The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  Till We Have Faces is possibly Lewis’s best book. He himself thought so, preferring it even to his earlier favourite, Perelandra. Ironically it had a poorer reception than any other story he had written.

  *

  Lewis’s Cambridge friends had hoped that he would prove a real opponent to the leading critic in that university at the time, F. R. Leavis of Downing College, whose demand for social earnestness in literature and literary criticism had for many years greatly coloured the thinking of undergraduates. But they had left it too late. Lewis was, by his own admission, past his intellectual prime; he told Professor Basil Willey, when he was still hesitating to accept the Cambridge chair: ‘We Lewises burn out quickly.’ At Cambridge he made little attempt to set up in opposition to Leavis. He continued to lecture on the background to medieval and Renaissance literature, and published the lectures as The Discarded Image; but his audiences were rather smaller than they had been in Oxford, though just as enthusiastic. His only real attempt to answer Leavis was An Experiment in Criticism, which he published in 1961 and which suggested that we should ‘scrutinise’ not books and writers in the manner of Leavis and his followers, but should rather categorise the readers. It was ingenious, but too oblique to make any real impact. A few Cambridge undergraduates were impressed by it. ‘Can it be that the tide is turning at last?’ Lewis asked hopefully after receiving fan-letters from one or two of them; and he also remarked: ‘Some of the younger men express great dissatisfaction at the rule of Downing.’ But it was a vain hope. In truth Lewis, who had for years attacked (openly or by implication) Leavis’s notions of ‘culture’, who regarded Leavis’s mode of criticism as fundamentally wrong because of its subjective basis, and who had perhaps hoped ever since his essay ‘Christianity and Literature’ to help to establish a school of criticism based on objective (and ultimately Christian and traditional) criteria, was no longer a fighter. Indeed, when he actually met Leavis he found him to be ‘quiet, charming and kindly’. There were one or two unhappy incidents when, at question-and-answer sessions after Lewis had addressed undergraduate societies, the more fervent disciples of Leavis would ask pointed questions about the ‘social relevance’ of Lewis’s own works of fiction, and Lewis’s temper might flare up. But he did not confuse the disciples with the master, and when it was suggested that he might like to accept the post of Chairman of the Faculty Board he not only refused but suggested that a good candidate might be Leavis.

  At this time he made his peace too with another old adversary, or at least someone whom he had seen as an adversary. He and T. S. Eliot were both on the commission to revise the language of the Psalter, and they were soon on the friendliest terms. One day in the summer of 1959 Lewis and Joy had lunch with Eliot and his new wife Valerie. It was an event which the pre-war Lewis would have declared to be in every respect impossible.

  *

  Lewis was no longer in good health. During the period of Joy’s recovery he too contracted a bone disease, and although it was not malignant and was soon brought under control he was obliged to live carefully. ‘I wear a surgical belt and shall probably never be able to take a real walk again,’ he told a friend, ‘but it somehow doesn’t worry me. The intriguing thing is that while I (for no discoverable reason) was losing the calcium from my bones, Joy, who needed it much more, was gaining it in hers. One dreams of a Charles Williams substitution! Well, never was gift more gladly given; but one must not be fanciful.’

  As to Joy’s condition, though she still limped badly (‘the doctors, rather than the disease, shortened one leg’. Lewis said) she was otherwise in good health. The bones had rebuilt themselves firmly. ‘Of course the sword of Damocles hangs over us,’ Lewis often remarked; but there was much ground for optimism. Not long after her recovery they went for a brief holiday (‘you might call it a belated honeymoon’, he said) to Ireland, travelling by air so as to avoid the sudden jolts likely on board ship. For both of them it was their first flight. ‘We found it – after our initial moment of terror – enchanting,’ Lewis said. ‘The cloud-scape seen from above is a new world of beauty – and then the rifts in the clouds through which one sees “a glimpse of that dark world where I was born” …’ At home, Joy sometimes helped Lewis with his correspondence, especially to American readers of his books:

  Dear Mary,

  Perhaps you won’t mind a letter from me this time, instead of Jack? He is having his first go at examining for the Cambridge tripos, and is fairly drowning in examination papers. He can’t even get home for the next fortnight; our longest separation since our marriage, and we’re both feeling it badly!

  Of course we’re both praying for you – and don’t be too afraid, even if you turn out to need an operation. I’ve had three, and they were nothing like so bad as my fears.

  Blessings,

  Yours,

  Joy Lewis.

  Then in October 1959 an X-ray check revealed that cancerous spots were returning to many of her bones.

  ‘This last check is the only one we approached without dread,’ Lewis told Roger Lancelyn Green. ‘Her health seemed so complete. It is like being recaptured by the Giant when you have passed every gate and are almost out of sight of his castle.’

