The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  In our opinion should be split,

  For he who has the sort of wit

  To score a bit on English Litt.,

  Is not, egad, the kind of man

  To babble Lithuanian.

  The crux of the issue, as Tolkien saw it, was twofold: the “lit.” track lacked necessary grounding in the philology and sources of English literary tradition, while the “lang.” track shortchanged the study of medieval texts qua literature. He despised the very term “lang. and lit.,” suggesting that its “banishment is probably the first need of reform in the Oxford School,” and argued for “A” and “B” instead. He did not think language the primary subject and literature an appendix, as some charged; in his view, they had equal merit and should be partners rather than rivals. In an essay, “The Oxford English School,” that appeared in May 1930 in The Oxford Magazine amid ads for a recital by the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska and “Hayes and Son, the Oldest Established Bookbinders in Oxford”—traditionalism was in the ascendant in Oxford just then—Tolkien advanced his agenda. To many modern eyes, it will appear to be traditionalism run rampant. He urged educators on the lit. side to cut back the study of “the thousand years at the modern end” of literature, including the elimination of nineteenth-century studies, to be replaced by “worthy Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts.” The lang. track needed similar reform; the syllabus should stop at A.D. 1400—even though this would mean sacrificing Shakespeare’s transformation of the English tongue—to make room for the study of cognate languages like Old Icelandic, with its rich literary tradition, and Gothic, “a main source of the poetic inspiration of ancient England and the North.”

  Lewis, although far more sympathetic to postmedieval English literature, came to share Tolkien’s vision for the reform of the syllabus and joined in the campaign, which lasted from their first acquaintance in 1926 until victory in 1931. Lewis read a paper (“Our English Syllabus”) to the English Society at Oxford, lambasting the study of modern literature as “an intrinsic absurdity,” declaring that “the student who wants a tutor’s assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse’s assistance in blowing his own nose.” The analogy says, inter alia, much about Lewis’s view of modern literature. In “The Idea of an ‘English School’” (a paper he delivered to a joint meeting of the Classical and English Associations), while proudly proclaiming his literary conservatism (“if any question of the value of classical studies were before us, you would find me on the extreme right”), Lewis argues that the origins of modern English literature, and therefore the necessary study of those who would understand this literature, lie not, as is commonly supposed, in Greek and Roman classics, which brought to English neither form nor spirit but only “matter” (i.e., subject matter), but in Anglo-Saxon. In the tongue of Beowulf he discerns “a sense of language … native to us all.”

  By the early 1930s, those members of the English School who shared the same viewpoint established, along with Tolkien and Lewis, a club known as “the Cave” to advance their interests. They took their name from the biblical Cave of Adullam (1 Samuel 22:2), in which “every one that was discontented” assembled around David, awaiting their return to power—by then “Cave of Adullam” was a familiar way to lampoon any group of political malcontents (such as the Jacobites in Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel Waverly) that retreats in the hope of better days ahead. The Cave lasted until World War II, becoming, once its core agenda had been achieved, a distant cousin of the Inklings. In addition to Lewis and Tolkien, Cave members who would double as Inklings included Nevill Coghill, the Anglo-Saxonist C. L. (Charles Leslie) Wrenn, who collaborated with Tolkien on the curriculum and in Beowulf studies (he would succeed Tolkien, in 1946, as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor), and Henry Dyson, a World War I veteran with an Oxford degree in English (Exeter College), then a lecturer in English, a passionate teacher and boisterous advocate for traditional humane learning at the University of Reading (he would return in glory to Oxford in 1945 as a Merton College fellow and tutor); activities included readings, dinners, and chat, but differed from those of the more celebrated circle by, among other things, inviting women to participate.

