The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  *

  In 1954 Cambridge University advertised a new Professorship of Medieval and Renaissance English. There could be few scholars as well qualified for the post as Lewis, for besides The Allegory of Love his academic reputation rested largely on his Oxford lectures which introduced undergraduates to the intellectual background of medieval and Renaissance writings. He had also just finished a lengthy study of sixteenth-century poetry and prose for the Oxford History of English Literature series, and his 700-page book on the subject, with its brilliant introductory summary of the period, was as one reviewer remarked a ‘triumphant refutation’ of the notion that his popular books had been a distraction from his academic work. Helen Gardner declared in the New Statesman that the book ‘is continuously enjoyable, provocative and stimulating, yet satisfying’, and concluded that it would remain a standard work of reference for some time. Donald Davie called it ‘far and away the best piece of orthodox literary history that has appeared for many a long year’ (though he remarked that almost all the judgements in the book were unsympathetic to modern taste). A. L. Rowse called the book ‘magnificent’, and said that it showed ‘such intellectual vitality, such sweep and imagination, such magnanimity’. John Wain declared that Lewis wrote ‘now as always, as if inviting us to a feast’, and I. A. Shapiro writing in the Birmingham Post asked: ‘Can Oxford really afford to let him migrate to Cambridge?’

  For, to the accompaniment of this chorus of praise, Lewis was leaving Oxford, having accepted the Cambridge chair. He had not taken the decision lightly. His admirers at Cambridge made it clear that they wanted him for the new professorship, particularly in the hope that he would be a counterblast to the influence of F. R. Leavis. Basil Willey, the Professor of English Literature, tried to move him by saying, ‘Come over into Macedonia and help us!’ But Lewis took a lot of persuading, and it was not until his Oxford friends (including Tolkien) had convinced him that it would be for the best that he accepted.1 Even so, he had no wish to leave his Oxford house, and Cambridge agreed that it would be acceptable if he returned to the Kilns for long weekends during term, as well as living there during the vacation.

  On Thursday 9 December 1954 the English Faculty at Oxford gave a farewell dinner for Lewis in Merton. The company included Warnie Lewis, Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien, Hugo Dyson, David Cecil and ‘Humphrey’ Havard. Shortly afterwards, Lewis left the rooms in Magdalen which he had occupied for very nearly thirty years, and settled in at Cambridge, where he was made a Fellow (appropriately) of Magdalene College. He was enthusiastic about his new home. ‘Many of my colleagues are Christians,’ he said, ‘more than was the case in my old College.’ Because of this he had soon named Magdalene ‘the penitent’, as compared to its impenitent Oxford namesake. ‘My rooms are comfortable, and Cambridge, unlike Oxford, is still a country town, with a farming atmosphere about it,’ he reported. ‘My new College is smaller, softer, more gracious than my old. The only danger is lest I grow too comfortable and over-ripe.’ Nor did he lose touch with his Oxford friends. The Bird and Baby meetings continued, though they were now moved to Monday so as to fit his timetable; and the custom was established that after the lunchtime beer, and perhaps a snack at the Trout at Godstow, Havard and one or two of the others would drive with him to Oxford station and see him off for his week in Cambridge, sitting in the train with him and talking until the whistle blew. Occasionally they would take him out into the country after their visit to the Trout, to pick up the Cambridge train at the wayside station of Islip; and sometimes they would come to Cambridge with him, dining in Magdalene before a long evening of conversation, and sleeping in the college guest rooms.

  Tolkien was not among them on these occasions. Though he often appeared in the Bird and Baby his feelings were, by the mid-nineteen-fifties, more cool towards Lewis than they had once been. Lewis knew it to be so, and once, walking away from the Bird and Baby, he asked Christopher Tolkien (who was now teaching in the University) why his father’s manner had altered. Christopher was unwilling to try and give an answer.

