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You look at trees, he said, and call them ‘trees’, and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star’, and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree’, ‘star’, were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jewelled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf-patterned’.
This was not a new notion to Lewis, for Tolkien was, in his own manner, expressing what Barfield had said in Poetic Diction. Nor, said Lewis, did it effectively answer his point that myths are lies.
But, replied Tolkien, man is not ultimately a liar. He may pervert his thoughts into lies, but he comes from God, and it is from God that he draws his ultimate ideals. Lewis agreed: he had, indeed, accepted something like this notion for many years. Therefore, Tolkien continued, not merely the abstract thoughts of man but also his imaginative inventions must originate with God, and must in consequence reflect something of eternal truth. In making a myth, in practising ‘mythopoeia’ and peopling the world with elves and dragons and goblins, a storyteller, or ‘sub-creator’ as Tolkien liked to call such a person,
is actually fulfilling God’s purpose, and reflecting a splintered fragment of the true light. Pagan myths are therefore never just ‘lies’: there is always something of the truth in them.
They talked on, until Lewis was convinced by the force of Tolkien’s argument. But he had another question to put to his friends, and as it was late they decided to go indoors to Lewis’s rooms on Staircase III of New Buildings. There, he recorded, ‘we continued on Christianity’.
*
Lewis had a particular reason for holding back from Christianity. He did not think it was necessarily untrue: indeed he had examined the historicity of the Gospels, and had come to the conclusion that he was ‘nearly certain that it really happened’. What was still preventing him from becoming a Christian was the fact that he found it irrelevant.
As he himself put it, he could not see ‘how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now – except in so far as his example could help us’. And he knew that Christ’s example as a man and a teacher was not the centre of the Christian story. ‘Right in the centre,’ he said, ‘in the Gospels and in St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious, expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed – “propitiation” – “sacrifice” – “the blood of the Lamb”.’ He had ridiculed them because they seemed not only silly and shocking but meaningless. What was the point of it all? How could the death and resurrection of Christ have ‘saved the world’?
Tolkien answered him immediately. Indeed, he said, the solution was actually a development of what he had been saying earlier. Had he not shown how pagan myths were, in fact, God expressing himself through the minds of poets, and using the images of their ‘mythopoeia’ to express fragments of his eternal truth? Well then, Christianity (he said) is exactly the same thing – with the enormous difference that the poet who invented it was God Himself, and the images He used were real men and actual history.
Do you mean, asked Lewis, that the death and resurrection of Christ is the old ‘dying god’ story all over again?
Yes, Tolkien answered, except that here is a real Dying God, with a precise location in history and definite historical consequences. The old myth has become a fact. But it still retains the character of a myth. So that in asking what it ‘meant’, Lewis was really being rather absurd. Did he ask what the story of Balder or Adonis or any of the other dying gods in pagan myth ‘meant’? No, of course not. He enjoyed these stories, ‘tasted’ them, and got something from them that he could not get from abstract argument. Could he not transfer that attitude, that appreciation of story, to the life and death of Christ? Could he not treat it as a story, be fully aware that he could draw nourishment from it which he could never find in a list of abstract truths? Could he not realise that it is a myth, and make himself receptive to it? For, Tolkien said, if God is mythopoeic, man must become mythopathtic.
*
It was now 3 a.m., and Tolkien had to go home. Lewis and Dyson came downstairs with him. They crossed the quadrangle and let him out by the little postern gate on Magdalen Bridge. Then, Lewis recorded, ‘Dyson and I found more to say to one another, strolling up and down the cloister of New Building, so that we did not get to bed till 4.’
Twelve days later Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves: ‘I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ – in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.’
4 (#ulink_37c53120-2755-5aac-becf-3a2cd49e8638)
‘The sort of thing a man might say’ (#ulink_37c53120-2755-5aac-becf-3a2cd49e8638)
Actually it was not quite so easy or so sudden as that. Arthur Greeves wrote to Lewis saying he was delighted that his friend had at last accepted Christianity. After reading this letter from Greeves, Lewis began to feel that ‘perhaps I had said too much’. He told Greeves cautiously: ‘Perhaps I was not nearly as clear on the subject as I had led you to think. But I certainly have moved a bit, even if it turns out to be a less bit than I thought.’
He had in fact reached the point where rational argument failed, and it became a matter of belief rather than of logical proof. Tolkien and Dyson’s argument about Christianity as ‘a true myth which is nevertheless a myth’ had a lot of imaginative force, but it was a questionable proposition in terms of strict logic.
