The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  *

  On 9 May the war in Europe came formally to an end. ‘How did you feel on V-Day?’ Lewis asked Dom Bede Griffiths. ‘I found it impossible to feel either so much sympathy with the people or so much gratitude to God as the occasion demanded.’ On the following Tuesday, the usual meeting-day for the Inklings at the Bird and Baby, the day dawned particularly fine. ‘It was the middle of the summer term,’ recalled John Wain, who was just coming to the end of his undergraduate career. ‘Beautiful weather, with a stir of hopefulness in the air. I was walking from Longwall Street, where I lodged, towards St John’s, and had just reached the Clarendon Building when a girl I knew by sight came pedalling fast and agitatedly on her bicycle round the corner from New College Lane. “John,” she called out, “Charles Williams is dead.”’

  *

  Williams had been taken into hospital a few days earlier suffering from adhesions in the digestive system, a legacy from his operation some years earlier. There was nothing to cause alarm, except that he was a very tired man and not strong. There was an operation, but he never recovered consciousness.

  On that day, Tuesday 15 May 1945, Warnie Lewis wrote in his diary: ‘At 12.50 this morning I had just stopped work on the details of the Boislève family, when the telephone rang, and a woman’s voice asked if I would take a message for J. – “Mr Charles Williams died in the Acland this morning”. One often reads of people being “stunned” by bad news, and reflects idly on the absurdity of the expression; but there is more than a little truth in it. I felt just as if I had slipped and come down on my head on the pavement. J. had told me when I came into College that Charles Williams was ill, and it would mean a serious operation: and then went off to see him. I haven’t seen him since. I felt dazed and restless, and went out to get a drink: choosing unfortunately the King’s Arms, where during the winter Charles and I more than once drank a pint after leaving Tollers at the Mitre, with much glee at “clearing one’s throat of varnish with good honest beer” as Charles used to say. There will be no more pints with Charles: no more “Bird and Baby”: the blackout has fallen, and the Inklings can never be the same again.’

  PART FOUR

  1

  ‘No one turned up’

  The railway line from Oxford to Fairford is closed now, but in 1945 it was still operating. At nine thirty-five each weekday morning a tank engine would haul two or three coaches northwards from Oxford station, along the edge of Port Meadow, and then sharp west at Wolvercote and over the fields to Witney. In the summer months the train would often be quite full, carrying (besides its usual complement of local people) families setting off for a holiday by the Upper Thames or in the Cotswolds, or maybe a group of men from the University armed with knapsacks and sticks and about to begin a walking tour. But in winter only a few people used the train.

  One Wednesday morning in December 1945 Jack Lewis was on board, looking out of the carriage window at the fields and streams and villages as they passed. The countryside through which the branch line meandered was not, as he observed, dramatically beautiful: just a fine English winter beauty of haystacks and stubble, ploughed land, bare trees and rooks. From Witney the train carried him on until it passed not far from William Morris’s old home at Kelmscott, and came at last to the end of the line and the station that served the small quiet town of Fairford. Warnie Lewis was on the platform to meet him, with Tolkien. They had already spent a day and a night staying at the Bull Hotel in Fairford. It was the long-planned Inklings’ celebration of victory (‘To take a whole inn in the countryside for at least a week, and spend it entirely in beer and talk’). But none of them could spare even as much as a week, let alone more; and they were only a small party. Dyson could not come, Owen Barfield was ill, Havard was only able to get to Fairford for lunch one day, Jack Lewis himself had not been able to arrive until after the others; and Charles Williams was dead.

