The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  I asked the earth and it answered, “I am not He”; and all things that are in the earth made the same confession. I asked the sea and the deeps and the creeping things, and they answered, “We are not your God; seek higher.” I asked the winds that blow, and the whole air with all that is in it answered, “Anaximenes was wrong; I am not God.” I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they answered, “Neither are we God whom you seek.” And I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: “Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him.” And they cried out in a great voice: “He made us.” My question was my gazing upon them, and their answer was their beauty.

  Lewis was approaching the “region of awe,” convinced that the call of Joy was drawing him out of himself toward a reunion with that mysterious Other (he stopped short of saying “God”) that held the secret of his identity.

  But there was much else on his mind just now. At the beginning of Michaelmas term 1925, he relocated his academic home to rooms in Magdalen College’s eighteenth-century “New Building,” overlooking the Deer Park, in surroundings “beautiful beyond expectation and beyond hope,” as he told his father; and once inducted there as a fellow (the ceremony of admission was, embarrassingly, “a kneeling affair” involving Latin declarations for which no one had prepared him), his horizons instantly broadened. Since there were not enough students reading English to fill up his requisite tutorial hours, he began to tutor in philosophy and political science as well. Magdalen was the wealthiest of the Oxford colleges, but undeveloped in some areas—particularly the new PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) program, the modern alternative to Greats. It also had the reputation of being the foppish and reactionary aristocrats’ favorite among Oxford colleges, a place for Etonians and Harrovians to win boat races, make the right connections, and academically squeak by (it was, after all, Bertie Wooster’s college). All this would soon change, however, thanks to maverick dons like the Philosophy tutor T. D. (Harry) Weldon, of whom Lewis said, “Contempt is his ruling passion: courage his chief virtue”; and though Lewis’s sympathies were with the old-guard dons, who were, in the main, churchgoing humanists, medievalists, and defenders of philosophical idealism, he would support efforts to raise the admission standards and make Magdalen as distinguished academically as it had been for “rowing, drinking, motoring and fornication.”

  From the beginning, his lectures—on “Some Eighteenth-Century Precursors of the Romantic Movement,” followed the next year by “Some English Thinkers of the Renaissance”—were gratifyingly well attended, “a pleasant change,” he told his father, “from talking to empty rooms in Greats.” It was not long before he began to make a powerful impression both as lecturer and tutor. His most famous lectures—“The Romance of the Rose and its Successors” beginning in Michaelmas term 1928, the “Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry” lectures beginning in Hilary term 1932, and the “Prolegomena to Medieval and Renaissance Studies” lectures throughout the 1930s, in which the previous two series were combined—soon would make him a genuine celebrity in Oxford and beyond.

  Reminiscences by those who attended these talks tell of the red face and booming voice, the rich, detailed presentations, and the rapt, enthusiastic crowds. Lewis had developed a trademark style, slow enough for note taking, loud enough to rouse the dullest listener, straightforward, abundantly furnished with quotations, and lavish in wit. He supported his prodigious memory by keeping two notebooks at the podium, one with a detailed outline on the left and illustrative matter on the right, the other a “Thickening” notebook furnished with additional anecdotes and examples. Paul Johnson remembers Magdalen Hall filled with “girls squatting or lying at his feet, displaying their stocky legs.” Harry Blamires, in a note he sent to Warnie Lewis, recalls that “as a lecturer he was the biggest ‘draw’ the English School had in the nineteen-thirties. He could fill the largest lecture rooms. He was popular because his lectures were meaty. He purveyed what was wanted in a palatable form. Proportion and direction were always preserved, but without forcing. Points were clearly enumerated; arguments beautifully articulated; illustrations richly chosen.” The poet and medievalist Sister Mary Madeleva Wolff, C.S.C., who during a sabbatical year in 1934 attended the “Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry” lectures (as well as lectures by Tolkien), before returning to America to become president of St. Mary’s College in Indiana, wrote to her Mother Superior to say that they were the best lectures she had ever heard. Alastair Fowler, who attended the “Prolegomena” lectures in the 1950s, recalls being impressed by Lewis’s “avuncular informality”:

  At times, ‘Uncle Lewis’ seemed hardly to be performing but rather exploring a thought for the first time. And, so far was he from standing on ceremony or authority or superior learning that he started his lecture as he came through the door and finished it as he walked out. He was a popular and (not at all the same thing) good lecturer—lecturing sometimes to an audience of three hundred or more. He towered above his colleagues in the English faculty—at a time, admittedly, when lecturing standards were not high. His resonant voice suited the rostrum; he was always easily audible (something that could not be said of Tolkien).

  Duties and Pleasures

  Lewis also tutored, in his private digs, a select group of students not always of his own choosing. Some were women, as he reported to Albert in June 1926: “I have been bothered into the last job I ever expected to do this term: taking a class of girls once a week at one of the women’s Colleges. However, I am not engaged to be married yet, and there are always seven of them there together, and the pretty ones are stupid and the interesting ones are ugly, so it is alright.” Reminiscences from several “ladies of St. Hugh’s” whom he would tutor during World War II—including Rosamund (Rieu) Cowan, daughter of the Homer translator E. V. Rieu—agree that, after overcoming their trepidation about approaching this red-faced “man’s man” who disliked tutoring women and brooked no nonsense, they found him courteous and even kindly, demanding only that they speak their own minds clearly. Given that women outnumbered men in the English School, it was hardly possible for Lewis to avoid them.

  Some of his charges drove him half-mad; for instance, John Betjeman, future poet laureate, whose aestheticism and frivolousness—including hauling around a teddy bear named Archibald Ormsby-Gore (inspiration for Sebastian Flyte’s Aloysius in Brideshead Revisited) and prostrating himself on Lewis’s floor declaring that he had no choice, given his poor performance as a student, but to enter Holy Orders—clashed badly with Lewis’s heartiness. The two did have points of connection, however, for Betjeman was no modernist, and they plotted together to submit parodies of T. S. Eliot poems to The Dial and The Criterion (the latter journal being edited by Eliot). Lewis also enjoyed a gathering of “super-undergraduates” in Betjeman’s rooms, including an “absolutely silent and astonishingly ugly person” from the Belfast region—the poet Louis MacNeice, Betjeman’s schoolmate.

  Betjeman represented the new breed, the Bright Young Things who came up between the world wars, for whom university life was champagne, plovers’ eggs, silk dressing gowns, sexual experimentation, and “luncheons, luncheons all the way.” He surprised Lewis with occasionally “creditable” papers, but the grammatical paradigms of Old English held absolutely no interest for him, and making excuses for work undone was an art form (“he hasn’t been able to read the O.E., as he was suspected for measles and forbidden to look at a book. Probably a lie, but what can one do?”). After Betjeman, notwithstanding his high church leanings, failed “Divvers” (a very basic exam in theology required of all undergraduates) for the second time, Lewis suggested he settle for a pass degree, without honors. Betjeman (who did in fact succeed at Divvers on the third try) blamed Lewis for his poor showing. He made the rift between them public, paying mock tribute in his 1933 poetry collection, In Ghastly Good Taste, to “Mr C. S. Lewis … whose jolly personality and encouragement to the author in his youth have remained an unfad
ing memory for the author’s declining years,” prefacing his 1937 poetry volume, Continual Dew, with an acknowledgement to Mr. C. S. Lewis “for the fact on p. 256” (the book is forty-five pages long), and broadcasting his grievance with these lines in “A Hike on the Downs”:

  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?