Lewis could not go on thinking it over for ever. He realised that some sort of ‘leap of faith’ was necessary to get him over the final hurdle. ‘There must’, he said, ‘perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible, for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?’
So he became a Christian. He made his Communion for the first time since childhood days on Christmas Day 1931, in his parish church at Headington Quarry. But he did not forget to maintain in his mind the distinction between the two questions: the existence of God, which he believed he could prove by logical argument, and the truth of Christianity, which he realised was not subject to rational proof. Indeed his doubts about the Christian story never entirely ceased. There were, he remarked, many moments at which he felt ‘How could I – I of all people – ever have come to believe this cock and bull story?’ But this, he felt, was better than the error of taking it all for granted. Nor was he utterly alarmed at the notion that Christianity might after all be untrue. ‘Even assuming (which I most constantly deny)’, he said, ‘that the doctrines of historic Christianity are merely mythical, it is the myth which is the vital and nourishing element in the whole concern.
*
One reason for Lewis’s holding back from conversion for so long was his inability to find the Gospel story attractive. It evoked none of the imaginative response that was aroused in him by pagan myths. As he told Greeves, ‘the spontaneous appeal of the Christian story is so much less to me than that of Paganism’. This was perhaps one reason why he now began to create his own fictional setting for Christianity.
He had already made two attempts to write an account of his conversion. The first, in prose, had been begun while he was a Theist but not yet a Christian, and it was soon abandoned. In the spring of 1932, shortly after returning to the practice of Christianity, he tried again, this time in verse. But again he quickly abandoned the project. Then, in August of the same year, he suddenly found the right method.
He had been at work for some time on a projected book about the allegorical love-poetry of the Middle Ages, and in consequence he had made a thorough study of the workings of allegory. Though Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was outside the scope of his project, he had known and loved it since childhood, and now its example rose before him. While staying with Arthur Greeves in Belfast he began to write what he called The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism. As he himself said of Bunyan’s book, ‘Now, as never before, the whole man was engaged’. In a fortnight this witty and often moving allegory of a modern pilgrim’s journey to Christianity was finished.
The writing of stories in prose came almost incredibly easy to Lewis. ‘It’s such fun after sweating over verse,’ he said, ‘like free-wheeling.’ He worked fast, managed to write almost everything in one draft, and never made more than minimal revisions. This was in marked contrast to Tolkien who, though he wrote fast, took endless pains over revision and regarded it as a continuing process that was not necessarily complete when the book was published. The two men were also very different in their attitudes to the manuscripts of their work. Tolkien invariably kept all his drafts and his notes; Lewis just as invariably tore his up as soon as the book reached print. He also tore up other people’s. Tolkien recalled: ‘He was indeed accustomed at intervals to throw away papers and books – and at such times he destroyed those that belonged to other people. He “lost” not only official documents sent to him by me, but sole MSS. of at least two stories.’
The most important fact about The Pilgrim’s Regress is one that can easily be missed because it is so obvious. Less than a year after he had become a Christian, Lewis already felt capable of telling other people about his own experiences, capable of being an ‘apologist’, a defender of Christianity by argument. There was to be no novitiate, no period in which he would wait for his understanding of his religion to mature and deepen. He must begin right away.
Nor was the book just to be a defence of Christianity. In it he also championed the two things which he believed had helped him along the road to belief: Reason, and ‘Romanticism’, by which he specifically meant the search for ‘Joy’. And in defending these two things he launched, in The Pilgrim’s Regress, a forceful and often bitter attack against almost every other form of thinking current in his time. For in describing the snares which the pilgrim encounters on his journey, Lewis enumerates not only traditional intellectual or emotional dangers (Ignorantia, Superbia, Orgiastica, Occultica, and so on) but also brings more contemporary enemies into the tale. At least, to him they were enemies.
Lewis had conceived a profound dislike not merely for T. S. Eliot’s poetry but for the whole modernist movement in the arts. In The Pilgrim’s Regress his hero lands in the middle of ‘the Clevers’, allegorical figures representing what Lewis thought were the objectionable features of the nineteen-twenties art forms. In a later edition of the book he added running headlines identifying the various members of the Clevers as ‘The poetry of the Silly Twenties’, ‘The swamp-literature of the Dirty Twenties’, and ‘The gibberish-literature of the Lunatic Twenties’. And it is not only the arts that come under attack in the book. Freudianism and Marxism are among the many other dangers that the pilgrim encounters, and Lewis’s feelings towards the whole era are summed up at the moment in the story when Reason attacks and slays the Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Age.
