘language’, though a good deal more than linguistics was involved) were the cultural descendants of the traditional Oxford classical scholarship, and more recently of nineteenth-century comparative philologists such as Max Müller. The ‘literature’ people (those in favour of the study of post-Chaucerian writers) were in general a new breed of teachers and literary critics who believed that the study of recent vernacular literature was just as important as reading Latin and Greek or other ancient writings. Indeed many of these people thought that, in a time of broadening educational opportunities, recent literature had a far greater future than ‘dead’ languages as an academic discipline. Some of them (more notably at Cambridge than at Oxford) were also beginning to form the idea that by reading English literature a student could in some way improve his character as well as his knowledge. It was this view which Tolkien attacked so vehemently when he told Lewis that he abominated ‘liberal studies’.

There were several reasons why Tolkien took this attitude. First, he himself had never studied post-Chaucerian literature more than cursorily, for ‘English’ had scarcely been taught at his school (King Edward’s, Birmingham), and as an undergraduate he had concentrated on the ‘language’ side of the English course. Moreover, although he had many favourites among later writers, he took an impish delight in challenging established values, saying that he found The Faerie Queene unreadable because of Spenser’s idiosyncratic treatment of the language, and declaring that Shakespeare had been unjustifiably deified. But a deeper and more important reason was that his own mind and imagination had been captivated since schooldays by early English poems such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Pearl, and by the Old Icelandic Völsungasaga and Elder Edda. These were all the literature that he needed.

Lewis’s view was rather different. For him the great works of post-Chaucerian literature had, after all, been a source of joy since boyhood. Spenser was a particular favourite with him. He knew comparatively little Anglo-Saxon literature, and though he was deeply attached to Norse mythology he did not know more than a few words of Old Icelandic itself. So the notion that the earliest part of the course was of special importance – or, as Tolkien put it, that ‘the language is the real thing’ – seemed an exaggeration. There was thus every reason for him to vote against Tolkien.

On the other hand the changes proposed by Tolkien were quite logical. At that time the Oxford syllabus was, in his view, gravely deficient in that it did not encourage a literary approach to early and medieval writings; and Tolkien did believe passionately that Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English prose and poetry should be treated as literature and not merely as a quarry for ‘gobbets’ (passages set in examinations) and for teaching the rules of sound-changes. He was annoyed that students were required by the syllabus to learn off pat such linguistic rules as Grimm’s and Verner’s Laws, but did not have to read any Old or Middle-English literature other than short pieces in anthologies. He thought it absurd, in other words, that Lewis’s pupils were having to learn rules by rote (‘Thus Æ to E they soon were fetchin’’) while they scarcely knew any of the literature to which these rules applied. Lewis in fact had realised the absurdity of this situation. Hence his ‘Beer and Beowulf’ evenings, in which his pupils actually did some reading beyond the syllabus.

This state of affairs applied to the men and women who chose the course which specialised in post-Chaucerian literature – in fact about ninety per cent of the undergraduates reading English Nor were conditions much better for the few who opted for early and medieval studies, for they had to spend a good deal of time – wasted time, thought Tolkien – away from their special field, reading Shakespeare and Milton. Tolkien was determined to end this, and to get the Faculty to accept a remodelled syllabus, in which everyone would be expected to read widely in early English literature, while the early and medieval specialists could pursue their chosen work without having to turn aside and study later writers.

Few people in the Faculty quarrelled with these notions as such. The trouble was that in order to make room for a more thorough study of the early period some other part of the syllabus would have to be abandoned or made optional. Tolkien recommended, in an article in the Oxford Magazine, ‘jettisoning certainly the nineteenth century (unless parts of it could appear as an “additional subject”)’, and suggested that the compulsory papers should stop at 1830.

The notion of improving the study of ancient literature by curtailing the reading of modern writers had a certain appeal at Oxford. The English Faculty had always been embarrassed by those in the University – and there were many – who alleged that undergraduates could read English literature in their baths, and did not need dons to teach it to them any more than they needed nursemaids to wipe their noses. (Lewis himself shared this view.) The study of recent writers was particularly open to this charge; so there was some attraction in amputating the nineteenth century from the syllabus, particularly if it was to give place to what was indubitably a more scholarly pursuit in Oxford’s eyes, the reading of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. This is perhaps why, though Tolkien’s proposal to finish the syllabus at 1830 was strongly resisted by many of the ‘literature’ dons, it was not quashed, but became the subject of considerable argument in the English Faculty during the months following Tolkien’s first meeting with Lewis; years, indeed, rather than months, for it was not until 1931 that the issue was settled.

*

At first, Lewis was among the opponents of Tolkien’s proposals. But soon he began to come round to Tolkien’s side in the English School faction fight. This was due in the beginning to the Coalbiters.

Tolkien had decided to form a club among the dons to read Icelandic sagas and myths. Among his proposals for syllabus reform was the suggestion that Old Icelandic, also known as Old Norse, should be given a more prominent place among early and medieval studies, at least for the specialists; and he thought that the best way to proselytise would be to show his colleagues how enjoyable the reading of Icelandic can be. So the Coalbiters came into existence.

Their Icelandic name was Kolbítar, a jesting term meaning ‘men who lounge so close to the fire in winter that they bite the coal’. Tolkien founded the club in the spring term of 1926. Its first members included several men with a reasonable knowledge of Icelandic: R. M. Dawkins, the Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek; C. T. Onions of the Dictionary; G. E. K. Braunholtz, the Professor of Comparative Philology; and John Fraser, the Celtic Professor. But another founder-member was Nevill Coghill, who knew no Icelandic; and soon he was joined by others who were similarly ignorant and were merely enthusiastic beginners. These included John Bryson, the English tutor at Balliol College; George Gordon, the Professor of English Literature and later President of Magdalen (who had been Tolkien’s head of department at Leeds); and two Magdalen dons, Bruce McFarlane, the historian, and C. S. Lewis.

The suggestion that Lewis be invited to join may have come from John Bryson, a fellow Ulsterman, or from George Gordon, who had taught Lewis as an undergraduate and had been influential in getting him the Magdalen fellowship (Gordon was a great intriguer and campaigner: he had also had a hand in Tolkien’s election as Professor of Anglo-Saxon). Or maybe it was Tolkien himself who discovered that Lewis was keen to join the club. At all events by January 1927 Lewis was attending the Kolbítar, and was finding it invigorating.

Like Coghill and several of the others he could not, when he first joined, read more than a few words of Icelandic without a dictionary. But this did not matter. During the evening, those present would take turns to translate from the text they were reading. Tolkien, who was of course expert in the language and knew the text well, would improvise a perfect translation of perhaps a dozen pages. Then Dawkins and others who had a working knowledge of Icelandic would translate perhaps a page each. Then the beginners – Lewis, Coghill, Bryson and the others – would work their way through no more than a paragraph or two, and might have to call on Tolkien for help in a difficult passage. The learners certainly found it hard going; as John Bryson remarked, ‘When we were enrolled we never realised that it was going to be such a business.’ He recalled that on one occasion ‘a certain scholar, who must remain nameless, was actually caught using a printed “crib” under the table as he translated his passage apparently impromptu. He was not invited back again!’ But most of them took it seriously, especially Lewis.

For someone who had been devoted to Norse myths and legends since adolescence it was exhilarating to be reading them in the original language. ‘Spent the morning partly on the Edda,’ Lewis wrote in his diary in February 1927: the Coalbiters were working their way through the Younger Edda, which contains a version of the great Norse myths. ‘Hammered my way through a couple of pages in about an hour, but I am making some headway. It is an exciting experience when I remember my first passion for things Norse under the initiation of Longfellow. It seemed impossible then that I should ever come to read these things in the original. The old authentic thrill came back to me once or twice this morning: the mere names of god and giant catching my eye as I turned the pages of Zoega’s dictionary were enough.’

The Coalbiters met once every few weeks in term-time, progressing through the sagas towards their eventual goal of the Elder Edda. But not until three years had passed did Lewis begin to realise that the thrill he received from Norse mythology was shared by Tolkien.

On 3 December 1929 Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves: ‘One week I was up till 2.30 on Monday, talking to the Anglo Saxon professor Tolkien, who came back with me to College from a society and sat discoursing of the gods and giants of Asgard for three hours, then departing in the wind and rain – who could turn him out, for the fire was bright and the talk good.’

It was the beginning of a friendship: the moment, as Lewis once remarked, when someone who has till then believed his feelings to be unique cries out, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’

*

Tolkien entirely shared Lewis’s love for ‘Northernness’. He too had first discovered the taste in childhood¹ when he found in a book of fairy stories the tale of Sigurd the Völsung who slew the dragon Fafnir. Reading it, the young Tolkien fell under the spell of what he called ‘the nameless North’. He ‘desired dragons with a profound desire’. At school in Birmingham he taught himself the Norse language and began to read the myths and sagas in their original words. Like Lewis, he fell under the spell of William Morris. And, just as Lewis during adolescence had begun to write his own Norse-style poetry and drama, Tolkien at about the age of eighteen conceived the idea of recreating the ‘Northernness’ that delighted him by writing a cycle of myth and legend. But it was a far more ambitious task than anything Lewis attempted, for whereas Lewis had merely written a pastiche of existing Norse stories, Tolkien began to create a whole new mythology out of his imagination. And while Lewis soon passed on from his adolescent ‘Northern’ writings to other kinds of poetry, Tolkien continued to work at his cycle year after year. It remained the centre of his imaginative life.

During the First World War he began to write in prose form the tales which were the principal elements of his cycle, and by the time he moved from Leeds to Oxford in 1925 these tales had long since been sketched out. But he did not organise them into an entirely continuous or consistent narrative, partly because his attention was taken up with a series of invented languages which were closely related to the mythology, being spoken by ‘elvish’ peoples; in fact these languages and the need to provide a ‘history’ for them had been a major motive for beginning the whole project. Tolkien also delayed drawing up a finished version of The Silmarillion, as he came to call his cycle, because he wanted to recast two of the principal stories into verse. Like Lewis he regarded himself chiefly as a poet. During his time at Leeds he began to write two long narrative poems, one telling the story of Túrin Túram-bar the dragon-slayer and the other recounting the romantic tale of Beren and Lúthien, the mortal man and the elven maid whom he loves, and for whose sake he goes on a terrible quest.

Tolkien kept this occupation a very private matter, rarely mentioning it to anyone. In 1925 he did send parts of the two poems to a retired schoolmaster who had once taught him, and he was disappointed when they were criticised rather severely. For a long time afterwards he consulted nobody.

It was early in December 1929, a few days after their late-night conversation about the Norse gods and giants, that he decided to show the Beren and Lúthien poem to Lewis. It was very long and still unfinished; its title was ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’, and it was in rhyming couplets. Here is part of the description, in the version Tolkien showed to Lewis, of the ‘elder days’ of the elven kingdom of Doriath:

There once, and long and long ago,

before the sun and moon we know

were lit to sail above the world,

when first the shaggy woods unfurled,

and shadowy shapes did stare and roam

beneath the dark and starry dome

that hung above the dawn of Earth,

the silences with silver mirth

were shaken, and the rocks were ringing –

the birds of Melian were singing,

the first to sing in mortal lands.

On 7 December 1929 Lewis wrote to Tolkien:

My dear Tolkien,

Just a line to say that I sat up late last night and have read the geste as far as to where Beren and his gnomish allies defeat the patrol of the ores above the sources of the Narog and disguise themselves in the reaf. I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight: and the personal interest of reading a friend’s work had very little to do with it – I should have enjoyed it just as well if I’d picked it up in a bookshop, by an unknown author. The two things that come out clearly are the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of a myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should suggest incipient allegories to the reader. So much at the first flush. Detailed criticisms (including grumbles at individual lines) will follow.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis.