  By October 1931, Lewis was crowing to Warnie that “next year is the first exam held under the syllabus which my party and I have forced upon the junto after much hard fighting: so that if I get a good colleague we shall be able to some extent to mould the new tradition. In fact, in English School politics, the anti-junto is in the ascendant—perhaps, from a prejudiced point of view, might be said to have become the junto.” Lewis was too much the moralist, however, and too recent the convert, to forget that any junto, however correct its views, may turn into an “inner ring”: “How long will it take us to become corrupt in our turn?” he asked. As it happened, the views of Tolkien and Lewis, with some compromises and modifications, prevailed at Oxford for many years, with the study of English literature beginning with Beowulf and ending just shy of the Victorians. Old English, the heart and soul of the old regime, ceased to be a required course only as of 2002.

  “The Fire Was Bright and the Talk Good”

  The Cave was not the only proto-Inklings group at Oxford during this era. In 1926, Tolkien founded the Kolbítars (coal-biters; that is, men who huddled around the fire against the Icelandic cold) devoted to intensive study of Old Norse literature. The club lasted for seven years, meeting, when possible, every other Monday morning. It counted among its members Lewis, Coghill, George Stuart Gordon (soon to become president of Magdalen College), and the lexicographer C. T. (Charles Talbut) Onions (1873–1965), fourth editor of the OED and a tutor and fellow of Magdalen. Tolkien dominated the meetings with fluent translations of extensive blocks of texts, while the novices, notably Lewis and Coghill, followed along as best they could or tackled, with considerably less success, much briefer passages. Lewis reveled in the study, poring over his Icelandic dictionary to catch sight of the names of gods or giants that would send him into “a wild dream of northern skies and Valkyrie music.” He liked the group’s philological tilt, but he loved its focus on myth and the opportunity it afforded to mingle with others who shared this love. His enthusiasm was unbounded; he records, in a letter to Arthur, that one evening he stayed up until 2:30 a.m., talking with Tolkien about “the gods & giants & Asgard for three hours, then departing in the wind & rain—who cd. turn him out, for the fire was bright and the talk good?”

  The friendship with Tolkien blossomed. In a letter to Arthur, Lewis describes his colleague as a friend “of the 2 class,” along with Dyson—just a notch below Greeves and Barfield. The feeling was warmly reciprocated; Tolkien, if he had thought in these categories, may have even considered Lewis a friend of the first class, for he removed his concealing armor and read out loud to him, in the intimate privacy of 22 Northmoor Road, substantial portions of the legendarium. At the end of 1929, he sent Lewis his long poem about Beren and Lúthien; Lewis read it and wrote back immediately, applauding the work’s “sense of reality,” mythic power, and freedom from contrived allegory: “I sat up late last night … I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight: and the personal interest of reading a friend’s work had very little to do with it.” This must have been honey in Tolkien’s ear. Lewis followed this initial report, a month or two later, with a fourteen-page analysis that parodied assorted literary and theological styles while lauding and pinpointing problems in Tolkien’s work. Basking in the glow of Lewis’s initial praise and open to suggestion, Tolkien accepted most of his friend’s recommendations.

  Despite Lewis’s enthusiasm, however, Tolkien continued to withhold his legendarium from publishers. Only some minor poems, an essay on the Ancrene Wisse, and a few other bits of scholarship made it into print at this time. In 1931 he further lifted the veil on his private creations, delivering to an Oxford philological gathering a talk he called “A Hobby for the Home” (later retitled “A Secret Vice”). In this essay, T
olkien reveals his passion for inventing artificial languages, recounting his explorations in Animalic, Nevbosh, Naffarin, Quenya, Noldorin, and the like. He also makes the following observation, detailing what might be called the Tolkien Law of Language Creation: “For perfect construction of an art-language it is found necessary to construct at least in outline a mythology … the making of language and mythology are related functions; to give your language an individual flavour, it must have woven into it the threads of an individual mythology … The converse indeed is true, your language construction will breed a mythology.” To bring this to fruition, and to present his most closely held secret vice to the world, would be the great work of the next two decades.

