No one who had been at Oxford during the Great War of 1914–1918 could fail to recall the devastating impact of the conflict on the university. Student numbers collapsed; academics went to war; college and university buildings were put to wartime use. The same pattern was repeated, though not on the same scale, at the outbreak of the Second World War. Yet new challenges emerged. The threat of bombing raids by the Luftwaffe could not be ignored. The wartime blackout plunged the entire city into a stygian darkness it had not known since the Middle Ages. Paper shortages meant that students could no longer get copies of the books they needed for tutorials.
There were immediate changes at The Kilns, as well. On 2 September, the day after the German invasion of Poland, Warnie was recalled to active military service. (Warnie had remained a member of the Regular Army Reserve of Officers since retiring from military service on 21 December 1932). He was instructed to leave immediately for Catterick in Yorkshire. Two weeks later, he was sent to France to organise troop transport and military supplies for the British Expeditionary Force with the rank of acting major.
Within hours of Warnie’s departure, The Kilns had four new occupants—schoolgirls evacuated from London. The threat of bombing raids on London led to a constant stream of “evacuees” at The Kilns, who often stayed there for several months. Lewis’s correspondence during this time notes with amusement their constant complaints that they had nothing to do. Couldn’t they read something? Lewis wondered.
But Lewis had other, more weighty matters on his mind during the first weeks of the war. The National Service (Armed Forces) Act, which came into force on 3 September 1939, enforced full conscription on all males between eighteen and forty-one residing in the United Kingdom. Lewis, then aged forty, was clearly alarmed. Would he be called up? Surely he would not have to fight in a second war? On the day after the invasion of Poland, he arranged to see George Gordon, the president of Magdalen College, who dismissed his fears. Lewis would be forty-one on 29 November—in just over two months. He had nothing to worry about.426
As things turned out, Lewis would be a spectator to the conflict, not an active participant. He became a member of the Local Defence Volunteers—later renamed the “Home Guard”—in the summer of 1940, spending one night in nine “mooching about the most depressing and malodorous parts of Oxford.”427 He felt somewhat ridiculous making his rounds from 1.30 to 4.30 in the morning with a rifle on his shoulder, comparing himself to constable Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing.428 However, he came to value the peace and seclusion of patrolling Oxford’s cool and deserted streets in the early summer mornings.
8.1 The Oxford Home Guard on parade in 1940. The parade is crossing The Plain, from which it would pass over Magdalen Bridge on its way to the centre of Oxford.
Lewis’s correspondence of the early 1940s paints a picture familiar to all students of wartime Britain—the need for economy, shortages of food and essential goods, taking in displaced people, and deep anxiety about the future. Lewis’s own ways of dealing with these issues were occasionally comical—for example, his “war-time economy” of drinking tea rather than Madeira when discussing Dante with friends. With Warnie away, Lewis now worked in the smaller of his two sitting rooms at Magdalen College, as it was cheaper to heat, using up less coal.429
Lewis’s Friendship with Charles Williams
One result of the war was the flowering of what would be one of Lewis’s most significant friendships. On 7 September 1939, Oxford University Press evacuated its London offices for the duration of the war, and relocated its staff to Oxford. Charles Williams thus moved to Oxford, leaving his wife and son behind in Hampstead. With Lewis’s encouragement and support, Williams now became a part of the Oxford scene, and a regular member of the Inklings. The Faculty of English was short of lecturers, and was easily persuaded by Lewis that Williams was the answer to their prayers. In the end, Williams’s lectures were regarded as something of a sensation, attracting large audiences and high praise in about equal measure.
The Inklings were changed irreversibly within a year of Williams’s arrival. Up to that point, the dominant figures had been Lewis and Tolkien. Perhaps it was inevitable that Williams—already with a string of novels, poems, plays, and biographies to his credit—would come to play a role of no small prominence within the group, disturbing its slightly precarious equilibrium. Tolkien, who had counted Lewis as his closest friend from 1925–1940, realised that Williams had now come between them, and interpreted this as a sign of alienation between himself and Lewis.430 Yet on balance, there is little doubt that Williams was good for the Inklings, and the Inklings good for Williams.
Things were also changing at The Kilns. Maureen married Leonard Blake, a music teacher at Worksop College, Nottinghamshire, in August 1940. Lewis disliked Blake, dismissing him as “a very small, dark, ugly, silent man who hardly ever utters a word.”431 Yet Leonard and Maureen Blake would subsequently show considerable kindness to Lewis at critical points in his life, particularly during the final years of Mrs. Moore’s life, and in helping care for Joy Davidman’s two sons in the late 1950s.
