The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  He skated on thin ice in the opening chapter of The Problem of Pain, where he offered his readers a ‘proof’ of the existence of God which, as Austin Farrer remarked, tackled this immense issue ‘on the scale of a pamphlet in a church porch’. This ‘proof’ was based first upon Man’s apprehension of the ‘Numinous’ or spiritual, and secondly on human awareness of an abstract Moral Law. Lewis repeated this argument in his BBC talks on Christianity, where he alleged that Reason, the part of the human mind which makes moral decisions, is directly related to the Moral Law and hence to God. And some years later in Miracles he took this even further, attempting to prove the existence of God by demonstrating the existence of Reason as something quite independent of the rest of human mentality.

  Philosophy changes faster than almost any other academic subject. By the 1940s Lewis was simply behind the times as a philosopher. He still argued along the lines taken by the post-Hegelians who had been fashionable in his undergraduate days; but among Oxford philosophers it was now as if Hegel and his disciples had never been. ‘Logical Positivism’ dominated, and Lewis’s methods seemed old fashioned.1 Moreover there were many passages in The Problem of Pain and Miracles where his dubious logic simply did not do justice to his standpoint.

  Lewis’s friends had observed the dangers of his methods. Charles Williams, listening to his wartime broadcasts, had expressed serious reservations about his tendency to make Reason the primary basis for belief in God, while Tolkien was aware of Lewis’s too close reliance on supposedly infallible dialectics. Tolkien remarked that, while Lewis was certainly a great debater who had the art of making points brilliantly and tellingly, he had distinct weaknesses. ‘He was keen-witted rather than clear-sighted,’ Tolkien wrote, ‘logical within some given position, but in ranging argument neither lucid nor coherent. On the fallacies, verbal subterfuges, and false deductions of his opponents (and of his friends) he could dart like a hawk; yet he was himself often confused, failing to make essential distinctions, or seeming unaware that his immediate contention had been already damaged by some “point” that he had made elsewhere.’

  Miracles was published in 1947. Early the following year, its third chapter, in which Lewis proved that human Reason is independent of the natural world, was publicly attacked at the Socratic Club, not by an atheist but by a fellow Christian, the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. Lewis was unprepared for the severely critical analysis to which she submitted his arguments, for she proved in her turn that his ‘proof’ of theism was severely faulty. It is true that Lewis’s most fervent supporters felt that she had not demonstrated her point successfully, but many who were at the meeting thought that a conclusive blow had been struck against one of his most fundamental arguments. Certainly after it was all over Lewis himself was in very low spirits. He and Hugo Dyson had organised an informal dining club with four of their pupils, Philip Stibbe, Tom Stock, Peter Bayley and Derek Brewer, and the club happened to meet a couple of days after the Socratic duel. Brewer wrote in his diary: ‘None of us at first very cheerful. Lewis was obviously deeply disturbed by his encounter last Monday with Miss Anscombe, who had disproved some of the central theory of his philosophy about Christianity. I felt quite painfully for him. Dyson said – very well – that now he had lost everything and was come to the foot of the Cross – spoken with great sympathy.’ Brewer added that Lewis’s imagery when talking about the debate ‘was all of the fog of war, the retreat of infantry thrown back under heavy attack’.

  Lewis had learnt his lesson: for after this he wrote no further books of Christian apologetics for ten years, apart from a collection of sermons; and when he did publish another apologetic work, Reflections on the Psalms, it was notably quieter in tone and did not attempt any further intellectual proofs of theism or Christianity. Though he continued to believe in the importance of Reason in relation to his Christian faith, he had perhaps realised the truth of Charles Williams’s maxim, ‘No-one can possibly do more than decide what to believe.’

  *

  Lewis’s next book after Miracles was published three years later, in 1950. It was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first of his seven ‘Narnia’ stories for children. What kind of mind was it that could switch from rigorous theological argument to children’s fantasy?

  Any attempt to describe a man’s mental attributes by dividing them into compartments will be artificial; yet to do this with Lewis does at least seem to give us some idea of how his mind worked. Certainly there are four aspects of his mind and work that deserve to be examined: let us call them the ‘Chestertonian’, the ‘boyish’, the ‘debater’ and the ‘poet’.

