The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  The Narnia stories are therefore entirely in keeping with Lewis and Tolkien’s shared belief that Story (especially of the mythical type) can in itself give nourishment without imparting abstract meaning. They have, it is true, a far more specifically Christian colouring than does The Lord of the Rings; indeed at times they have something very near a didactic purpose. But so do Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, and Tolkien had been extremely enthusiastic about those books. Why then did he totally reject the Narnia stories?

  For reject them he did. Lewis told his former pupil Roger Lancelyn Green, who sometimes drank with the Inklings at the Bird and Baby, that after listening to the opening chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Tolkien had said he ‘disliked it intensely’. And when Green met Tolkien shortly afterwards, Tolkien said to him, ‘I hear you’ve been reading Jack’s children’s story. It really won’t do, you know!’

  Why wouldn’t it ‘do’? Tolkien was, by his own admission, a man of limited sympathies. He lacked Lewis’s habitual urge to be enthusiastic about a friend’s work simply because it was a friend’s. He judged stories, especially stories in this vein, by severe standards. He disliked works of the imagination that were written hastily, were inconsistent in their details, and were not always totally convincing in their evocation of a ‘secondary world’. This was one reason why it had taken him the past eleven years to write The Lord of the Rings, which was still not finished at the time that Lewis began to write The Lion. Every loose end, every detail of the story – the chronology, the geography, even the meteorology of Middle-earth – had to be consistent and plausible, so that the reader would (as Tolkien wished) take the book in a sense as history.

  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe offended against all these notions. It had been very hastily written, and this haste seemed to suggest that Lewis was not taking the business of ‘sub-creation’ with what Tolkien regarded as a proper seriousness. There were inconsistencies and loose ends in the story, while beyond the immediate demands of the plot the task of making Narnia seem ‘real’ did not appear to interest Lewis at all. Moreover, the story borrowed so indiscriminately from other mythologies and narratives (fauns, nymphs, Father Christmas, talking animals, anything that seemed useful for the plot) that for Tolkien the suspension of disbelief, the entering into a secondary world, was simply impossible. It just wouldn’t ‘do’, and he turned his back on it.

  *

  While Lewis was dashing off The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Inklings were meeting as usual on Tuesdays and Thursdays regularly in term-time and often in vacation. There had been much of late to give them a corporate identity in the public eye. Essays Presented to Charles Williams, the book intended as a Festschrift but which became a memorial volume, had been published in 1947, while the joint Lewis-Williams Arthurian Torso followed a year later. The first, besides including articles by several of the Inklings (as well as one outsider, Dorothy L. Sayers, whose essay on Dante Lewis thought ‘a trifle vulgar in places’) had for an introduction Lewis’s memoir of Williams and a brief account of the Inklings themselves. Moreover, two of the essays, by Lewis and Tolkien, were a clear expression of their deep belief in the value of Story in general and mythical fairy-stories in particular. The second book, Arthurian Torso, consisted of those chapters which Williams had written for his study of the Arthurian legends, followed by a detailed commentary by Lewis on the Taliessin cycle. In this commentary, Lewis did not stint his praise of Williams. He called the cycle ‘among the two or three most valuable books of verse produced in the century’, and declared that in certain poems Williams had produced ‘word music equalled by only two or three in this century and surpassed by none’.

  Yet only a small public bought Arthurian Torso, and both it and Williams’s two Taliessin volumes soon went out of print, to reappear only sporadically at the discretion of the publishers. Williams had left his mark on contemporary poets – one critic, George Every, has cited Norman Nicholson, W. H. Auden, Sidney Keyes, John Heath-Stubbs and Anne Ridler as those who bear Williams’s mark to a greater or lesser extent – but his fame dwindled rather than increased in the years immediately following his death, and Lewis’s energetic praise perhaps did as much harm as good. Certainly some critics were irritated by it. Kenneth Allott wrote in The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (1950) that he considered Lewis’s estimate of the importance of Williams’s poetry to be ‘wildly off the mark’, adding: ‘Mr Lewis has in my opinion been hypnotised by his memories of the man, and by his conviction of the importance and wisdom of the things Williams had to say, into imagining that they are said (and happily) in the poems.’ He concluded by judging the poems to be ‘a literary oddity of great interest’. F. R. Leavis was even less enthusiastic; in The Common Pursuit (1952) he declared that Williams ‘hadn’t begun to be a poet’. And even David Jones, who was largely sympathetic to Williams’s poetry and whose own work bore certain resemblances to it, judged of the Taliessin cycle: ‘Somehow, somewhere, between content and form, concept and image, sign and what is signified, a sense of the contemporary escapes.’

