What remains that can be called a ‘common Inklings attitude’? Certainly it seems a significant link that Tolkien, Lewis and Williams all wrote stories in which myth plays an important part. Yet each of the three uses myth in quite a different way. Williams takes the already existing Arthurian myth and uses it as a setting for metaphysical odes. Lewis uses the Christian ‘myth’ and reclothes it for his didactic purposes. Tolkien invents his own mythology and draws stories of many different kinds from it. The distinction needs to be emphasised as much as the similarity. On the other hand there is, of course, the belief shared by Tolkien and Lewis that myth can sometimes convey truth in a way that no abstract argument can achieve: a very important notion behind both men’s work, and an idea that was certainly shared in some degree by Williams.
Where else might the ‘fox’ of shared ideas be found? Possibly in the area of magic and the occult, for as Adam Fox expressed it, when recalling his acquaintance with the Inklings, ‘They all had a tendency to the occult in some way.’ Certainly Tolkien’s stories are concerned with such devices as the Silmarils and the One Ring, which contain immense supernatural power; and if one searches for comparisons two that suggest themselves are the Stone of Suleiman in Williams’s Many Dimensions and the Graal in his War in Heaven. But the comparison does not go very deep. The Ring in Tolkien’s story may be supernaturally endowed, but the story of Frodo Baggins carrying it to Mordor is a story more of natural than of supernatural events, a tale of courage and heroism and treachery rather than of actual magic. By contrast, in Charles Williams’s novels the crucial events occur in the plane of the supernatural, while the terminology of magic and occult practices is part of Williams’s basic vocabulary. He and Tolkien had nothing whatever in common in the way they used the supernatural in their stories. As for Lewis, he was by his own admission fascinated by the occult. It was a fascination that began in schooldays and was revived when he discovered Yeats’s poetry. But Lewis was always very wary of it. When he met Yeats at Oxford in 1921 he was ‘half fascinated and half repelled, and finally the more repelled because of the fascination’. Later, when he had become a Christian, he set his face firmly against anything smacking of the occult. Certainly magical events do occur in his stories, most notably in That Hideous Strength, where Merlin (a figure probably drawn, as the magician in Dymer certainly was, from Lewis’s memories of Yeats) engineers the downfall of the villains by supernatural means. But Lewis never indulged in the kind of occultism that attracted Williams, believing that a passion for such things is (as he put it) a ‘spiritual lust’. Nor would it be more than superficially true to say that Owen Barfield was interested in magic or the occult. The word ‘occult’ does occur in his writings in connection with Anthroposophy, but he is quick to emphasise that in this context the word merely means ‘hidden’ and has nothing to do with magic or witchcraft.
We are being driven to look for the fox in some rather unlikely places, and the next one looks distinctly unpromising: the fact that Tolkien, Lewis and Williams felt, to some extent, alienated from the mainstream of contemporary literature.
Though Tolkien lived in the twentieth century he could scarcely be called a modern writer. Certainly some comparatively recent authors made their mark on him: men such as William Morris, Andrew Lang, George MacDonald, Rider Haggard, Kenneth Grahame and John Buchan. There are also, perhaps, certain ‘Georgian’ characteristics about him. But his roots were buried deep in early literature, and the major names in twentieth-century writing meant little or nothing to him. He read very little modern fiction, and took no serious notice of it.
Lewis read much more widely than Tolkien among modern writers, and disliked much of what he saw. His projected crusade against T. S. Eliot in 1926 was the opening shot in what was to be years of sniping at that poet. He did come to have a guarded respect for Eliot’s criticism, but he continued to attack his verse. At an Inklings in 1947 he declared one of Eliot’s poems to be ‘bilge’, and in 1954, writing to Katherine Farrer, he defined his dislike of Eliot’s image of evening ‘like a patient etherised upon a table’: ‘I don’t believe one person in a million, under any emotional stress, would see evening like that. And even if they did, I believe that anything but the most sparing admission of such images is a very dangerous game. To invite them, to recur willingly to them, to come to regard them as normal surely poisons us?’ In 1921 he declared that ‘our best modems’ were Brooke, Flecker, de la Mare, Yeats and Masefield; and he remained a Georgian all his life, both in his criticism and in his own poetry. He did approve of some of Edith Sitwell’s verse, and he came to admire W. H. Auden’s alliterative poems (which were themselves partly the result of Auden’s admiration for Tolkien). But the great body of modern poetry remained outside his sympathy. Nor where prose was concerned was he any more generous in his comments. Predictably, he disliked D. H. Lawrence’s novels for their attitude to sex; he dismissed such writers as James Joyce as ‘steam of consciousness’, and categorised Virginia Woolf as one of ‘the clevers’. E. M. Forster was almost the only serious novelist of the period whose work he admired. He declared that he preferred science fiction to the work of many accepted writers, and he said of the magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction: ‘Some of the most serious satire of our age appears in it. What is called “serious” literature now – Dylan Thomas and Pound and all that – is really the most frivolous.’