  There was still some hope. ‘Meanwhile you have the waiting,’ Lewis said. ‘And while you wait, you still have to go on living – if only one could go underground, hibernate, sleep it out. And then the horrible by-products of anxiety: the incessant, circular movement of the thoughts, even the Pagan temptation to keep watch for irrational omens. And one prays; but mainly such prayers are themselves a form of anguish.’ He asked Father Peter Milward: ‘Can one without presumption ask for a second miracle?’

  Joy began to experience slowly increasing amounts of pain; yet, as Warnie Lewis recorded in his diary, ‘her courage and vitality were such that one was able to forget the grim fact for hours and even days at a time’. She was even determined that she and Jack should go on the holiday to Greece that they had planned to take with Roger Lancelyn Green and his wife June; and though Joy was by that time suffering considerably the party left London Airport on 3 April 1960 and flew to Athens. During the following fortnight the Lewises did not join in the more strenuous expeditions (they were travelling as part of a ‘package’ tour), but they climbed the Acropolis, visited Mycenae and Rhodes, and went with the Lancelyn Greens in a private hired car on a day’s expedition to the Gulf of Corinth. The Greek trip – Lewis’s first journey abroad since the First World War – had been Joy’s greatest remaining ambition, and on their return Lewis told Chad Walsh, ‘She came back in a nunc dimittis frame of mind, having realized, beyond hope, her greatest, lifelong, this-worldly desire.’

  Secondary cancer had now developed, and Joy had to go to hospital. During this time, Tolkien’s wife Edith who was also in hospital met her and became friendly with her; this helped at least in some degree to reconcile Tolkien to Lewis’s marriage. On 20 May Joy had to have her right breast removed. The operation went well, and a fortnight later she was sent home in good spirits, though she could now only move about in a wheelchair. She was still able, though, to make a few short expeditions. Warnie wheeled her about the garden so that she could inspect her plants, and late in June (after another spell in hospital following a severe relapse) she and Jack were even able to go out to dinner at Studley Priory hotel. ‘It is incredible,’ he recalled, ‘how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone.’

  On the night of Tuesday 12 July Warnie took the usual evening cups of tea to Joy and Jack, and found them playing Scrabble. ‘Before I dropped off to sleep,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘they sounded as if they were reading a play together.’ (‘How long, how tranquilly, how nourishingly, we talked together that last night!’ Lewis later wrote). Next morning Warnie was woken at a quarter past six by Joy’s screams: she had severe pains which seemed to be in the stomach but were really in the spine. Warnie woke Jack who called the doctor; he arrived before seven and dr
ugged her, ‘but even now she has tremendous resistance’, Warnie wrote in his diary, ‘and this and subsequent dopings did no more than make her drowsy’. After a nightmare morning of telephoning and argument with the hospital authorities, Lewis at last managed to arrange for the surgeon to give her a bed in his private ward at the Radcliffe Infirmary. She was taken there by ambulance, still conscious. Jack went with her.

  Once during these days he had written a poem.

  All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.

  I never had a selfless thought since I was born.

  I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:

  I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

  Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,

  I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin

  I talk of love – a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek –

  But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

  Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.

  I see the chasm. And everything you are was making

  My heart into a bridge by which I might get back

  From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

  Late the same night, a few hours after Joy had been taken into hospital, Warnie wrote in his diary: ‘When I was in my bath about 11.40 p.m. I heard J. come into the house and went out to meet him. Self: “What news?” J.: “She died about twenty minutes ago.”’

  *

  ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

  ‘There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met her. I’ve plenty of what are called “resources”. People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this “commonsense” vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.’

  Writing had always been Lewis’s way of coping with life, and now he began to write once again, recording his thoughts in the days and weeks after Joy’s death. This was not like the loss of Charles Williams, when there had been easy assurances of his supernatural presence. ‘I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. “Them as asks don’t get.” I was a fool to ask. For now, even if that assurance came, I should distrust it. I should think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers.’

  There was also the danger not of ceasing to believe in God, but of going back to his old belief in a cruel God, the belief that had haunted him in his early days before his conversion to Christianity. ‘The conclusion I dread is not “So there’s no God after all”, but “So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.”’ And again: ‘Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, “good”? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite?’

