1933–1939
1933–1939
A Man of Letters: Literary Scholarship and Criticism
By 1933, Lewis’s Oxford world seemed to be a stable place. He had been reelected to his tutorial fellowship in English, a position he retained until December 1954, when he moved to Cambridge. His family life was settled. The Kilns had been extended, and its grounds were being tamed and replanted. Warnie, now retired from the British army, had settled in with Lewis and Mrs. Moore at The Kilns for good. To Lewis, it seemed as if the “old days” had been restored. After the arrival of Warnie, Lewis increasingly came to see The Kilns as a re-creation or extension of Little Lea. It was as if everything that had happened between 1914 and 1932 had been reversed.[360]
That sense of continuity with bygone days was reinforced by Warnie’s decision to edit the Lewis family letters, papers, and diaries, cataloguing them and finally typing them up on his old Royal typewriter. The result of Warnie’s efforts, originally intended simply as a record of “ordinary, undistinguished” people, became the eleven volumes of The Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family, 1850–1930. They have since become an essential research tool for Lewis scholars.
Lewis thus reestablished the “secure base” that had been taken away from him by the death of his mother and the scattering of his family. As Lewis remarked to Greeves late in 1933, “stability” was now his strong point.[361] Having realised that he would never achieve fame as a poet, Lewis was now focussing on the world of literary scholarship, seeing this as the field in which he could achieve distinction, perhaps even eminence.
Lewis the Teacher: Oxford Tutorials
Lewis’s primary responsibility from 1927–1954 was tutorial teaching and university lecturing. He was a member of the Faculty of English by virtue of his teaching appointment at Magdalen. Membership in this faculty permitted him to give lectures open to all Oxford University students. Unlike his colleague J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis was never a “professor” at Oxford University. He was always—as the painted college nameplate on his staircase in the Magdalen New Building attested—simply “Mr. C. S. Lewis.” Given the importance of tutorials and lectures for Lewis’s academic life, it is appropriate to reflect on what we know of these.
During the nineteenth century, Oxford University developed the weekly tutorial as the foundation of its pedagogy. Colleges established “tutorial fellowships” with the object of raising academic standards, particularly in Literae Humaniores. Typically, a tutorial was an hour long. To begin with, a student would read aloud an essay of his own composition. The remainder of the time was taken up with close discussion of the student’s ideas and arguments.
Lewis’s account of a typical working day during the eight teaching weeks of Oxford’s full term indicates how his faith was now woven into his life, along with his heavy teaching load. Apart from Mondays and Saturdays, his working days from 1931 onwards looked like this:
7.15 a.m. Woken by scout with cup of tea
8.00 a.m. Chapel
8.15 a.m. Breakfast with Dean of Chapel and others
9.00 a.m. Tutorials begin, continuing until 1.00 p.m.
1.00 p.m. Driven home to Headington (Lewis did not drive)
Afternoon: working in garden, walking the dog, time with “the family”
4.45 p.m. Driven back to college
5.00 p.m. Tutorials recommence, ending at 7.00 p.m.
7.15 p.m. Dinner[362]
While at Great Bookham, Lewis had fallen into a set routine that continued, with appropriate adaptations to his circumstances, for the rest of his working life. The morning was set aside for working, the early afternoon was set aside for solitary walking, the late afternoon for more work, and the evening for talking. Lewis’s walks at The Kilns were often not strictly solitary; he was generally accompanied on these by whatever dog Mrs. Moore happened to own at the time. Yet the routine seemed to work, and Lewis saw little reason to change it.
Students having tutorials with Lewis at Magdalen in the early 1930s often commented on the “clacking” of the typewriter from behind a door, as Warnie worked on The Lewis Family Papers in the smaller sitting room, while their tutorial proceeded in the larger. Lewis himself never learned to type, always depending on pens. One reason for this was that the same “native clumsiness” arising from Lewis’s having only one joint in his thumbs prevented him from using a typewriter properly.
Yet there is more to it than this. Lewis actively chose not to type. This mechanical mode of writing, he believed, interfered with the creative process in that the incessant clacking of the typewriter keys dulled the writer’s appreciation of the rhythms and cadences of the English language. When reading Milton or other poets, or composing a work of one’s own, Lewis argued, it was essential to appreciate how the writing sounded. As he later advised anyone thinking about writing seriously, “Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.”[363]
By the mid-1930s, Lewis’s tutorial load was heavy. We possess a number of accounts of Lewis’s approach to tutorials during the 1930s, all of which emphasise his acutely critical questioning, his desire not to waste time, and a certain degree of impatience with weaker or lazier students. Lewis did not see it as his responsibility to impart information to his students. He resented and resisted what some then called the “gramophone” model of tuition, in which the tutor simply imparted the knowledge that the student had so signally failed to discover for himself.