  Certainly Williams’s work no longer had any great appeal in Oxford. A number of undergraduates attended Lewis’s lectures on Taliessin when they were delivered in the autumn of 1945 (it was these lectures which went to make up Lewis’s contribution to Arthurian Torso) but they were soon succeeded at the University by other young men and women many of whom had never heard of Williams. Moreover, the apparent religious revival at Oxford in the forties was now seen to have been largely a wartime phenomenon. The religious societies, including the Socratic Club, continued to exist; but now, as one historian of the University has remarked, ‘they attracted only a few men of intellectual distinction, and served as a refuge for the shy and sensitive’, while the vast majority of undergraduates and dons maintained towards Christianity an attitude of incurious tolerance.

  The Inklings continued to meet. Their Thursday routine had not changed outwardly. ‘I can see it now,’ recalled John Wain; ‘the electric fire pumping heat into the dank air’ (coal fires were no longer lit in most colleges), ‘the faded screen that broke some of the keener draughts, the enamel beer-jug on the table, the well-worn sofa and armchairs, and the men drifting in (those from distant colleges would be later), leaving overcoats and hats in any corner and coming over to warm their hands before finding a chair.’ Yet things were not quite the same.

  As he approached the end of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s pace of work slowed almost to a standstill. Moreoever, after October 1947 he did not read any more of the story to the Inklings. Whether it was that Hugo Dyson’s objections had finally offended him into silence, or simply that he was now progressing so slowly as to make it impossible to achieve any continuity with the readings, he did not bring the final chapters with him on Thursday nights. This, together with the fact that Lewis no longer read any major part of his own ‘work in progress’ to the Inklings (the Narnia stories were never read aloud to the group) meant that Thursday nights now depended chiefly on conversation. Occasionally somebody would produce a poem, either his own or someone else’s, and there would be a discussion about it; and sometimes Lewis would take Amanda Ros’s eccentric novel Irene Iddesleigh from the shelves and set a competition to see who could read the longest passage without breaking into helpless laughter. But for much of the time talk was the staple diet. This meant that the success of the evening was rather less certain, depending entirely on the mood of those present. ‘A very pleasant meeting,’ Warnie Lewis wrote in his diary one Thursday in November 1947. ‘We talked of Bishop Barnes, of the extraordinary difficulty of interesting the uneducated indifferent in religion: savage and primitive man and the common confusion between them: and how far pagan mythology was a substitute for theology.’ But on another Thursday not very long afterwards, ‘A very poor Inklings in Merton this evening. J. was worn out with examining, Tollers had a bad cold, Chris was moody: and the talk was slack and halting. We talked of philology, variou
s ways of saying “farewell”, and of the inexplicable problem of why some children are allowed to die in infancy. Home by midnight.’

  The end came almost imperceptibly, and for no apparent reason. The last Thursday Inklings to be recorded in Warnie Lewis’s diary was on 20 October 1949, when there was a ‘ham supper’ in his brother’s rooms. The next Thursday, ‘No one turned up after dinner, which was just as well, as J. has a bad cold and wanted to go to bed early.’ And the week after that: ‘No Inklings tonight, so dined at home.’ So vanished the Thursday Inklings. ‘The best of them,’ said John Wain, ‘were as good as anything I shall live to see.’

  *

  Tuesdays at the Bird and Baby continued, but that was not quite the same thing, and the word ‘Inklings’ no longer appeared in Warnie Lewis’s diary.