  The grief slowly eased. After a time his prayers ceased to be the same desperate demands for help. ‘I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face?’ One night, quite unexpectedly, he thought he felt some sense of Joy’s presence. He had said that even if such a thing did happen, he would regard it as self-hypnosis. But now, ‘Easier said than done. It was quite incredibly unemotional. Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own.’ Her mind, not her emotions. ‘Didn’t people dispute once whether the final vision of God was more an act of intelligence or of love? That is probably another of the nonsense questions.’ And he remembered her last words in hospital, spoken not to him but to the chaplain. ‘I am at peace with God’, she had said. ‘She smiled, but not at me. Poi si torno all’eterna fontana.’1

  *

  And after that there is really nothing more to be said. Lewis published these thoughts pseudonymously under the title A Grief Observed. He continued to work at Cambridge. He met his friends regularly in the Bird and Baby, reluctantly changing the meeting-place to the Lamb and Flag across the road when the Bird was disagreeably ‘modernised’. He wrote Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, a wise and gentle book whose subject he had attempted before, but for which he only now found the form. Occasionally he saw Tolkien, who lived not very far away on the other side of Headington; but their meetings were rare. He contributed an essay to the Festschrift published in 1962 to mark Tolkien’s seventieth birthday. In November of that year, Tolkien wrote him a letter (which does not survive) asking him whether he would be at the dinner to mark its publication. He replied to Tolkien, on a postcard:

  What a nice letter. I also like beer less than I did, tho’ I have retained the taste for general talk. But I shan’t be at the Festschrift dinner. I wear a catheter, live on a low protein diet, and go early to bed. I am, if not a lean, at least a slippered pantaloon. All the best. Yours, Jack.

  He was supposed to be having an operation on his prostate, but the surgeon would not perform it until his heart and kidneys were in a better condition; and after a time the plans for the operation were abandoned. In the summer of 1963 he had a heart attack, but recovered. ‘I can’t help feeling it was rather a pity I did survive,’ he remarked. ‘I mean, having glided so painlessly up to the Gate it seems hard to have it shut in one’s face and know that the whole process must some day be gone through again, and perhaps less pleasantly. Poor Lazarus!’

  Reluctantly, he gave up his Cambridge professorship, and kept to a ground-floor room at the Kilns. A young American, Walter Hooper, came to live in the house for a time as companion and secretary, but had to go home in September 1963 to wind up his affairs before returning (as he intended) on a permanent basis. By this time Warnie was away, drinking heavily on his annual Irish holiday, and for a long time failing to return despite appeals from Jack’s friends. Jack was left in the care of the housekeeper and the gardener, not greatly happy in this near-solitude but certain that at least he would not have long to wait. He was, he told Arthur Greeves, ‘quite comfortable and cheerful. The only real snag is that it looks as if you and I shall never meet again in this life.’

  At last Warnie came home. ‘The wheel had come full circle,’ he said. ‘Once again we were together in the little end room at home, shutting out from our talk the ever-present knowledge that the holidays were ending, and that a new term fraught with unknown possibilities awaited us both.’

  On the afternoon of Friday 22 November 1963, not long after taking Jack his tea, Warnie heard a crash and found his brother lying unconscious at the foot of his bed. Jack Lewis died a few minutes later. He was not quite sixty-five. The news of his death was a little overshadowed by the fact that on the same day President Kennedy was assassinated.

  The funeral was held four days later at Headington Quarry parish church. Among those in the congregation were Barfield, Havard and Tolkien. ‘The coffin was carried out into the churchyard and set down,’ recalled Peter Bayley, who was also there. ‘It was a very cold, frosty morning, but the winter sun coming through the yews was brilliantly bright. One candle stood on the coffin. The flame burned steadily. Although out in the open air, it did not so much as flicker.’

  *

  Some years earlier, Havard had remarked to Lewis that the Inklings would come to an end if he was not there. Lewis replied that this was nonsense; and now, after his death, there was some attempt to keep up the meetings at the Lamb and Flag. But they were soon abandoned as being absurd without Lewis. As Havard said, ‘He was the link who bound us all together.’

  *

/>   Warnie Lewis lived for another ten years, remaining for most of that time at the Kilns. He died in the same year as Tolkien, 1973.

  *

  Not long after Lewis’s death, Tolkien began a letter to one of his children:

  ‘I am sorry that I have not answered your letters sooner; but Jack Lewis’s death on the 22nd has preoccupied me. It is also involving me in some correspondence, as many people still regard me as one of his intimates. Alas! that ceased to be some ten years ago. We were separated first by the sudden apparition of Charles Williams, and then by his marriage. But we owed each a great debt to the other, and that tie, with the deep affection that it begot, remained. He was a great man of whom the cold-blooded official obituaries have only scraped the surface.’

  THE END

  If you enjoyed The Inklings, check out these other great Humphrey Carpenter titles.

  The original authorised biography, and the only one written by an author who actually met J.R.R. Tolkien.

  In the 25 years since Tolkien’s death in September 1973, millions have read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and become fascinated about the very private man behind the books.

  Born in Bloemfontein in January 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was orphaned in childhood, brought up in near-poverty and almost thwarted in adolescent romance. He served in the First World War, surviving the Battle of the Somme, where he lost some of his closest friends, and returned to academic life, achieving high repute as a scholar and university teacher, eventually becoming Merton Professor of English at Oxford.