8.2 The novelist and poet Charles Williams (1886–1945).
On 16 August 1940, Warnie—then based at the Supply Technical Training and Mobilization Centre, Wenvoe Camp, Cardiff—was taken off the active service list, and returned to the Regular Army Reserve of Officers. It is not clear precisely what happened to Warnie’s military career, which appears to have imploded at a time when the British army was trying to recover from the near catastrophe of Dunkirk, and needed experienced officers to help with its reconstruction. Warnie’s military record offers no explicit reason for his discharge, while leaving its readers wondering what is to be read into its terse statements. Inevitably, given his subsequent history, many will suspect that alcohol addiction played a part in it. Warnie returned to Oxford, where he joined the Oxford Home Guard, with the rank of private soldier. The two Lewis brothers were together again.
Other changes were taking place around Lewis. Oxford University terminated all arrangements for paying those who gave intercollegiate lectures “for the duration.” To his irritation, Lewis found that he would be £200 a year worse off. He would still give his usual lectures, of course, despite not being paid for them.
Magdalen College moved to a wartime economy, making savings wherever possible. The herd of deer in Magdalen Grove was culled. Fellows were offered haunches of venison for their private use. Mrs. Moore’s attempts to cook it “filled the whole house with the most intolerable stench”; yet Lewis pronounced the end product to be “excellent.”432
A letter to Warnie (at that point still in France) of November 1939 makes it clear that the Inklings were continuing to meet and discuss one another’s works. After dining together at the Eastgate Hotel (just across the street from Magdalen), they enjoyed “a really first-rate evening’s talk” about three works in progress from members:
The bill of fare afterwards consisted of a section of the new Hobbit book from Tolkien, a nativity play from Williams (unusually intelligible for him, and approved by all), and a chapter out of the book on the Problem of Pain from me.433
The first work mentioned is an early draft of a section of The Lord of the Rings; the second is Charles Williams’s play The House by the Stable; the third is Lewis’s work The Problem of Pain, which he had begun to draft around this time.
Lewis’s role in the writing of Tolkien’s “new Hobbit book” cannot be overlooked. Too often, Lewis is seen simply as an author in his own right. The story of the completion of this classic work of English literature allows us to see him in quite a different light—as a literary midwife, who encouraged others to produce their masterpieces. In this case, some critics suggest, Lewis helped bring about a classic that would be greater than anything he himself would write.
Lewis the Literary Midwife: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
Every writer needs encouragement to write, both in terms of discernment of possibilities
and getting the job done. Charles Williams, for example, relied on his wife, Florence, to keep him focussed on his writing tasks. His evacuation to Oxford during the war removed this stimulus to write. In April 1945, Williams wrote to Florence, lamenting her absence from his Oxford exile: “Why are you not here to give me a cup of tea, & then make me do some work? An infinite distaste of writing is upon me.”434 Like so many before and after him, Williams needed a mentor to help him write.
Tolkien had the same problem. He was a man of immense creativity who nevertheless needed someone to affirm him in what he was writing—and, more important, persuade him to finish it. Tolkien was inundated with responsibilities as an examiner, and found these intruded on his writing time. The early sections of Tolkien’s first novel, The Hobbit, were drafted quickly between 1930 and 1931, until he reached the section dealing with the death of Smaug the dragon. Then he ran out of creative steam—like Richard Wagner writing his Ring of the Nibelungs, who left his Siegfried under his Linden Tree, unable to work out where to take things next. Tolkien produced a rough draft of the ending, and left it there. As his relationship with Lewis developed, Tolkien finally plucked up the courage to ask Lewis to read it, and give him his opinion of it. Lewis declared that he liked it, while having some misgivings about its ending.
The eventual publication of The Hobbit was the result of a series of fortunate accidents. Tolkien had lent the typescript of The Hobbit to one of his students, Elaine Griffiths (1909–1996). Griffiths in turn drew the text to the attention of Susan Dagnall, a former Oxford student now working for the London publisher George Allen & Unwin. After securing a copy of the typescript, Dagnall passed it on to publisher Stanley Unwin for his evaluation. Unwin in turn asked his ten-year-old son, Rayner, to read it. Rayner gave it such an enthusiastic review that Unwin decided to publish it. The contract’s deadline for submission gave Tolkien the motivation he so badly needed to complete the writing. On 3 October 1936, the work was complete.
The Hobbit appeared on 21 September 1937. Its initial print run of 1,500 copies sold out quickly. Realising the potential of this new and unexpected market for hobbits, Allen & Unwin pressed Tolkien to write another “Hobbit-Book”—quickly. As Tolkien had no intention whatsoever of writing a sequel to his book, this demand proved to be something of a challenge.
After writing an opening chapter—“A Long-Expected Party”—with relative ease, Tolkien began to lose momentum and enthusiasm. The plot became more complex, and its tone darker. His ambition to write a more sophisticated mythological work kept intruding. In the end, the writing process stalled. Like his self-referential character Niggle, Tolkien found that he was better at painting leaves than trees. Fine detail delighted him, especially where it concerned the minting of new myths and strange words; broad narrative structure began not so much to weary him as to overwhelm him.