When Lewis’s ‘detailed criticisms’ of the poem arrived, Tolkien found that Lewis had, in jest, annotated its text as if it were a celebrated piece of ancient literature, already heavily studied by scholars with such names as ‘Pumpernickel’, ‘Peabody’, ‘Bentley’, and ‘Schick’; he alleged that any weaknesses in Tolkien’s verses were the result of scribal errors or corruptions in the manuscript. Sometimes Lewis actually suggested entirely new passages to replace lines he thought poor, and here too he ascribed his own versions to supposedly historical sources. For example, he suggested that the lines about the ‘elder days’ quoted above could be replaced by the following stanza of his own, which he described as ‘the so called Poema Historiale, probably contemporary with the earliest MSS of the geste’:

There was a time before the ancient sun

And swinging wheels of heaven had learned to run

More certainly than dreams; for dreams themselves

Had bodies then and filled the world with elves.

The starveling lusts whose walk is now confined

To darkness and the cellarage of the mind,

And shudderings and despairs and shapes of sin

Then walked at large and were not cooped within.

Thought cast a shadow: brutes could speak: and men

Get children on a star. For spirit then

Threaded a fluid world and dreamed it new

Each moment. Nothing was false or new.

Lines like these showed how greatly Lewis’s poetic imagination differed from Tolkien’s. Tolkien wrote unaffectedly and simply, sometimes lapsing into slack diction or banality but often producing lines that were terse and dramatic; his unadorned style showed no particular ‘influence’. Lewis’s lines – and indeed all his poems – were more complex philosophically and stylistically, and more sure in diction and metre, but they often hovered on the borders of pastiche. Perhaps it was Lewis’s enormous knowledge of English poetry through the centuries that encouraged him to copy earlier models rather than to find a style of his own; at all events this fondness for pastiche was arguably the major reason why his poetry was in the end a failure.

Tolkien did not agree with all Lewis’s emendations of his poem. When Lewis suggested that Tolkien’s couplet ‘Hateful thou art, O Land of Trees!/My flute shall fingers no more seize’ would be better as ‘Oh hateful land of trees, be mute!/My fingers, now forget the flute’, Tolkien scribbled in the margin, ‘Frightful 18th century!!!’ Worse still, where Tolkien’s lines describing the three great and sacred elvish jewels had read ‘The peerless Silmarils; and three/alone he made’, Lewis suggested that this would be better as ‘The Silmarils, the shiners three’. Tolkien, upon reading this, contemptuously underlined the last three words and scribbled a large exclamation mark beside them. But he was greatly encouraged by Lewis’s enthusiasm, and took considerable notice of his criticisms, marking for revision almost all the lines that Lewis thought were inadequate, and in a few cases actually adopting Lewis’s proposed emendations, including several whole lines. Eventually, indeed, he came to rewrite the whole poem, renaming it ‘The Lay of Leithian’; though this was chiefly because of a wish to harmonise it with later developments in The Silmarillion.

Tolkien now began to read more of The Silmarillion aloud to Lewis, having noticed that he had a fondness for being read to. So Lewis was permitted to explore the vast imaginary terrain of ‘Middle-earth’, aided by the maps Tolkien had drawn to accompany the stories. Lewis was delighted, for Tolkien’s poems and prose tales reminded him in many ways of the romantic writings of Malory and William Morris in which he and Arthur Greeves had revelled during adolescence. At the end of January 1930 he wrote to Greeves: ‘Tolkien is the man I spoke of when we were last together – the author of the voluminous metrical romances and of the maps, companions to them, showing the mountains of Dread and Nargothrond the City of the Orcs. In fact he is, in one part of him, what we were.’

It was not a very accurate description of Tolkien’s work. The stories were by no means all ‘romances’, and the majority were in prose and not ‘metrical’, while Nargothrond was a city not of orcs but of elves. Yet if Lewis was not precise in these details he was as enthusiastic as Tolkien could ever have hoped. And this enthusiasm proved to be crucial. ‘The unpayable debt that I owe to him’, Tolkien wrote of Lewis years later, ‘was not “influence” as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my “stuff” could be more than a private hobby.’ His growing friendship with Lewis was also deeply important to him for reasons quite apart from his literary work. His marriage, never easy, had begun to go through a long period of extreme difficulty caused largely by his wife’s resentment of his Roman Catholicism, and by other factors that went back to the broken childhoods they had both endured in Birmingham. By 1929 the Tolkiens were bringing up four children at their north Oxford house, but this if anything increased rather than lessened the strains of their marriage. It was thus with much feeling that Tolkien wrote in his diary, ‘Friendship with Lewis compensates for much.’

3
Mythopoeia

The friendship was not quite so important to Lewis as it was to Tolkien. Late in 1931 Lewis, writing to Arthur Greeves, described Tolkien as ‘one of my friends of the second class’. In the first class, as he explained in the same letter, were Greeves himself and Owen Barfield.

To anyone studying Lewis’s life, Arthur Greeves is constantly present in the background: a shadowy figure who actually played no part in the action but was the constant recipient of confidences and reflections from Lewis. There is in fact little to be said about him. His family were neighbours of the Lewises in Belfast. Arthur himself was slightly older than Jack Lewis but distinctly less mature: rather childlike, in fact, brought up in perpetual anxiety about his health and, because of his poor constitution and plentiful family funds, soon abandoning any attempt to earn his living. He was so different from Lewis that the friendship seems rather surprising, yet they corresponded regularly, Lewis using Greeves as a mixture of father-confessor and spiritual pupil. With Arthur Greeves he discussed, in adolescent days, questions relating to sex – Greeves later scored out these passages in the letters – and to Greeves he was also something like frank on the topic of Mrs Moore. In fact Greeves burnt several pages which may have contained a full account of Lewis’s relationship with her. On the other hand he often lectured Greeves on weak spelling or poor morale, taking a condescending line with his friend. It was altogether an odd and distinctly schoolboyish correspondence.

Lewis’s friendship with Owen Barfield was of a very different nature, for he regarded Barfield as in every way an intellectual equal and in some respects superior to himself. Of smaller and lighter build than Lewis, Barfield was lithe and nimble – he thought at one time of earning his living as a dancer – and though almost equally adept at logical argument he had none of Lewis’s rather heavy-handed dogmatism.

Lewis and Barfield often took holidays together, and from 1927 onwards they went on a walking tour with a couple of friends almost every spring.

*

It was an idyllic way to spend three or four days. Footpaths were plentiful, motor traffic rarely disturbed the quiet of the countryside, roads were often unmetalled and comfortable to the feet, inns were numerous and cheap, so that reservations for the night were not often necessary, and pots of tea and even full meals could be bought in most villages for the smallest sums. Much of rural England was in fact still as it had been in the nineteenth century.

In April 1927 Lewis and Barfield, together with two friends from undergraduate days, Cecil Harwood and W. O. Field (known as ‘Woff’ from his initials), walked along the Berkshire and Wiltshire downs, through Marlborough and Devizes, and then across the edge of Salisbury Plain to Warminster. A year later their walking tour was across the Cotswolds, and in 1929 they made a four day journey from Salisbury to Lyme Regis. But though the route was different every year their habits were almost unvarying. They did not attempt to cover vast distances each day, in the manner of fanatical hikers – Lewis said he disliked the word ‘hiking’ because it was unnecessarily self-conscious for something so simple as going for a walk – but they certainly set a good pace, and would reckon to do perhaps twenty miles a day, maybe a little more on easy country or rather less if the going was rough. Lewis refused to allow the party to take packed meals, insisting on plenty of stops at pubs. He and his friends always made a mid-morning halt for beer or draught cider, and there was more beer at lunch time as an accompaniment to bread and cheese. Lunch was always concluded by a pot of tea, and more tea was drunk at an inn or cottage in mid-afternoon. Indeed Lewis cared for his tea just as much as for his beer, if not more so. Meals were simple but usually excellent. On Salisbury Plain in 1929 they were ‘given tea by a postmistress, with boiled eggs and bread and jam ad lib., for which she wanted to take only sixpence’, and for supper that night at Warminster they had ‘ham and eggs, cider, bread, cheese, marmalade and tea’.

Sometimes things went wrong. Of the Cotswolds trip in 1928 Lewis reported to his brother: ‘This time we committed the folly of selecting a billeting area for the night instead of one good town: i.e. we said “Well here are four villages within a mile of one another and the map marks an inn in each so we shall be sure to get somewhere.” Your imagination can suggest what this results in by about eight o’clock of an evening, after twenty miles of walking, when one is just turning away from the first unsuccessful attempt and a thin cold rain is beginning to fall. Yet these hardships had their compensations: thin at the time, but very rich in memory. One never knows the snugness and beauty of an English village twilight so well as in the homelessness of such a moment: when the lights are beginning to show up in the cottage windows and one sees the natives clumping past to the pub – clouds meanwhile piling up “to weather” Our particular village was in a deep narrow valley with woods all round it and a rushing stream that grew louder as the night came on. Then comes the time when you have to strike a light (with difficulties) in order to read the maps: and when the match fizzles out, you realise for the first time how dark it really is: and as you go away, the village fixes itself in your mind – for enjoyment ten, twenty, or thirty years hence – as a place of impossible peace and dreaminess.’

Occasionally – very occasionally indeed – Lewis and his friends would abandon a walk because of bad weather. But nothing short of a continuous downpour would stop them. Lewis himself was particularly determined to carry on through all but impossible conditions, maintaining stoutly that every kind of weather has its attractions. On Exmoor in 1930 the companions woke up in the morning to find a thick fog. ‘Some of the others were inclined to swear at it,’ wrote Lewis, ‘but I (and I soon converted Barfield) rejoiced to meet the moor at its grimmest. In the afternoon the fog thickened but we continued in spite of it to ascend Dunkery Beacon as we had originally intended. There was of course not a particle of view to be seen.’

He was similarly determined to enjoy every kind of landscape, however dull it might seem to other people. His brother Warnie recorded of a journey they made near Plymouth in 1933: ‘We had a long, tiresome, and very hot walk of about ten miles in hot sunken lanes, from which one occasionally got a glimpse of a dull, commonplace countryside, peppered with bungalows. J. and I argued briskly about the country we had walked through, J. contending that not to like any sort of country argues a fault in oneself: which seems to me absurd. He also said that my description of what we had seen – “lacking in distinction” – was “almost blasphemous”. But I suspect that he was talking for victory.’

There was a certain amount of this ‘talking for victory’ on the walking holidays, for Lewis liked to argue with his companions as they walked. They were all of them well matched. Lewis, writing to ‘Woff’ Field, defined their characteristics as ‘Owen’s dark, labyrinthine pertinacious arguments, my bow-wow dogmatism, Cecil’s unmoved tranquillity, your needle-like or greyhound keenness’. But too much serious talk was discouraged. One year when Lewis’s pupil Griffiths (later Dom Bede Griffiths) joined them, he offended protocol by engaging Barfield in a lengthy and profoundly serious theological battle. Equilibrium was badly upset, nor was it restored until the party had him cracking jokes along with the rest of them. The kind of day they really liked was one such as in Dorset when they ‘got through the serious arguments in the ten miles before lunch and came down to mere fooling and school-boy jokes as the shadows lengthened.’