  On the morning that Williams died, Lewis went straight from the hospital where he heard the news to the Bird and Baby, where the other Inklings had already gathered for their Tuesday beer. It was only a couple of minutes’ walk, ‘but I remember the very streets looked different,’ he said. When he got to the pub he had difficulty in making the others believe or even understand what had happened. In the days that followed, Warnie Lewis reacted simply with grief. ‘There is something horrible, something unfair about death,’ he said, ‘which no religious conviction can overcome.’ Tolkien too was greatly saddened. ‘In the far too brief years since I first met him,’ he told Michal Williams, ‘I had grown to love and admire your husband deeply, and I am more grieved than I can express.’ As for Jack Lewis, after the initial shock he experienced ‘great pain but no mere depression’. And he wrote to Michal Williams: ‘My friendship is not ended. His death has had the very unexpected effect of making death itself look quite different: I believe in the next life ten times more strongly than I did. At moments it seems quite tangible. Mr Dyson, on the day of the funeral, summed up what many of us felt. “It is not blasphemous,” he said, “to believe that what was true of Our Lord is, in its less degree, true of all who are in Him. They go away in order to be with us in a new way, even closer than before.” A month ago I would have called this silly sentiment. Now I know better. He seems, in some indefinable way, to be all around us now. I do not doubt he is doing and will do for us all sorts of things he could not have done while in the body.’ Williams himself had described this very sensation of experiencing the presence of a recently dead loved one, in the first (rejected) draft of All Hallows’ Eve: ‘She was dead, but her very death heightened that word “supernatural”; it was what she, not being, was.’

  The Fairford party made the best of it. They walked. They argued. They found a pub called the Pig and Whistle. They admired the flat countryside. ‘I don’t remember ever seeing more exquisite winter colouring, both of sky and landscape, of the subdued type,’ Warnie Lewis wrote in his diary. ‘Down on the river was a perfect mill house where we amused ourselves by dreaming of it as a home for the Inklings.’ Then, on Friday afternoon, they took the train back to Oxford.

  *

  The Thursday meetings of the Inklings continued. There was, after all, no reason why they should not.

  To talk of filling Charles Williams’s place would have been absurd. But a few new people were asked to come along on Thursday nights. Gervase Mathew was already in the habit of putting in appearances, and now he became a fairly regular member. At about this time the Inklings were also joined by Colin Hardie, a Fellow of Magdalen and a friend of Jack Lewis’s – he was the brother of the Hardie who had been a Magdalen don in the twenties. At first Colin Hardie was inclined towards Harry Weldon’s atheist-progressive junto in Magdalen, but later he married a Catholic and was received into that church himself. Two other Magdalen dons sometimes turned up: C. E. (‘Tom’) Stevens, the Ancient History Tutor, and J. A. W. Bennett, the Anglo-Saxon and medieval scholar who came to Magdalen after the war to relieve Lewis by teaching the ‘language’ side of the English course, there now being a considerably larger number of undergraduates than before the war.

  These men were all senior members of the University, but one person who was invited to become an Inkling late in 1945 was only twenty-one. Tolkien’s third son Christopher had been known to the Lewis brothers and to Havard since he was a schoolboy; they also knew that he was deeply involved with the writing of The Lord of the Rings. He had read the first chapters in manuscript, and had drawn maps and made fair copies of the text for his father. Later, when he was abroad with the R.A.F., his father sent him the new parts of the story as they were written, telling him: ‘I don’t think I should write any more, but for the hope of your seeing it.’ After the war Christopher Tolkien returned to Oxford and resumed his undergraduate career, with Lewis as his tutor for several terms. In the autumn of 1945 his father told him that the Inklings proposed ‘to consider you a permanent member, with right of entry and what not quite independent of my presence or otherwise’. Once
Christopher had become an Inkling it grew to be the custom that he, rather than his father, should read aloud any new chapters of The Lord of the Rings to the company, for it was generally agreed that he made a better job of it than did Tolkien himself. ‘Chris gave us an admirable chapter of the Hobbit, beautifully read,’ Warnie wrote in his diary in February 1947. And on another Thursday: ‘Tollers gave us a chapter of Hobbit; but I think we all missed Christopher’s reading.’

  Another young man who was made welcome by the Inklings at this time was John Wain. He had been Lewis’s pupil, and after taking his degree he held first a junior research fellowship at his old college, St John’s, and then a lecturership at Reading University. Wain had discovered (as others had discovered) that the only way to survive being Lewis’s pupil was to copy Lewis’s manner, and he was certainly able to counter his old tutor’s dogmatic pronouncements with an equal torrent of assertion, proof, illustration and metaphor. Warnie wrote in his diary in January 1949: ‘A good Inklings after dinner: present, J., McCallum, Gervase, Tom Stevens, John Wain, and myself. We started on the Lays of Ancient Rome and thence to poetry in general, on which Wain talked an amazing amount of nonsense – even going so far as to illustrate his point by reciting a song of Harry Champion’s, which he claimed was as good as Macaulay. If I got him aright, his point is that poetry whose meaning can be apprehended at a first reading is not poetry at all: I should say for my part that exactly the reverse is true. The sense of the House was strongly against him. He recited a pretty good poem of his own composing on the death of the John’s porter,1 and then read to us from the first two chapters of his book on Arnold Bennett: absolutely first class, and I enjoyed them greatly.’

