Lewis’s domestic arrangements also served—in retrospect this would seem providential—as a cure for self-absorption. As he put it in Surprised by Joy, his “hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged.” In later years, Lewis liked to quote George MacDonald’s maxim “the one principle of hell is—‘I am my own.’” Life with Mrs. Moore ensured that Lewis could not call his soul his own, could not shield himself, as he had done with his father, from interference and irrational demands. So it was a purgatory, but not a hell. Lewis may have suffered under her roof, but he certainly didn’t stagnate: his diary records many lively conversations with intellectual friends, conversations in which Mrs. Moore sometimes took part; and he continued to read omnivorously from Greek and Roman classics to Shelley, Freud, Jung, William James, and Walter de la Mare. Best of all, an exciting new friendship was dawning. In 1923 he befriended Nevill Coghill, an admirer of Tolkien and a future Inkling.
Coghill, five months Lewis’s junior, had grown up a few hundred miles south of him, in an Irish Protestant family among the lush green hills and nationalist ardors of County Cork. He, too, had fought in World War I, on the Macedonian front, enrolled in Oxford right after the war, distinguished himself as a fiddler and boatman, and, like Lewis, won his First in English literature and language in a single year rather than the usual three. He had a rough-and-tumble, earthy air about him, which attracted Lewis right away. John Wain later painted a memorable portrait of him: “[Coghill] was a big man built on generous lines … He smiled easily, revealing somewhat battered teeth, and indeed his whole face had a slightly rough, knocked-about quality, like a chipped statue. But it was a noble statue, generous in expression and bearing. His voice was deep and strong, his speech soft and gentle, and this contrast was carried through everything. He was totally courteous, a gentleman by instinct as well as by tradition…” W. H. Auden—inspired by his tutorial sessions with Coghill to change course from engineering to English—would pay tribute to Coghill’s courtesy in a poem on the occasion of Coghill’s retirement, reminding him that “you countenanced all species” yet “never looked cross or sleepy” even “when our essays were / more about us than Chaucer.” Auden also dedicated his celebrated collection of essays, The Dyer’s Hand, to Coghill as “a tutor in whom one could confide.”
Lewis first noticed Coghill in a class taught by George Stuart Gordon, by now Merton Professor of English Literature. During Hilary term each year, Gordon held a weekly discussion class for Honours candidates in English. It was on February 2, 1923, in this happy setting, ideal for the formation of intellectual friendships, that Coghill read a paper on “Realism from Gorboduc to Lear.” Lewis’s diary entry for the day speaks of him almost in a schoolgirl’s smitten voice, as “a good looking fellow … an enthusiastic sensible man, without nonsense, and a gentleman, much more attractive than the majority.” Two days later, Lewis met Coghill again, at a tea held by the formidable tutor of Old English at St. Hugh’s College, Edith Elizabeth Wardale, who remained in the background as the two students volleyed merrily over literary likes and dislikes. Coghill said he couldn’t share Lewis’s love of Morris and Langland (strangely, since Coghill would one day be a renowned interpreter of Langland as well as Chaucer). They agreed that Blake was as inspired as Joan of Arc had been, but differed about the source of that inspiration, Lewis bristling at Coghill’s accusation that he (Lewis) was a materialist.
The following week, Lewis read his paper on The Faerie Queene to Gordon’s class. As class stenographer, Coghill had the usual task of preparing the minutes in verse. He wrote in a mock-Chaucerian vein, prefacing a long description of his new acquaintance’s argument with a courteous exordium that begins “In Oxenford some clerkés of degree / Were gadréd in a goodlye companye" and goes on to praise “Sir Lewis … a good philosopher,” noting in particular “Well couthe he speken in the Greeké tongue.” Later Coghill would recall how dazzled he had been by Lewis’s “combative pleasure” while delivering his paper, which “was certainly the best the class had heard.” The Faerie Queene, he wrote,
was a world he could inhabit and believe in … its knights, dwarfs, and ladies were real to him, and became real even to me while he discussed them: he rejoiced as much in the ugliness of the giants and in the beauty of the ladies as in their spiritual significances, but most of all in the ambience of the faerie forest and plain that, he said, were carpeted with a grass greener than the common stuff of ordinary glades; this was the reality of grass, only to be apprehended in poetry: the world of the imagination was nearer to the truth than the world of the senses …
We may detect here the early influence of Barfield’s viewpoint. Even the gods, Coghill noticed, were real to Lewis, as long as they remained in the world of imagination and did not challenge his atheism directly.