After the pilgrim has escaped from ‘darkest Zeitgeistheim’ he spends the night at the house of ‘Mr Sensible’, a learned but utterly shallow dilettante who undoubtedly represents Lewis’s view of many of his Oxford colleagues – well-read men, able to produce witty aphorisms for every occasion, but adhering to no religion or philosophy and living a shallow life; the kind of man in fact that Lewis was thinking of when he said that, in contrast, Hugo Dyson was ‘none of your damned dilettanti’. Then, from the house of Mr Sensible, the pilgrim John journeys into sterner regions of the mind; and here the book launches an attack on another of Lewis’s enemies.
Sheltering in a hut and attempting to survive by extreme asceticism are three Pale Men, ‘Humanist’, ‘Neo-Classical’, and ‘Neo-Angular’. The first two profess no religion, but Neo-Angular is a believer in ‘the Landlord’, the figure that stands for God in the allegory. His practice of religion, however, is a very different thing from the orthodoxy which John eventually embraces. ‘My ethics are based on dogma, not on feeling,’ he tells John, and he disapproves of John’s search for ‘the Island’, the allegorical representation of ‘Joy’, telling him that it is the wrong reason for the pilgrimage. He also declares that John should not speak directly to ‘Mother Kirk’ (the Church) but should ‘learn from your superiors the dogmata in which her deliverances have been codified for general use’. Lewis explained this part of the allegory in a letter to a friend: ‘What I am attacking in Neo-Angular is a set of people who seem to me to be trying to make of Christianity itself one more highbrow, Chelsea, bourgeois-baiting fad. T. S. Eliot is the single man who sums up the thing I am fighting against.’
Eliot’s conversion to Christianity had by this time become a matter of public knowledge, but it had not endeared him to Lewis, who felt that Eliot’s form of religion was ‘High and Dry’, not merely sectarian in its Anglo-Catholicism but also emotionally barren and counter-romantic. So in The Pilgrim’s Regress a character dismisses the fact that Neo-Angular is a Christian by suggesting that he may be only ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’.
The book’s title is explained in the last section. John the pilgrim, after crossing by Mother Kirk’s aid the chasm of original sin, has no sooner become regenerate as a Christian than he is told to retrace his steps. This he does, passing once more through the regions of the mind and seeing them for the delusions they really were. He comes at last to his childhood home of Puritania, and it is from the gate of his parents’ cottage that he finally climbs the foothills towards the mountain where stands the Landlord’s Castle, the City of God. He has come at last to true ‘Joy’, and has found it in – of all places – the religion of his childhood.
This element of revisiting childhood, combined with the attack on contemporary ideas, did not escape the notice of the critics. ‘Though Mr Lewis’s parable claims to reassert romanticism,’ remarked The Times Literary Supplement reviewer when the story was published in 1933, ‘it is the romanticism of homesickness for the past, not of adventure towards the future, a “Regress” as he candidly avows.’
Among Lewis’s friends there was one who gradually began to think that the book’s title was particularly significant, though in rather a different way. Tolkien admired The Pilgrim’s Regress, but many years later he wrote of it: ‘It was not for some time that I realized that there was more in the title Pilgrim’s Regress than I had understood (or the author either, maybe). Lewis would regress. He would not re-enter Christianity by a new door, but by the old one: at least in the sense that in taking it up again he would also take up, or reawaken, the prejudices so sedulously planted in boyhood. He would become again a Northern Ireland protestant.’
*
Was Lewis an Ulster Protestant? In Surprised by Joy he denies that he had been brought up in any particularly puritanical form of religion, and he was very angry when a Catholic publisher who reissued The Pilgrim’s Regress identified ‘Puritania’ with Ulster. ‘My father’, declared Lewis, ‘was, by nineteenth-century and Church of Ireland standards, rather “high”.’ However, his diary of life at Wynyard School, written when he was ten years old, gives a rather different impression:
We were obliged to go to St John’s (Watford), a church which wanted to be Roman Catholic, but was afraid to say so. A kind of church abhorred by respectful [sic] Irish Protestants. In this abominable place of Romish hypocrites and English liars, the people cross themselves, bow to the Lord’s Table (which they have the vanity to call an altar), and pray to the Virgin.