  The arrival of Charles Williams had perhaps begun it. ‘We saw less and less of one another after he came under the dominant influence of Charles Williams,’ Tolkien wrote of Lewis in 1964. Lewis’s continuing lack of sympathy towards Tolkien’s Catholicism, together with his almost vulgar level of success as what Tolkien once called ‘Everyman’s Theologian,’ had possibly hardened it. Then came ‘Narnia’, which did not help; though when The Lord of the Rings was eventually published in 1954 and 1955 Tolkien’s reputation as a storyteller rose to a height that certainly equalled Lewis’s and eventually surpassed it. Moreover Lewis did everything he could to contribute to the success of The Lord of the Rings, writing a note of praise for the ‘blurb’, and contributing richly enthusiastic reviews to Time & Tide. So it might be true to say that none of these things, by themselves, were the cause of the friendship’s decay – or rather, of the cooling in Tolkien’s feelings, for Lewis behaved as warmly and magnanimously towards Tolkien as he had ever done. It was in part perhaps the complex nature of Tolkien’s emotions and affections. And if external causes are still sought, few events in the nineteen-fifties upset Tolkien as much as Lewis’s marriage.

  2

  Till We Have Faces

  Mrs Moore died in January 1951, aged nearly eighty. Always a demanding woman, during the last years of her life she became tyrannical, forbidding Lewis to light a fire in his study at the Kilns so as to save fuel, engendering quarrels among the maids, and, as Warnie Lewis described it in his diary, ‘going mad through trying to live on hate instead of love’. In 1944 she had a stroke, and thereafter she kept to her bed, but not until April 1950 was her condition sufficiently poor for her to be removed to a nursing home. Jack visited her every day. ‘She is in no pain but her mind has almost completely gone,’ he said. ‘What traces of it remain seem gentler and more placid than I have known for years.’ When the winter was at its most severe she caught influenza and died.

  ‘So ends the mysterious self-imposed tyranny in which J. has lived for at least thirty years,’ Warnie wrote in his diary. And of life at the Kilns without Mrs Moore he declared, ‘Gosh, how I am loving it all!’ Even Jack was obliged to admit that life was easier. ‘I specially need your prayers,’ he wrote to Sister Penelope at Wantage, ‘because I am (like the pilgrim in Bunyan) travelling across “a plain called Ease”. Everything without, and many things within, are marvellously well at present.’ And in the autumn of the year following Mrs Moore’s death he told Arthur Greeves that he had just passed through ‘what has perhaps been the happiest year of my life’.

  A few months before Mrs Moore was taken into the nursing home there came, among Lewis’s invariably large mail from readers of his books, a letter from a Mrs Joy Gresham who lived in the neighbourhood of New York. ‘Just another American fan,’ remarked Warnie, ‘with however the difference that she stood out from the rut by her amusing and well-written letters, and soon J. and she had become “pen-friends”.’ In 1952 she told Lewis that she was coming to England for a time, and he invited her to Oxford.

  *

  Joy Davidman was born in New York City in 1915. Her parents were Jews who had come to America from eastern Europe in their childhood, and her mother brought her up on tales of Jewish village life in the Ukraine, a life where more than six hundred ritual laws governed daily conduct, and religion was of the letter rather than the spirit. Her father and mother had abandoned Judaism; Joy declared herself an atheist at the age of eight, after reading H. G. Wells’s Outline of History. ‘In a few years’, she recalled, ‘I had rejected all morality as a pipe dream. If life had no meaning, what was there to live for except pleasure? Luckily for me, my preferred pleasure happened to be reading, or I shouldn’t have been able to stay out of hot water as well as I did.’

  If she had any philosophy in her childhood, it was a belief in American prosperity. But that faith was destroyed by the Depression, and by 1930 she believed in nothing. ‘Men, I said,
are only apes. Love, art, and altruism are only sex. The universe is only matter. Matter is only energy. I forget what I said energy was only.’ Yet she was also a poet, and in her verse she asked whether life was really no more than just a matter of satisfying one’s appetites:

  Come now all Americans

  kiss and accept your city, the harsh mother,

  New York, the clamor, the sweat, the heart of brown land.

  This is New York,

  our city; a kind place to live in; bountiful – our city

  envied by the world and by the young in lonely places.

