In time Lewis’s debate about Subjectivity grew to include a further debate about the importance of Culture. And this involved two other members of the English Faculty at Cambridge. I.A. Richards (1893–1979), Fellow of English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, inaugurated a modern critical movement through his Principles of Literary Criticism (1925), which Lewis read and, in his personal copy, annotated. In that book Richards argued that one of the qualifications for being a good critic is that one ‘must be a sound judge of values’. Later, in Science and Poetry (1926), he argued that ‘Poetry is failing us, or we it, if after our reading we do not find ourselves changed … with a permanent alteration of our possibilities as responsive individuals in good or bad adjustments to all but overwhelming concourse of stimulations.’ It became increasingly clear that to Richards poetry was to be a means of salvation.
Richards’s theory of value and his notion of poetry as having a soteriological function was even more pronounced in the most outspoken voice of the Cambridge school of literary criticism. This was F.R. Leavis (1895–1978) of Downing College, who wanted to see Culture made the basis of a humane society, but without basing it on any objective standard – and certainly not Christianity. To this end Leavis founded the periodical Scrutiny (1932–53), in which the editors expressed a belief in ‘a necessary relationship between the quality of the individual’s response to art and his general fitness for a humane existence’.46
Later in his life Lewis was to engage with Leavis’s ideas again; but now he responded to the Cambridge school of literary criticism in two important essays. The first, ‘Christianity and Literature’, was published in Rehabilitations (1939) and reprinted in Christian Reflections (1969); in it he maintained that though the recipe for writing Christian and secular literature is the same (good diction and the like), a Christian approach to literary theory and criticism ought not to be like that of most secular writers. The latter describe great authors as always ‘breaking fetters’, ‘bursting bonds’ and generally ‘being themselves’.47 Though the New Testament has nothing to say of literature, the metaphors it most often uses are those of ‘imitation’, ‘reflection’ and ‘assimilation’.48 In St John’s Gospel, Christ ‘copies’ the operation of the Father.49 Thus, while secular critics aim at being ‘original’ and ‘creative’, ‘originality’, Lewis believed, is plainly the prerogative of God alone.50
The Christian approach to literature, Lewis concludes, ought to be very like Phemius’s claim to be a poet (in Odyssey xxii, 347): ‘I am self-taught; a god has inspired me with all manner of songs.’ Says Lewis:
The unbeliever may take his own temperament and experience, just as they happen to stand, and consider them worth communicating simply because they are facts, or, worse still, because they are his. To the Christian his own temperament and experience, as mere fact, and as merely his, are of no value or importance whatsoever: he will deal with them, if at all, only because they are the medium through which, or the position from which, something universally profitable appeared to him … And always, of every idea and of every method he will ask not ‘Is it mine?, but ‘Is it good?’51
Lewis’s fighting instincts were instantly engaged when he read an article by Brother George Every on ‘The Necessity of Scrutiny’ in the columns of Theology (March 1939). Brother Every suggested that theological students should be ‘tested’ on their ability to read a new piece of writing on a secular subject, thus hinting that ‘culture’ and ‘good taste’ were almost as important as Christianity itself. Lewis’s response was a second essay, ‘Christianity and Culture’. In this he stated that after trying to determine the value of culture from the writings of St Matthew, St Luke, St Paul, Aristotle, St Augustine, St Jerome, Milton, and Cardinal Newman he had come to the conclusion that ‘the whole tradition of educated infidelity’ from Matthew Arnold to Scrutiny ‘appeared to me as but one phase in that general rebellion against God which began in the eighteenth century’.52 He summed up: ‘My general case may be stated in Ricardian terms – that culture is a storehouse of the best (sub-Christian) values. These values are in themselves of the soul, not the spirit … They will save no man … The work of a charwoman and the work of a poet become spiritual in the same way and on the same condition.’53
In this miniature apologia he argues the claims both for and against culture, arriving at the following conclusions: (1) The safest and shortest way towards salvation is devotion to the person of Christ. (2) Most men glorify God by doing to his glory things which, though not per se acts of glorification, become so by being offered to him. (3) Though culture in itself will save no man, it sometimes has a distinct part to play in bringing souls to Christ – is sometimes a road into Jerusalem, and sometimes the road out. (4) People such as himself, who are not fit for any other kind of work, are justified in making their living by teaching and writing. It was this last point which set free Lewis’s own genius – as we shall see from the chapter that follows.