  This was Lewis’s estimate of G. K. Chesterton: ‘A great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man’. And in Surprised by Joy he makes it clear how much Chesterton’s writings and in particular The Everlasting Man helped him to become a Christian. So it was scarcely surprising that he took Chesterton for a model in many of his own attitudes to his faith. ‘Christianity is a fighting religion’ – ‘I don’t want retreat; I want attack’ – ‘We shall probably fail, but let us go down fighting for the right side’. This is Lewis, but it might easily be Chesterton; and Lewis adopts the same persona when he refers to his Socratic Club atheist opponents as ‘the enemy’, when he declares that Christianity is ‘manly’, and when he talks of his deep regard for ‘common things and common men’.

  Yet the Chestertonian cap did not really fit Lewis. It was indeed more ‘the sort of thing a man might say’ rather than the expression of his real feelings. For example, he might declare roundly that the business of writing poetry did not require so much courage as the act of stepping into a cold bath, but from his own experience as a poet he must have known that this was absurd. So why did he adopt this Chestertonian manner?

  Perhaps the answer has something to do with a remark by Charles Williams. He, too, was much influenced by Chesterton (particularly in his early poetry and in War in Heaven), but he had serious reservations about him. Chesterton, he once declared, was ‘adult by inspiration at great moments; hardly wholly so’. And indeed there is something very like a schoolboy about much of Chesterton’s work. Is this why he appealed to Lewis? For there was a very boyish element in Lewis too.

  In his literary criticism Lewis liked to adopt a childlike posture. He told his audience at a British Academy Shakespeare Lecture that he felt ‘rather like a child brought in at dessert to recite his piece before the grown-ups’, and he said that in talking about Hamlet he would ‘bestow all my childishness upon you’ – would in fact remind his audience that, to a child, Hamlet is an exciting play, and not an ‘artistic failure’ as T. S. Eliot had called it. Similarly, when he was writing about The Faerie Queene he said, ‘It demands of us a child’s thirst for adventures, a young man’s passion for physical beauty. The poem is a great palace, but the door into it is so low that you must stoop to go in.’ He also said: ‘Beyond all doubt it is best to have made one’s first acquaintance with Spenser in a very large – and, preferably, illustrated – edition of The Faerie Queene, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen.’

  Once again, all this was a guise. When the Hamlet lecture really got into its stride it became a serious and scholarly argument which no child could have formulated. Similarly, Lewis’s real contribution to Spenserian studies depended on his considerable scholarship rather than on any childlike instinctive appreciation. Nor indeed did the remarks about a child’s responses make much sense in themselves. Although Lewis himself had loved The Faerie Queene and Hamlet when he first met them in boyhood, comparatively few other modern children could really be expected to do the same. These remarks are chiefly interesting not so much as literary criticism but because they show how important Lewis thought it was to remain spiritually a child – or at least to retain something of the child’s responses to the world.

  A superficial observer of his life might suppose that in some ways he never grew up. He himself said he felt his youth to have been ‘of
immense length’, and certainly his autobiography gives the impression that he was, at the comparatively late age when he wrote it, still deeply concerned with the crises of childhood – an odd father, a cruel headmaster, schoolfellows who bullied him – for these take up a lot of space in the book. Such an observer might also conjecture that since most of his adult years were spent with a woman whom he called ‘my mother’, he himself remained largely the childlike or adolescent son. This sort of observation would, of course, be trivial in that it ignores the maturity of his scholarly work, and of much of his writing on Christianity, beside the sheer shrewdness and wisdom of what he had to say about human behaviour. It also ignores the plain fact that though he behaved as ‘son’ to Mrs Moore he treated her with a far more adult patience than most real sons would have displayed in the circumstances. And yet one cannot observe his mind without remarking on the very large part that boyishness did play in it.