Within a few days the friendship blossomed. Their mutual love of literature and of conversational fencing—Coghill’s deep and mellow voice a perfect match for Lewis’s deep, more strident one—glued them one to the other. They spent the year, under the shared tutelage of F. P. Wilson, exploring English literature for eight or ten hours a day. Their minds caught fire. “It was,” Coghill wrote, “a continuous intoxication of discovery: to almost every week came its amazement.” With the war behind them, a life of art and scholarship ahead, “we were uninhibitedly happy in our work and felt supported by an endless energy.”
Coghill knew nothing at this time of Lewis’s problems with his father or of his relationship with Mrs. Moore. He did know that Lewis was at his best out of doors, preferably at a distance from home and college. The two friends met regularly for country rambles, bounding from one hill and one idea to another as they talked for hours on end. They agreed—rapturously—about Milton, Matthew Arnold, and so much more; they disagreed—violently—about Congreve, Restoration comedy, and the value of theater; but above all, they disagreed about Christianity. For Coghill, Lewis was astonished to discover, was a Christian.
Here was something new: a bright, creative, voracious mind who was a “supernaturalist” and, what’s more, an orthodox one with a love of ecclesiastical and liturgical tradition. Coghill was a devout Anglican, deeply committed to the English Catholic revival of the 1920s; he would be one of the few laymen invited to address the 1927 Anglo-Catholic Congress on the Holy Eucharist (his speech echoes Lewis’s skepticism about finding evidence for God in nature; but in Coghill’s view, the failure of the classical argument from design is all the more reason to believe in and adore the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, undetectable to the senses).
The ground was rolling and cracking under Lewis’s feet, as he recounts in Surprised by Joy: so many of his favorite writers, MacDonald, Chesterton, Johnson, Spenser, Milton—and now friends like Coghill—all Christians. How could this be? And, compounding his distress, why was he still unable to find a job? In 1924, Coghill landed a fellowship in English at Exeter, while Lewis found every door shut. One solace remained, putting pen to paper. Long letters and longer diary entries poured out, recounting his reading, his passions, his hopes. At the same time, he toiled away on what would become his longest and perhaps best narrative poem, Dymer.
Dymer
The idea had come to him when he was seventeen; Lewis said he did not consciously invent it. It was, on the surface at least, a horrific tale: a man fathers a monster; the monster slays his father and becomes a god.
Lewis began to write the story in prose during Christmas 1916 at Little Lea; in December 1918, while convalescing in a military hospital, he attempted a verse version, “The Redemption of Ask,” soon abandoned. Finally, on April 2, 1922, sitting by the sunny window in his bedroom while Mrs. Moore cut up oranges for marmalade, he had his breakthrough: he saw how he could re-create Dymer as a narrative poem in rhyme royal. So he began:
You stranger, long before your glance can light
Upon these words, time will have washed away
The moment when I first took pen to write,
With all my road before me …
For the next three years, Lewis labored to draw forth from his initial inspiration a story of mythic proportions and a prosody noble enough to go with it.
Lewis told Arthur that the main theme was “development by self-destruction”; to Coghill he called it “redemption by parricide.” The poem seethes with anger against totalitarianism and war and coruscates with insatiable longings. It begins as a broad social satire, with Dymer’s birth in a Perfect City—a modern Plato’s Republic with a planned economy and all-embracing bureaucracy from which no misfit can hide:
At Dymer’s birth no comets scared the nation,
The public crêche engulfed him with the rest,
And twenty separate Boards of Education
Closed round him. He passed through every test,
Was vaccinated, numbered, washed and dressed,
Proctored, inspected, whipt, examined weekly,
And for some nineteen years he bore it meekly.
