The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  The modern reader is predisposed to regard allegorical language as artificial, arbitrary, and insufficiently introspective to provide real insight into the experience of medieval lovers. The personification of abstract qualities, mother’s milk to medieval writers, came to seem alien and repugnant to modern thought. But Lewis loved nothing more than the chance to defend ways of thinking that moderns find alien and repugnant. Hence, with a degree of exaggeration, he insists that allegory belongs to “the very nature of thought and language.” It is a fragment of the perennial language, signaling immaterial feelings by material images that remain constant across the ages and around the world: heaven images the highest good, dark caverns image evil, life is a journey, reason the unconquered sun, conscience a voice. “To ask how these married pairs of sensibles and insensibles first came together would be great folly; the real question, is how they ever came apart.”

  Owen Barfield had given Lewis a way of answering this question: rejection of allegory is a symptom of estrangement from the poetic roots of our own everyday language. The irony is that allegory is inescapable: the modern Freudian psychodrama of ego, superego, and id is as artificial an allegory as one can find in any medieval mystery play. Moreover, the allegorical personification of abstract qualities and ideals reflected a moral psychology that, in Lewis’s opinion, was more robust, demanding, objective, and exhilarating than the shapeless and chronically unfinished self-project of modern psychologies. Allegory did become artificial, Lewis concedes, after Spenser, and it is the debased, contrived form of allegory that for so long gave it a bad name. But allegory before Spenser, and allegory in the hands of Spenser, is another matter altogether. Spenser is the true hero of The Allegory of Love: the Christian poet who celebrated “life’s golden tree” so vividly “that it is difficult not to fancy that our bodily, no less than our mental, health is refreshed by reading him”; the love poet who transfigured fin’ amor into a communion to which married couples could aspire; the Renaissance poet who perfected medieval allegory before its decline into a “literary toy.”

  Allegory, then, is something disenchanted moderns need to know better, but it is not, Lewis intimates, quite as revelatory as symbol or myth. “There is nothing ‘mystical’ or mysterious about medieval allegory; the poets know quite clearly what they are about and are well aware that the figures which they present to us are fictions. Symbolism is a mode of thought, but allegory is a mode of expression.” Allegory is a lower form in that “the allegorist leaves the given—his own passions—to talk of that which is confessedly less real, which is a fiction. The symbolist leaves the given to find that which is more real.” The distinction, reminiscent of Coleridge, was rather forced, however; in a 1940 letter, Lewis said it was one of the parts of The Allegory of Love with which he felt dissatisfied. While Tolkien would insist to his last breath on the strict separation of the allegorical from the mythopoeic imagination, Lewis was willing to accept that these genres can be difficult to define with precision and often come mixed.

  The Allegory of Love is a brilliant literary double helix: it tells the history of courtly love and the history of allegory by turns, revolving around a shared axis. Either history would have been a tour de force on its own; entwined together, the book irritated some as much as it impressed other scholarly reviewers. In an early review (April 1937) in Speculum, the American medieval studies journal, Howard Patch, a medievalist teaching at Smith College, acknowledged that the book “affords excellent reading,” but could not endorse it: “If his work lacks permanent importance it is because his light touch has at times led him into extravagant statement.” The same month, the University of Manchester philologist G. L. Brook, writing in The Modern Language Review, called The Allegory of Love “undoubtedly one of the best books on mediaeval literature ever published in this country,” and a few months later, Kathleen Tillotson, a scholar of Victorian literature, told readers of The Review of English Studies that “it is rarely that we meet with a work of literary criticism of such manifest and general importance as this. No one could read it without seeing all literature a little differently for ever after.” She concluded that “Mr. Lewis is a critic alive at all points and wearing his learning like a plumed hat. His book, in addition to its other virtues, celebrates the marriage of Philologia and Mercury, too long divided”—by which she meant the marriage of the warring disciplines of philology and literary interpretation, or lang. and lit.

  The intense labors of this seven-year period also appeared later in the 1944 Clark Lectures and the OHEL volume (discussed below), as well as in the posthumously published Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature and The Discarded Image. Taking these works together, one sees the lineaments of Lewis’s entire scholarly project—which was nothing less than to give an account, at once historical and spiritual, of Europe’s Christian literary imagination, from its Latin beginnings to its vernacular allegories and romances and its secular spin-offs, and to defend, against modernist prejudices, its enduring significance; to unlearn what we thought we knew about medieval poetry, morality, and science; to overcome the intellectual inhibitions that prevent us from enjoying literature both ancient and modern, on its own terms and for its own sake; to celebrate old books as a means of recovering the roots of Western culture; to savor, within those old books, those elements least congenial to modern prejudices, overcoming even a justified dislike of rhetorical artifice, “for surely to be indulgent to mere fashion in other periods, and merciless to it in our own, is the first step we can make out of the prison of the Zeitgeist?” If Spenser was, as Lewis suggests, “something between the last of the medieval poets and the first of the romantic medievalists,” then Lewis, with The Allegory of Love, was emerging as the last of the romantic medievalists. He was convinced that it needed only the effort of looking through medieval eyes for us to see a meaningful, humanly habitable, ordered universe—a universe that is truly a cosmos rather than a chaos or a trackless waste; he was convinced that poetry and imaginative literature were a means of keeping alive, by transposing to a new key, the aesthetic and moral sensibilities endangered by a crude scientific positivism.