  We have the bright-lights, the bridges, the Yankee Stadium

  and if we are not contented then we should be

  and if we are discontented we do not know it,

  and anyhow it has always been this way.

  She read eagerly: ghost stories, science fiction, the tales of George MacDonald and Lord Dunsany. She revelled in the supernatural. ‘It interested me above all else,’ she said. But she did not believe in it.

  After school she went to Hunter College in New York and then to Columbia University where she received her M.A. in English Literature. She took a job teaching English in New York high schools, and she joined the Communist Party. ‘All I knew was that capitalism wasn’t working very well, war was imminent – and socialism promised to change all that. And for the first time in my life I was willing to be my brother’s keeper. So I rushed round to a Party acquaintance and said I wanted to join.’ She became an energetic worker for the Party, and she published a volume of poems entitled Letter to a Comrade.

  Now with me,

  bow and set your mouth against America

  which you will make fine and the treasure of its men,

  which you will give to the workers and those who turn land over with the plough.

  There is no miracle of help

  fixed in the stars, there is no magic, no savior

  smiling in blatant ink on election posters;

  only the strength of men.

  Yet there was a delicacy of imagery in her poetry too, and the volume won two awards. She gave up teaching to devote her time to writing, and her first novel, Anya, was published in 1940. It was based on her mother’s childhood memories, and gave a vivid account of Jewish village life in the Ukraine during the late nineteenth century, as seen through the eyes of Anya, the shopkeeper’s daughter who rejects the strict conventions of her people and goes in search of love, wherever she may find it. The book had something about it of D. H. Lawrence.

  For a few months Joy Davidman had a job with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, as a junior scriptwriter. Then in 1942 she married a fellow Communist, William Lindsay Gresham. Born in 1909, in his time Bill Gresham had worked as office boy, copywriter, singer in Greenwich Village clubs, and reviewer for a New York newspaper. Brought up an agnostic, he toyed for some time with Unitarian theology, but later became an atheist and joined the Communist Party. In 1937 he went out to Spain to fight on the Communist side; he spent fifteen months there, never fired a shot, and came home in a state of mind so bad that shortly afterwards he tried to hang himself. Psychoanalysis restored him to some degree of self-confidence, but he became a heavy drinker. He managed, however, to hold down a series of editorial jobs on popular story-magazines. It was at this stage that his first marriage was ended by divorce and he married Joy Davidman.

  They set up home in upstate New York, and two sons were born to them, David and Douglas. Neither Joy nor Bill Gresham now had much time or inclination for Party activities, though they still called themselves Communist and, out of habit, accepted Marxist philosophy. Meanwhile Joy’s taste for books about the supernatural led her to The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. ‘These books stirred an unused part of my brain to momentary sluggish life,’ she said. ‘Of course, I thought, atheism was true; but I hadn’t given quite enough attention to developing the proof of it. Someday, when the children were older, I’d work it out. Then I forgot the whole matter.’

  Bill Gresham was still going through mental difficulties, and one day he rang Joy from his New York office to say he was having a nervous breakdown. He felt his mind going; he could not stay where he was and he could not bring himself to come home. Then he rang off. For hours, Joy tried frantically to find out what had happened to him. In the end she gave up and waited. ‘I put the babies to sleep. For the first time in my life I felt helpless; for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, “the master of my fate” and “the captain of my soul”. All my defences – the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God – went down momentarily. And God came in. There was a Person with me in the room, directly present to my consciousness – a Person so real that all my previous life was by comparison mere shadow play. I understood that God had always been there, and that, since childhood, I had been pouring half my energy into the task of keeping him out. My perception of God lasted perhaps half a minute. When it was over I found myself on my knees, praying. I think I must have been the world’s most astonished atheist.’

  When Bill Gresham finally came home, he accepted his wife’s experience without questioning it, largely because he himself had become interested in the supernatural. Together they began to study the outlines of theology. Joy considered becoming a practising Jew of the ‘Reformed’ persuasion, but soon decided that she must accept Christianity. Then in the summer of 1948, Bill Gresham, frightened by his alchoholism, prayed for help to stop drinking. ‘And my prayer was answered,’ he wrote in 1951. ‘Up until now I have never taken another drink.’ This gave him the final spur to accepting Christianity, and he and Joy became Presbyterians.