  Allegories of Love

  It has been observed that a man becomes a man, in the fullness of being, only when his father dies; this seems to be true in the case of C. S. Lewis. The relationship between father and son had improved; in his diary, Albert described a visit from Lewis and Warnie to Belfast over the 1926–27 Christmas holiday as “Roses all the way.” For Lewis the roses bristled with briars, but this was a distinct improvement over previous years. Several more visits ensued over the next few years. In May 1928, Albert resigned with a pension from his post, held for nearly forty years, as county solicitor. He had little more than a year to enjoy retirement, for in August 1929 he fell seriously ill. Lewis rushed to his bedside; an operation disclosed cancer; Albert died on September 25, 1929. Lewis sent a telegram to Warnie, stationed in Shanghai, informing him of their father’s death. It took the two brothers, with Lewis shouldering most of the burden, nine months to dispose of Little Lea and its contents. Warnie returned from Shanghai in April 1930, and the climactic moment in the process came when he and Lewis together retrieved their childhood toys, stored in an attic trunk, and buried them in the vegetable garden. “We will resolve them into their elements,” wrote Lewis to his brother, “as nature will do to us.” This nine-month obsequies, eerily like an inverted pregnancy, produced an unexpected birth. For two weeks after the sale of Little Lea, the two brothers, along with Mrs. Moore and her daughter, looking for a house in which they could all reside, discovered, far from the Oxford bustle, near a small pond bordered by moss and harboring coots and ducks—where, legend had it, Shelley once passed a day brooding atheistically—a property called the Kilns. “J and I went out and saw the place on Sunday morning, and I instantly caught the infection,” wrote Warnie in his diary (July 7, 1930), adding that the garden was “such stuff as dreams are made on.” The brothers moved in during October 1930 and would stay there until their death.

  But a greater birth impended, for Lewis was about to move into new spiritual quarters as well. Of his conversion to Christianity, we will say more below; first there is a scholarly transformation to record. The long hours in Duke Humfrey’s Library poring over manuscripts, incunabula, and recondite editions of medieval and Renaissance poetry were beginning to bear fruit in his first and most important book of literary scholarship, to be published in 1936 as The Allegory of Love. He dedicated the book “TO OWEN BARFIELD WISEST AND BEST OF MY UNOFFICIAL TEACHERS.”

  Lewis had originally contemplated writing a book about Erasmus, but found that Renaissance studies sent him back to the Middle Ages, and the Middle Ages to classical antiquity. Now he decided that his subject was simply “Old Europe.” Reaching from late antiquity to the cusp of early modernity, Old Europe was the perennial spring from which the modern wasteland could be reirrigated; the “Renaissance,” on the other hand, was a fiction concocted to devalue the “Middle Ages.” Nevill Coghill recalled running into Lewis on Addison’s Walk, just as this realization was dawning:

  … I saw him coming slowly towards me, his round, rubicund face beaming with pleasure to itself. When we came within speaking distance, I said, “Hullo, Jack! You look very pleased with yourself; what is it?”

  “I believe,” he answered, with a modest smile of triumph, “I believe I have proved that the Renaissance never happened in England. Alternatively”—he held up his hand to prevent my astonished exclamation—“that if it did, it had no importance!”

  In May 1928, he told Barfield his plan: he was starting a book on The Romance of the Rose “and its school.” “I have actually begun the first chapter,” he told his father in July 1928, of a study that would look at “mediaeval love poetry and the mediaeval idea of love which is a very paradoxical business indeed when you go into it: for on the one hand it is extremely super-sensual and refined and on the other it is an absolute point of honour that the lady should be some one else’s wife…” The seven years the book took to complete coincided with Lewis’s “Great War” with Owen Barfield, his journey from atheism to the threshold of Christianity (“I … wrote nearly the whole of the Allegory book while I was still an agnostic,” he told the critic George Watson), his first meetings with Tolkien, and his belated efforts to forge an adult relationship with his father.