When the life force (Lewis had been reading Bergson) invades the stifling classroom in the form of an April breeze, young Dymer breaks into a wild mirth, kills his teacher, and flees to the open field. So far he would seem to be a rebel after the pattern of Blake’s Los, championing the cause of imagination, energy, sensuality, and freedom; but Dymer’s rebellion, which sets off a bloody revolution, propels him into desperate adventures. He wanders naked into a castle, where he spies his body in a mirror, triggering a narcissistic trance. He dreams he is a great hero, then a great tyrant, and then he enjoys passionate sex with a girl who appears in the dark of night and slips into his arms.
In the morning his lover is gone—he never even saw her face. Maddened by loss, he sets out after her, confronting an old matriarch and a succession of gruesome figures. A magician (based on Yeats) offers Dymer an occult potion that will empower him to retrieve his beloved and recapture his lost ecstasy; Dymer drinks but by now he has begun to repent, and the potion fails to overpower his will. The magician goes mad and shoots him. In agony from the wound, Dymer at last meets his mysterious bride, only to discover that she is none other than his own desire for transcendence, misconstrued as lust. In the final canto, he confronts the monstrous son born from their union, kills him, and dies declaiming heroic platitudes. Out of all this death—and, readers might ruefully note, out of all this furious convolution of plot—good comes: spring returns and all revives, “that country clothed with dancing flowers / Where flower had never grown,” the monster-son becomes a god, and Dymer, though dead, is redeemed.
Dymer succeeds, as Lewis acknowledged, in at least one of its purposes: to write the poem had been a necessary catharsis. He, like Dymer, had been obsessed with recapturing the ecstasies of the past. “To ‘get it again,’” he would write in Surprised by Joy, “became my constant endeavor; while reading every poem, hearing every piece of music, going for every walk, I stood anxious sentinel at my own mind to watch whether the blessed moment was beginning and to endeavor to retain it if it did.” He found it couldn’t be done. Like Dymer, his initial reaction to this failure was angry rejection; and with the “new psychology” whispering to him that his romantic longings were really sublimated lust, he set out to “unmask and defeat” the stratagems of wish-fulfilling fantasy. Like Dymer, Lewis succumbed for a time to pessimism and, like Dymer, he was tempted by magic; but in the end he came to his senses, rejecting both despair and empty promises. He grew up.
Among the wish-fulfilling fantasies that died with Dymer was Lewis’s image of himself as a major poet. The first blow was a peremptory rejection from Heinemann, publisher of Spirits in Bondage. This stung Lewis so bitterly that he sat down and wrote himself a long letter minutely analyzing his desire to see Dymer succeed:
My desire then contains two elements. (a) The desire for some proof to myself that I am a poet. (b) The desire that my poet-hood should be acknowledged even if no one knows that it is mine … As far as I can see both these are manifestations of the single desire for what may be called mental or spiritual rank. I have flattered myself with the idea of being among my own people when I was reading the poets and it is unpleasing to have to stand down and take my place in the crowd. Such a desire is contrary to my own settled principles: the very principles which I expressed in Dymer.
Dymer finally did make its mark—it was published by Dent, Lewis’s friends were encouraging, and there were a number of highly positive reviews. AE (under the pseudonym “V.O.”) had kind things to say about it in The Irish Statesman. The detective novelist Rupert Croft-Cooke called it a “great poem” in G.K.’s Weekly. The most favorable notice, by the poet and critic Hugh l’Anson Fausset in The Times Literary Supplement, called the poem “notable because it is in the epic tradition and yet is modern in idiom and reflects a profoundly personal intuition” in which the hero’s adventure takes place “not on the high seas but in the swamps and arid places of his own soul-making.” But the triumph was fleeting; the book did not sell, and the more enthusiastic reviews struck Lewis as “silly.”