  They were both having some success as writers. Bill Gresham’s first thriller, Nightmare Alley, was published in 1946. It sold well and was bought up for the cinema. Joy’s second novel, Weeping Bay (dealing with the miseries of an impoverished community in Canada), came out in 1950 and was well reviewed. In 1951 the Greshams each contributed an account of their conversion to Christianity to a Protestant anthology. But their marriage continued to go through difficulties, and in 1952 Joy decided to travel to England, in the hope that some months of separation would help it. During her English trip, C. S. Lewis invited her to Oxford and gave a lunch party in her honour at Magdalen.

  *

  Warnie Lewis met her for the first time on that occasion. ‘I was some little time in making up my mind about her,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘She proved to be a Jewess, or rather a Christian convert of Jewish race, medium height, good figure, horn rimmed specs., quite extraordinarily uninhibited.’ At the Magdalen lunch ‘she turned to me,’ wrote Warnie, ‘in the presence of three or four men, and asked in the most natural tone in the world, “Is there anywhere in this monastic establishment where a lady can relieve herself?” But her visit was a great success, and we had many merry days together; and when she left for home in January 1953, it was with common regrets, and a sincere hope that we would meet again.’

  Lewis was astonished by her. ‘Her mind was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard,’ he wrote of her. ‘Passion, tenderness and pain were all equally unable to disarm it. It scented the first whiff of cant or slush; then sprang, and knocked you over before you knew what was happening. How many bubbles of mine she pricked! I soon learned not to talk rot to her unless I did it for the sheer pleasure of being exposed and laughed at.’

  Joy went home to her husband in January 1953, but it quickly became apparent that the marriage was at an end. Allowing him to divorce her for desertion, she came back to England, bringing the two boys and setting up home in London. Thanks to financial help from her parents she was able to send the boys to a preparatory school in Surrey. Then, in the winter of 1953, she and her sons came to stay with the Lewises at the Kilns.

  ‘Last week we entertained a lady from New York for four days, with her boys, aged nine and seven respectively,’ Lewis wrote to a friend in December. ‘Can you imagine two crust
ed old bachelors in such a situation? It however went swimmingly, though it was very, very exhausting; the energy of the American small boy is astonishing. This pair thought nothing of a four mile hike across broken country as an incident in a day of ceaseless activity, and when we took them up Magdalen tower, they said as soon as they got back to the ground, “Let’s do it again!” Without being in the least priggish, they struck us as being amazingly adult by our standards and one could talk to them as one would to “grown-ups” – though the next moment they would be wrestling like puppies on the sitting room floor.’ Lewis dedicated the Narnia story that was just about to be published, The Horse and his Boy, to the two boys.

  Joy was writing another book, rather on the model of Lewis’s Christian apologetics. With her Jewish origins in mind she chose as her subject an interpretation of the Ten Commandments in terms of contemporary life. The book, Smoke on the Mountain, was published in 1955 with a foreword by Lewis. Though it did not equal his brilliance it was the product of much thought and imagination, and it was enriched by her own experience of life.

  In the first weeks of 1954 she helped Lewis move to Cambridge. ‘Poor lamb,’ she wrote to friends, ‘he was suffering all the pangs and qualms of a new boy going to a formidable school – he went around muttering, “Oh, what a fool I am! I had a good home and I left!” and turning his mouth down at the corners most pathetical. He always makes his distresses into a joke, but of course there’s a genuine grief in leaving a place like Magdalen after thirty years; rather like a divorce, I imagine. Even I feel I shall miss those cloisters after a mere dozen visits! The Cambridge college is nothing like so beautiful, though pleasant enough; and Lewis has just written to say that they only get one glass of port after dinner, instead of Magdalen’s three! In spite of the move, he keeps on working as hard as usual; has finished his autobiography – I’ve got the last chapters here now and must get my wits to work on criticism.’ The autobiography was entitled, apparently without any intention of a double meaning, Surprised by Joy.