Owen Barfield’s sympathies can be seen to be strongly allied to Lewis’s dislike of modernism. In Poetic Diction he agrees with the critic who declared that Eliot ‘has done serious damage in his poetry to the structure of the English language’. Indeed the whole theory behind Poetic Diction, the notion that poetic language has decayed over the centuries, has moved from semantic unity towards fragmentation, carries the implication that modern poetry must of necessity be less rich in meaning than that of earlier centuries.
Williams’s attitude was more subtle. His own early poetry and verse-dramas were scarcely modern in character, having a strong tendency towards the pastiche of earlier styles. Those poets who made a mark on him in his early work included Chesterton, Yeats, and Lascelles Abercrombie, as well as such diverse people as Kipling, the Pre-Raphaelites and Macaulay. His attitude to Eliot was at first largely one of puzzlement. Yet in his book Poetry at Present(l930) he was characteristically quick to find virtues in poets whose work was distinctly modern, and by that time he was aware that if he wished to achieve anything more than minor success as a poet he must find a more modern style. ‘Better be modern than minor,’ says a character in War in Heaven, and it was with this in mind that Williams set about remodelling his verse-rhythms. Yet, despite the apparent modernity of much of Taliessin through Logres, his style resembled Gerard Manley Hopkins far more than (say) Eliot, while his diction remained largely formal and never became thoroughly colloquial. He was perhaps never a true modern in his poetry.
As to prose, Williams’s novels, or at least the early ones, are more like the Fu Manchu thrillers of Sax Rohmer or Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday than ‘serious’ modern fiction. Williams, however, did read widely among contemporary writers, partly because of his work as a reviewer; and he was always finding virtues in authors whose ideas were very different from his own. In an essay for the journal Theology in 1939 he examined D. H. Lawrence’s attitude to sex, and recorded his admiration of Lawrence’s glorification of the physical body, though he pointed out that Lawrence stopped short of developing this glorification to what he himself thought out to be its true (and Dantean) end. This essay, reprinted in The Image of the City, precisely expresses how much more subtle Williams’s mind was than Lewis’s when confronted with such issues. After reading what Williams has to say about Lawrence it is merely irritating to listen to Lewis’s occasional snorts of disapproval about him.1
If there is very little that can be called a ‘common Inklings attitude’, what about the notion that Lewis and his friends made a deliberate attempt to organise a movement which would change the course
of literature? One person close to them certainly thought that this was the case. In the late 1940s John Wain often came to the Inklings on Thursday nights, and some years later he wrote of them: ‘This was a circle of instigators, almost of incendiaries, meeting to urge one another on in the task of redirecting the whole current of contemporary art and life.’ This was undoubtedly an exaggeration, and Lewis took John Wain to task for it, replying: ‘The whole picture of myself as one forming a cabinet, or cell, or coven, is erroneous. Mr Wain has mistaken purely personal relationships for alliances.’ Perhaps the truth lay somewhere between the two. Lewis was not so naïve as to suppose that the Inklings could, merely by ‘urging one another on’, directly instigate a change of taste in art and life. On the other hand he undoubtedly believed that if a sufficient number of people were to read his friends’ (and his own) books they would be significantly affected by them. For example he declared of The Lord of the Rings: ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it really succeeded (in selling I mean)? It would inaugurate a new age. Dare we hope?’
Whether or not the Inklings can with any justification be called ‘a circle of incendiaries’, it must be remembered that the word ‘influence’, so beloved of literary investigators, makes little sense when talking about their association with each other. Tolkien and Williams owed almost nothing to the other Inklings, and would have written everything they wrote had they never heard of the group. Similarly, Tolkien’s imagination was fully fledged and the fundamental body of his ideas was sketched out before he even met Lewis. As he himself declared, his debt to Lewis ‘was not “influence” as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement’. Nor did Williams owe any crucial part of his thinking to Lewis or to others of the group. His work was almost finished by the time he came to Oxford, and though he did benefit from the contact with the Inklings, this was of small importance in his life compared to what had gone before. He appreciated the criticism of the group, but they and their remarks had little effect on the work he did in Oxford, and the books he wrote there are not greatly different or markedly superior to those written towards the end of his time in London. Lewis, on the other hand, had not written many of his books before the Inklings began to meet, and there are elements in his later work which can be easily identified as bearing the mark of Tolkien or Williams. Perhaps he even tried consciously to take up the mantle of both writers. He alone can be said to have been ‘influenced’ by the others1 (he was as Tolkien said ‘an impressionable man’), but for the rest it is sufficient to say that they came together because they already agreed about certain things. As Lewis put it, ‘To be sure, we had a common point of view, but we had it before we met. It was the cause rather than the result of our friendship.’
*
The question at the beginning of this chapter was ‘Were the Inklings more than just a group of friends?’ So far it has only received some rather patchy answers. Are we after the wrong fox? Should we not rather ask ‘What sort of friends were they?’