The problem was this: the poem, taken stanza by stanza, gleams like gold, but it is partly fool’s gold. At least that is how The Poetry Review saw it in November 1926: “One is little impressed by the allegory that is hard to understand, amazed at the alternate flashes of brilliance and dullness in the style of writing, and wholly delighted by the lyrical quality of many of the lines.” A friend of Barfield’s judged that “the metrical level is good, the vocabulary is large: but Poetry—not a line.” Coghill, whose appreciation for the spiritual themes had been an encouragement to Lewis, admitted later that he was never quite sure what the poem meant; he just knew that it felt mysteriously significant, and though he didn’t say this to Lewis, he judged that its “Pre-Raphaelite stained glass imagery” and its “toe-hold in Wardour Street” (a reference to its pseudoarchaic language, the same problem that afflicted Tolkien) would prevent it from having lasting power. Coghill was convinced that Lewis was better at prose than poetry, and more than one reviewer agreed: the stories would be captivating, if only the verse didn’t get in the way.
Lewis was crushed. There was no way to deflect a verdict shared so widely by critics he respected (in a letter to Harwood he quoted John Henry Newman quoting Augustine: Securus judicat orbis terrarum—the world is a sure judge). Later he told Arthur, who was suffering similar agonies about his painting, that “from the age of sixteen onwards I had one single ambition, from which I never wavered, in the prosecution of which I spent every ounce I could, on wh. I really & deliberately staked my whole contentment: and I recognise myself as having unmistakably failed in it.” He had worshipped at poetry’s altar and monitored himself, as well as his friends, for any sign of flagging devotion to the art. A decade earlier or a few decades later he might have fared better, but he had the misfortune to publish just as the critical tide turned against narrative poetry, against formal rhyme and meter, against pastoral landscapes, heroic quests, and archaisms of all kinds. His middling talent could not buck the modernist surge, and his dream collapsed. Even after he abandoned hope of poetic greatness, however, his love for poetry never ceased. He continued to turn out short lyric verse, and he labored for two decades (1918–1938) on a narrative poem transposing the Hippolytus myth to fairyland, reciting it, under the title “The Queen of Drum,” at a 1938 “Oxford Summer Diversion.” It remained unpublished during his lifetime.
Realism …
Finishing Dymer coincided with another sea change in Lewis’s life. As an adolescent he had learned to view the universe as “a meaningless dance of atoms” and had assumed a Romantic posture in defiance of this harsh truth. By the time he had completed Dymer, however, Lewis had taken his first steps in the direction of a Romanticism without defiance, a Romanticism wedded to sanity and reason.
To accomplish this, he needed to decouple poetry and magic. He’d had enough of the hankering for mystical secrets that had made a tawdry spectacle of the great poet Yeats, turned the benign Leo Baker in
to an alarming enigma, and sent more than a few of his contemporaries into sectarian coteries or worse. He’d had enough of second-rate revelations from the spirit world and psychical researchers whose proof of an afterlife was always just around the corner. There was “Cranny,” the Reverend Frederick Walker MacRan, an Anglo-Irish priest and friend of Mrs. Moore who had entered Holy Orders without believing in Christ and had ended up—as Lewis describes him in Surprised by Joy—“an old, dirty, gabbling, tragic, Irish parson” and an unwelcome weekend guest, obsessed with finding evidence for survival of death. His fellow student, Pasley, had become a spiritualist and was, Lewis thought, much the worse for it. “The whole question of immortality became rather disgusting to me,” Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy; it was encouraging to find that Barfield, though desperate to find an alternative to pessimistic materialism, shared his friend’s contempt for pie-in-the-sky consolations.
Most disturbing of all was the descent into madness of Mrs. Moore’s brother, John “Doc” Askins, who was now living nearby with his family. Lewis enjoyed his company, and when Askins held forth on his favorite metaphysical subjects, whether Atlantis or the afterlife, Lewis was a willing sounding board. On one such occasion, however, Askins bared his soul; he was haunted by evil thoughts, terrified of Hell, convinced of his own sinfulness. Lewis was unsure whether the pathology stemmed from actual misdeeds or subconscious impulses, from untreated syphilis or war neurosis. Things soon came to a crisis, and Mrs. Moore insisted they shelter her brother as he writhed on the floor, tortured by fiendish blasphemies and thoughts of imminent damnation, while his wife (a consummate witch in Lewis’s opinion) was having fits of her own upstairs. A doctor was sent for, and later a policeman. Lewis needed all his strength to hold Doc down while they chloroformed him. He was hospitalized, only to die three weeks later when his exhausted heart gave out.
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings Page 19