*

Lewis and Barfield were at this time engaged in a battle of ideas.

Barfield had for several years been a disciple of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, a form of religious philosophy which offers a very idiosyncratic account of the nature of the world and of the relationship between God and Man.¹ Lewis was at first alarmed at his friend’s enthusiasm for Steiner’s teachings, with their occasional use of the word ‘occult’ and their inclusion of such doctrines, as a belief in reincarnation. But he discovered that at close quarters Anthroposophy radiated, at least in his opinion, what he called ‘a re-assuring Germanic dullness which would soon deter those who were looking for thrills’. However, he was still disturbed that Barfield should adopt any kind of supernaturalism, for he himself was trying to be utterly rational in his philosophical outlook and to exclude any notion of the ‘other’ from his view of the universe. He was prepared to admit the existence of the imaginative thrill or romantic longing which he had experienced since childhood, and which he called ‘Joy’; but he refused to admit that it had anything to do with objective truth. He declared to Barfield: ‘Imaginative vision cannot be invoked as a source of certainty – for any one judgment against another.’ In other words, it was splendid to have sensations of delight when you saw a sunset or read a poem, but this told you nothing objective about the world. The imaginative must be kept strictly apart from the rational.

Barfield disagreed utterly. Besides following Steiner’s teachings, he had for many years admired and studied Coleridge’s writings on the Imagination; and he began to argue this point with Lewis, both on the walking tours and in a correspondence that they soon named ‘The Great War’. In particular, Barfield tried to persuade Lewis that purely rational argument of the kind that he had used since he was tutored by Kirkpatrick often depended on artificial terms and had little to do with the actual business of life. Barfield also did his best to convince Lewis that imagination and aesthetic experience did lead, if not automatically to objective truth, then at least to a better understanding of the world.

Lewis did not accept all Barfield’s points. But as a result of the ‘Great War’ he ceased to separate his emotional experiences from his intellectual process, and came to regard ‘Joy’ and poetic vision, in their way, as truthful as rational argument and objective fact.

*

If Greeves and Barfield were one degree higher than Tolkien in Lewis’s hierarchy of friends, his brother Warnie was above even them.

After leaving school, Warnie had become an army cadet, and served in the Royal Army Service Corps for the entire First World War. After the war he remained in the army as a regular officer, serving in England and overseas, and using the Lewis family house in Belfast as a home base – for like Jack he had remained unmarried. In 1929 their father died, and the Belfast house was sold. As a result, Warnie needed another home, especially as he was approaching his middle thirties and planned to leave the army soon on retirement pay, which, together with small private means, would be sufficient to keep him. Jack and Mrs Moore invited him to make his home with them, and Warnie accepted readily, though privately there were feelings of caution on both sides. Warnie knew that ‘Minto’ could be very demanding, while she and Jack felt in their turn that it was a sacrifice of their privacy. But the two brothers were chiefly delighted at the prospect of each other’s company.

Warnie and Jack were fairly similar physically, both being heavily built with broad faces, though Warnie was more thickset and was tanned from his years abroad. They dressed similarly in baggy flannel trousers and tweed jackets, and they shared a liking for pipe tobacco and beer and country walks. Warnie’s formal education had stopped far short of Jack’s, but he kept up his reading and was widely knowledgeable in English literature and even more so in French history, particularly of the seventeenth century. In English literature he regarded himself as a mere amateur, but his sheer enthusiasm, uncomplicated by any preconceived notions of what he ought or ought not to like, made him a discerning critic. Jack much appreciated this quality in his brother. After receiving a letter from Warnie on service abroad, enthusing about The Faerie Queene, he wrote to him: ‘I wonder can you imagine how reassuring your bit about Spenser is to me who spend my time trying to get unwilling hobble-de-hoys to read poetry at all? One begins to wonder whether literature is not, after all, a failure. Then comes your account of the Faerie Queene on your office table, and one remembers that all the professed “students of literature” don’t matter a rap.’ In the next few years Jack Lewis was to develop a persona as the ‘plain man’ of literary criticism. Perhaps that role was influenced by the unaffectedly ‘plain’ qualities of his brother’s taste.

Not that Warnie Lewis was in any sense intellectually crude. But there was something ‘simple’ about him in the best and most positive sense of the word. ‘Dear Warnie,’ Jack remarked to Arthur Greeves, ‘he’s one of the simplest souls I know in a way: certainly one of the best at getting simple pleasures.’

It was largely this quality of getting the best out of ordinary life that made Warnie Lewis a first-rate diarist. He kept a record of daily events intermittently throughout his adult years. Here, for example, is his entry for 21 December 1932, shortly after he had come from foreign service and had at last retired from the army:

To-day, I got up early, and went to the hall door where I found The Times containing the announcement which I have been dreaming of for years – ‘Capt. W. H. Lewis retires on ret. pay (Dec. 21)’. And so, after eighteen years, two months, and twenty days, my sentence comes to an end, and I am able to say, like Wordsworth, that I have

shaken off

The heavy weight of many a weary day

Not mine, and such as were not made for me.

But so far from grousing, I am deeply, and I hope devoutly thankful.

It has been a good bargain: how many men are there, who, before they are forty, can struggle free, and begin the business of living?

In 1930 the Lewis-Moore ménage moved to the Kilns, a house at the foot of Shotover Hill not far outside Oxford city and on the edge of the village of Headington Quarry. The house was named after the brick kilns that stood nearby; the garden was the size of a small park, with eight acres of land rising steeply up a wooded hillside, and broken by a lake which could be used for bathing and even punting. Chiefly thanks to funds from the sale of the Belfast house, the Lewis brothers and Mrs Moore were able to raise the sum asked for the property, and it became their home late in 1930. After settling in with Jack and ‘Minto’, Warnie took stock of his new life, of the house in its idyllic setting, of the undeniable domestic tensions, and also of the pleasant daily routine that he envisaged. ‘I reviewed the pros and cons’, he wrote in his diary, ‘and came to the conclusion that on balance, I prefer the Kilns at its worst to army life at its best: the only doubtful part being “Have I seen the Kilns at its worst?”’

*

By the beginning of September 1931 eleven years had passed since Jack Lewis had stopped being a dogmatic atheist.

As long ago as 1920 his study of philosophy had led him ‘to postulate some sort of God as the least objectionable theory’, though he added, ‘of course we know nothing’. The notion of an ultimate truth made sense to him because, as he remarked in 1924 when commenting on Bertrand Russell’s free-thinking idealism, ‘our ideas are after all a natural product’, and there must be some objective standard, some ultimate fact to explain them. On the other hand ‘God’ still seemed a crude and nursery-like word, and for several years Lewis used other terms to describe his notion of fundamental truth. During this time he was, like most of those who studied philosophy at Oxford in the early nineteen-twenties, still accepting the work of Hegel and his disciples, and as a result he chose Hegelian expressions such as ‘the Absolute Mind’ or just ‘the Absolute’.

But when he spent the year 1924–5 teaching Philosophy at University College he discovered that this ‘watered Hegelianism’ was inadequate for tutorial purposes. The notion of an unspecified Absolute simply could not be made clear to his pupils. So he resorted to referring to fundamental truth as ‘the Spirit’, distinguishing this (though not really explaining how) from ‘the God of popular religion’, and emphasising that there was no possibility of being in a personal relationship with this Spirit. Meanwhile he adopted a benevolent but condescending attitude to Christianity, which he said was a myth conveying as much of the truth as simple minds could grasp.

This was all very well, but among those ‘simple minds’ were men whose thinking he profoundly admired in other respects: Malory, Spenser, Milton, Donne and Herbert, Johnson, and the author whose romance Phantastes he had discovered in adolescence, George MacDonald. It was annoying to love the writings of these men without being able to accept the central premise of their thought, Christianity. Moreover, many of his friends were Christians. Tolkien was a Catholic, and Greeves and Coghill were Anglicans, while Barfield, though an Anthroposophist, accepted the principal ideas of Christianity. So, in the company of those whom he most liked, Lewis was the outsider.

His ideas changed again when, as a result of their ‘Great War’, Barfield managed to persuade him to accept the experience of ‘Joy’ as relevant to his thinking, and not to dismiss it as merely subjective emotional sensation. ‘Joy was not a deception,’ he now decided. ‘Its visitations were rather the moments of clearest consciousness we had.’

He was going through this stage during 1926 and 1927, and the admission of something as irrational as Joy into his ruthlessly logical thinking threw him into confusion. ‘All my ideas are in a crumbling state at present,’ he wrote in his diary in May 1926. He realised that he had let his rational side dominate his emotions too long, remarking in the diary, ‘One needn’t be asking questions and giving judgments all the time.’ But while this realisation was refreshing, he recorded (in January 1927) that he was frightened of what he called ‘the danger of falling back into the most childish superstitions’, by which he presumably meant belief in God and Christianity. He still had immense resistance to the idea of returning to anything so nursery-like.

Three weeks after this he stopped keeping a diary and never resumed, declaring that it was a foolish waste of time. It was also perhaps because he was unwilling to make public (he often read his diary to Mrs Moore and showed it to Warnie, so it was really a public document) the sensations of the supernatural which he was now experiencing; for he had begun to feel that it was not he himself who was taking the initiative but something outside him. As he expressed it to Owen Barfield, the ‘Spirit’ was ‘showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive’. One day while going up Headington Hill on a bus he ‘became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out’. There was a choice to open the door or keep it shut. Next moment he found that he had chosen to open it. From this, which happened in 1927 or 1928, it was only a matter of time before he ‘admitted that God was God’, a step that he finally took in the summer of 1929. It was then that he ‘gave in and knelt and prayed’. But even so he had done no more than accept Theism, a simple belief in God. He was not able to perceive the relevance of Christ’s death and resurrection, and he told a friend, Jenkin: ‘My outlook is now definitely religious. It is not precisely Christianity, though it may turn out that way in the end.’

*

Apart from the last stage, when he had admitted some kind of supernatural experience, Lewis had reached this position entirely through logical argument. Even his acceptance of ‘Joy’ as a factor had only been conceded after elaborate reasoning by Barfield. But now he began to realise that reasoning would not take him any further. The acceptance of God did not lead him automatically to the acceptance of Christianity. He was becoming certain that he wanted to accept it: he examined other religions, but found none that was acceptable; meanwhile his present state of simple Theism was inadequate. On the other hand he did not know how he could argue himself into specifically Christian beliefs. Even if he were to accept the historicity of the Christian story – and he could see no particular barrier to it – he could not understand how the death and resurrection of Christ were relevant to humanity.

*

By the time that Lewis had come to believe in God (but not yet in Christ), Owen Barfield had done something for him that would later bear fruit. He had shown Lewis that Myth has a central place in the whole of language and literature.

Barfield’s arguments were printed in Poetic Diction, a short book by him that appeared in 1928 – though by that time Lewis knew its ideas well. Barfield examined the history of words, and came to the conclusion that mythology, far from being (as the philologist Max Müller called it) ‘a disease of language’, is closely associated with the very origin of all speech and literature. In the dawn of language, said Barfield, speakers did not make a distinction between the ‘literal’ and the ‘metaphorical’, but used words in what might be called a ‘mythological’ manner. For example, nowadays when we translate the Latin spiritus we have to render it either as ‘spirit’ or as ‘breath’ or as ‘wind’ depending on the context. But early users of language would not have made any such distinction between these meanings. To them a word like spiritus meant something like ‘spirit-breath-wind’. When the wind blew, it was not merely ‘like’ someone breathing: it was the breath of a god. And when an early speaker talked about his soul as spiritus he did not merely mean that it was ‘like’ a breath: it was to him just that, the breath of life. Mythological stories were simply the same thing in narrative form. In a world where every word carried some implication of the animate, and where nothing could be purely ‘abstract’ or ‘literal’, it was natural to tell tales about the gods who ruled the elements and walked the earth.