  This boyishness can be seen in quite small details: in his handwriting, for example, which looked bold and confident but had (as Peter Bayley remarks) ‘something uncertain or incomplete about it’. His sense of humour, too, showed itself in schoolboy jokes, like his fondness for referring to his book as The Alligator of Love; while his slang was often (though perhaps deliberately) that of an Edwardian schoolboy – he called one author ‘a corking good writer’, another story ‘a tip-top yarn’, and yet another ‘an absolute corker’.

  These are rather trivial examples; more revealing is his much-vaunted fondness for re-reading childhood favourites such as The Wind in the Willows and the works of Rider Haggard and Beatrix Potter – or indeed for re-reading anything, for he once declared: ‘An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books only once’. David Cecil says of this: ‘Lewis’s taste in light literature was that of an imaginative Victorian schoolboy’.1

  When one comes to Lewis’s own stories, boyishness is immediately apparent. Often it is an asset. The poet Ruth Pitter has praised his ‘child’s sense of glory and nightmare’, and the success of Screwtape is largely due to the splendidly childish characterisations of Screwtape and Wormwood, who are every schoolboy’s idea of devils. But the serious themes of Out of the Silent Planet come dangerously near to being lost in farce when Weston and Devine behave like a cartoon-strip caricature of the Englishman among the natives in their encounter with the Oyarsa of Malacandra; while Ransom’s fight with the diabolical Un-man in Perelandra is (though splendidly written in itself) the intellectual battle of Paradise Lost reduced to fisticuffs. The third ‘Ransom’ novel, That Hideous Strength, is both the worst and the most enjoyable book of the trilogy, worst because its central action around the Inner Ring at Belbury is Lewis working out his schoolboy resentment of bullies, and most enjoyable because it is on a full-bloodedly schoolboy level, and this is the level on which Lewis is at his best. It might even be argued that the whole Ransom trilogy is really a series of children’s books in disguise. The unfallen worlds of Malacandra and Perelandra are largely characterised by the fact that their inhabitants include furry animals who can talk, a baby dragon which sports at Ransom’s feet, and a fleet of dolphin-like fish who will carry humans about at their bidding. In That Hideous Strength, Ransom’s household includes a tame bear and a troop of mice who gather the crumbs when he summons them. The Un-man’s grossest crime is not his tempting of the Eve of Perelandra but his wanton destruction, schoolboy fashion, of the frogs which inhabit the floating islands; and when he wants to annoy Ransom he chants his name over and over again, like ‘a nasty little boy at a preparatory school’ as Lewis says, and performs unnamed obscenities ‘like a very nasty child’. And at the conclusion of the trilogy, when Mark Studdock finally comes to his senses and rejects the villainy of Belbury, he goes to a hotel, has a boiled egg for his tea, and discovers in bound volumes of The Strand Magazine

  a serial children’s story which he had begun to read as a child but abandoned because his tenth birthday came when he was half-way through it and he was ashamed to read it after that. Now, he chased it from volume to volume till he had finished it. It was good. The grown-up stories to which, after his tenth birthday, he had turned instead of it, now seemed to him, except for Sherlock Holmes, to be rubbish.1

  It is of course very easy to sneer at Lewis’s boyishness, and any accusation of immaturity must be accompanied by a clear definition of maturity. It is no good just saying that Lewis wrote like a schoolboy without determining which writers can, by comparison, really be called adult. One might suggest Charles Williams as an example of maturity, both in his fiction and his theology, at least in comparison with Lewis. His mind held belief and scepticism in a balance that was arguably more adult that Lewis’s rather boyish enthusiasm. F. R. Leavis has, however, called Williams’s supposed preoccupation with evil ‘evidence of arrest at the schoolboy (and -girl) stage rather than of spiritual maturity’, which shows how subjective all such judgements are. Moreover, it needs to be realised that Lewis’s best and most characteristic work sprang from this very boyishness, and also that he was largely conscious of both the spiritual and literary value of it. He willed it, and knew its effect.

  These two aspects of Lewis’s mind, the ‘Chestertonian’ and the ‘boyish’, were closely reflected in the two distinct kinds of writing he produced. He was both a debater and a poet – ‘poet’ in the sense of imaginative writer, for his actual poetry is of negligible importance compared with the rest of his work. At times the debater had the upper hand, and showed the mark of Chesterton. Often the poet was in charge, and then it was the boyishness that became apparent.

  The poet was, of course, always present to assist the debater. Though the logic of Lewis’s Christian apologetics may be fallible, the imagination of the writing with its brilliantly-conceived analogies is itself enough to win a reader to his side. As Austin Farrer expressed it, ‘We think we are listening to an argument; in fact we are presented with a vision; and it is the vision that carries conviction.’

  Moreover, while the ‘poet’ in Lewis is often a very attractive figure, the debater frequently is not. There is often an unnecessarily bullying weight to his arguments, particularly if he is putting down an opponent. When he disagrees with a remark he tends to tear it from its context and wave it all at the reader, blinded by his feelings from considering the real meaning of the writer. One case of this is the opening of his Abolition of Man, the 1943 lectures that he gave to Durham University,1 where he bases an attack on modern ethics chiefly on a handful of remarks about subjectivity made by the authors of a school text-book for the teaching of English. Even supposing these remarks to be truly representative of modern thought, Lewis does not give them a chance. He removes them from the context and brandishes them furiously, declaring that they prove that the old belief in objective values has now been entirely lost. He does not discuss the work of any modern ethical philosopher (except C. H. Waddington, who gets a brief mention in a footnote), and he bases his argument entirely on what he supposes to be his opponents’ case, taking that supposed case to its extreme and producing a reductio ad absurdum which of course he has no difficulty in demolishing. He is not prepared to examine those elements in his opponents’ case which have a potential for good (unlike Charles Williams); and he selects, as typical of the achievements of science, the aeroplane, the radio, and the contraceptive, entirely ignoring (for example) the advance of medicine. The result is not an argument but a harangue.

  Such a manner of dealing with a subject grew largely from Lewis’s susceptibility to prejudices. Among these prejudices were the closing of his mind towards the avant-garde in literature, his deep suspicion of anything ‘liberal’ in theology, and his notions about certain aspects of Roman Catholicism: he was convinced, despite the attempts of his Catholic friends to persuade him otherwise, that Catholics do not merely revere but actually worship the Virgin. In contrast with Lewis, Charles Williams was always on his guard against prejudice. ‘Prejudice must be regarded as sinful,’ he declared; and he once remarked
, ‘Hell is always inaccurate.’

  Neither the bullying tone of his arguments nor the basing of a substantial part of his thought on prejudice rather than knowledge helped to improve Lewis’s work as a debater, and it was as well that in the late nineteen-forties the argumentative side of his writing did begin to give place to the poetic or imaginative. Lewis himself was well aware of the poetic element in his mind as something indentifiable. In 1954 he wrote: ‘The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic. It was he who made me first attempt (with little success) to be a poet. It was he who, in response to the poetry of others, made me a critic, and in defence of that response, sometimes a critical controversialist. It was he who, after my conversion, led me to embody my belief in symbolic or mythopoeic form, ranging from Screwtape to a kind of theologised science-fiction. And it was, of course, he who has brought me, in the last few years, to write the series of Narnia stories for children.’

  *

  One day in the early spring of 1949, Lewis began to read aloud to Tolkien the beginning of a new book he was writing: ‘Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of air-raids …’

  Lewis said that the immediate cause of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was a series of nightmares that he had been having about lions. On a deeper level the story was, he explained, an answer to the question, ‘What might Christ be like if there really were a world like Narnia and he chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as he actually has done in ours?’ So arose the story of four children and the great Lion, Aslan, who perhaps also owed a little of his origin to Williams’s The Place of the Lion. And in one sense The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was simply an extension of Lewis’s three ‘Ransom’ novels. For, as in the earlier books Ransom travelled to other planets to discover the truth of the Christian ‘myth’, so the children who journey into Narnia experience, in The Lion and its sequels, many of the chief events of the Christian story, described as they might happen in another world. But the fact that the Narnia stories are ‘about’ Christianity does not mean that they are allegorical. The characters exist in their own right and are not mere allegorical types. The events of the Christian story are reimagined rather than allegorised, and the reader is left free, as he never is with allegory, to interpret in whatever fashion he pleases.