by A. N. Wilson
You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old (Ptolemaic) cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height: height which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated … To look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking about one in a trackless forest – trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old writers present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic and theirs was classical.4
By the time we have finished his chapter called ‘The Heavens’, we have not only been informed about what the shape of the Ptolemaic universe was like, and how the belief in astrology worked, and how much knowledge was in our sense ‘scientific’ and how much ‘poetic’ or ‘mythological’. We have actually had our picture of the universe changed for ever. By this, I do not mean mat Lewis has represented the medieval picture as ‘better’ than the modern; but he has shown us that both are merely pictures. And in understanding the old picture so vividly, he has prepared us to appreciate, and to understand, many things which we either could not previously have hoped to understand, or which we had been looking at with half-open eyes. He enhances our sense not only of the poets’ universe – the cosmology of Dante and Milton, for example – but also of the symbolism used by painters and architects. The past is still a foreign country, but we have been shown round it by the most genial and expert of guides. Such basic matters as what people believed about their own bodies – made up of humours – or their pasts are juxtaposed with fascinating excursions into such areas of belief as the fairies and mythical beasts. The range of reading and reference is prodigious. Almost the most enjoyable thing of all is Lewis’s ability to find traces of the ‘old world’ – beliefs which go back to Isadore of Seville or Macrobius or even as far as Plato – surviving in the pages of Fielding, Johnson or Wordsworth. In The Discarded Image his omnivorous reading taste is best synthesized.
If 1936 was a sort of annus mirabilis for Jack, it was one of mixed happiness for Warnie. The more Jack was in demand, as a lecturer, teacher, and man of letters, the more danger there was that Warnie would be thrown back on his own society or, worse, on that of Mrs Moore. They really were not compatible, in spite of the affections they held in common. There were other loves besides the love of Jack which bound them together. At the end of January, for example, Warnie took Minto and Maureen to the Electra cinema to see the funeral of George V, and it was obvious that they were all much affected by it. A fortnight later came the emotionally more disturbing death of Minto’s dog, Mr Papworth. He was fourteen years old, blind and hardly able to walk, but they had grown much attached to him and could hardly endure the thought of his death. In the last four days of his life, he could take nothing but whisky, administered to him by Warnie. Jack too felt a painful void – ‘one remembers his old happy days, especially his puppyhood, with an ache’, and for Minto it was grief ‘as if for a human being’.5 (They were eventually to get another dog – a very lively golden retriever, but before that Warnie had bought himself a boat.)
For J. R. R. Tolkien, the 1930s were a decade of continuous literary activity. Unlike Lewis, who tended to write out his stories or essays once, and only lightly revise them, Tolkien was a cautious and hesitant ‘maker’. He was in a continual process of rewriting his material and revising his mythology. It would seem as though The Hobbit, for instance, the story which was to make him famous when it was published in 1937, had existed in embryonic form as early as about 1930. Lewis was shown a version in 1932 and admired it enormously. It was probably in 1937 that he and Tolkien had a conversation about their distaste for much of what was being published at that time. ‘Tollers,’ said Lewis, ‘there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.’6
It was agreed that Tolkien should write a story about time-travel, and Lewis one about space-travel. Tolkien’s story, The Lost Road, seems to be the only example of his attempting to depict the twentieth century. It is the tale of a father and son, academics, bom interested in legends and lost tales of the old world, Alboin and Audoin by name. In only a very few pages, we have left the twentieth century far behind and discovered that these two descend from the Lombardic heroes mentioned in the Old English poem Widsith (Aelfwin and Eadwin); and since Aelfwin means ‘Elf-friend’, we are not surprised to find ourselves drifting further back to the times when elves still walked the earth, before Numenor (the Atlantis of the Tolkien mythology) had sunk beneath the waves.
Sadly, The Lost Road survives only as a fragment, and its story line is at a rudimentary stage of evolution. There could be no greater indication of the contrast between the two friends’ approach to their craft than a comparison between The Lost Road, tentatively built up stage by stage, with an infinite number of backward glances at the whole mythology that has gone before, and Lewis’s self-confident brush strokes as he dashed off Out of the Silent Planet. The latter is a book in which the author is firing on all cylinders. It brings together Lewis the scholar, Lewis the voracious reader of anything from medieval schoolmen or Italian epic to modern science fiction, Lewis the Christian apologist, Lewis the Irish satirist in the savage tradition of Swift, Lewis the failed Romantic poet. ‘Thus skidding violently from one side to the other, his youth approached the moment at which he would begin to be a person.’
It is the story of a philologist (said to be loosely based on Tolkien, but in fact fairly unlike him: Tolkien recognized some of his own opinions and ideas Lewisified in the character) who, by a series of mishaps on a walking tour, comes to a house where two sinister entrepreneurs, Weston and Devine, are planning a visit to outer space. They have everything ready except a human being to accompany them on their voyage. They are going to a planet called Malacandra (which turns out to be Mars) and, having made a previous recce there, they are under the impression that the inhabitants are fierce and eat men. Hence their need for a human companion to placate the natives on their arrival.