This, in greatly simplified form, is what Barfield argued in Poetic Diction. He was not the only person to come to this conclusion: for example in Germany, Ernst Cassirer had said much the same thing independently. But it was said with particular force by Barfield, and his book impressed not just Lewis but also Tolkien. Not long after the book’s publication, Lewis reported to Barfield: ‘You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said à propos of something quite different that your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook and that he was always just going to say something in a lecture when your conception stopped him in time. “It is one of those things,” he said “that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.”’ Perhaps it was as a result of reading Barfield’s book that Tolkien made an inversion of Muller’s remark. ‘Languages’, he declared, ‘are a disease of mythology.’

So it was that by 1931 Lewis had come to understand that mythology has an important position in the history of thinking. It was a realisation that helped him across his last philosophical hurdle.

*

On Saturday 19 September 1931 Lewis invited two friends to dine with him in Magdalen. One was Tolkien. The other was Hugo Dyson.

Henry Victor Dyson Dyson, always known as ‘Hugo’, lectured in English Literature at Reading University. He was a couple of years older than Lewis. He had been severely wounded in the First World War, had read English at Oxford, and was a practising member of the Church of England. He was also exuberant and witty. Lewis had been introduced to him in July 1930 by Nevill Coghill, and ‘liked him so much that I determined to get to know him better’. On further acquaintance he found Dyson to be ‘a man who really loves truth: a philosopher and a religious man; who makes his critical and literary activities depend on the former – none of your dammed dilettanti’.

On this Saturday night in 1931, after they had dined, Lewis took his guests on a walk through the Magdalen grounds. They strolled along Addison’s Walk (the path which runs beside several streams of the River Cherwell) and here they began to discuss metaphor and myth.

Lewis had never underestimated the power of myth. Far from it, for one of his earliest loves had been the Norse myth of the dying god Balder. Now, Barfield had shown him the crucial role that mythology had played in the history of language and literature. But he still did not believe in the myths that delighted him. Beautiful and moving though such stories might be, they were (he said) ultimately untrue. As he expressed it to Tolkien, myths are ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver’.

No, said Tolkien. They are not lies.

Just then (Lewis afterwards recalled) there was ‘a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We held our breath.’

When Tolkien resumed, he took his argument from the very thing that they were watching.

You look at trees, he said, and call them ‘trees’, and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star’, and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree’, ‘star’, were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jewelled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf-patterned’.

This was not a new notion to Lewis, for Tolkien was, in his own manner, expressing what Barfield had said in Poetic Diction. Nor, said Lewis, did it effectively answer his point that myths are lies.

But, replied Tolkien, man is not ultimately a liar. He may pervert his thoughts into lies, but he comes from God, and it is from God that he draws his ultimate ideals. Lewis agreed: he had, indeed, accepted something like this notion for many years. Therefore, Tolkien continued, not merely the abstract thoughts of man but also his imaginative inventions must originate with God, and must in consequence reflect something of eternal truth. In making a myth, in practising ‘mythopoeia’ and peopling the world with elves and dragons and goblins, a storyteller, or ‘sub-creator’ as Tolkien liked to call such a person,¹ is actually fulfilling God’s purpose, and reflecting a splintered fragment of the true light. Pagan myths are therefore never just ‘lies’: there is always something of the truth in them.

They talked on, until Lewis was convinced by the force of Tolkien’s argument. But he had another question to put to his friends, and as it was late they decided to go indoors to Lewis’s rooms on Staircase III of New Buildings. There, he recorded, ‘we continued on Christianity’.

*

Lewis had a particular reason for holding back from Christianity. He did not think it was necessarily untrue: indeed he had examined the historicity of the Gospels, and had come to the conclusion that he was ‘nearly certain that it really happened’. What was still preventing him from becoming a Christian was the fact that he found it irrelevant.

As he himself put it, he could not see ‘how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now – except in so far as his example could help us’. And he knew that Christ’s example as a man and a teacher was not the centre of the Christian story. ‘Right in the centre,’ he said, ‘in the Gospels and in St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious, expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed – “propitiation” – “sacrifice” – “the blood of the Lamb”.’ He had ridiculed them because they seemed not only silly and shocking but meaningless. What was the point of it all? How could the death and resurrection of Christ have ‘saved the world’?

Tolkien answered him immediately. Indeed, he said, the solution was actually a development of what he had been saying earlier. Had he not shown how pagan myths were, in fact, God expressing himself through the minds of poets, and using the images of their ‘mythopoeia’ to express fragments of his eternal truth? Well then, Christianity (he said) is exactly the same thing – with the enormous difference that the poet who invented it was God Himself, and the images He used were real men and actual history.

Do you mean, asked Lewis, that the death and resurrection of Christ is the old ‘dying god’ story all over again?

Yes, Tolkien answered, except that here is a real Dying God, with a precise location in history and definite historical consequences. The old myth has become a fact. But it still retains the character of a myth. So that in asking what it ‘meant’, Lewis was really being rather absurd. Did he ask what the story of Balder or Adonis or any of the other dying gods in pagan myth ‘meant’? No, of course not. He enjoyed these stories, ‘tasted’ them, and got something from them that he could not get from abstract argument. Could he not transfer that attitude, that appreciation of story, to the life and death of Christ? Could he not treat it as a story, be fully aware that he could draw nourishment from it which he could never find in a list of abstract truths? Could he not realise that it is a myth, and make himself receptive to it? For, Tolkien said, if God is mythopoeic, man must become mythopathtic.

*

It was now 3 a.m., and Tolkien had to go home. Lewis and Dyson came downstairs with him. They crossed the quadrangle and let him out by the little postern gate on Magdalen Bridge. Then, Lewis recorded, ‘Dyson and I found more to say to one another, strolling up and down the cloister of New Building, so that we did not get to bed till 4.’

Twelve days later Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves: ‘I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ – in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.’

4
‘The sort of thing a man might say’

Actually it was not quite so easy or so sudden as that. Arthur Greeves wrote to Lewis saying he was delighted that his friend had at last accepted Christianity. After reading this letter from Greeves, Lewis began to feel that ‘perhaps I had said too much’. He told Greeves cautiously: ‘Perhaps I was not nearly as clear on the subject as I had led you to think. But I certainly have moved a bit, even if it turns out to be a less bit than I thought.’

He had in fact reached the point where rational argument failed, and it became a matter of belief rather than of logical proof. Tolkien and Dyson’s argument about Christianity as ‘a true myth which is nevertheless a myth’ had a lot of imaginative force, but it was a questionable proposition in terms of strict logic.

Lewis could not go on thinking it over for ever. He realised that some sort of ‘leap of faith’ was necessary to get him over the final hurdle. ‘There must’, he said, ‘perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible, for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?’

So he became a Christian. He made his Communion for the first time since childhood days on Christmas Day 1931, in his parish church at Headington Quarry. But he did not forget to maintain in his mind the distinction between the two questions: the existence of God, which he believed he could prove by logical argument, and the truth of Christianity, which he realised was not subject to rational proof. Indeed his doubts about the Christian story never entirely ceased. There were, he remarked, many moments at which he felt ‘How could I – I of all people – ever have come to believe this cock and bull story?’ But this, he felt, was better than the error of taking it all for granted. Nor was he utterly alarmed at the notion that Christianity might after all be untrue. ‘Even assuming (which I most constantly deny)’, he said, ‘that the doctrines of historic Christianity are merely mythical, it is the myth which is the vital and nourishing element in the whole concern.¹

*

One reason for Lewis’s holding back from conversion for so long was his inability to find the Gospel story attractive. It evoked none of the imaginative response that was aroused in him by pagan myths. As he told Greeves, ‘the spontaneous appeal of the Christian story is so much less to me than that of Paganism’. This was perhaps one reason why he now began to create his own fictional setting for Christianity.

He had already made two attempts to write an account of his conversion. The first, in prose, had been begun while he was a Theist but not yet a Christian, and it was soon abandoned. In the spring of 1932, shortly after returning to the practice of Christianity, he tried again, this time in verse. But again he quickly abandoned the project. Then, in August of the same year, he suddenly found the right method.

He had been at work for some time on a projected book about the allegorical love-poetry of the Middle Ages, and in consequence he had made a thorough study of the workings of allegory. Though Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was outside the scope of his project, he had known and loved it since childhood, and now its example rose before him. While staying with Arthur Greeves in Belfast he began to write what he called The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism. As he himself said of Bunyan’s book, ‘Now, as never before, the whole man was engaged’. In a fortnight this witty and often moving allegory of a modern pilgrim’s journey to Christianity was finished.

The writing of stories in prose came almost incredibly easy to Lewis. ‘It’s such fun after sweating over verse,’ he said, ‘like free-wheeling.’ He worked fast, managed to write almost everything in one draft, and never made more than minimal revisions. This was in marked contrast to Tolkien who, though he wrote fast, took endless pains over revision and regarded it as a continuing process that was not necessarily complete when the book was published. The two men were also very different in their attitudes to the manuscripts of their work. Tolkien invariably kept all his drafts and his notes; Lewis just as invariably tore his up as soon as the book reached print. He also tore up other people’s. Tolkien recalled: ‘He was indeed accustomed at intervals to throw away papers and books – and at such times he destroyed those that belonged to other people. He “lost” not only official documents sent to him by me, but sole MSS. of at least two stories.’

The most important fact about The Pilgrim’s Regress is one that can easily be missed because it is so obvious. Less than a year after he had become a Christian, Lewis already felt capable of telling other people about his own experiences, capable of being an ‘apologist’, a defender of Christianity by argument. There was to be no novitiate, no period in which he would wait for his understanding of his religion to mature and deepen. He must begin right away.

Nor was the book just to be a defence of Christianity. In it he also championed the two things which he believed had helped him along the road to belief: Reason, and ‘Romanticism’, by which he specifically meant the search for ‘Joy’. And in defending these two things he launched, in The Pilgrim’s Regress, a forceful and often bitter attack against almost every other form of thinking current in his time. For in describing the snares which the pilgrim encounters on his journey, Lewis enumerates not only traditional intellectual or emotional dangers (Ignorantia, Superbia, Orgiastica, Occultica, and so on) but also brings more contemporary enemies into the tale. At least, to him they were enemies.

Lewis had conceived a profound dislike not merely for T. S. Eliot’s poetry but for the whole modernist movement in the arts. In The Pilgrim’s Regress his hero lands in the middle of ‘the Clevers’, allegorical figures representing what Lewis thought were the objectionable features of the nineteen-twenties art forms. In a later edition of the book he added running headlines identifying the various members of the Clevers as ‘The poetry of the Silly Twenties’, ‘The swamp-literature of the Dirty Twenties’, and ‘The gibberish-literature of the Lunatic Twenties’. And it is not only the arts that come under attack in the book. Freudianism and Marxism are among the many other dangers that the pilgrim encounters, and Lewis’s feelings towards the whole era are summed up at the moment in the story when Reason attacks and slays the Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Age.