  Later in 1949 Tolkien finished The Lord of the Rings, and he immediately passed the complete typescript to Lewis, who read it all through and wrote an enthusiastic critique. He told Tolkien that in its mounting levels of grandeur and terror it was ‘almost unequalled in the whole range of narrative art’. But his remarks were not without censure. ‘There are many passages I could wish you had written otherwise or omitted altogether,’ he said. ‘If I include none of my adverse criticisms in this letter that is because you have heard and rejected most of them already (rejected is perhaps too mild a word for your reaction on at least one occasion!).’

  After Lewis had finished reading the typescript, he passed it to his brother. Warnie took three weeks to read it and then wrote in his diary: ‘Golly, what a book! The inexhaustible fertility of the man’s imagination amazes me. A great book of its kind, and in my opinion ahead of anything that Eddison did.’

  The Inklings naturally hoped that, now that the twelve years’ labour of writing The Lord of the Rings was over, the book would soon get into print. Gervase Mathew, ‘the universal Aunt’, suggested to a friend and fellow Catholic, Milton Waldman of the publishing house of Collins, that he should read the manuscript. Waldman did so, and was enthusiastic; but the resulting negotiations between Tolkien, Collins, and the publishers of The Hobbit (Allen & Unwin) became so confused that for a long time nothing definite happened towards publication.

  In the meanwhile, Lewis was hard at work on his ‘Narnia’ stories. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was quickly snapped up by a publisher, and long before it had reached the bookshops Lewis had written three more stories in the series, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Horse and his Boy. All three were finished in less than a year, and The Silver Chair followed soon afterwards. A sixth, The Magician’s Nephew, was virtually completed by the autumn of 1951, and in March 1953 Lewis told his publisher that he had written the seventh and final book in the series, The Last Battle. The Narnia stories were not, of course, published with quite such speed as they were written, and were issued at a more sedate pace; nevertheless Lewis was soon being reckoned among the most prolific and respected writers of children’s fiction.

  The Narnia series was rather uneven in quality. Lewis began to write the first two books with little forethought, and with nothing like the elaborately prepared background upon which Tolkien had been able to draw for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. As a result, the earlier Narnia stories largely lacked that special quality of atmosphere which Lewis himself declared was such a vital ingredient of stories. They showed signs, too, of hasty writing, and had little of the careful pacing of Tolkien’s work; for Lewis threw in any incident or colouring that struck his fancy. Yet by the time he wrote the third story, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he had developed something like Tolkien’s sense of decorum, while the very existence of the first two Narnia books gave him a certain degree of ‘history’ to draw upon. In the four remaining stories he did full justice to his imagination, and produced some of his best and most moving work, drawing not just on the traditions of children’s literature but enriching his writing from such ‘adult’ sources as Plato and Dante, and infusing the whole with his own deeply-held Christian beliefs.

  But Tolkien’s views on the Narnia books continued to be as unfavourable as when he had listened to the opening chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In 1964 he wrote to an admirer of his own books: ‘It is sad that “Narnia” and all that part of C. S. L.’s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy.’

  *

  By 1946 Lewis had been a Fellow of Magdalen College for twenty-one years. It was not unnatural to regard him as a strong candidate for a professorship. Indeed early in 1945 Tolkien told Christopher: ‘Five years ago my ambition was to get C. S. L. and myself into the two Merton chairs. It would be marvellous to be both in the same college.’ He was referring to the Professorship of English Language and Literature and the Professorship of English Literature at Oxford, which are both attached to Merton College. Half of this ambition was gratified later the same year when Tolkien went to Merton as the holder of one of the two professorships, and there was a chance that the other half could be achieved when, the next year, the retirement was announced of David Nichol Smith, the then Professor of English Literature. Moreover, as one of the seven persons responsible for electing the new professor, Tolkien was theoretically in a position to help to bring it about. But he did not give his support exclusively to Lewis’s candidature, and he suggested to David Cecil that he too should put in his name. He wrote to his publisher Sir Stanley Unwin: ‘We are about to elect another Merton professor (of modern literature). It ought to be C. S. Lewis, or perhaps Lord Devid Cecil, but one never knows.’