Out of the Silent Planet is a book which is quite un-put-downable. The freshness of the writing reflects the boyish excitement with which Lewis wrote it and read it aloud, chapter by chapter, to his circle of friends. Into the excitement is woven a tragic sense of the Fall, both as something Romantically conceived (the ruin of the earth, of Man’s relationship with the beasts, of the erotic life) and as straight Christian theology. The theology does not wage war on the story. The eldils, the angelic beings who are at first invisible to Ransom, and their hierarchic sense of obedience are introduced gently. And the sheer incidentals, the imagined languages of the Martian creatures, the poetic hrossi, the intellectual sorns and the practical and commercially minded pfifltriggs have a playful quality which, while being purely enjoyable, is not without satiric edge.
Many of the linguistic elements are borrowed from Tolkien and – which must have been more exasperating for their originator – changed and got ‘wrong’. Lewis’s eldils, for instance, are little more than the angels of Judaeo-Christian tradition; but by confusing them linguistically with Tolkien’s eldalie (in The Silmarillion), he implies that the elves of that mythology are angelic, which they are not – they are simply elves. Any irritation Tolkien felt at this appropriation of his own imaginative world did not prevent him from doing his best for the
book. Since it had been a great success when read aloud to ‘our local club’,7 Tolkien had absolute confidence in submitting it to the publisher of The Hobbit, Stanley Unwin. Tolkien’s letter reveals that in the original draft of the story the hero is called not Ransom but Unwin (‘The latter detail could I am sure be altered’). Ransom, the name finally arrived at, develops its own significance in the sequels to Out of the Silent Planet.
Stanley Unwin turned the book down. It had already been shown by Lewis to Dent, publisher of Dymer, who rejected it. Unwin did, however, pass the typescript to a small publishing company called The Bodley Head. They accepted it and it was swiftly published, appearing before the end of 1938.
It received high praise, often from surprising quarters. ‘Here is a very good book,’ declared that sentimental realist Hugh Walpole. ‘It is of thrilling interest as a story, but it is more than that; it is a kind of poem, and it has the great virtue of improving as it goes on. It is a unique thing, full of stars, cold and heat, flowers of the planets and a sharp sardonic humour.’ Walpole himself, after a spell of agnosticism, had returned to Christian belief in middle age. The Lewisian thing about the first of his space stories is precisely its blend of literary originality and religious truth; it is not ‘theology’ dressed up as ‘literature’; rather it makes its best literary effects when it is at its most religious because the religious matter is what most engages the author’s imagination. In this, Lewis resembles two of his favourite authors, Edmund Spenser and George MacDonald. The Muses have been traditionally at war with Christ, ever since the period of late classical antiquity, when Jerome and Augustine both viewed literary excellence with the gravest suspicion. Lewis is one of those very rare writers whose Muse appears to be an anima naturaliter Christiana. There have been plenty of good writers who were also Christians. Plenty of Christians have tried their hand at putting their beliefs into prose or poetry, usually with calamitous aesthetic results. There have been very few with the gift of Dante or John Milton, who have written at their best when being most Christian. It was to this great tradition, though as a self-confessedly very junior follower, that Lewis quite easily and naturally belonged. This did not mean that he was above sacrificing aesthetic principle – if there is such a thing, and if he had it – to the purely partisan pleasures of Morte aux païens.
Dante could turn aside from his most sublime passages of religious contemplation to hone a gratuitous insult for the benefit of Florentine families whom he happened to dislike. Milton, who sang of God and his angels, was equally happy slinging mud at bishops. Tolkien and Lewis, in some of the same spirit, decided to make a party issue out of the election to the Oxford Chair of Poetry in 1938.
Unlike other professors at Oxford, the Professor of Poetry is elected by the MAs of the University: that is to say, not only by the dons, but also by all the old members of the University who have paid the appropriate fees and undergone, either in person or in absentia, a short ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre. Although there have been some famous poets who occupied this chair (for example Matthew Arnold and W. H. Auden), it has much more commonly been occupied by dons; and the point at issue when choosing candidates for the Chair of Poetry has very seldom been their views about the subject on which they are supposed to lecture, still less their competence to do so. One day over breakfast, the chaplain of Magdalen, Adam Fox, opened his newspaper and saw that Sir Edmund Chambers was being put up as a candidate for the Chair of Poetry. He described him as ‘a retired civil servant who has made Shakespeare his hobby’.8 In this Fox was simply showing his ignorance. Though indeed he had been a civil servant, Chambers was one of the foremost literary scholars in England. His books The Medieval Stage and The Elizabethan Stage remain classics of literary history, and in their range and period there are few better anthologies of verse than his Early English Lyrics and Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse. He had lately come to live in a village called Eynsham, near Oxford, he was a D.Litt. of his old university, and all this Lewis must have known. Nevertheless, when Fox made the preposterous statement that ‘This is simply shocking, they might as well make me Professor of Poetry,’ Lewis responded, ‘Well, we will.’