Twenty-two years later when Lewis resumed the practice of religion he was still rather evangelical in his approach, making his Communion only at major festivals and generally preferring to attend Matins. After a time he increased his frequency of Communion to monthly intervals. Eventually he adopted the habit of communicating weekly and on major saints’ days. Indeed as the years passed he became distinctly more ‘Catholic’ in his practices. He began to make regular confessions, and came to believe in the importance of prayers for departed souls. Yet these things did not play a large part in his religious thought, or at least not in his Christian writings, where he rarely discussed them. Indeed, he tried to avoid anything that would classify him as ‘Anglo-Catholic’ or ‘Evangelical’. He hated such terms and maintained that to say that you were High Church or Low Church was to be wickedly schismatical.
For him, the real distinction lay elsewhere, not between High and Low at all but between religious belief that was orthodox and supernatural on the one hand, and ‘liberal’ and ‘demythologised’ on the other. He had been on a long journey before he arrived at Christianity, and now that he had arrived he was determined to accept the traditional doctrines of the Church; he wanted not to argue about them or to reinterpret them but to defend them. As a result he was highly critical of the ‘broad church’ as he called it, the liberalism which he believed to be the canker in modern Christianity. Among the targets for attack in The Pilgrim’s Regress is ‘Mr Broad’, who though a ‘Steward’ (a clergyman) doubts the necessity of actual conversion. ‘I wouldn’t for the world hold you back,’ he tells John. ‘At the same time there is a very real danger at your age of trying to make these things too definite. These great truths need reinterpretation in every age.’ Lewis thought he saw this attitude growing in the contemporary church, and he took a stand firmly in opposition. For him, the great truths did not need reinterpretation. They needed to be championed, to be defended as much against ‘liberalisers’ as against unbelievers. In this attitude he was in agreement with two ultra-orthodox defenders of the faith, G. K. Chesterton, whose apologetic writings had been an influence on him during his conversion, and Tolkien.
Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. He had hoped that Lewis too might become a Catholic, and he was disappointed that he had returned to membership of the Church of England (the equivalent of the Church of Ireland in which Lewis had been baptised). Tolkien was strongly unsympathetic towards the Church of England, not least because during his childhood his own mother, a Catholic convert, had been treated harshly by relatives who belonged to it – indeed he believed that this ‘persecution’ had hastened her death. As a result he was particularly sensitive to any shade of anti-Catholic prejudice.
Unfortunately Lewis retained more than a trace of the Belfast Protestant attitude to Catholics. In unguarded moments he and his brother Warnie might refer to Irish Catholics as ‘bog-trotters’ or ‘bograts’, and, though they usually avoided such crude remarks in Tolkien’s presence, there were moments of tension. ‘We were coming down the steps from Magdalen hall,’ Tolkien recalled, ‘long ago in the days of our unclouded association, before there was anything, as it seemed, that must be withheld or passed over in silence. I said that I had a special devotion to St John. Lewis stiffened, his head went back, and he said in the brusque harsh tones which I was later to hear him use again when dismissing something he disapproved of: “I can’t imagine any two persons more dissimilar.” We stumped along the cloisters, and I followed feeling like a shabby little Catholic caught by the eye of an “Evangelical clergyman of good family”
taking holy water at the door of a church. A door had slammed. Never now should I be able to say in his presence:
Bot Crystes mersy and Mary and Jon,
Thise am the grounde of alle my blysse
– The Pearl, 383-4; a poem that Lewis disliked
– and suppose that I was sharing anything of my vision of a great rood-screen through which one could see the Holy of Holies.’
Tolkien wrote this thirty years later, when other events had soured his recollections. In the early days of the friendship such moments were rare, and for the most part he was profoundly grateful for Lewis’s conversion. In October 1933 he wrote in his diary that friendship with Lewis, ‘besides giving constant pleasure and comfort, has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual – a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher – and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord’.
*
‘On Saturday last, I started to say my prayers again after having discontinued doing so for more years than I care to remember: this was no sudden impulse, but the result of a conviction of the truth of Christianity which has been growing on me for a considerable time.’
This was written not by Jack Lewis but by his brother Warnie. During the months when Jack was returning to Christianity, Warnie too was resuming the religious beliefs and practices of his childhood. Like Jack he had in boyhood drifted away from the Church. Now in 1931 his return to Christianity was different in manner from his brother’s. He indulged in few philosophical speculations, merely recording in his diary that his new-found belief was ‘a conviction for which I admit I should be hard put to find a logical proof, but which rests on the inherent improbability of the whole of existence being fortuitous, and the inability of the materialists to provide any convincing explanation of the origin of life’.