After the pilgrim has escaped from ‘darkest Zeitgeistheim’ he spends the night at the house of ‘Mr Sensible’, a learned but utterly shallow dilettante who undoubtedly represents Lewis’s view of many of his Oxford colleagues – well-read men, able to produce witty aphorisms for every occasion, but adhering to no religion or philosophy and living a shallow life; the kind of man in fact that Lewis was thinking of when he said that, in contrast, Hugo Dyson was ‘none of your damned dilettanti’. Then, from the house of Mr Sensible, the pilgrim John journeys into sterner regions of the mind; and here the book launches an attack on another of Lewis’s enemies.

Sheltering in a hut and attempting to survive by extreme asceticism are three Pale Men, ‘Humanist’, ‘Neo-Classical’, and ‘Neo-Angular’. The first two profess no religion, but Neo-Angular is a believer in ‘the Landlord’, the figure that stands for God in the allegory. His practice of religion, however, is a very different thing from the orthodoxy which John eventually embraces. ‘My ethics are based on dogma, not on feeling,’ he tells John, and he disapproves of John’s search for ‘the Island’, the allegorical representation of ‘Joy’, telling him that it is the wrong reason for the pilgrimage. He also declares that John should not speak directly to ‘Mother Kirk’ (the Church) but should ‘learn from your superiors the dogmata in which her deliverances have been codified for general use’. Lewis explained this part of the allegory in a letter to a friend: ‘What I am attacking in Neo-Angular is a set of people who seem to me to be trying to make of Christianity itself one more highbrow, Chelsea, bourgeois-baiting fad. T. S. Eliot is the single man who sums up the thing I am fighting against.’

Eliot’s conversion to Christianity had by this time become a matter of public knowledge, but it had not endeared him to Lewis, who felt that Eliot’s form of religion was ‘High and Dry’, not merely sectarian in its Anglo-Catholicism but also emotionally barren and counter-romantic. So in The Pilgrim’s Regress a character dismisses the fact that Neo-Angular is a Christian by suggesting that he may be only ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’.

The book’s title is explained in the last section. John the pilgrim, after crossing by Mother Kirk’s aid the chasm of original sin, has no sooner become regenerate as a Christian than he is told to retrace his steps. This he does, passing once more through the regions of the mind and seeing them for the delusions they really were. He comes at last to his childhood home of Puritania, and it is from the gate of his parents’ cottage that he finally climbs the foothills towards the mountain where stands the Landlord’s Castle, the City of God. He has come at last to true ‘Joy’, and has found it in – of all places – the religion of his childhood.

This element of revisiting childhood, combined with the attack on contemporary ideas, did not escape the notice of the critics. ‘Though Mr Lewis’s parable claims to reassert romanticism,’ remarked The Times Literary Supplement reviewer when the story was published in 1933, ‘it is the romanticism of homesickness for the past, not of adventure towards the future, a “Regress” as he candidly avows.’

Among Lewis’s friends there was one who gradually began to think that the book’s title was particularly significant, though in rather a different way. Tolkien admired The Pilgrim’s Regress, but many years later he wrote of it: ‘It was not for some time that I realized that there was more in the title Pilgrim’s Regress than I had understood (or the author either, maybe). Lewis would regress. He would not re-enter Christianity by a new door, but by the old one: at least in the sense that in taking it up again he would also take up, or reawaken, the prejudices so sedulously planted in boyhood. He would become again a Northern Ireland protestant.’

*

Was Lewis an Ulster Protestant? In Surprised by Joy he denies that he had been brought up in any particularly puritanical form of religion, and he was very angry when a Catholic publisher who reissued The Pilgrim’s Regress identified ‘Puritania’ with Ulster. ‘My father’, declared Lewis, ‘was, by nineteenth-century and Church of Ireland standards, rather “high”.’ However, his diary of life at Wynyard School, written when he was ten years old, gives a rather different impression:

We were obliged to go to St John’s (Watford), a church which wanted to be Roman Catholic, but was afraid to say so. A kind of church abhorred by respectful [sic] Irish Protestants. In this abominable place of Romish hypocrites and English liars, the people cross themselves, bow to the Lord’s Table (which they have the vanity to call an altar), and pray to the Virgin.

Twenty-two years later when Lewis resumed the practice of religion he was still rather evangelical in his approach, making his Communion only at major festivals and generally preferring to attend Matins. After a time he increased his frequency of Communion to monthly intervals. Eventually he adopted the habit of communicating weekly and on major saints’ days. Indeed as the years passed he became distinctly more ‘Catholic’ in his practices. He began to make regular confessions, and came to believe in the importance of prayers for departed souls. Yet these things did not play a large part in his religious thought, or at least not in his Christian writings, where he rarely discussed them. Indeed, he tried to avoid anything that would classify him as ‘Anglo-Catholic’ or ‘Evangelical’. He hated such terms and maintained that to say that you were High Church or Low Church was to be wickedly schismatical.

For him, the real distinction lay elsewhere, not between High and Low at all but between religious belief that was orthodox and supernatural on the one hand, and ‘liberal’ and ‘demythologised’ on the other. He had been on a long journey before he arrived at Christianity, and now that he had arrived he was determined to accept the traditional doctrines of the Church; he wanted not to argue about them or to reinterpret them but to defend them. As a result he was highly critical of the ‘broad church’ as he called it, the liberalism which he believed to be the canker in modern Christianity. Among the targets for attack in The Pilgrim’s Regress is ‘Mr Broad’, who though a ‘Steward’ (a clergyman) doubts the necessity of actual conversion. ‘I wouldn’t for the world hold you back,’ he tells John. ‘At the same time there is a very real danger at your age of trying to make these things too definite. These great truths need reinterpretation in every age.’ Lewis thought he saw this attitude growing in the contemporary church, and he took a stand firmly in opposition. For him, the great truths did not need reinterpretation. They needed to be championed, to be defended as much against ‘liberalisers’ as against unbelievers. In this attitude he was in agreement with two ultra-orthodox defenders of the faith, G. K. Chesterton, whose apologetic writings had been an influence on him during his conversion, and Tolkien.

Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. He had hoped that Lewis too might become a Catholic, and he was disappointed that he had returned to membership of the Church of England (the equivalent of the Church of Ireland in which Lewis had been baptised). Tolkien was strongly unsympathetic towards the Church of England, not least because during his childhood his own mother, a Catholic convert, had been treated harshly by relatives who belonged to it – indeed he believed that this ‘persecution’ had hastened her death. As a result he was particularly sensitive to any shade of anti-Catholic prejudice.

Unfortunately Lewis retained more than a trace of the Belfast Protestant attitude to Catholics. In unguarded moments he and his brother Warnie might refer to Irish Catholics as ‘bog-trotters’ or ‘bograts’, and, though they usually avoided such crude remarks in Tolkien’s presence, there were moments of tension. ‘We were coming down the steps from Magdalen hall,’ Tolkien recalled, ‘long ago in the days of our unclouded association, before there was anything, as it seemed, that must be withheld or passed over in silence. I said that I had a special devotion to St John. Lewis stiffened, his head went back, and he said in the brusque harsh tones which I was later to hear him use again when dismissing something he disapproved of: “I can’t imagine any two persons more dissimilar.” We stumped along the cloisters, and I followed feeling like a shabby little Catholic caught by the eye of an “Evangelical clergyman of good family”¹ taking holy water at the door of a church. A door had slammed. Never now should I be able to say in his presence:

Bot Crystes mersy and Mary and Jon,

Thise am the grounde of alle my blysse

– The Pearl, 383-4; a poem that Lewis disliked² – and suppose that I was sharing anything of my vision of a great rood-screen through which one could see the Holy of Holies.’

Tolkien wrote this thirty years later, when other events had soured his recollections. In the early days of the friendship such moments were rare, and for the most part he was profoundly grateful for Lewis’s conversion. In October 1933 he wrote in his diary that friendship with Lewis, ‘besides giving constant pleasure and comfort, has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual – a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher – and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord’.

*

‘On Saturday last, I started to say my prayers again after having discontinued doing so for more years than I care to remember: this was no sudden impulse, but the result of a conviction of the truth of Christianity which has been growing on me for a considerable time.’

This was written not by Jack Lewis but by his brother Warnie. During the months when Jack was returning to Christianity, Warnie too was resuming the religious beliefs and practices of his childhood. Like Jack he had in boyhood drifted away from the Church. Now in 1931 his return to Christianity was different in manner from his brother’s. He indulged in few philosophical speculations, merely recording in his diary that his new-found belief was ‘a conviction for which I admit I should be hard put to find a logical proof, but which rests on the inherent improbability of the whole of existence being fortuitous, and the inability of the materialists to provide any convincing explanation of the origin of life’.

While he was at home at the Kilns early in 1931, Warnie went to Matins at the local church with Jack. But the brothers scarcely discussed their changing views, and soon afterwards Warnie was posted to Shanghai for his final months of army service. It was there, and without any knowledge that his brother was doing the same, that he made his Communion for the first time for many years on Christmas Day 1931. A few weeks later a letter from Jack reported that he too had made his Communion on that day. ‘I am delighted,’ Warnie wrote in his diary. ‘Had he not done so I, with my altered views, would have found – hardly a barrier between us, but a lack of complete identity of interest which I should have regretted.’ Jack, when he learnt of Warnie’s full return to Christianity, made the same comment: ‘What a mercy that the change in his views (I mean as regards religion) should have happened in time to meet mine – it would be awkward if one of us were still in the old state of mind.’

The brothers’ new ‘identity of interest’ was reflected when, after Warnie’s retirement from the army and his return to the Kilns as a permanent member of the household, the two of them almost immediately set off on a walking tour, their first together, up the Wye Valley. Warnie, despite his army training, was nervous about carrying a heavy pack for twenty miles or more a day, but he was soon being pleasantly surprised at the ease of it all, and at the end of their journey he judged it to be one of the best holidays he had ever had. This was in January 1933, and for many years afterwards a January walking tour was a regular fixture for the two brothers, quite independent of Jack’s annual walk with Barfield and the other friends of that set, which usually took place just after Easter. Warnie and Jack were at their happiest on these walks, talking about anything from beer to theology. ‘We discussed’, Warnie noted in January 1935 when he and Jack were walking in the Chilterns, ‘how useful it would be if there were a beer map of England, showing the areas controlled by each Beer Baron.’ Another day they argued about the nature of personal immortality. Warnie was less well-read than Jack, but with his speculative imagination and his common sense he was an excellent companion for his brother.

At home too they spent a lot of time together. In term, Jack now slept in his college rooms, partly so that he could go to chapel early in the morning and begin work immediately after breakfast. (Mrs Moore declared herself to be an atheist and was inclined to mock at the brothers’ return to Christianity.) But in the afternoons Jack came out to the Kilns, where he and Warnie took the family dogs for a walk, or worked in the garden, rebuilding paths and planting saplings, which they called ‘public works’. Warnie had a bedroom at the Kilns, but he kept most of his books in Magdalen, in one of his brother’s two sitting-rooms; and he usually spent the morning there, sorting out and typing transcripts of the Lewis family papers, a task that took him several years. In fact it became his chief occupation, for his army pension together with small private means meant that he did not need to take a paid job. He was able to spend much of his time going to concerts, and reading, which he did a great deal. He also got to know Jack’s friends when they dropped in at Magdalen.

He was typing one morning in February 1933 when (he wrote in his diary) ‘in came J’s friend Dyson from Reading – a man who gives the impression of being made of quick silver: he pours himself into a room on a cataract of words and gestures, and you are caught up in the stream – but after the first plunge, it is exhilarating. I was swept along by him to the Mitre Tap in the Turl (a distinct discovery this, by the way) where we had two glasses of Bristol Milk apiece and discussed China, Japan, staff officers, Dickens, house property as an investment, and, most utterly unexpected, “Your favourite reading’s Orlando Furioso isn’t it?” (deprecatory gesture as I got ready to deny this). “Sorry! Sorry! my mistake.” As we left the pub, a boy came into the yard and fell on the cobbles. Dyson (appealingly): “Don’t do that my boy: it hurts you and distresses us.”’