Tolkien simply could not sustain his enthusiasm for the project in the midst of a busy academic life. His perfectionism, the burden of family life and academic responsibilities, and his own preference for working on his invented languages rather than writing prose, all combined to delay and defer his new “Hobbit-Book.” Discouraged, he turned to other matters.
Only one other person seemed to be interested in the work: Lewis. After Lewis’s death, Tolkien emphasised the critical role that Lewis had played in keeping him working on The Lord of the Rings:
The unpayable debt that I owe to [Lewis] 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. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.435
Lewis showed considerable personal commitment to encouraging Tolkien in his literary endeavours around this time. He made a nighttime visit in December 1939 to Tolkien’s home in North Oxford while Tolkien’s wife, Edith, was recovering from an operation in the Acland nursing home. The wartime blackout made this journey hazardous. Lewis walked north along Longwall Street and Holywell Street “almost as one does in a dark room,” struggling to find his bearings. When he passed Keble College, things got easier, and he eventually arrived at Tolkien’s home at 20 Northmoor Road. They spent the evening “drinking gin and lime juice,” discussing Tolkien’s “new Hobbit” and Lewis’s “Problem of Pain.”436 By the time Lewis headed back to Magdalen at midnight, the moon had risen, making his homeward journey much easier than the outward.
By the beginning of 1944, Tolkien’s writing had stalled again. Like Niggle, he had become bogged down in details. He had lost confidence both in the project and in his own ability to complete it. The contrast with Lewis at this point is striking. Lewis was primarily a storyteller, who conceived images of Narnia which guided his pen. A fluent writer, Lewis did not unduly worry about resolving the inconsistencies that abound in the Chronicles of Narnia. Although Tolkien was also a storyteller, he took his role as a “subcreator” with great seriousness, devising complex histories and languages, and populating his novels with characters whose roots went deep into the story of Middle-earth.
Inevitably, Tolkien found himself overwhelmed with the need to maintain consistency, ensuring the proper correlation of his complicated and detailed backstory and the written narrative. Each leaf on the “tree of stories” had to be just right—a process which inevitably made the achievement of consistency triumph over imaginative subcreation. Tolkien became trapped in his own complex world, unable to complete it because of his anxieties about the coherence and consistency of what he had already written. His fussiness threatened to overwhelm his creativity.
A turning point was reached when Tolkien lunched with Lewis on 29 March 1944. Although Lewis does not mention or give any details of this meeting in his correspondence, it clearly gave Tolkien a new injection of energy and enthusiasm. Tolkien began to read chapters to Lewis at their private meetings on Monday mornings, and was encouraged by Lewis’s reactions—indeed, at points, Lewis was reduced to tears.437 Sections of the work began to feature regularly at Inklings meetings, often generating high praise from some. But not all. Hugo Dyson took an intense dislike to the book, and regularly attempted to prevent its being read at the meetings. In the end, Lewis often had to intervene. “Shut up, Hugo! Come on, Tollers!”
If this book were mainly about Tolkien, there would be much more to be said about the genesis and development of the text of The Lord of the Rings. But it is not. The point to be made is that Lewis was a willing and dedicated supporter and encourager of others—just as others encouraged him. We have already noted how the Inklings discussed Lewis’s ideas about the “Problem of Pain.” This book is widely seen as marking the beginning of Lewis’s rise to fame as a Christian apologist. So what is this book, and how did it come to be written?
The Problem of Pain (1940)
The Problem of Pain was Lewis’s first published work of “Christian apologetics”—the business of identifying, understanding, and answering concerns and difficulties that ordinary people have about the Christian faith, and also demonstrating its power to explain things and satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart. The book’s best-known sentence perhaps fails to do justice to the overall argument: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”438 Although this is a subsidiary point, it is often incorrectly presented as if it were the total sum of Lewis’s approach.
Lewis opens the book by recalling the period of his life when he was an atheist. As he later commented, if you are to “warn others against something,” you must “have loved it once” yourself.439 There are hints everywhere in this opening chapter of the themes raised, but not answered, in Spirits in Bondage and Dymer—human suffering in the face of a seemingly deaf heaven and a silent God. Lewis sketches the universe he once believed in himself—a futile place of darkness and cold, of misery and suffering. He invokes the spe
ctacle of civilizations pointlessly rising and passing away, of a human race that science condemns to a final extinction, and of a universe that is bound to die. Speaking as he once spoke twenty years earlier, he concludes that “either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.”440
But is it really that straightforward, he muses? “If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?” Having argued for the intrinsic reasonableness of faith, Lewis then turns to the problem that is posed by pain: “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.”441 Yet with his characteristic Socratic approach, Lewis then observes that the terms being used—such as good, almighty, and happy—need careful examination. If these words bear the meanings of everyday language, there is indeed a serious problem. But what if they do not? What if we have to learn their special meanings, and see things in their light?
C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 21