There was nothing particularly unusual in the fact that they gathered together in this way. Oxford has always been peppered with unofficial and semi-official clubs of a similar kind. For example, Tolkien founded a short-lived dining club when he was an undergraduate, and a few years later Hugo Dyson was one of a group of undergraduates who met informally at an Oxford public house to read Elizabethan plays (these meetings, at the Jolly Farmers in Paradise Street, were initiated by Sir Walter Raleigh, the then Professor of English Literature, and were often visited by such literary notables living in the area as T. E. Lawrence, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, and John Masefield). Such things were the habit rather than the exception, and in this sense the Inklings were just one more Oxford club.1 Yet they were certainly more than that to Jack Lewis. And one can perhaps begin to see why this was by looking at certain recurring patterns in his life.
As he himself pointed out, his first real friendship was with his brother Warnie, and this friendship was nourished twice, both by the persecution at their preparatory school and by the difficulties of home life in Belfast. ‘We stood foursquare against the common enemy,’ he wrote in his autobiography, adding, ‘I suspect that this pattern, occurring twice and so early in my life, has unduly biased my whole outlook. To this day the vision of the world which comes most naturally to me is one in which “we two” or “we few” (and in a sense “we happy few”) stand together against something stronger and larger.’
His attitude to friendship was also affected by his experience at Malvern when he found that the school was ruled by the unofficial clique of ‘Bloods’. He saw this group as at once highly objectionable and infinitely enviable, and his feelings about it eventually became a fixation. He called such groups ‘Inner Rings’. He wrote, when describing the frequency of such things in society:
There exist two different systems of hierarchies. The one is printed in some little book and anyone can easily read it up. A general is always superior to a colonel and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it. It is not constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are several on the border-line. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. I believe that in all men’s lives one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring.
Whether or not this really corresponds to most people’s experience of the world, circumstances conspired to embed the idea in Lewis’s mind, for when he came up to Oxford as an undergraduate he found himself in a society where cliques really did play a large part. ‘I have a holy terror of coteries,’ he told his father when describing university life, but really the terror was of not belonging to one himself, and he gradually drew his own coterie around him – men such as Barfield, who shared his taste for traditional art-forms as opposed to modernism. Then came his fellowship at Magdalen, and his discovery that the college was ruled to a large extent by the unofficial junto of ‘progressives’ under the leadership of Harry Weldon. This really was an Inner Ring, and it inevitably increased Lewis’s determination to gather his own friends around him for protection. Weldon was the perfect enemy for Lewis: militantly atheist, ruthless, subtle, everything that Lewis was not. He was in fact far too good an enemy, and he and Lewis never really joined battle. Instead Lewis to a large extent turned his back on his college and concentrated on the English Faculty. Here too he found something of an Inner Ring (though it was a poor one compared with Weldon and his allies) – the ‘Literature’ camp; and, after at first giving his allegiance to it, Lewis soon broke away and formed his own clique with Tolkien, a clique that actually managed to change the direction of the whole Faculty. It was to a large extent this clique – Lewis, Tolkien, Coghill and others of like mind – who were the nucleus of the Inklings when that group began to meet; and it might have been observed that the Inklings too had certain resemblances to those Inner Rings which Lewis described with such detestation.
‘There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections,’ Warnie Lewis declared of the Inklings, and the words are noticeably reminiscent of what his brother had to say about the Inner Ring (Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules). ‘From time to time we added to our original number,’ Warnie recalled of the Inklings, ‘but without formalities.’ (You are never formally admitted by anyone.) And as for the indefinable membership of the Inner Ring (It is not easy to say who is inside and who is outside), nothing could be more characteristic of the Inklings. Even the hostility of the Inner Ring to uninvited intruders, or to earlier
members whom it has rejected, is reflected in the Inklings’ proceedings. ‘Jack and I much concerned this evening by the gate crashing of ——,’ Warnie wrote in his diary one Thursday night. ‘Tollers, the ass, brought him here last Thursday, and he has apparently now elected himself an Inkling.’ And on another occasion: ‘Well attended Inkling in the evening with ——, whom we all thought had tacitly resigned’ (and whose resignation, he might have added, they had clearly hoped for).
Certainly one of the few involvements of the Inklings in University affairs shows them behaving like an Inner Ring of the more unscrupulous sort. This was the election of Adam Fox to the Professorship of Poetry in 1938. The other candidate was E. K. Chambers, the distinguished Shakespearian scholar, whose candidature Lewis opposed on the grounds that ‘we must have a practising poet’. It was ostensibly for this reason that the Inklings put up Adam Fox for election, even though he could scarcely be called a poet – his Old King Coel, a long narrative poem published in 1937, is hardly more than light verse – and though Fox himself thought the whole thing rather absurd. The election of the Professor of Poetry at Oxford is unique in that it is determined by a poll of all M.A.s, and Lewis and his friends gathered everybody they could muster to vote, with the result that Fox was elected, greatly to the disappointment of Chambers. Lewis could scarcely have had any real reason for doing this other than to demonstrate the power of his Ring.
The Inklings Page 21