While he was at home at the Kilns early in 1931, Warnie went to Matins at the local church with Jack. But the brothers scarcely discussed their changing views, and soon afterwards Warnie was posted to Shanghai for his final months of army service. It was there, and without any knowledge that his brother was doing the same, that he made his Communion for the first time for many years on Christmas Day 1931. A few weeks later a letter from Jack reported that he too had made his Communion on that day. ‘I am delighted,’ Warnie wrote in his diary. ‘Had he not done so I, with my altered views, would have found – hardly a barrier between us, but a lack of complete identity of interest which I should have regretted.’ Jack, when he learnt of Warnie’s full return to Christianity, made the same comment: ‘What a mercy that the change in his views (I mean as regards religion) should have happened in time to meet mine – it would be awkward if one of us were still in the old state of mind.’
The brothers’ new ‘identity of interest’ was reflected when, after Warnie’s retirement from the army and his return to the Kilns as a permanent member of the household, the two of them almost immediately set off on a walking tour, their first together, up the Wye Valley. Warnie, despite his army training, was nervous about carrying a heavy pack for twenty miles or more a day, but he was soon being pleasantly surprised at the ease of it all, and at the end of their journey he judged it to be one of the best holidays he had ever had. This was in January 1933, and for many years afterwards a January walking tour was a regular fixture for the two brothers, quite independent of Jack’s annual walk with Barfield and the other friends of that set, which usually took place just after Easter. Warnie and Jack were at their happiest on these walks, talking about anything from beer to theology. ‘We discussed’, Warnie noted in January 1935 when he and Jack were walking in the Chilterns, ‘how useful it would be if there were a beer map of England, showing the areas controlled by each Beer Baron.’ Another day they argued about the nature of personal immortality. Warnie was less well-read than Jack, but with his speculative imagination and his common sense he was an excellent companion for his brother.
At home too they spent a lot of time together. In term, Jack now slept in his college rooms, partly so that he could go to chapel early in the morning and begin work immediately after breakfast. (Mrs Moore declared herself to be an atheist and was inclined to mock at the brothers’ return to Christianity.) But in the afternoons Jack came out to the Kilns, where he and Warnie took the family dogs for a walk, or worked in the garden, rebuilding paths and planting saplings, which they called ‘public works’. Warnie had a bedroom at the Kilns, but he kept most of his books in Magdalen, in one of his brother’s two sitting-rooms; and he usually spent the morning there, sorting out and typing transcripts of the Lewis family papers, a task that took him several years. In fact it became his chief occupation, for his army pension together with small private means meant that he did not need to take a paid job. He was able to spend much of his time going to concerts, and reading, which he did a great deal. He also got to know Jack’s friends when they dropped in at Magdalen.
He was typing one morning in February 1933 when (he wrote in his diary) ‘in came J’s friend Dyson from Reading – a man who gives the impression of being made of quick silver: he pours himself into a room on a cataract of words and gestures, and you are caught up in the stream – but after the first plunge, it is exhilarating. I was swept along by him to the Mitre Tap in the Turl (a distinct discovery this, by the way) where we had two glasses of Bristol Milk apiece and discussed China, Japan, staff officers, Dickens, house property as an investment, and, most utterly unexpected, “Your favourite reading’s Orlando Furioso isn’t it?” (deprecatory gesture as I got ready to deny this). “Sorry! Sorry! my mistake.” As we left the pub, a boy came into the yard and fell on the cobbles. Dyson (appealingly): “Don’t do that my boy: it hurts you and distresses us.”’
Hugo Dyson, on his visits to Oxford from Reading, became a frequent and most welcome interrupter of Warnie Lewis’s mornings: ‘At about half past eleven when I was at work in the front room in College, in burst Dyson in his most exuberant mood. He began by saying that it was such a cold morning that we would have to adjourn almost immediately to get some brandy. I pointed out to him that if he was prepared to accept whiskey as an alternative, it was available in the room. Having sniffed it he observed “it would be unpardonable rudeness to your brother to leave any of this” and emptied the remains of the decanter into the glass. After talking very loudly and amusingly for some quarter of an hour, he remarked airily “I suppose we can’t be heard in the next room?” then having listened for a moment, “Oh, it’s all right, it’s the pupil talking – your brother won’t want to listen to him anyway”. He next persuaded me to walk round to Blackwell’s with him, and here he was the centre of attraction to a crowd of undergraduates. Walking up to the counter he said: “I want a second hand so-and-so’s Shakespeare; have you got one?” The assistant: “Not a second hand one, sir, I’m afraid.” Dyson (impatiently): “Well, take a copy and rub it on the floor, and sell it to me as shop soiled.”’