  Checkmate

  If Lewis was an agnostic while writing The Allegory of Love, by the time it was published he was a Christian and an allegorist in his own right. It was almost inevitable. Not only the poetry that made the subject of the “Prolegomena” lectures and The Allegory of Love, but almost all his leisure reading—from George Herbert’s rapturous poems to G. K. Chesterton’s exuberant history, The Everlasting Man—conspired to give him a mental landscape bedecked with symbols and images, even doctrines, of the faith. The balance of Western thought, he was beginning to realize, tilted heavily toward Christianity. His own history followed the same ineluctable curve. The movement along this arc had taken several years, as he moved from Joy as an end in itself, to Joy as a sign of something beyond, to the idealism of Bradley with its impersonal Absolute. But no one with Lewis’s romantic yearnings rests content for long with the impersonal Absolute, even under the pseudonym of Spirit. A metaphysical solution that precludes all devotion, all worship—who can lose his heart to such a heartless answer? All the writers he most admired, Lewis notes (Plato, the medieval romancers, Johnson, Milton), and all the friends he most admired (Barfield, Tolkien, Coghill) believed in a personal God. He tells us, in Surprised by Joy, that the turning point came in 1929 during a bus ride up Headington Hill, when he realized that he had to choose: “I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out.” He let that something—which soon proved to be a Someone—in, knowing as he did so that he was turning his back, or kicking apart, the great atheist/agnostic edifice, built of theorizing and prejudices, proofs and hatreds, fear and ambition, that he had constructed over so many years:

  I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed in some way from “the God of popular religion.” My Adversary waived the point. It sank
into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, “I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am” … You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed; perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

  This passage has been taken by most biographers as the gospel truth about Lewis’s journey toward the Gospel; it has achieved the status of a classic conversion testimony. But it should be noted that the conversion Lewis describing is to “theism,” not yet to full-blown Christianity. And there is a problem about dates; for in the February following the Trinity (i.e., spring) term of 1929, Lewis wrote Barfield that “terrible things are happening to me. The ‘Spirit’ or ‘Real I’ is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery.” On this evidence, it would appear that Lewis was still on the fence. A revised dating suggested by Alister McGrath would place Lewis’s conversion to theism in the Trinity term of 1930.

  Then, too, God as the “Adversary” who makes “moves” and achieves “checkmate” reminds one much, perhaps a bit too much, of Francis Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven” (“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days / I fled Him, down the arches of the years”). Thompson’s descriptions of himself—“of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot” and a “strange piteous futile thing”—are first cousins to Lewis’s self-accounting on the eve of his conversion, as “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.” Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God; but Lewis was a well-read man. There is no direct evidence that he knew Thompson’s poem, but it appeared in The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1917); Tolkien, as early as 1914, had lauded Thompson and his work during a talk to the Exeter College Essay Club, and it is certainly possible that he and Lewis discussed the poem.

  The metaphorical language in Lewis’s account of his conversion may signal that in at least some instances poetic considerations trump strict historical accuracy: “And so the great Angler played His fish and I never dreamed that the hook was in my mouth.” On the other hand, it scarcely surprises that there are discrepancies in chronology. The shift from acknowledging Spirit (abstract noun) to adoring Spirit (personal noun), though tremendous in its implications, may well be a gradual transformation too subtle to date. In any event, if the artistic play of imagery, the conscious shaping of the tale, is everywhere evident, so, too, is the power and the glory of it. As a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement noted, “the tension of these final chapters holds the interest like the close of a thriller.”

  A Walk at Night

  Lewis was now half-ready—and perhaps more than half-willing, perhaps even eager—to know the embrace of a personal God. He couldn’t be sure, at first, about what demands God would make—the surrender of Joy might be, he surmised, one of the first. Nonetheless, God’s will be done; for God, being God, the fullness of goodness, power, beauty, and truth, deserves obedience; or as Lewis puts it, “To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him.” He discovered one immediate blessing: his relentless introspection, which had plagued him since childhood, abated. He ended his diary. Instead, he learned to pray and read the Bible, attended church, and corresponded with Griffiths, by this time a convinced Christian. He ascribes these acts to his “sense of honor”; now a theist, he thought he should behave like one, even if it meant enduring “the fussy, time-wasting botheration of it all! the bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing,” and, worst of all, the hymns and organ music.