Hugo Dyson, on his visits to Oxford from Reading, became a frequent and most welcome interrupter of Warnie Lewis’s mornings: ‘At about half past eleven when I was at work in the front room in College, in burst Dyson in his most exuberant mood. He began by saying that it was such a cold morning that we would have to adjourn almost immediately to get some brandy. I pointed out to him that if he was prepared to accept whiskey as an alternative, it was available in the room. Having sniffed it he observed “it would be unpardonable rudeness to your brother to leave any of this” and emptied the remains of the decanter into the glass. After talking very loudly and amusingly for some quarter of an hour, he remarked airily “I suppose we can’t be heard in the next room?” then having listened for a moment, “Oh, it’s all right, it’s the pupil talking – your brother won’t want to listen to him anyway”. He next persuaded me to walk round to Blackwell’s with him, and here he was the centre of attraction to a crowd of undergraduates. Walking up to the counter he said: “I want a second hand so-and-so’s Shakespeare; have you got one?” The assistant: “Not a second hand one, sir, I’m afraid.” Dyson (impatiently): “Well, take a copy and rub it on the floor, and sell it to me as shop soiled.”’

*

Tolkien too was a regular caller while Warnie Lewis was at work in Magdalen. He and Jack were in the habit of spending an hour together on Monday mornings, generally concluding their conversation with a pint of beer in the Eastgate Hotel opposite the college. ‘This is one of the pleasantest spots in the week,’ remarked Jack. ‘Sometimes we talk English School politics; sometimes we criticize one another’s poems; other days we drift into theology or “the state of the nation”; rarely we fly no higher than bawdy or puns.’

By ‘bawdy’ Lewis meant not obscene stories but rather old-fashioned barrack-room jokes and songs and puns. For example, he greatly relished one of his pupils’ perfectly serious description of courtly love as ‘a vast medieval erection’, and in meetings of the Coalbiters he and the other members of that club listened with delight to scurrilous jests composed in Icelandic by Tolkien, who was a past master of bawdy in several languages. Lewis believed that to be acceptable, bawdy ‘must have nothing cruel about it. It must not approach anything near the pornographic. Within these limits I think it is a good and wholesome genre.’

As to ‘English School politics’, these became less turbulent after 1931 when – chiefly thanks to Lewis’s part in the campaign – Tolkien’s syllabus reforms were accepted by the Faculty, with the result that the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English parts of the course became much more attractive to undergraduates, and the study of Victorian literature was virtually abandoned. Lewis was delighted at this victory, which as he put it ‘my party and I have forced upon the junto after hard fighting’.

Shortly after the new syllabus was put into effect, Lewis and Tolkien were both doing duty as examiners in the English School, together with Tolkien’s friend and former colleague from Leeds, E. V. Gordon. Lewis lost no opportunity of writing a jibe in the Beowulf metre at the two philologists’ performance in the viva voce examination sessions:

Two at the table in their talk borrowed

Gargantua’s mouth. Gordon and Tolkien

Had will to repeat well-nigh the whole

That they of Verner’s law and of vowel sorrows,

Cares of consonants, and case endings,

Heard by hearsay.

Never at board I heard

Viler vivas.

‘In fact’, Tolkien remarked of these lines, ‘during the sessions C. S. L.’s voice was the one most often heard.’

Outside term time, Tolkien and Lewis sometimes went for afternoon walks together. Warnie Lewis liked to enjoy as much of his brother’s company as possible, and he was not always pleased about this. ‘Confound Tolkien!’ he wrote in his diary on one such occasion. ‘I seem to see less and less of J. every day.’ Knowing Warnie’s feelings, Jack took a great deal of trouble not to leave his brother out of anything and, when Tolkien and he decided to spend an evening reading aloud the libretto of Wagner’s Die Walküre, Warnie was asked to join them even though he knew no German and could only take part by using an English translation. They began after tea, broke off for supper at the Eastgate – ‘where we had fried fish and a savoury omelette, with beer’ – and then returned to Jack’s rooms in Magdalen ‘and finished our play (and incidentally the best part of a decanter of very inferior whiskey),’ recorded Warnie. ‘Arising from the perplexities of Wotan we had a long and interesting discussion on religion which lasted until about half past eleven.’¹

Warnie was with Jack at a dinner in July 1933 when Tolkien and Hugo Dyson acted as joint hosts at Exeter College, of which they were both old members. ‘Dyson and Tolkien were in exuberant form,’ recorded Warnie. ‘I should like to have seen more of a man on the opposite side of the table, Coghill: big, pleasant, good looking.’ Later ‘the party broke up, Tolkien, Dyson, J., a little unobtrusive clergyman, and myself walking back to Magdalen where we strolled about in the grove, where the deer were flitting about in the twilight – Tolkien swept off his hat to them and remarked “Hail fallow well met”.’

There were also quite a few gatherings of this sort at which Warnie Lewis was not present. The English School ‘junto’ led by Lewis and Tolkien began to hold informal dinners. This was quite a large group, known as ‘the Cave’ and including a number of college tutors besides the nucleus of Lewis and his friends.² Sometimes a similar group, ‘the Oyster Club’, would gather to celebrate the end of examination-marking by eating oysters. Meanwhile the Coalbiters continued to meet, until at last they had read the major Icelandic sagas and both Eddas, when they were dissolved.

Such semi-formal groups were a regular feature of Oxford life, and there was certainly nothing remarkable about them. Nor was there anything particularly notable about a literary society in which Lewis and Tolkien were both involved for a few terms. It met at University College, where Lewis still taught a few pupils (though in English Literature now, rather than Philosophy). Its founder and organiser, like most of the members, was an undergraduate, Edward Tangye Lean, who edited the university magazine Isis and published a couple of novels while still studying for his degree. There were also a few dons present at the meetings. The club existed so that members could read unpublished compositions aloud, and ask for comments and criticisms. Tangye Lean named it ‘The Inklings’.

No record of its proceedings survives, though Tolkien recalled that in its original form the club soon died, probably when Tangye Lean left Oxford in 1933 for a career in journalism and broadcasting. Tolkien also remembered that among the unpublished works read aloud at its meetings was his own poem ‘Errantry’. That poem (which begins ‘There was a merry passenger, A messenger, a mariner’) was published soon afterwards in the Oxford Magazine. Warnie Lewis read it, admired it, and declared it to be ‘a real discovery’, not least because of its unusual metre. Meanwhile Jack Lewis had recently finished reading a longer work by Tolkien. On 4 February 1933 he wrote to Arthur Greeves: ‘Since term began I have had a delightful time reading a children’s story which Tolkien has just written. I have told you of him before: the one man absolutely fitted, if fate had allowed, to be a third in our friendship in the old days, for he also grew up on W. Morris and George MacDonald. Reading his fairy tale has been uncanny – it is so exactly like what we would both have longed to write (or read) in 1916: so that one feels he is not making it up but merely describing the same world into which all three of us have the entry.’ The story was called The Hobbit.

Tolkien had invented it partly to amuse his own children, and certainly without any serious thought of publication. He had not even bothered to finish typing out a fair copy, but had left it broken off some way before the end. Lewis, much as he liked the story, was by no means certain of the measure of Tolkien’s achievement. ‘Whether it is really good’, he remarked to Greeves, ‘is of course another question: still more, whether it will succeed with modern children.’

*

Tolkien ought, on the face of it, to have been an ideal companion for Lewis and Barfield on their walking tours. But when he did accompany them he found that twenty miles or so a day, carrying a heavy pack, was more than he liked.¹ Tolkien’s own idea of a walk in the countryside involved frequent stops to examine plants or insects, and this irritated Lewis. When Tolkien spent some time at Malvern on holiday with the Lewis brothers in 1947, Warnie remarked: ‘His one fault turned out to be that he wouldn’t trot at our pace in harness; he will keep going all day on a walk, but to him, with his botanical and entomological interests, a walk, no matter what its length, is what we would call an extended stroll, while he calls us “ruthless walkers”.’

Lewis once described an event that might be imagined to have happened on one of his and Tolkien’s rural expeditions:

We were talking of dragons, Tolkien and I

In a Berkshire bar. The big workman

Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe

All the evening, from his empty mug

With gleaming eye, glanced towards us;

‘I seen ’em myself’, he said fiercely.

The lines, however, were invented by Lewis simply as a demonstration of the alliterative metre, and Tolkien said that they had no basis in fact: ‘The occasion is entirely fictitious. A remote source of Jack’s lines may be this: I remember him telling me a story of Brightman, the distinguished ecclesiastical scholar, who used to sit quietly in Common Room (in Magdalen) saying nothing except on rare occasions. Jack said that there was a discussion on dragons one night and at the end Brightman’s voice was heard to say, “I have seen a dragon.” Silence. “Where was that?” he was asked. “On the Mount of Olives,” he said. He relapsed into silence and never before his death explained what he meant.’

*

A great part of Lewis’s time was of course taken up with giving tutorials and lectures to undergraduates. When teaching, he turned for a model to the method of his old tutor Kirkpatrick. But while ‘Kirk’s’ ways had served well in their place, they were not liked by many of the undergraduates who climbed the stairs of Magdalen New Buildings for tutorials. Lewis (though he privately found tutorials boring) was conscientiously attentive to his pupils and to the essays they read aloud to him. But he rarely praised their work, preferring to engage them in heated argument about some remark they had made. This frightened all but the toughest-minded undergraduates. A few managed to fight back and even win a point – which was just what Lewis wanted them to do – but the majority were cowed by the force of his dialectic and went away abashed.

In the lecture room his manner was less fierce. He lectured clearly in a steady, even voice, and without dramatic gestures; though when he quoted, which he did a great deal, he read superbly. Sometimes, in his ‘Prolegomena to Medieval Studies’, he actually dictated important passages word by word to his audience, while all the time he cited facts, and this was what many undergraduates wanted. Other English School dons might be more entertaining – Nevill Coghill expounded Chaucer with urbane humour, and Tolkien’s Beowulf lectures were famed for their striking recitations – but Lewis handed out information, and his lectures were very well attended for this reason.

He was becoming known as an expert in medieval literature, and his ‘Prolegomena’ lectures, setting out the background required for a study of the medieval period, were soon regarded as indispensable. In his spare time from teaching he was still at work on his study of the allegorical love-poetry of the Middle Ages. When it was published in 1936 as The Allegory of Love it was greatly admired, not least for Lewis’s beautifully apt translations of medieval Latin and French poems into mock-medieval English verse of his own composition. Lewis did this to preserve the flavour of the originals, and also because he enjoyed writing pastiche. But fine as was the achievement of The Allegory of Love, he did not regard himself exclusively as a specialist in that period of literature. Indeed, as early as 1931 he had begun to take arms over a critical issue affecting the whole of English literature, an issue that was profoundly involved with his conversion to Christianity.

He believed that he saw a characteristic in literary criticism which was becoming more marked, and which disturbed him. This was the tendency for critics to discuss the personality of the writer as it could be deduced from his work, rather than the character of the writing. At best, Lewis believed, this produced a kind of pseudo-biography, at worst sheer psychological muck-raking. For example he quoted E. M. W. Tillyard saying that Paradise Lost ‘is really about the true state of Milton’s mind when he wrote it’. Lewis thought this was nonsense, and he wrote an essay attacking what he called ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’, declaring: ‘A poet does what no one else can do: what, perhaps, no other poet can do; but he does not express his personality.’ The essay was published in an academic journal; Tillyard replied, and a public controversy began between them.