It is hard, at this distance of time, to see what his motives were, apart from the mere love of a fight for its own sake, and the desire to promote one of his friends. If E. K. Chambers could be suspected of being dull and pedantic, what were Fox’s qualities? He had published one ‘long and childlike’ (his own words) poem called Old King Coel and he had won the sacred poem prize (in another competition open to all MAs of the University). He was no orator. He had nothing much to say about poetry. He was a grotesquely inappropriate choice. Nevertheless, Lewis put up Fox to stand against Chambers, and his gang of friends rallied to Fox’s support. This had its (presumably) desired effect of annoying a lot of other dons. They, guided by the strong impression in ‘literary’ circles that Chambers was an old bore and Fox was a non-starter, put up their own candidate, Lord David Cecil, a friend of Lewis’s, as it happened, and the English tutor at New College.
But no quarrel in England is ever about what it seems to be about. Although David Cecil was and always had been a devout Christian, he became the favourite candidate of those who resented the ‘clerical candidate’, the man who had been put up by Lewis, just because he was a Christian. So the literary set, many of them agnostic or hostile to religion, ranged behind Lord David, while those who had already committed themselves, together with those who esteemed him as a scholar, voted for E. K. Chambers. This was a situation which the Ulsterman in Lewis relished. For the time being, he ceased to be a cloistered academic and became once more the son of the police-court solicitor in Belfast, the city where the most popular political slogan at election times was ‘Vote early, vote often’. Lewis knew well that most of the dons would vote for David Cecil or E. K. Chambers. They would thereby split the opposition. All he needed to do was to collect the votes of the majority of MAs who had left the University. By putting up a clergyman as a candidate, he could rely on the vote of hundreds of MAs who, sitting in their country rectories, could easily be persuaded by a judiciously worded letter that their old University was falling into the hands of infidels. A vote for Fox became, absurdly, a vote for the Church, a vote for Orthodoxy, a vote for all the things which Lewis now ‘stood for’. In staunch Irish fashion, he laid on transport for Fox’s supporters to be ‘bused’ into Oxford on the appropriate days and rewarded them for their votes with meals and refreshments at Magdalen. Fox was a nice man, much liked among a wide circle of his fellow-clergy. He romped home.
The election did much to harm Lewis’s reputation in Oxford. The dons felt that he could not be trusted: that he was populist, bullying, showy, and hostile to them. By his campaign for Fox, Lewis probably destroyed his own chances of promotion in the University, even though he was very obviously the most distinguished member of the English Faculty.
It is certainly easy for those who did not belong to Lewis’s group of friends, and who merely come upon the record of it in after days, to see its faults. Chief among them, and born of the group’s increasing feeling that they stood for something, embattled against a hostile world, was their tendency not only to see merit where none existed (in the poetry of Fox, for example), but actually to think that belonging to the group – which began at around this period to be known as the Inklings – was in itself a sort of merit. One gets the feeling from Warnie’s diary, for example, that it was better to be a good Inkling than a good poet, or even a good man. The most exaggerated example of this (it was the dangerous tendency which Jack himself labelled the ‘Inner Ring’) was when they attended a production of Hamlet at the New Theatre in Oxford, produced – as were so many great Oxford University Dramatic Society productions in the middle years of this century – by Nevill Coghill. ‘What dramatic merit the play had’, Warnie noted afterwards, ‘seemed to have been supplied by Coghill and not by Shakespeare.’ Shakespeare, one realizes, had the supreme misfortune not to be an Inkli
ng. One gets the strong feeling that he would not (in the unlikely event of his standing as a candidate) have stood much chance of becoming Professor of Poetry at Oxford if Lewis and Tolkien had had anything to do with it. Though Fox was never to give a distinguished lecture, his friends were triumphant. He had defeated, as Tolkien boasted to his publisher, ‘a Knight and a noble Lord. 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.’9 That was certainly one way of looking at things.
The original Inklings club had been started by an undergraduate at University College, and broke up in 1933. This was a literary dining club, to which Tolkien and Lewis had both, on different occasions, been invited as guests. Little by little, Lewis, with his passion for nicknames, adopted this one to describe his own circle of friends. It was never a formal club with minutes, or apologies for absence, or any ‘business’ or recognizable membership. Yet, as Tolkien remarked, ‘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.’10
In this way, another Oxford legend was born. It would be a mistake, however, even when the intimacy between Lewis and Tolkien was at its strongest, to believe that this was the only thing in both their lives. Tolkien always had close family ties in which Lewis had no wish to be involved. Knowing Tolkien to have his difficulties, maritally speaking, the two Lewis brothers stayed away; and Lewis, who disliked sharing spoken intimacies with friends, never allowed the conversation to develop if Tolkien tried to speak of his troubles. On one occasion when Tolkien tore a ligament playing squash, and was told that he would be confined to his bed for ten weeks, Lewis went to see him – but, as Warnie recorded, he ‘found Madame [i.e. Tolkien’s wife] there, so could not have much conversation with him’. The Tolkien children were invited to swim and punt on Lewis’s lake at The Kilns, but there was nothing in the way of a ‘family friendship’ between the two. Indeed, Lewis was always impatient with ‘Tollers’ if he pleaded family commitments as a reason for not attending an Inklings evening.