*
Tolkien too was a regular caller while Warnie Lewis was at work in Magdalen. He and Jack were in the habit of spending an hour together on Monday mornings, generally concluding their conversation with a pint of beer in the Eastgate Hotel opposite the college. ‘This is one of the pleasantest spots in the week,’ remarked Jack. ‘Sometimes we talk English School politics; sometimes we criticize one another’s poems; other days we drift into theology or “the state of the nation”; rarely we fly no higher than bawdy or puns.’
By ‘bawdy’ Lewis meant not obscene stories but rather old-fashioned barrack-room jokes and songs and puns. For example, he greatly relished one of his pupils’ perfectly serious description of courtly love as ‘a vast medieval erection’, and in meetings of the Coalbiters he and the other members of that club listened with delight to scurrilous jests composed in Icelandic by Tolkien, who was a past master of bawdy in several languages. Lewis believed that to be acceptable, bawdy ‘must have nothing cruel about it. It must not approach anything near the pornographic. Within these limits I think it is a good and wholesome genre.’
As to ‘English School politics’, these became less turbulent after 1931 when – chiefly thanks to Lewis’s part in the campaign – Tolkien’s syllabus reforms were accepted by the Faculty, with the result that the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English parts of the course became much more attractive to undergraduates, and the study of Victorian literature was virtually abandoned. Lewis was delighted at this victory, which as he put it ‘my party and I have forced upon the junto after hard fighting’.
Shortly after the new syllabus was put into effect, Lewis and Tolkien were both doing duty as examiners in the English School, together with Tolkien’s friend and former colleague from Leeds, E. V. Gordon. Lewis lost no opportunity of writing a jibe in the Beowulf metre at the two philologists’ performance in the viva voce examination sessions:
Two at the table in their talk borrowed
Gargantua’s mouth. Gordon and Tolkien
Had will to repeat well-nigh the whole
That they of Verner’s law and of vowel sorrows,
Cares of consonants, and case endings,
Heard by hearsay.
Never at board I heard
Viler vivas.
‘In fact’, Tolkien remarked of these lines, ‘during the sessions C. S. L.’s voice was the one most often heard.’
Outside term time, Tolkien and Lewis sometimes went for afternoon walks together. Warnie Lewis liked to enjoy as much of his brother’s company as possible, and he was not always pleased about this. ‘Confound Tolkien!’ he wrote in his diary on one such occasion. ‘I seem to see less and less of J. every day.’ Knowing Warnie’s feelings, Jack took a great deal of trouble not to leave his brother out of anything and, when Tolkien and he decided to spend an evening reading aloud the libretto of Wagner’s Die Walküre, Warnie was asked to join them even though he knew no German and could only take part by using an English translation. They began after tea, broke off for supper at the Eastgate – ‘where we had fried fish and a savoury omelette, with beer’ – and then returned to Jack’s rooms in Magdalen ‘and finished our play (and incidentally the best part of a decanter of very inferior whiskey),’ recorded Warnie. ‘Arising from the perplexities of Wotan we had a long and interesting discussion on religion which lasted until about half past eleven.’
Warnie was with Jack at a dinner in July 1933 when Tolkien and Hugo Dyson acted as joint hosts at Exeter College, of which they were both old members. ‘Dyson and Tolkien were in exuberant form,’ recorded Warnie. ‘I should like to have seen more of a man on the opposite side of the table, Coghill: big, pleasant, good looking.’ Later ‘the party broke up, Tolkien, Dyson, J., a little unobtrusive clergyman, and myself walking back to Magdalen where we strolled about in the grove, where the deer were flitting about in the twilight – Tolkien swept off his hat to them and remarked “Hail fallow well met”.’
There were also quite a few gatherings of this sort at which Warnie Lewis was not present. The English School ‘junto’ led by Lewis and Tolkien began to hold informal dinners. This was quite a large group, known as ‘the Cave’ and including a number of college tutors besides the nucleus of Lewis and his friends.
Sometimes a similar group, ‘the Oyster Club’, would gather to celebrate the end of examination-marking by eating oysters. Meanwhile the Coalbiters continued to meet, until at last they had read the major Icelandic sagas and both Eddas, when they were dissolved.