  Lewis’s aim in The Allegory of Love was “rehabilitation.” He sought to recover “that long-lost state of mind for which the allegorical love poem was a natural mode of expression.” Unearthing its classical and early medieval antecedents, he traced the form to its high-water mark in The Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser, the sixteenth-century poet Lewis called “the greatest among the founders of that romantic conception of marriage which is the basis of all our love literature from Shakespeare to Meredith.” His canvas was vast, encompassing the structure of medieval narrative poetry, the dream-vision genre, the origins of romantic love, the ethos of chivalry, the moral psychology embodied in medieval lists of the virtues and vices—virtually, the whole late-antique and medieval cosmos. His interest in these matters was neither nostalgic (Lewis condemned “that itch for ‘revival’”) nor merely antiquarian. “Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.” Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind: the history of a period (medieval), a rhetorical practice (allegory), and an ethos (courtly love), which had something important to contribute to modern culture if only they could be better understood.

  It would be difficult to overstate the significance of his achievement. Not alone, but with decisive impact, he opened a new era in the study of medieval literature and culture. Reading medieval and Renaissance poetry with generous sympathy, he was able to see—and convincingly show—that it expressed a philosophical worldview, with pagan as well as Christian roots, as profound and viable as anything ancient or modern civilization had to offer. He did indeed, and lastingly, “rehabilitate” Spenser, making The Faerie Queene morally meaningful to readers who had hitherto viewed it as an intriguing political period-piece. He also offered groundbreaking if not unassailable insights into the origin of romantic love.

  We moderns, Lewis points out in The Allegory of Love, are conditioned to believe that romantic love—“the love interest”—is essential to literature, drama, and film; we take it for granted, even as formal courtesy erodes and sexual liberties expand, that romantic love has the power to ennoble and inspire. What we don’t recognize, Lewis maintains, is that we owe our exalted vision of love to a small group of medieval poets whose transformation of both pagan and early Christian eros opened a new spiritual epoch:

  French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth. They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the oriental present. Compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature.

  Yet it was not romantic love as we conceive of it today that the troubadours and poets of the high Middle Ages celebrated. Rather, Lewis points out, it was fin’ amor (pure love), a highly speci
alized form of passion, ascetical in the extremes of self-abasement and disciplined courtesy it demanded, cultlike in its ardent devotion, and, since medieval marriage was, according to Lewis, an affair of property and inheritance, not of the heart, strictly confined to adulterous love.

  The object of fin’ amor, then, is essentially unlawful and unattainable, even if fleetingly enjoyed. Fin’ amor, one can’t help notice, approaches everything Lewis meant by Joy: that delicious sharp pang of pure desiring, desiring what cannot be possessed, that leads beyond the narrow confines of the self. Did Lewis, too, think that joy could not be found in married life? It would be reasonable to suspect so, given his domestic situation; yet the whole point of The Allegory of Love is to show how fin’ amor came at last, in Spenser, to be translated to the sphere of married life. The revolution that began in adultery ended in Christian domesticity.

  Courtly love was, according to Lewis, a genuine novum, irreducible to historical or sociological terms. The sudden increase of landless knights attached to the isolated castle where a powerful lady and her damsels held sway was a favorable condition for this development, not an adequate cause. The medieval cult of the Blessed Virgin was more likely a beneficiary than a source of the new religion of love. Classical love poetry contributed material but not did shape the essential vision of courtly love; and early Christianity did not foresee it. Thus in The Allegory of Love, Lewis rejected the determinism of history, much as in later apologetic books like Miracles he would reject the determinism of scientific naturalism. New things can happen, Lewis insists; there can be miracles of literary as of moral history. One reads him as a literary scholar, only to be brought up short by the realization that he is making a philosophical as well as a historical argument.

  Readers of The Allegory of Love have sometimes questioned whether Lewis underestimated the rhetorical character of courtly love literature. Was “courtly love” (the expression was coined by Gaston Paris, a nineteenth-century scholar of Arthurian romances) actually felt and practiced by knights and ladies? Or was it merely a stylish literary invention, decked out in allegorical finery? Lewis was inclined to grant the justice of both views: yes, it was a literary phenomenon, but one that afforded a real window into medieval souls. Why could it not be both at once?