  All this suggests a deliberate catechumenate, as if Lewis already knew, at least subliminally—as most future converts know, long before the decision dawns in consciousness—where he would wind up. “‘Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?’” he began to ask himself, according to Surprised by Joy. “Paganism had been only the childhood of religion, or only a prophetic dream. Where was the thing full grown? or where was the awakening?” Chesterton had helped to convince him that there were only two conceivable answers: Christianity and Hinduism (the latter would, decades later, help to lure Griffiths away from European monasticism into an intermonastic—some would say syncretistic—Christian ashram). But he must have guessed the answer even as he posed the question. For Hinduism, all of Lewis’s reading and thinking and desiring proclaimed, was too ahistorical and too redolent of humanity’s pagan childhood to win the day, while Christianity offered Christ, in all His incarnate numinosity, the culmination of all myth, the perfection of all paganism, the Joy within Joy. As a result, Lewis told Arthur, he felt he had found a genuine way to rekindle his Romanticism and keep it permanently aflame.

  Lewis’s brother and friends knew where he belonged. On May 9, 1931, Warnie became a Christian, writing in his diary that “I started to say my prayers again after having discontinued doing so for more years than I care to remember” and adding that his conversion was not an irrational impulse but the conclusion of a long process, resting upon materialism’s failure to explain the origins of life and “the inherent improbability of the whole of existence being fortuitous.” Lewis makes no mention of Warnie’s conversion as an influence upon his own. The two brothers liked, admired, and took counsel from each other, however, so we may assume with some confidence that Jack was swayed, perhaps at a level more fundamental than rational analysis, by Warnie’s action.

  A few months later, Lewis’s friends joined the argument. On September 19, 1931, an event unfolded that has acquired its own mythic numinosity in the minds of Inklings lovers: the Night of Addison’s Walk. Lewis, Tolkien, and their mutual friend, Hugo Dyson, strolled for hours along Addison’s Walk—a tree-lined path within Magdalen College circling a meadow bordered by the River Cherwell—discussing the nature of myth and its relation to Christianity. Lewis insisted that myths are essentially lies; Tolkien countered that myths are essentially true, for they reflect and transmit, in secondary form, the primary and primordial creative power of God. Tolkien later reworked the conversations of that night in “Mythopoeia,” a soliloquy in heroic couplets addressed by Philomythus (myth-lover = Tolkien) to Misomythus (myth-hater = Lewis) and dedicated “To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver.’”

  Moreover, Tolkien argued—and this was the crux of the matter—that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus we discover a myth that has entered history. Here God tells—indeed, enacts—a tale with all the beauty and wonder and symbolic power of myth, and yet a tale that is actually true. It was a strange thought, but it reminded Lewis of an offhand remark he had heard five years before from the atheist Harry Weldon. “Rum thing,” Weldon had said, “all that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.” It looked as if it had really happened once—and yet it lost none of its mythic power for having become fact.

  Tolkien’s exposition hit home; as he talked, a strong wind rustled the overhanging leaves, and all three noted, as Lewis put it, “the ecstasy of such a thing”—almost like the passing-by of a god, or of God. At 3:00 a.m., Tolkien headed home, but Dyson sustained the offensive, delineating the blessings that come from a Christian life, as he and Lewis walked in the cloister garden of New Building. They went to bed at 4:00 a.m.

  This night of Lewis’s passion—intellectual, as it must surely be—bore fruit on a sunny morning a week or so later. The key moment came, as in Lewis’s conversion to theism, while he rode a vehicle, this t
ime not a bus ascending Headington Hill but the sidecar of Warnie’s motorcycle as the brothers motored toward Whipsnade Zoo, a new animal park thirty miles north of London. “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.” Henceforth, Joy “lost nearly all interest” for him. He had found, and would henceforth worship and defend with all his might, the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy. On October 1, Lewis wrote to Greeves, “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity … My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”

  The Pilgrim’s Regress

  Aside from brief mention in his letters, the first record of Lewis’s conversion to Christianity was the allegorical novel The Pilgrim’s Regress, written in a white heat in August 1932, while Lewis was staying with Greeves in Northern Ireland, and published the following May (Lewis, who rarely wrote second drafts, excelled in lightning-fast production of this sort). Modeled on Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Pilgrim’s Regress tells of a boy named John who flees the stern Landlord of Puritania in search of a far-off Island that awakens in him “a sweetness and a pang,” an indescribable yearning. The island, of course, is Joy, and John’s odyssey is Lewis’s own. John’s quest takes him past the “barren, aching rocks” of the north (“rigid systems, whether sceptical or dogmatic”) and the “foetid swamps” of the south (“the smudging of all frontiers, the relaxation of all resistances”) before he learns, with the help of Reason and Mother Kirk, to steer a middle course that brings him, after numerous adventures, to the Island—which he discovers, in the sort of narrative loop beloved by artistic young authors (and deployed by Chesterton, from whom Lewis may have learned the trick), to be nothing other than an outcropping of his homeland, Puritania. The book offers giants, dragons, virgins; a landscape whose features signify spiritual states; characters named Mr. Angular, Vertue, Mr. Sensible. In these rich inventions and in the happy, hard-won culmination of John’s quest, Lewis produces a clever homage and, in part, a worthy sequel to Bunyan’s masterpiece.