  It would in fact be groundless to suppose that Lewis’s failure to be elected was due to lack of support from Tolkien. His chances were poor at the outset. The widespread antipathy of many senior members of the University to such books as The Screwtape Letters had not been modified by Lewis’s openly contemptuous attitude towards much of the academic work done in Oxford, and in particular his dislike (strongly shared by Tolkien) of specialised ‘research’ degrees, which he regarded as a very poor substitute for wide knowledge in the subject. Lewis liked to remark that there were three categories at Oxford: the literate, the illiterate, and the B. Litt-erate, and he preferred the first two. This attitude ‘may well’ (said W. W. Robson, another member of the English Faculty) ‘have cost him a professorship’. Moreover, the board of electors responsible for choosing the new professor included, besides Tolkien, three particularly severe stalwarts of the English School, H. W. Garrod, C. H. Wilkinson and Helen Darbishire, none of whom is likely to have approved of the popular nature of many of Lewis’s books. It was presumably because he realised how hopeless were Lewis’s chances that Tolkien supported David Cecil. In the event both Lewis and Cecil were passed over, and the chair was given to Lewis’s former tutor F. P. Wilson.

  Shortly afterwards, Cecil was elected Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature. But Lewis remained without a chair. Then in 1951 his friends put up his name for the Professorship of Poetry, which had again fallen vacant. This time the other candidates were C. Day Lewis and Edmund Blunden, but Blunden stood down before the election. Lewis’s friends campaigned energetically on his behalf. Warnie Lewis recorded of a Tuesday morning at the Bird and Baby: ‘Present, Hugo Dyson, Colin Hardie, Dundas-Grant, Humphrey Havard, David Cecil, J. and I. Hugo, who has been canvassing for J. in the poetry chair, was at his most effervescent (“If they offer you sherry, you’re done, they won’t vote for you: I had lots of sherry”).’ And on Thursday 8 February 1951: ‘While we were waiting to dine at the Royal Oxford – Barfield, Humphrey, David, J. A. W. Bennett, J. and I – came the bad news that J. had been defeated by C. Day Lewis for the Poetry Chair, by 194 votes to 173. J. took it astonishingly well, much better than his backers. Hugo told me that one elector whom he canvassed announced his intention of voting for C. D. L. on the ground that J. had written Screwtape!’ Ironically, Day Lewis’s chief backer in the election, Enid Starkie, had put up his name on the same grounds that Jack Lewis had used in 1938 when proposing Adam Fo
x for the poetry chair: ‘We must have a practising poet’.

  Neither of the two professors of English Literature now holding office, F. P. Wilson and David Cecil, shared the views so energetically held by Lewis and Tolkien in the nineteen-thirties that Victorian literature should be excluded from compulsory examination papers in the English School so as to leave room for Anglo-Saxon and medieval studies; and at about this time they set up a committee, which also included Humphry House and Helen Gardner, to make recommendations about possible changes in the syllabus. As Professor of English Language and Literature, Tolkien was an inevitable choice to be a fifth member of the committee, and he was eventually persuaded by his colleagues on it that the time had come to restore Victorian literature to the syllabus, and indeed to extend the period of study into the twentieth century. This was what the committee recommended to the full Faculty in their report.

  Lewis was still passionately devoted to the syllabus that he and Tolkien had created. He was now deeply upset that Tolkien had deserted their cause. ‘He at least should have supported me,’ he told Roger Lancelyn Green. But he did not give in so easily. Before the Faculty meeting which was to vote on the report, he campaigned energetically; and at the meeting he made an impassioned speech championing the present syllabus and opposing any changes. He achieved his aim, for the proposals were voted down for the time being, despite opposition led by David Cecil, who was fervently in favour of restoring the nineteenth century to the syllabus. Moreover, among those who voted against them was Tolkien, for Lewis had persuaded him to change his mind; so the Faculty was presented with the spectacle of Tolkien voting in the full meeting against proposals which he himself had helped to draft in committee. Lewis had not lost his old power of marshalling his friends.