Lewis’s attack was partially justified. In its extreme form this ‘biographical’ tendency in criticism is objectionable. Yet there are also grounds for supposing that Lewis’s attitude to it grew from something deep-seated in his own personality. In saying this one is of course falling into the very Personal Heresy that he attacked. Nevertheless it needs to be said.

He had always been shy of the emotions. He was aware of this himself, and he said it was because in his childhood he had been embarrassed by his father’s ups and downs of mood. In reaction he tried to cultivate a detachment from passing shades of sorrow and happiness, and to maintain a calmly cheerful exterior. Taking this one stage further, he also abstained from speculations about his own psychological make-up and that of his friends. There was of course no reason why he should speculate about his own personality. On the other hand, given his strange and perhaps inexplicable attachment to Mrs Moore, there were perhaps reasons why he should not.

This attitude was held even more deeply by him after his conversion. He managed to incorporate it into his Christianity, declaring that it was a Christian’s duty to get on with doing the will of God and not to waste time tinkering with his own psychology. ‘To know how bad we are’, he said, ‘is an excellent recipe for becoming much worse.’ His own motto for the conducting of his life was

Man, please thy Maker and be merry,

And set not by this world a cherry.

Was this deliberate lack of interest in his own personality the cause of an alteration in Lewis’s manner after his conversion? At all events Owen Barfield gradually became aware that something was happening to Lewis during this period. ‘Looking back over the last thirty years,’ Barfield wrote shortly after Lewis’s death, ‘it appears to me that I have throughout all that time been thinking, pondering, wondering, puzzling over the individual essence of my old friend. The puzzlement has had to do above all with the great change that took place in him between the years 1930 and 1940 – a change which roughly coincided with his conversion but which did not appear, and does not appear in retrospect, to be inevitably or even naturally connected with it.’

In particular Barfield noticed that, once this change had occurred, Lewis had ‘deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals’. He also observed that something a little strange was happening to Lewis’s manner as a writer.

One example in particular stuck in Barfield’s memory. After Tillyard’s rejoinder to the ‘Personal Heresy’ essay had been published, Lewis wrote a reply to that rejoinder which he called ‘An Open Letter to Dr Tillyard’. Barfield was staying at the Kilns at the time and, when Lewis handed it to him, he read it with admiration, but also (he said) ‘with a certain underlying – what is the word? – restlessness, malaise, bewilderment – that gradually increased until, when I came to the passage at the end:

As I glance through the letter again I notice that I have not been able, in the heat of argument, to express as clearly or continuously as I could have wished my sense that I am engaged with “an older and a better soldier”. But I have little fear that you will misunderstand me. We have both learnt our dialectic in the academic arena where knocks that would frighten the London literary coteries are given and taken in good part; and even where you may think me something too pert you will not suspect me of malice. If you honour me with a reply it will be in kind; and then, God defend the right!

I am, my dear Sir, with the greatest respect,

Your obedient servant,

C. S. Lewis.

‘I slapped down the book’ (Barfield continued) ‘and shouted: ‘I don’t believe it! It’s pastichel”’

It may of course have been deliberate pastiche, something that Lewis always enjoyed writing. Yet on that occasion he had no ready answer to Barfield’s accusation – or at least none that Barfield could recall thirty years later – and all through the ‘Personal Heresy’ controversy there was something in his tone that seemed just subtly artificial. He attacked the tendency of critics to exalt poets because he said it disparaged what he called ‘common things and common men’. He declared that the modern verse of the nineteen-twenties only succeeded in communicating a boredom and nausea that had little place in ‘the life of the corrected and full-grown man’. And, laughing at the notion that poets are in any sense braver than ordinary men, he asked: ‘What meditation on human fate demands so much “courage” as the act of stepping into a cold bath?’

This last remark seems more appropriate to G. K. Chesterton than to Lewis. It would not have been voiced by Lewis as a young man; he had taken the writing of poetry very seriously. But after his conversion this came more and more to be the kind of thing he said and the kind of attitude he took. Or rather, it was the kind of attitude he thought he took, or had decided to take. As Barfield expressed it, ‘It left me with the impression, not of “I say this”, but of “This is the sort of thing a man might say”.’¹

It was naturally a little disturbing, not least because sometimes the old Lewis would appear again. ‘From about 1935 onwards I had the impression of living with, not one, but two Lewises,’ said Barfield. ‘There was both a friend and the memory of a friend; sometimes they were close together and nearly coalesced; sometimes they seemed very far apart.’

*

If Barfield thought that Lewis’s contribution to The Personal Heresy had something of a pose or posture about it, others observed that in the controversy Lewis took up a position that was specifically Christian. In his initial essay he declared that one of the reasons why he disliked paying too much attention to a poet’s personality was that this implied that the personality mattered, which, he said, was the sort of view held by ‘a half-hearted materialist’. He said that the modern critic failed to realise that if the materialistic view of the universe was true, then ‘personality’ was as meaningless as everything else. ‘If the world is meaningless,’ he said, ‘then so are we; if we mean something, we do not mean alone.’

He himself of course did now believe that the universe ‘meant something’. And he did not intend to keep his Christian view of the world out of his literary criticism. If his attitude in The Personal Heresy (which was eventually published as a book) was only Christian by implication, in a short article published soon afterwards he was much more open about what he thought.

The article was called ‘Christianity and Literature’. It originated as a paper read to a religious society at Oxford, and it was printed in 1939 in Lewis’s volume of essays Rehabilitations. In it, Lewis said he found ‘a disquieting contrast between the whole circle of ideas used in modern criticism and certain ideas recurrent in the New Testament’.

‘What’, he asked, ‘are the key-words of modern criticism? Creative, with its opposite derivative; spontaneity, with its opposite convention; freedom, contrasted with rules. We certainly have a general picture of bad work flowing from conformity and discipleship, and of good work bursting out from certain centres of explosive force – apparently self-originating force – which we call men of genius.’ This, he said, was in conflict with the New Testament, where (he claimed) it is often implied that all ‘creation’ by men is at its best no more than imitation of God, and in no sense ‘original’ at all. From this he concluded that the duty of a Christian writer lies not in self-expression for its own sake, but in reflecting the image of God. ‘Applying this principle to literature,’ he said, ‘we should get as the basis of all critical theory the maxim that an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom. Our criticism would therefore from the beginning group itself with some existing theories of poetry against others. It would have affinities with the primitive or Homeric theory in which the poet is the mere pensioner of the Muse. It would have affinities with the Platonic doctrine of a transcendent Form partly imitable on earth; and remoter affinities with the Aristotelian doctrine of μιμησις and the Augustan doctrine about the imitation of Nature and the Ancients. It would be opposed to the theory of genius as, perhaps, generally understood; and above all it would be opposed to the idea that literature is self-expression.’

The argument of Lewis’s ‘Christianity and Literature’ was paralleled by Tolkien’s lecture on Fairy-Stories, delivered the same year (1939) that Lewis’s essay was published. In this lecture Tolkien declared – as he had told Lewis on that September night eight years earlier – that in writing stories man is not a creator but a sub-creator who may hope to reflect something of the eternal light of God. In the lecture he quoted from the poem that he had written for Lewis, recording something of their talk that night under the trees in Addison’s Walk:

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled

With Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build

Gods and their houses out of dark and light,

and sowed the seed of dragons – ’twas our right

(used or misused), That right has not decayed:

we make still by the law in which we’re made.

Something of the same view was held by Hugo Dyson. In a British Academy lecture on Shakespeare’s tragedies – not delivered until 1950 but presumably expressing ideas that he had held for some years – Dyson said: ‘Man without art is eyeless; man with art and nothing else would see little but the reflections of his own fears and desires.’ And Owen Barfield in Poetic Diction had expressed a similar notion when he said that in studying great poetry, ‘our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres’.

These views could hardly have been more different from those held by one of the major and most influential literary critics of the time, F. R. Leavis. Indeed, Leavis and the contributors to his periodical Scrutiny were the group of critics whom Lewis was by implication attacking in The Personal Heresy and ‘Christianity and Literature’. From the beginning of his work at Cambridge, Leavis campaigned for the recognition of ‘culture’ as the basis of a humane society, but did not believe that this culture should be based on any one objective standard, least of all Christianity. He declared that there was among educated persons ‘sufficient measure of agreement, overt and implicit, about essential values to make it unnecessary to discuss ultimate sanctions, or to provide a philosophy, before starting to work’.

In answer to this, Lewis declared that Leavis and one of the other great critics of the period, I. A. Richards, were part of a ‘tradition of educated infidelity’ which could be traced to Matthew Arnold, were even indeed ‘one phase in that general rebellion against God which began in the eighteenth century’. He also said that Leavis’s position as a critic was fundamentally based on subjective judgement and nothing more, which he said was ‘like trying to lift yourself by your own coat collar’; and he declared: ‘Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.’ He said too that the ‘personal heresy’ in Leavis’s and Richards’s work could be traced to this subjectivism: ‘Since the real wholeness is not, for them, in the objective universe, it has to be located inside the poet’s head. Hence the quite disproportionate emphasis laid by them on the poet.’ And he summed up the differences between them when he said: ‘Leavis demands moral earnestness; I prefer morality.’

*

While Lewis was widening his reputation as a literary critic, Owen Barfield was tied to an office job in London. He had found that he could not make a living from literary work – he now had a wife and children to support – so he entered his father’s legal firm in London and became a solicitor, hoping to continue writing in his spare time. But this proved to be a mirage. First there was the challenge of learning a new discipline, and then simply the exhaustion of the job. Though he still wrote poetry, none of it got into print, and for some years the total of his published works was a children’s story, The Silver Trumpet, a short book entitled History in English Words, and Poetic Diction. Lewis often referred to this book and to Barfield’s notions about myth and language in his lectures and in his own published writings, so often indeed that it became a jest among his pupils that Barfield was actually an alter ego, a figment of Lewis’s imagination to whom Lewis chose to ascribe some of his own opinions.

To Barfield, the jest was perhaps rather hollow. He had not wanted to slide into this obscurity. Nor was there in his friendship with Lewis quite the same richness as there had once been. They still went on walking tours, until the increasing suburbanisation of the countryside and the outbreak of war brought that annual event finally to a halt. But they did not argue as before, at least not about fundamentals, for now that he had become a Christian Lewis ceased to discuss his beliefs with his old friend. This was rather to Barfield’s regret, for he had found few people of weighty intellect in the Anthroposophical movement, and he would have been glad of a rational exchange of views. But Lewis shied away from real argument; he had made up his mind.

Meanwhile Barfield was obliged to continue in his London office, even when war seemed imminent, dealing with the petty grind of routine legal work. As he expressed it in a moment of fury:

How I hate this bloody business,

Peddling property and strife

While the pulse of Europe falters –

How I hate this bloody life!