  Wain’s difference of outlook from the other Inklings was fundamental. ‘I admired Lewis and his friends tremendously,’ he wrote some years later, ‘but already it was clear that I did not share their basic attitudes. The group had a corporate mind, as all effective groups must; the death of Williams had sadly stunned and impoverished this mind, but it was still powerful and clearly defined. Politically conservative, not to say reactionary; in religion, Anglo- or Roman Catholic; in art, frankly hostile to any manifestation of the “modern” spirit. There was very little here that I could fit myself into.’ Moreover Wain did not share the belief, very precious to Tolkien and Lewis, that the practice of ‘mythopoeia’, the invention of myth-like stories, was a valuable (indeed invaluable) form of art. One evening he was unable to keep silent while Lewis aired this view. ‘A writer’s task, I maintained’, Wain recalled, ‘was to lay bare the human heart, and this could not be done if he were continually taking refuge in the spinning of fanciful webs. Lewis retorted with a theory that, since the Creator had seen fit to build a universe and set it in motion, it was the duty of the human artist to create as lavishly as possible in his turn. The romancer, who invents a whole world, is worshipping God more effectively than the mere realist who analyses that which lies about him. Looking back, I can hardly believe that Lewis said anything so manifestly absurd.’

  John Wain, like many others of his generation, believed and hoped that the Labour victory in the 1945 general election would set in motion a long-delayed wave of social justice in Britain. Lewis on the other hand thought that the Labour government and its prime minister Attlee were the very devils of Hell incarnate. He lamented that heavy taxation would liquidate the middle classes, or would at least prevent them from educating their children privately, declaring that only if a man were so educated could he have ‘the freeborn mind’. He poured scorn on the use of ‘Brotherhood’ as a social maxim, declaring that it was a hypocritical disguise for self-advancement; and he maintained that while democracy was a necessity this was only because of the Fall. ‘I do not believe’, he wrote, ‘that God created an egalitarian world. I believe that if we had not fallen, patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government.’ Nor did he support those who, some years after the war, began to campaign for nuclear disarmament, for the prospect of mass destruction did not greatly alarm him. ‘As a Christian I take it for granted that human history will end some day,’ he said, and he was irritated by ‘young people who make it [the bomb] a reason for poisoning every pleasure and evading every duty in the present. Didn’t they know that, Bomb or no Bomb, all men die? There is no good moping and sulking about it.’

  These views are perhaps more understandable when one remembers that he was brought up in middle-class Belfast society, where constant vituperation was poured upon the then equivalent of the Left, the Liberals, for their Irish Home Rule Bill; and also when one realises that such things did not really interest him very much. His attention was directed towards the salvation of the individual soul rather than to the solution of communal problems. Indeed, reading the newspapers as little as he did, he really knew next to nothing about contemporary affairs. ‘Jack’s ignorance in some directions amazes me as much as his knowledge in others,’ Warnie wrote in his diary in 1950. ‘Last night at dinner I mentioned Tito’s volte-face in Jugoslavia, where there is a state-fostered return to Christianity. I thought J. very stupid about the whole affair, and we had talked for a minute or two before I found out that he was under the impression that Tito was the King of Greece!’

  Not surprisingly, Lewis started to find himself out of touch with the post-war generation of undergraduates, many of whom, like John Wain, were beginning to be politically aware and to take the state of society rather more seriously than their predecessors had done. Lewis lamented this. ‘The modern world is so desperately serious,’ he remarked to Arthur Greeves. He also regretted that the post-war undergraduates rarely took the long country walks which he himself had felt to be such an important part of his development. Gone too were the small coteries and cliques of friends which had mattered so much to his generation. He remarked that the modern undergraduate lived in a crowd. ‘Caucus,’ he said, ‘has replaced friendship.’

  He was also increasingly out of sympathy with his fellow dons, but this was for rather a different reason. It might or might not be true to say that Christians were in the minority in the senior common rooms of Oxford; but certainly those dons who did profess Christianity generally kept their religion to themselves, attending their college chapel or parish church but not making any display of the fact, and certainly not writing popular books in the hope of converting others to their beliefs. Lewis, in fact, had offended against Oxford etiquette not by becoming a Christian, but by making a public matter of his conversion. He had refused to adopt the detached irony which Oxford has always regarded as an acceptable manner of cloaking one’s true beliefs. He had indeed guyed this ironical detachment in the character of ‘Mr Sensible’ in The Pilgrim’s Regress. ‘He must have irritated many by the lack of any ironic view of himself,’ wrote John Bayley of New College when discussing Lewis’s life some years later in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘In all innocence, he took over areas which others assume cannot be owned. Faith, belief, affections, sorrows – they are areas which most prefer to assume than to demonstrate knowledge of, and people were not endeared to Lewis by his downright occupation of them.’ There was also the plain fact that some of Lewis’s colleagues resented the sheer success of such books as Screwtape. ‘Academicism cherishes a knowing anonymity,’ wrote John Bayley. ‘Contrary to what is often supposed, dons do not like drawing colleagues’ attention to themselves, and regard with a mixture of envy and resentment any of their number who achieve public notoriety on the scale that Lewis did.’ (As to the matter of financial success, from an early stage – and this was not known to his colleagues – Lewis paid more than two-thirds of all royalties from his books into a trust fund, from which he then gave generously, and usually anonymously, to persons in need.) What many in Oxford resented most of all was the breadth of appeal of such things as Screwtape. Lewis’s books (and Tolkien’s too, after the publication of The Lord of the Rings) were read eagerly by children, by working people, by the poorly educated, and by many other categories very alien to the world
of professional scholarship in general and ‘literary criticism’ in particular. A good many at Oxford did not much care for this. They resented the remarkable capacity of Lewis and Tolkien for getting themselves across to an enormous range of readers, a capacity for climbing the walls that surround academicism and communicating with the world outside.

  But if Oxford was censorious and envious, it was also rather proud of Lewis. He and the Inklings were now part of the scenery. One morning during the war, John Wain was walking towards the Bird and Baby when he met a friend coming away from it. ‘“Who’s in there?” I asked. “Nothing much,” he answered, “just the poet Williams and the theologian MacKinnon disputing in a comer.”’ The phrase stuck in Wain’s mind as an indication of the atmosphere of the period. Similarly when another graduate of St John’s College, Bruce Montgomery, published one of his first detective stories under the name of Edmund Crispin, he set one scene in the Bird and Baby, and made his professor-detective Gervase Fen remark: ‘There goes C. S. Lewis – it must be Tuesday.’

  Tuesdays at the ‘Bird’ continued unabated, and at these morning sessions the Thursday company was usually augmented by one or two of Lewis’s other friends, such as ‘D-G.’, Commander Jim Dundas-Grant, a Scotsman who had been quartered in Magdalen during the war to supervise the University Naval Division, and who was still living in Oxford. Another who put in a very occasional appearance was a friend of Havard’s named Edward Robinson, whom Lewis, recalling Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, christened ‘Little Pig’. These and others occupied the back parlour of the ‘Bird’ on Tuesdays, a parlour whose seclusion and whose coal fire (especially lit for the Inklings by Charles Blagrove, the landlord) was one of the attractions of that pub, another being the very potent draught cider, which the company inexplicably referred to as ‘Bung Misery’.1 Indeed the only pub which became a rival to the ‘Bird’ was the Trout, on the river at Godstow, to the north of Oxford. ‘An exquisitely lovely spring day,’ Warnie wrote in his diary in 1946. ‘To the Bird and Baby as usual in the morning, where I had started on my second pint before J. arrived. When Humphrey came, he suggested an adjournment to the Trout at Godstow: which, picking up Christopher Tolkien on the way, we did, and there drank beer in the sunlight. The beauty of the whole scene was almost theatrical, and that nothing might be lacking to show off the warm grey of the old inn, there was a pair of peacocks.’