Such semi-formal groups were a regular feature of Oxford life, and there was certainly nothing remarkable about them. Nor was there anything particularly notable about a literary society in which Lewis and Tolkien were both involved for a few terms. It met at University College, where Lewis still taught a few pupils (though in English Literature now, rather than Philosophy). Its founder and organiser, like most of the members, was an undergraduate, Edward Tangye Lean, who edited the university magazine Isis and published a couple of novels while still studying for his degree. There were also a few dons present at the meetings. The club existed so that members could read unpublished compositions aloud, and ask for comments and criticisms. Tangye Lean named it ‘The Inklings’.
No record of its proceedings survives, though Tolkien recalled that in its original form the club soon died, probably when Tangye Lean left Oxford in 1933 for a career in journalism and broadcasting. Tolkien also remembered that among the unpublished works read aloud at its meetings was his own poem ‘Errantry’. That poem (which begins ‘There was a merry passenger, A messenger, a mariner’) was published soon afterwards in the Oxford Magazine. Warnie Lewis read it, admired it, and declared it to be ‘a real discovery’, not least because of its unusual metre. Meanwhile Jack Lewis had recently finished reading a longer work by Tolkien. On 4 February 1933 he wrote to Arthur Greeves: ‘Since term began I have had a delightful time reading a children’s story which Tolkien has just written. I have told you of him before: the one man absolutely fitted, if fate had allowed, to be a third in our friendship in the old days, for he also grew up on W. Morris and George MacDonald. Reading his fairy tale has been uncanny – it is so exactly like what we would both have longed to write (or read) in 1916: so that one feels he is not making it up but merely describing the same world into which all three of us have the entry.’ The story was called The Hobbit.
Tolkien had invented it partly to amuse his own children, and certainly without any serious thought of publication. He had not even bothered to finish typing out a fair copy, but had left it broken off some way before the end. Lewis, much as he liked the story, was by no means certain of the measure of Tolkien’s achievement. ‘Whether it is really good’, he remarked to Greeves, ‘is of course another question: still more, whether it will succeed with modern children.’
*
Tolkien ought, on the face of it, to have been an ideal companion for Lewis and Barfield on their walking tours. But when he did accompany them he found that twenty miles or so a day, carrying a heavy pack, was more than he liked.
Tolkien’s own idea of a walk in the countryside involved frequent stops to examine plants or insects, and this irritated Lewis. When Tolkien spent some time at Malvern on holiday with the Lewis brothers in 1947, Warnie remarked: ‘His one fault turned out to be that he wouldn’t trot at our pace in harness; he will keep going all day on a walk, but to him, with his botanical and entomological interests, a walk, no matter what its length, is what we would call an extended stroll, while he calls us “ruthless walkers”.’
Lewis once described an event that might be imagined to have happened on one of his and Tolkien’s rural expeditions:
We were talking of dragons, Tolkien and I
In a Berkshire bar. The big workman
Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe
All the evening, from his empty mug
With gleaming eye, glanced towards us;
‘I seen ’em myself’, he said fiercely.
The lines, however, were invented by Lewis simply as a demonstration of the alliterative metre, and Tolkien said that they had no basis in fact: ‘The occasion is entirely fictitious. A remote source of Jack’s lines may be this: I remember him telling me a story of Brightman, the distinguished ecclesiastical scholar, who used to sit quietly in Common Room (in Magdalen) saying nothing except on rare occasions. Jack said that there was a discussion on dragons one night and at the end Brightman’s voice was heard to say, “I have seen a dragon.” Silence. “Where was that?” he was asked. “On the Mount of Olives,” he said. He relapsed into silence and never before his death explained what he meant.’
*
A great part of Lewis’s time was of course taken up with giving tutorials and lectures to undergraduates. When teaching, he turned for a model to the method of his old tutor Kirkpatrick. But while ‘Kirk’s’ ways had served well in their place, they were not liked by many of the undergraduates who climbed the stairs of Magdalen New Buildings for tutorials. Lewis (though he privately found tutorials boring) was conscientiously attentive to his pupils and to the essays they read aloud to him. But he rarely praised their work, preferring to engage them in heated argument about some remark they had made. This frightened all but the toughest-minded undergraduates. A few managed to fight back and even win a point – which was just what Lewis wanted them to do – but the majority were cowed by the force of his dialectic and went away abashed.