*

The Hobbit was published in 1937. It had come to the notice of a London publisher, and Tolkien was persuaded to finish it in time for it to be issued in the autumn of that year. Lewis was delighted, and he helped the book on its way by giving it two glowing reviews, both in The Times and in The Times Literary Supplement. In the first he wrote: ‘All who love that kind of children’s book which can be read and re-read by adults should take note that a new star has appeared in this constellation. To the trained eye some characters will seem almost mythopoeic.’ And he concluded by saying of Tolkien that he ‘has the air of inventing nothing. He has studied trolls and dragons at first hand and describes them with that fidelity which is worth oceans of glib “originality”.’ In The Times Literary Supplement he classed the book with the works of his beloved George MacDonald, and remarked: ‘No common recipe for children’s stories will give you creatures so rooted in their own soil and history as those of Professor Tolkien – who obviously knows much more about them than he needs for this tale.’

By now Tolkien had read much of The Silmarillion to Lewis, and when at the end of 1937 he began to write a sequel to The Hobbit he passed his new chapters to Lewis. ‘Mr Lewis and my youngest boy are reading it in bits as a serial,’ Tolkien told his publishers when reporting on its progress. He also said that the boy (his third son, Christopher) and Lewis ‘approve it enough to say that they think it is better than The Hobbit’.

By the time that Lewis began to read Tolkien’s still untitled new story, he himself had turned his hand to fiction again. His new book began as a joint project, a kind of bargain or wager with Tolkien, who recalled of it: ‘Lewis said to me one day: “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to write some ourselves.”’ What they had in mind was stories that were ‘mythopoeic’ but were thinly disguised as popular thrillers. Tolkien began on ‘The Lost Road’, the tale of a journey back through time to the land of Númenor. Lewis decided to tackle space-travel because he wished to refute what he considered to be a prevalent and dangerous notion: that interplanetary colonisation by mankind was morally acceptable and even a necessary step forward for the human race. (He found this notion clearly expressed by J. B. S. Haldane in the final chapter of Possible Worlds.) He also wanted to do what he had attempted in The Pilgrim’s Regress, to give the Christian story a fresh excitement by retelling it as if it were a new myth. His choice of science fiction as a form was also influenced by his admiration for H. G. Wells – or rather, for Wells’s narrative powers, but not his ideology – and for David Lyndsay, whose Voyage to Arcturus (he said) ‘first suggested to me that the form of “science fiction” could be filled by spiritual experiences’.

Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet was finished by the autumn of 1937. He submitted it to J. M. Dent, who had published Dymer and The Pilgrim’s Regress; but they turned it down. Tolkien then came to Lewis’s aid. He recommended the book in warm terms (though not without criticism) to his own publisher, Stanley Unwin, the chairman of Allen & Unwin who had published The Hobbit. ‘I read the story in the original MS.,’ he told Unwin, ‘and was so enthralled that I could do nothing else until I had finished it. My first criticism was simply that it was too short. I still think that criticism holds, for both practical and artistic reasons. Other criticisms, concerning narrative style (Lewis is always apt to have rather creaking stiff-jointed passages), inconsistent details in the plot, and philology, have since been corrected to my satisfaction. The author holds to items of linguistic invention that do not appeal to me (Malacandra, Maleldil – eldila in any case I suspect to be due to the influence of the Eldar in The Silmarillion –) but this is a matter of taste.’ And Tolkien concluded: ‘I at any rate should have bought this story at almost any price if I had found it in print.’

Allen & Unwin’s readers reported unfavourably on the book, and the firm turned it down. But Stanley Unwin passed it to The Bodley Head, of which he was also chairman, and they accepted it and brought it out a few months later, in the autumn of 1938. Many people were soon echoing Tolkien’s enthusiasm for it. Not that he had been obliged to rely solely on his own judgement in recommending it, for, as he told Stanley Unwin in another letter, after reading the book in manuscript he had ‘heard it pass rather a different test: that of being read aloud to our local club (which goes in for reading things short and long aloud). It proved an exciting serial, and was highly approved. But of course we are all rather like-minded.’

This was in February 1938. In June of the same year, Tolkien wrote (again to Unwin): ‘You may not have noticed that on June 2 the Rev. Adam Fox was elected Professor of Poetry (at Oxford). He was nominated by Lewis and myself, and miraculously elected: our first public victory over established privilege. For Fox is a member of our literary club of practising poets – before whom The Hobbit, and other works (such as the Silent Planet) have been read. We are slowly getting into print.’ Fox was a Magdalen don and had been a friend, though not an intimate, of Lewis for about ten years. As for the ‘literary club of practising poets’, neither of the Lewis brothers was keeping a diary at this time, and there is no mention of it in their papers until more than a year later when, on 11 November 1939, Jack Lewis wrote in a letter to Warnie: ‘On Thursday we had a meeting of the Inklings’.

*

After the dissolution of Tangye Lean’s ‘Inklings’ at University College, the name, Tolkien recalled, ‘was then transferred (by C. S. L.) to the undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered about C. S. L. and met in his rooms at Magdalen’. There is no record of precisely when this happened – if indeed it was a precise event and not a gradual process. Tolkien seems to imply that it took place as soon as Tangye Lean’s club broke up, which would be in about 1933. On the other hand there is no contemporary mention of it until Tolkien’s report of their ‘public victory’ in the professorial election of 1938.

Lewis never explained why he transferred the name ‘Inklings’ from the undergraduate club to the group of his friends. Yet there was a certain attraction in its ambiguity. Tolkien said of it: ‘It was a pleasantly ingenious pun in its way, suggesting people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas plus those who dabble in ink.’

*

Lewis’s walking tours with his brother and with Barfield came to an end with the outbreak of war. Warnie Lewis had acquired a small two-berth cabin cruiser which he moored at Salter’s boatyard on the Thames in Oxford, and which he called Bosphorus. In August 1939 he arranged to take Jack and Hugo Dyson on a short holiday up the river. But war now seemed likely, and when the time came Warnie, who had rejoined the Royal Army Service Corps with the rank of Major, was obliged to report for army duty. Jack and Dyson had no wish to cancel their trip, but neither of them felt able to manage the practical side of a motor boat; so they enlisted the Lewis family doctor, R. E. Havard, as navigator, he being a man whom Lewis much liked and admired, a Catholic convert who would cheerfully allow Lewis to engage him in a philosophical conversation when they were supposed to be discussing medical symptoms. The party met at Folly Bridge at midday on Saturday 26 August. The pact between Germany and Russia had just been signed, and there was much anxiety about what would be the consequences. ‘Yet’, recalled Havard, ‘our spirits were high at the prospect of a temporary break with politics and daily chores.’

They set off up the Thames from Oxford, following the river through low meadows and past riverside pubs (‘Few of these’, remarked Havard, ‘escaped a visit from us’). On the first evening, after an hour or two spent at the Trout Inn at Godstow, Dyson and Lewis began a vigorous argument about the Renaissance, which Lewis contended had never happened at all, or if it had, hadn’t mattered. They went on through the darkness to the Rose Revived at Newbridge; Lewis and Dyson slept in the inn while Havard spent the night on board. ‘The next morning, Sunday,’ recalled Havard, ‘we moved on to Tadpole Bridge and separated on foot to our respective churches in Buckland a mile or so away. That afternoon after lunch we went on upstream and met, coming down, Robert Gibbings in a canoe, naked to the waist. His bearded figure was greeted rapturously by Lewis with a quotation:

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

At this, Gibbings picked up an enormous conch from the bottom of his canoe and attempted to blow a fanfare on it. After some lively talk, each craft went on its way. Gibbings later put some of the canoe trip into his book Sweet Thames Run Softly.

‘We saw no papers’ (continues Havard) ‘and were cut off from all news except what Lewis and Dyson gathered from the inns where they slept at night. I remember an hour on a riverside lawn waiting for lunch to be ready at Radcot. I remember an evening meal at Lechlade and an expedition upstream for half a mile to Inglesham and the ruined opening into the disused Thames and Severn Canal. I remember little of the return downstream except that the engine broke down, as engines of small boats often do. Lewis and Dyson shared a tow rope on the river bank. I offered my own share; but neither of the other two seemed able to keep the boat out of the bank while it was being towed. So after a short spell ashore I was voted back again to the helm. About this time also the weather broke. Fortunately for tempers, the engine recovered and returned to duty.

‘Our spirits revived until we heard at midday on the Friday that Hitler had invaded Poland. We knew then that war was imminent. The news broke on us, I think, at Godstow, and the return to Oxford was in an unnatural silence. We left Bosphorus at Salter’s, and agreed to meet for a final dinner at the Clarendon in Cornmarket. At dinner Lewis tried to lighten the gloom by saying, “Well, at any rate we now have less chance of dying of cancer.”’

*

War was declared the following Sunday. Lewis had been told that his college rooms, together with the whole of New Buildings, would be required for government use. Gloomily he and Warnie had moved all their books into the basement. A week after the war began it was announced that the building was not needed after all. Laboriously, he brought all the books back again. Indeed it soon appeared that the hostilities were unlikely to cause so very great a disruption in the life of the University – at least, the colleges would not be closing down to anything like the extent they had done in the First World War. Besides the undergraduates (comparatively few in number) who continued with their normal studies, there began some time later to be a steady flow of cadets who were sent to Oxford to spend a few terms reading ‘shortened courses’ before going off to active service. While some dons who, like Lewis, were above the age for military service were required to take on government jobs of various kinds, many remained to continue working much as they had done in peacetime. Lewis soon found that he and Tolkien and most of his Oxford friends were in the latter category. Meanwhile evacuee children were billeted at the Kilns, and, when on 17 September news came that Russian forces had crossed into Poland, Lewis reported that Mrs Moore ‘regards this as sealing the fate of the allies – and even talks of buying a revolver’.

But, as he wrote to Warnie, ‘along with these not very pleasant indirect results of the war, there is one pure gift – the London branch of the Oxford University Press has moved to Oxford, so that Charles Williams is living here.’

PART TWO

1
C.W.

“The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.’

It was a conventional beginning to what at first sight appeared to be a conventional detective story. An unidentified man is murdered in the offices of a publishing company. There are a number of suspects. Inspector Colquhoun investigates.

But, when the book was published in 1930, readers soon discovered that it was not exactly like that. The corpse, it appeared, was only the introduction to the real story: the discovery of the Holy Grail in a country church, its theft by a black magic enthusiast, and the attempt of an Anglican parson and a Roman Catholic Duke to rescue it. Nor did even this seem to be entirely what the story was about, for the pursuit of the Grail (or ‘Graal’ as the author spelt it) was soon giving place to visionary experiences and the contention of the forces of good and evil. As Inspector Colquhoun remarked in Chapter Sixteen, ‘What an infernally religious case this is getting!’

The book was called War in Heaven, and it was the first novel to be published by Charles Williams.

*

By that time – 1930 – the name ‘Mr Charles Williams’ was a familiar sight on the list of evening classes arranged by the London County Council at the City Literary Institute and at Evening Institutes in many parts of the metropolis. Here, in bare buildings with naked light-bulbs, people of all ages and types and levels of education would come for a couple of hours each week, to sit in echoing lecture rooms and study the subject of their choice. Those who opted for English Literature would soon find themselves being lectured to by a thin man with round spectacles, a high forehead, and a long upper lip. He talked in a lower middle-class London accent, and the vowels of his speech seemed at first to contrast oddly with his manner, which was quite unlike that of any other Evening Institute lecturer. Sitting on a table and often moving his arms and hands in dramatic gestures, he spoke passionately and without ceasing. Most people gave up trying to take notes.

His lectures were usually on major poets, especially Milton, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, though sometimes he talked about modem poetry or even (though the classes were supposed to be in English Literature) on Dante. People who came hoping for plain information were taken aback, for, though he chose his words with great precision, he mentioned few facts. Nor did he offer the usual sort of critical opinions. Indeed he did not really discuss

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