* * *
* Frederick William Calcutt ‘Fred’ Paxford (1898–1979) was born in Fifield, Oxfordshire, on 5 August 1898, the son of Alice Sophia Paxford. Lewis and Mrs Moore hired him shortly after they moved to The Kilns in 1930, and he remained there until Lewis’s death. Over the years he became an integral part of their lives. Mrs Moore was particularly dedicated to him, and he to her. He never married, and was perfectly content with his radio, cigarettes and the occasional pint. In 1964 he retired to the little village of Churchill, near where he was born. There he had a little garden of his own. He died on 10 August 1979. See his biography in CG.
* Dom Bede Griffiths OSB (1906–93) was born Alan Richard Griffiths. He went up to Magdalen College in 1925 where he was tutored by Lewis. After becoming a Christian in 1931 he was almost immediately received into the Catholic Church, and a year later he became a novice at the Benedictine priory of Prinknash. Dom Bede made his final vows in 1936 and was ordained in 1940. In 1947 he became Prior at Farnborough, and in 1951 he was sent to the new Scottish priory at Pluscarden as novice master. By this time Dom Bede was interested in Eastern thought, and in 1955 his order sent him to India. He founded Kurisumala Ashram, a Benedictine monastery of the Syrian rite, in Kerala. In 1968 he went to Saccidananda Ashram, Shantivanam, in Tamil Nadu. This ashram was a pioneer attempt to found a Christian community following the customs of a Hindu ashram and adapting itself to Hindu ways of life and thought. Dom Bede’s many books include his autobiography, The Golden String (1954), The Marriage of East and West (1982), and A New Vision of Reality (1989).
* Writing about his own first dive in one of his notebooks, Lewis explained the religious connection: ‘Nothing is simpler than this art. You do not need to do anything, you need only to stop doing something, to abstain from all attempt at self-preservation – to obey the command which Saint Augustine heard in a different context, Securus te projice.’
* The Rev. Canon Claude Lionel Chavasse (1897–1983), of an Anglo-Irish family, was educated at Haileybury College and Exeter College, Oxford. He came to know the entire Lewis family when he was curate of St Mark’s Church, Dundela, 1928–31. From Belfast he went on to serve in a number of churches in Co. Cork, after which he was vicar of Kidlington, Oxon., 1947–58.
* Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886–1945) was London born and bred. He attended the University of London and in 1908 joined the London branch of Oxford University Press, for whom he worked for the rest of his life. In 1917 he married Florence Conway, and they had one son, Michael Stansby Williams, born 18 June 1922. A reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy led to one of his most remarkable ideas, the ‘Beatrician experience’. This is a recovery of that vision which would have been common to each of us if Man had not fallen. The fullest expression of this ‘Theology of Romantic Love’ is found in Williams’s He Came Down from Heaven (1938). Lewis’s own favourites of his books were Williams’s ‘supernatural thrillers’: War in Heaven (1930); Many Dimensions (1931); The Place of the Lion (1931); The Greater Trumps (1932); Shadows of Ecsta
sy (1933); Descent into Hell (1937); All Hallows’ Eve (1945). For more information see Lewis’s preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C.S. Lewis (1947).
* John James Lawlor (1918–99) read English with Lewis at Magdalen College and took his BA in 1939. He saw service in the Devonshire Regiment, 1940–5, and he returned to Oxford in 1947 as lecturer in English at Brasenose and Trinity College. In 1950 he became Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Keele, retiring in 1980. His works include The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare (1960) and Piers Plowman: an Essay in Criticism (1962). He was the editor of Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C.S. Lewis (1966), and his C.S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections (1998) is an invaluable work of biography and criticism.
NOTES
1 FL, pp. 973–4.
2 LP III, p. 302.
3 1 Peter 3:15.
4 Matthew 7:20.
5 TST, pp. 432–3.
6 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (1945), ch. 5, pt. 3, p. 117.
7 Letters, p. 292.
8 ‘Unreal Estate’, in Of This and Other Worlds, p. 192. Published in the US as On Stories and Other Essays on Literature (1982), p. 153.
9 George Bailey, ‘In the University’, C.S. Lewis: Speaker & Teacher, ed. Carolyn Keefe (1971), p. 89.
10 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (1923), p. 137.
11 C.S. Lewis and E.M.W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939), ch. 1, p. 11.
12 Bodleian Library, MS Eng. lett. c. 220/2, fol. 178.
13 Ibid., fols 179–80.
14 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), ch. 1.
15 TST, p. 452.
16 The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936), ch. 2, pp. 44–5.
17 ‘The Vision of John Bunyan’, Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (1969), p. 149.
18 The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933; new and revised edn, 1943; Fount, 1998), bk VIII, ch. 6, p. 184.
19 Ibid., bk VIII, ch. 8, p. 189.
20 Ibid., p. 193.
21 Ibid., pp. 193–4.
22 Ibid., ch. 10, p. 200.
23 St Augustine, Confessions, VIII.ix.27, ‘throw yourself away without care’.
24 The Pilgrim’s Regress, bk IX, ch. 4, pp. 221–2.
25 TST, p. 447.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., letter of 4 December 1932, p. 445.
28 Ibid.
29 The Times Literary Supplement (6 July 1933), p. 456.
30 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fols 81–2.
31 Ibid.
32 Vatican Council: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery OP, Volume I, revised edn (1988), pp. 738–9.
33 TST, p. 448.
34 For more information on Albert’s brothers, see William Lewis (1859–1946) and Richard Lewis (b. 1861) in The Lewis Family, found in the Biographical Appendix to FL, pp. 1014–18.
35 TST, p. 456.
36 ‘C.S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, ch. 8, p. 210.
37 Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. d. 297, fol. 24.
38 TST, p. 479.
39 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fols 48–9.
40 The Times Literary Supplement (6 June 1939), p. 475.
41 C.S. Lewis, ‘Open Letter to Dr Tillyard’, Essays and Studies, vol. XIX (1936), pp. 153–68.
42 John Lawlor, C.S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections (1998), p. 103.
43 Ibid., p. 98. Emphasis added.
44 Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper (Fount, 1986), p. 81.
45 The Personal Heresy, ch. 1, pp. 26–7.
46 ‘Scrutiny: A Manifesto’, Scrutiny, vol. I, No. 1 (May 1932), p. 5.
47 ‘Christianity and Literature’, Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (1967; Fount, 1998), p. 4.
48 Ibid., p. 6.
49 Ibid., p. 7.
50 Ibid., p. 8.
51 Ibid., pp. 8–9.
52 ‘Christianity and Culture’, p. 19.
53 Ibid., pp. 23, 24.
6
INKLINGS AND OTHERS
In the days when Lewis kept a diary and his father filed away both his and Warnie’s incoming letters, it was easy to follow him chronologically. But from 1931 onwards not only was the continuity broken, but Lewis was tending more and more to divide his life into compartments that occasionally could only be described accurately as watertight. His home life became more and more separated from his life in Magdalen. One could be a constant visitor to him in college without ever having been to The Kilns. And it was a perpetual surprise to some of his closest friends to discover other friends of his equally close of whom he had never even spoken.
To pupils and younger friends Lewis was simply a bachelor don living in college rooms. Pupils would be invited in twos or threes to stimulating – some found it ‘overwhelming’ – talk in his rooms after Hall of an evening, where they would be regaled with port, beer and the inevitable pot of strong tea.
Even when he was known only as a tutor, and as the author of The Allegory of Love, Lewis was so good a lecturer that undergraduates who usually avoided as many lectures as possible attended his, made sure of completing the course (which usually meant two lectures a week for six weeks) – and sometimes came again when Lewis repeated the series.
Lewis lectured almost entirely from a written text; but he would add to this, both during the lectures with additional examples or explanations, and in the basic text before delivering the course again where further research or later criticism made this desirable. There were also lighter moments: good laughs which he timed with an actor’s skill, and knew from previous experience when to build up to them. For example, in the ‘Prolegomena to Medieval Studies’ (which formed the basis, much later, of The Discarded Image), he described the various types of men born under the different planetary influences: when he came to Jupiter, ‘the Jovial character is cheerful, festive; those born under Jupiter are apt to be loud-voiced and red-faced – it is obvious under which planet I was born!’ always produced its laugh.
On one occasion during the war, when the audience at his lectures came to consist predominantly of women, and these tended more and more to come without their academic gowns (which were still statutory wear at lectures), Lewis strode into the hall at his usual speed, but did not begin to lecture when he had deposited his notes on the lectern. Instead, he gazed slowly up and down the crowded tables with a blank stare until, like Mr Puff, he had produced ‘a proper expectation in the audience’; then, with his usual perfect timing, he exclaimed, ‘Oh! I must apologize for wearing a gown!’ At the next lecture gowns were in fashion again.
Whether one had read any of his works or not, the first sight of C.S. Lewis was always a surprise. One undergraduate just initiated to lecturers as varied as Tolkien, Edmund Blunden* and Lascelles Abercrombie, remembers the shock as he sat for the first time in the hall at Magdalen in October 1938 and there strode in a big man with a large red face and shabby clothes, looking like nothing so much as a prosperous butcher, who began addressing his audience in a loud, booming voice and with tremendous gusto.
Of course one soon got over this first impression when Lewis began lecturing. It was obvious even in such utilitarian lectures as his two ‘Prolegomena’ series (to ‘Medieval Literature’ and ‘Renaissance Literature’) that one was listening not merely to a scholar of immense erudition, but to a lover of literature who had read every text he mentioned, had enjoyed most of them, and was eager to share both his knowledge and his enthusiasm with anyone whom he could persuade to do so.
Lewis was popularly supposed to regard both lectures and tutorials as a complete waste of his valuable time, and to hold undergraduates in the uttermost contempt. But even if these assumptions had been correct, no one could deny that he gave more fully and conscientiously than most tutors of the very best that he could give.
Perhaps the impression of not wasting more time than was absolutely necessary was giv
en by the fact that Lewis did indeed seek to exemplify Kipling’s dictum about filling ‘the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run’.1 He lectured for precisely three-quarters of an hour, and he never waited to answer questions. Two minutes before the end of the lecture he would quietly gather his notes together, return the watch that he had borrowed from the nearest member of his audience, and prepare to leave – lecturing all the time. Then, as he finished his last sentence, he would step off the dais and stride down the hall at top speed. If he was at all late in arriving at the lecture, he would begin it even before he entered the hall: several times the great voice came booming up the steps outside the hall door and Lewis would enter in haste, lecturing vigorously.
Lewis never wore a watch; and in the Michaelmas Term of 1938, as was his habit, he borrowed one from the nearest undergraduate. This chanced to be Roger Lancelyn Green, who sat almost at his feet and sported an obvious pocket watch and chain – and only he would know, as the watch was unobtrusively returned to him, that the lecture was ending. But not by the wildest stretch of imagination could Green have dreamt that twenty-five years later the book built out of those lectures to which he was listening with such interest would be dedicated to him.
Lewis’s knowledge certainly seemed prodigious. Every quotation that was not originally in English was given in the correct language, followed by a translation: Old Norse, Old and Middle English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian – even Old Welsh, though that was probably the only one of these languages which he would not have been able to read unseen with ease. His interest was in the written rather than the spoken word, and on the way to Greece in 1960 when the plane was forced down at Naples by bad weather, he made no attempt to talk Italian, beyond the few bare words needed to procure a bottle of Chianti; and in Greece itself he made no attempt to learn even the odd phrase in Modern Greek, though during an enforced wait he picked up a local paper and was soon eagerly translating as much as his knowledge of the ancient language enabled him to do – and was earnestly working out how the meanings of words had changed (‘nero for water, instead of hudor: ah, of course! nero from the Nereids!’), and what certain new or obscure words could mean.
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