In the lecture room his manner was less fierce. He lectured clearly in a steady, even voice, and without dramatic gestures; though when he quoted, which he did a great deal, he read superbly. Sometimes, in his ‘Prolegomena to Medieval Studies’, he actually dictated important passages word by word to his audience, while all the time he cited facts, and this was what many undergraduates wanted. Other English School dons might be more entertaining – Nevill Coghill expounded Chaucer with urbane humour, and Tolkien’s Beowulf lectures were famed for their striking recitations – but Lewis handed out information, and his lectures were very well attended for this reason.
He was becoming known as an expert in medieval literature, and his ‘Prolegomena’ lectures, setting out the background required for a study of the medieval period, were soon regarded as indispensable. In his spare time from teaching he was still at work on his study of the allegorical love-poetry of the Middle Ages. When it was published in 1936 as The Allegory of Love it was greatly admired, not least for Lewis’s beautifully apt translations of medieval Latin and French poems into mock-medieval English verse of his own composition. Lewis did this to preserve the flavour of the originals, and also because he enjoyed writing pastiche. But fine as was the achievement of The Allegory of Love, he did not regard himself exclusively as a specialist in that period of literature. Indeed, as early as 1931 he had begun to take arms over a critical issue affecting the whole of English literature, an issue that was profoundly involved with his conversion to Christianity.
He believed that he saw a characteristic in literary criticism which was becoming more marked, and which disturbed him. This was the tendency for critics to discuss the personality of the writer as it could be deduced from his work, rather than the character of the writing. At best, Lewis believed, this produced a kind of pseudo-biography, at worst sheer psychological muck-raking. For example he quoted E. M. W. Tillyard saying that Paradise Lost ‘is really about the true state of Milton’s mind when he wrote it’. Lewis thought this was nonsense, and he wrote an essay attacking what he called ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’, declaring: ‘A poet does what no one else can do: what, perhaps, no other poet can do; but he does not express his personality.’ The essay was published in an academic journal; Tillyard replied, and a public controversy began between them.
Lewis’s attack was partially justified. In its extreme form this ‘biographical’ tendency in criticism is objectionable. Yet there are also grounds for supposing that Lewis’s attitude to it grew from something deep-seated in his own personality. In saying this one is of course falling into the very Personal Heresy that he attacked. Nevertheless it needs to be said.
He had always been shy of the emotions. He was aware of this himself, and he said it was because in his childhood he had been embarrassed by his father’s ups and downs of mood. In reaction he tried to cultivate a detachment from passing shades of sorrow and happiness, and to maintain a calmly cheerful exterior. Taking this one stage further, he also abstained from speculations about his own psychological make-up and that of his friends. There was of course no reason why he should speculate about his own personality. On the other hand, given his strange and perhaps inexplicable attachment to Mrs Moore, there were perhaps reasons why he should not.
This attitude was held even more deeply by him after his conversion. He managed to incorporate it into his Christianity, declaring that it was a Christian’s duty to get on with doing the will of God and not to waste time tinkering with his own psychology. ‘To know how bad we are’, he said, ‘is an excellent recipe for becoming much worse.’ His own motto for the conducting of his life was
Man, please thy Maker and be merry,
And set not by this world a cherry.
Was this deliberate lack of interest in his own personality the cause of an alteration in Lewis’s manner after his conversion? At all events Owen Barfield gradually became aware that something was happening to Lewis during this period. ‘Looking back over the last thirty years,’ Barfield wrote shortly after Lewis’s death, ‘it appears to me that I have throughout all that time been thinking, pondering, wondering, puzzling over the individual essence of my old friend. The puzzlement has had to do above all with the great change that took place in him between the years 1930 and 1940 – a change which roughly coincided with his conversion but which did not appear, and does not appear in retrospect, to be inevitably or even naturally connected with it.’
In particular Barfield noticed that, once this change had occurred, Lewis had ‘deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals’. He also observed that something a little strange was happening to Lewis’s manner as a writer.
One example in particular stuck in Barfield’s memory. After Tillyard’s rejoinder to the ‘Personal Heresy’ essay had been published, Lewis wrote a reply to that rejoinder which he called ‘An Open Letter to Dr Tillyard’. Barfield was staying at the Kilns at the time and, when Lewis handed it to him, he read it with admiration, but also (he said) ‘with a certain underlying – what is the word? – restlessness, malaise, bewilderment – that gradually increased until, when I came to the passage at the end:
