The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  “I was big for my age”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 94.

  “gloom and boredom”: Warren Lewis, “Memoir of C. S. Lewis,” 4.

  “I had an idea”: Warnie in “Lewis Family Papers” IV: 156–57, quoted in Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 52.

  “I find it very difficult to believe”: Warren Lewis, “Memoir of C. S. Lewis,” 4.

  “‘Norse in subject’ … Why should creatures have the burden of existence”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 114–15.

  “dog-tired”: Ibid., 96.

  “Please take me out of this”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 51.

  “‘Do you like that?’”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 130.

  “You know how I would love”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 176.

  “neither of us had any other outlet”: C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 2: Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 101.

  “The story that you have a headache after being drunk”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 319–20. In editing the Lewis letters, Hooper reinstated passages that Arthur Greeves had attempted to blot out; the reinstated text appears within these brackets: < >. See Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, x.

  “Terreauty”: Ibid., 176.

  “Niflheim and Asgard, Britain and Logres, Handramit and Harandra”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 154. Handramit and Harandra are the lower and upper regions of Malacandra (Mars) in Lewis’s first space fantasy novel, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Scribner, 1938; reprint ed., 2003).

  “crowing cocks and gaggling ducks … ‘spirit grocers’”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 154.

  “I learned charity”: “Lewis Family Papers” X: 218–20, quoted by Hooper in Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 995.

  homosexual inclination: Lewis addresses this kind of speculation in the chapter on friendship in The Four Loves: “This imposes on me at the outset a very tiresome bit of demolition. It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual … Kisses, tears and embraces are not in themselves evidence of homosexuality … On a broad historical view it is, of course, not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation. We, not they, are out of step.” C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), 60–63.

  “Do you ever wake up in the morning”: Ibid., 94.

  “With the Chaucer I am most awfully bucked”: Ibid., 187.

  “I feel my fame as a ‘Man-about-the-Gramaphone’ greatly put out”: Ibid., 116.

  “feelings ought to be kept for literature”: Ibid., 117.

  “I am a coarse-grained creature”: Ibid., 205.

  “You are interested in a brand of That … Let us talk of these things when we want”: Ibid., 287, 288.

  “‘however great an evil in itself”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 109–110. Lewis’s discussion of pederasty in Surprised by Joy gives many of his Christian acolytes pause; he refused to condemn it, even though he considered it sinful, partially because it was a temptation he never experienced and therefore could not speak about with authority, and partially because the cruelty of Malvern he found far more depraved than the lust; any activity touched by Eros, he suggests, still carries “the traces of his divinity” (Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 110). This seems remarkable for a middle-aged heterosexual man in the 1950s.

  Kirkpatrick: See Ian Wilson, “William Thompson Kirkpatrick (1848–1921),” Review: Journal of the Craigavon Historical Society 8, no. 1 (April 2008), www.craigavonhistoricalsociety.org.uk/rev/wilsonikirkpatrick.html (accessed August 6, 2014).

  “simply out of his proper environment … there would be no one there except Mr and Mrs K”: “Lewis Family Papers” IV: 156–57 and 160, quoted by Hooper in Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 52.

  “hopelessly rotten”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 65.

  “Stop!” … “Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 134, 135.

  “the great Rubicon”: Ibid., 141.

  “I suppose I reached as much happiness”: Ibid., 147.

  “If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity”: Ibid., 135.

  “I have repeatedly explained”: C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (New York: Scribner, 2003), 166.

  “a man of unusual mental power … he became an almost incomparable teacher”: Robert M. Jones, in Joseph R. Fisher and John H. Robb, Royal Belfast Academical Institution: Centenary Volume,1810–1910 (Belfast: McCaw, Stevenson & Orr, 1913). Cited in Wilson, “William Thompson Kirkpatrick (1848–1921),” and in Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide, 685.

  “Je soupçonne”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 545.

  “firstly, I am very happy … It seems a great pity”: Ibid., 87, 93.

  “You ask me my religious views”: Ibid., 230–31.

  3. ADVENT LYRICS

  “Tolkien, if we are to be guided by the countless notices on his mantelpiece”: Oxoniensis (pseud.), “Oxford Letter,” King Edward’s School Chronicle, December 1912, quoted in Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 954.

  his allowance from Father Francis: That Father Francis was underwriting Tolkien’s university career is suggested by Tolkien’s remark, reported by Humphrey Carpenter, that when Father Francis learned that Tolkien had been seeing Edith, he “threatened to cut short my University career.” Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: The Authorized Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 43.

  “two people … capable of bouts of profound despair”: Carpenter, Tolkien, 31.

  “the Finnish language is still in so unsettled and fluid a condition”: Charles Eliot, A Finnish Grammar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890), 5.

  “deserves its undesirable reputation”: Charles Eliot, Finnish Grammar, xxxvii.

  “quite intoxicated me”: Tolkien, Letters, 214.

  “gasping out of deep water”: Ibid., 347.

  Tolkien’s new art: For discussion of these visionary pictures, with reproductions, see Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 35–40.

  “Name him not!”: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 50th Anniversary One-Volume Edition (London: HarperCollins, 2005; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), Part 2: The Two Towers, book 3, 501.

  “incomparably easier and clearer”: C. S. Lewis, “William Morris,” Rehabilitations and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 39.

  “I am trying to turn one of the stories”: Tolkien, Letters, 7.

  “that very primitive undergrowth … I would that we had more of it left”: Quoted in John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 52.

  “an attempt to reorganize”: Tolkien, Letters, 214.

  “a curious thrill”: quoted in Carpenter, Tolkien, 64.

  Éarendel … eorendel: For eorendel as John the Baptist, see The Blickling Homilies, ed. Richard J. Kelly (London: Continuum, 2010), XIV “The Birth of John the Baptist,” 116–17, section 45: Ond nu seo Cristes gebyrd set his aeriste, se niwa eorendel Sanctus Johannes. Ond nu se leoma Þære soÞan sunnan, God selfa, cuman wille. “The birth of Christ occurred at his appearing; John the Baptist heralded the new dawn. Now the ray of the true Sun, God Himself, will come.”

  astral myth: See Tolkien’s explanation of the astronomical associations with Éarendel (and its variants), in a draft letter to “Mr. Rang” (Gunnar Urang, who later published Shadows of Heaven: Religion and Fantasy in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkien), dated by Tolkien August 1967, in Letters, 385 and note.

  “not a Redeemer”: Shippey, Road to Middle-earth, 246.

  she agreed to switch altars: Ro
bert Murray, S.J., personal interview, July 12, 2006.

  “the moving force”: Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, quoted in Scull and Hammond, J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide, 1001.

  “Council of London … I never spent happier hours”: Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, quoted in ibid., 1001.

  “to drive from life, letters, the stage and society … to reestablish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty”: Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, quoted in ibid., 1001.

  “had been granted some spark of fire”: Letter to G. B. Smith, August 12, 1916, Tolkien, Letters, 10.

  “those grey days”: Carpenter, Tolkien, 78.

  “Edith Mary Tolkien”: J.R.R. Tolkien: Life and Legend. An Exhibition to Commemorate the Centenary of the Birth of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Judith Priestman (Oxford: Bodleian Library, [1992]), 30.

  “O lonely, sparkling isle, farewell!”: J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Lonely Isle” (or “Tol Eressëa”), first published as “The Lonely Isle” in Leeds University Verse 1914–1924, quoted in Garth, Tolkien and the Great War, 144–45. See Michael D. C. Drout, “Tol Eressëa,” in J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, ed. Michael D. C. Drout (New York: Routledge, 2007), 651.

  “Theoretically … it would have been possible to walk from Belgium”: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 37.

  “one of the most interesting in the whole long history of human disillusion”: Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 29.

  “I see men arising”: Henry Williamson, The Wet Flanders Plain (London: Faber & Faber, 1929), 3, quoted in Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 29.

  “hungry and lonely … a mere individual”: Tolkien, Letters, 10.

  “spark of fire … testify for God”: Ibid.

  “you might scribble something”: From an interview with Philip Norman, “‘More Than a Campus Craze; It’s Like a Drug Dream’; The Prevalence of Hobbits: Thirty Years After They Were Invented by a Bored Oxford Don, the Hobbits—‘a Benevolent, Furry-Footed People’—Have Taken a New Generation by Storm,” The New York Times, January 15, 1967.

  “in grimy canteens”: Tolkien, Letters, 78.

  “It is plain”: Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” Tree and Leaf, 54.

  “being huddled up in a little dog-kennel”: Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), 64.

  “The child alone a poet is”: Robert Graves, “Babylon,” Fairies and Fusiliers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918), 14.

  4. HARD KNOCKS AND DREAMING SPIRES

  “I am desperately in love”: Letter to Arthur Greeves, November 22, 1916, in Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 256.

  “will be an improvement”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 257.

  “He hardly realizes”: Kirkpatrick quoted in “Lewis Family Papers,” quoted by Walter Hooper in Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 178.

  “He is always cheerful”: Kirkpatrick quoted in “Lewis Family Papers,” quoted in Walter Hooper, preface to Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics, by C. S. Lewis, (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1984), xvii.

  Among letters that speak of suicide, see also “My father seemed in very poor form when I got home, and fussed a lot about my cold: so everything is beastly, and I have decided—of course—to commit suicide again,” September 18, 1916. Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 222.

  “the rod”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 283, 271.

  “the recognized scientific account”: Ibid., 231.

  “as an old Saxon thane”: Ibid., 244.

  “Leopard witches … He is as voluptuous as Keats”: Ibid., 290.

  “the place has surpassed my wildest dreams”: Ibid., 262.

  “Oxford is absolutely topping”: Ibid., 266.

  “in a way we have spoiled our paradise”: Ibid., 288.

  “a really ripping kind of person”: Ibid., 310. Such cultured female society is “a great anodyne in a life like ours,” he told Arthur (Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 325). So much for the charge that Lewis avoided the company of intellectual women.

  “Of course, mind you, I am not laying down as a certainty that there is nothing outside the material world”: Ibid., 231.

  “ardent Newmanite … He came into my rooms last night”: Ibid., 307.

  “do not actually prove the agency of real spirits”: Ibid., 313–14. The book, according to Walter Hooper, was Psychical Research by William Fletcher Barrett, [1911]; ibid., 313, note 96.

  “one of our few philosophers”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 326. Lewis started reading Principles of Human Knowledge June 12 and finished it June 14, 1924. C. S. Lewis, All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, 1991), 329, 332.

  “royally drunk” … Butler and Dodds: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 319.

  “good fellow … very decent”: Ibid., 319, 322.

  “immensely”: Ibid., 334.

  “Don’t understand telegram”: Quoted in ibid., 345.

  “the frights, the cold … I have gone to sleep marching”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 197–98.

  “dear Sergeant Ayres … turned this ridiculous”: Ibid., 196. See Everard Wyrall, History of the Somerset Light Infantry 1914–1919 (London: Methuen, 1927), 295.

  “west country farmers”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 193.

  Siegfried Sassoon: Consider, for example, Sassoon’s famous war poem, “The General” (1917): “‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said / When we met him last week on our way to the line. / Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead, / And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine. / ‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack / As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. / But he did for them both by his plan of attack.”

  “shows rarely”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 196.

  “a boy lay asleep on a bank”: Warnie in “Lewis Family Papers” V: 109–110, quoted in K. J. Gilchrist, A Morning After War: C. S. Lewis & WW I (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 27.

  “ghastly dreams”: Lewis’s diary entry for July 19, 1915, quoted in Walter Hooper, preface to Spirits in Bondage, xxi.

  “Long leagues on either hand the trenches spread”: Lewis, “French Nocturne (Monchy-Le-Preux),” Spirits in Bondage, 4.

  “This is War … Here is a man dying”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 196–97.

  “that there was a fully conscious ‘I’”: Ibid., 197–98.

  “something purely spiritual”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 372.

  “a self-caressing luxury”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 168.

  “a particular hill walk”: Ibid., 166.

  “to care for almost nothing but the gods and heroes”: Ibid., 174.

  “the passion for the Occult”: Ibid., 60.

  “a superabundance of mercy”: Ibid., 178. March 4, 1916, is the date indicated in Lewis’s letter of March 7, 1916, to Arthur (Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 169). But Lewis places this event in October in Surprised by Joy.

  “bright shadow … Holiness”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 179.

  “transforming all common things … baptized”: Ibid., 181.

  “its thought is not daring”: T. S. Eliot on Arthur Clutton-Brock’s The Ultimate Belief, quoted in Donald J. Childs, T. S. Eliot: Mystic, Son, and Lover (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 63.

  “god-imposed … an object”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 343.

  “Most people in England”: Arthur Clutton-Brock, The Ultimate Belief (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916), 20.

  highbrows: For an apposite portrait of the sort of highbrow Lewis has in mind, see Ian Hay (pseudonym for John Hay Beith), The Lighter Side of School Life (Edinburgh: Ballantyne Press, 1914), 107–108:

  Then comes the Super-Intellectual—the “Highbrow.” He is a fish out of the water with a vengeance, but he does exist at school—somehow. He congregates in places
of refuge with others of the faith; and they discuss the English Review, and mysterious individuals who are only referred to by their initials—as G. B. S. and G. K. C. Sometimes he initiates these discussions because they really interest him, but more often, it is to be feared, because they make him feel superior and grown-up. Somewhere in the school grounds certain youthful schoolmates of his, inspired by precisely similar motives but with different methods of procedure, are sitting in the centre of a rhododendron bush smoking cigarettes. In each case the idea is the same—namely, a hankering after meats which are not for babes. But the smoker puts on no side about his achievements, whereas the “highbrow” does. He loathes the vulgar herd and holds it aloof. He does not inform the vulgar herd of this fact, but he confides it to the other highbrows, and they applaud his discrimination. Intellectual snobbery is a rare thing among boys, and therefore difficult to account for. Perhaps the pose is a form of reaction. It is comforting, for instance, after you have been compelled to dance the can-can in your pyjamas for the delectation of the Lower Dormitory, to foregather next morning with a few kindred spirits and discourse pityingly and scathingly upon the gross philistinism of the lower middle classes. No, the lot of the æsthete at school is not altogether a happy one, but possibly his tribulations are not without a certain beneficent effect. When he goes up to Oxford or Cambridge he will speedily find that in the tolerant atmosphere of those intellectual centres the prig is not merely permitted to walk the earth but to flourish like the green bay-tree …

  See also Lewis’s November 4, 1917, letter to Arthur (Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 342).

  “immediate conquest … God is”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 190–91.

  “to relish energy”: Ibid., 198.

  “the Junior Common Room”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 428.

  “household gods”: Ibid., 447.

  “After breakfast I work”: Ibid., 425.

  “most of them vile”: Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 252–53.

  “She is old enough to be his mother … The daily letter business”: “Lewis Family Papers” VI: 129, quoted by Walter Hooper in Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 451–52.