  The novelist Henry Green—known at Oxford by his birth name, Henry Yorke—also went in for dissipated undergraduate parties and struggled with Lewis as a tutor, calling him “rude and incompetent.” Unlike Betjeman, however, Green liked Anglo-Saxon and shared this interest with Nevill Coghill, who became for a while a close friend; his jaundiced view of Lewis may have arisen from differing literary inclinations, for Green, as Maurice Bowra wrote, “thought nothing of Lewis’ gods, Sidney and Spenser,” while Lewis knew nothing of Green’s beloved nineteenth-century Russian novelists—a clash of tastes exacerbated, as the Green biographer Jeremy Treglown suggests, by the volatile mix of “Lewis’s abrasiveness [and] Henry’s passivity.”

  With most of his tutorial charges, Lewis maintained a portcullis of reserve. When John Lawlor (later professor of English at the University of Keele) knocked one day on Lewis’s door to apologize for missing a scheduled session, “He cut short my apologies: ‘I’m not your schoolmaster, you know.’ It was coldly said, and coldly meant … I mustn’t think of our relationship as a personal one.” Yet sometimes the tutor-tutee relationship blossomed into friendship. Many pupils, including Lawlor, have recorded fond memories of their tutorial sessions with Lewis, the don perched in his tatty armchair in a swirl of tobacco smoke, dressed in shabby tweeds (“He looked more like an angler than a don”), doodling on a pad, always ready to challenge students on every possible intellectual front. Alan (Bede) Griffiths and Derek Brewer found him a sympathetic, incisive, challenging, inspiring guide. Martin Lings (who would become an influential Muslim thinker, discussed below) was grateful above all for his tutor’s “implacable criticism.” Alan Rook (who would become a successful war poet and vintner) said that tutorials with Lewis and occasional nightlong Madeira-and-dialectics sessions in Lewis’s Magdalen rooms left him feeling “happy but incompetent.” The literary critic W. W. Robson, though he disagreed profoundly with Lewis on questions of literary judgment, rejected the picture of him as a bully: “Lewis did not want to bully anyone … Nor—though his controversial manner sometimes lends colour to this belief—was he a brow-beater. His fault as an examiner was quite contrary to what undergraduates feared; he was too kind, being apt extravagantly to over-mark the papers of a candidate whose views he disliked.” Tutoring stole time from more important pursuits—it was the intellectual counterpart to all the domestic chores that awaited him at home—but it was, after all, what he was paid to do, and Lewis believed strongly in doing one’s duty.

  Duty left room for pleasure, though. For Lewis, pleasure took three intense forms. One was solitary walks; he knew all the footpaths in Oxford and tramped them regularly. Another was solitary reading. Helen Gardner, the formidable critic whose admiration for Lewis was matched by her disagreements with him on many points—she wrote two admiring books on T. S. Eliot, one of Lewis’s bêtes noires, and clashed with him over changes in the English syllabus—marveled at his capacity and generosity as a reader. A. N. Wilson attributes to the poet and critic William Empson (Lewis’s sometime adversary) the opinion that Lewis was “the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read”—and many biographers have repeated the statement, though the source for it remains elusive. It is a plausible enough remark, though, for it is difficult to posit an alternative; Eliot, an obvious contender, was too busy with his banking job to challenge for the title.

  A favorite place to read was Duke Humfrey’s Library, a fifteenth-century reading room at the Bodleian, with vaulted ceiling, hidden study-nooks, mullioned windows, and unlimited provisions of books and incunabula close to hand. “If only you could smoke and if only there were upholstered chairs, the Bodleian would be one of the most delightful places in the world,” Lewis wrote. He was thankful that talking was allowed, for he found the hum of conversation soothing rather than distracting. Like all great readers, he could create for himself a “wall of stillness,” as Helen Gardner put it. “To sit opposite him in Duke Humphrey,” Gardner recalled, “when he was moving steadily through some huge double-columned folio … was to have an object lesson in what concentration meant.”

  The third recreation, balancing the other two, was hobnobbing. His latest discovery in this line was the Wee Teas (named after the “Wee Frees,” a minority sect of the Free Church of Scotland), a regular gathering of six junior lecturers convened over a three-course dinner, at a more convenient hour than the “Philosophers’ Teas” held in the afternoon by their seniors. Here Lewis locked philosophical horns with Gilbert Ryle (a realist and ordinary language philosopher in the tradition of Cook Wilson, adept at exposing the pitfalls of mind-body dualism), Harry Weldon, Frank Hardie (brother of future Inkling Colin Hardie), H. H. Price, and John Mabbott. Sometimes, intellectual games lightened the proceedings; Mabbott recalls hearing Frank Hardie quote John Alexander Smith’s Latin lines about Noah’s Ark:

  Cum bove bos, grue grus, sue sus, cum tigride tigris,

  Rhinoceros tum cum rhinocerote venit

  With cow bull, with female crane male crane, with sow pig, with tigress tiger,

  Then came bull rhinoceros with cow rhinoceros

  At which, according to Mabbott, Lewis and Frank Hardie instantly added four more lines (though there is reason to think the four lines were composed beforehand by Barfield and Lewis):

  Necnon ridicula cum mure it ridiculus mus,

  Tum tom felis cum fele leone leo;

  Et pterodactylium par nobile, parque draconum

  Et dinos saurus dinaque saura sua

  Likewise the silly mouse goes with his silly doe mouse,

  Then tom-cat with molly-cat, lion with lioness;

  And a noble pair of pterodactyls, and a pair of dragons,

  And the terrible lizard with his terrible lizardess

  Still, Lewis’s participation in the Wee Teas was limited. He relished intellectual scrapes but needed deeper comradeship. To date, Greeves, Barfield, and to some extent Coghill had filled that want. But Greeves was far away and a lesser intellect, and Barfield, although always exciting (“To Clive Hamilton: Opposition Is True Friendship” reads the dedication of Poetic Diction), insisted on cloaking his scintillating mind in Anthroposophical clouds. On May 11, 1926, however, at another tea—the late afternoon Merton College “English Tea” of the Oxford English School—he met a man who would become a close friend and profoundly affect his thought and work, a “smooth, pale fluent little chap” by the name of J.R.R. Tolkien.

  8

  A MEETING OF MINDS

  Lewis’s impressions of his first meeting with Tolkien appear in his diary in telegraphed fashion: “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.” Lewis records Tolkien’s academic conservatism, noting that “his pet abomination is the idea of ‘liberal’ studies. Technical hobbies are more in his line” (presumably this would include calligraphy, painting, and invented languages) and ascribing to him a degree of male exclusivity that sounds just a bit too much like Lewis’s own view of the matter. Beyond that, he clearly has no idea of what he has encountered, remarking flippantly that there was “no harm in him: only needs a smack or so.” But it was Tolkien who would supply the smack, jolting Lewis—with the help of other friends and Lewis’s own desperate yearning—into Christian faith.

  The first contact between the two was, however,
professional. When Lewis remarked that Tolkien “thinks the language is the real thing in the school,” he was referring to a controversy over the proper balance between philological and literary study in the English syllabus—a controversy resolved in 1931, only to erupt more violently in the “lang. and lit.” debates of the 1950s and ’60s.

  English has now become, for better or worse, the quintessential humanities subject. At this time, however, it was a relatively new field of study, established as an Honours subject in 1894 against much opposition. As the younger and scruffier cousin to Classics, which had long been the preeminent subject for Honours candidates in the Arts, the Faculty of English could not hope to achieve a similar dignity if it appeared simply to cater to a taste for Shakespeare’s plays, let alone modern novels. It needed rigor, and that rigor could be supplied by the demand that students master the ancient and medieval roots of their literary heritage, its Germanic antecedents, its Norman and Celtic influences, and its most recondite texts. But this posed a serious problem. From the earliest days of the English School, most candidates for instruction cared nothing for these subjects. An unsigned 1890s pamphlet, “A Perilous Protest Against Certain Lewd Fellows of the Baser Sort, banding Themselves together under the name of ‘Philologists,’” reads like a precursor of Betjeman’s tirades:

  The school of English Lang. and Litt.