Lewis saw himself as enabling the student to develop the skills necessary to uncover and evaluate such knowledge for himself. For example, George Sayer (1914–2005) recalls Lewis using a strongly Socratic method in their tutorials of the mid-1930s, perhaps modelled on his experience when studying at Great Bookham under Kirkpatrick. “What exactly do you mean by the word sentimental, Mr. Sayer? . . . If you are not sure what the word means or what you mean by it, wouldn’t it be very much better if you ceased to use it at all?”[364]
The most perceptive account of Lewis as a tutor at this time is generally thought to be by John Lawlor (1918–1999), who became one of only two students to study English at Magdalen College in October 1936. Lawlor’s finely observed account of tutorials with Lewis captures something significant about both the man and his pedagogic method. He recalls the jovial and resonant bellow, “Come in,” when the student, wearing a black gown and nervously clutching his flimsy essay, clambered up the stairway and knocked on the doors of Lewis’s rooms; the red-faced bald man, dressed in baggy jacket and trousers, who would sit smoking in his shabbily comfortable armchair, doodling and occasionally taking notes, while the student read his essay for about twenty minutes; and the inevitable scrupulous examination of the essay that followed. Lewis had no hesitation in finding fault with what was said, and perhaps more important, with what had also been left unsaid.[365]
For Lawlor, it was not difficult to work out that Lewis did not really enjoy tutorials; students who made the experience more engaging and interesting were therefore especially welcome to Lewis. For at its best, as Lawlor rightly notes, the Oxford tutorial provides an “unmatched experience in intellectual exhilaration—a sight of wide horizons and a growing sense of . . . the mastery of the thing.”[366] The tutorial was not simply about the accumulation of knowledge; it was also about developing critical thinking—fostering a spirit of analysing and evaluating important ideas or beliefs in an effort to calibrate their quality and to improve them, and to discover unexamined assumptions and challenge them.
Lawlor’s feelings towards Lewis changed as the term progressed. He gradually “passed from dislike and hostility to stubborn affection, and then to gratitude for the weekly bout in which no quarter was asked or given.” Yet for all the argumentativeness and rhetorical force of Lewis’s interaction with his students, Lawlor recalls a point of no small significance: “One thing Lewis never did, in any recollection I have of him. He never imposed his Christianity on the argument.”
By the 1940s, Lewis was famous. John Wain (1925–1994) recalls that students of that period would approach Lewis’s room through an “echoing antechamber of reputation,” to experience “dense clouds of smoke from a rapidly puffed cigarette or pipe,” a “brisk argumentative manner,” and above all “a love of debate.”[367] Yet perhaps the most characteristic memory of Lewis’s tutorials concerns his personal appearance. Terms such as “shabby,” “untidy,” or “unkempt” occur frequently in accounts of Lewis the tutor from his students. Warnie once remarked on his brother’s “complete indifference” to the clothes he wore—such as his old tweed sports jacket, or a pair of slightly tattered carpet slippers. Lewis was a heavy smoker, usually puffing a pipe during tutorials, with clouds of smoke enveloping the room. Lewis’s habit of using his carpet as an ashtray added further to the general impression of grand decrepitude usually then associated with confirmed bachelors living on their own.
Yet Lewis’s untidiness was seen with affection by his students—a sign of his indifference to external matters, arising from his love and knowledge of deeper and more significant matters. Furthermore, it fitted perfectly with an Oxford stereotype of that period—the bachelor don, whose only female company was an ageing mother. It suited Lewis perfectly to be characterised in this way, in that it deflected attention from the true nature of his unusual domestic arrangements.
One of Lewis’s abilities must be noted here, for it is of obvious relevance to his gifts as a writer: his formidable memory. Lewis’s mastery of the Renaissance skill of the ars memorativa unquestionably contributed to the success of his Oxford lectures, enabling him to recite quotes from memory. Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980), an “angry young man” of the 1960s, whom Lewis tutored in the 1940s, recalls Lewis playing a memory game with him. Tynan would read aloud a line he had arbitrarily chosen from a book he had selected from Lewis’s library. Lewis would then identify the work in question, and set the line in its proper context.[368]
Lewis, it seems, could remember texts primarily because he had absorbed their deep inner logic. His diaries bear witness to his habit of reading an astonishing number of texts; his personal library contains annotations indicating when a book was first read, and then read again. He was good at explaining complex ideas to others, because he had first explained them to himself: “I’m a professional teacher and explanation happens to be one of the things I’ve learned to do.”[369] Lewis achieved this feat partly by neglecting other sources of reading—such as daily newspapers. As a result, even his friends sometimes found him worryingly ignorant of current affairs.
William Empson (1906–1984), a leading literary critic who had little time for Lewis’s views on Milton, nevertheless declared that “he was the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read.”[370] It showed. Students attending his lectures were impressed by his grasp not simply of the texts of leading works of literature—above all, Milton’s Paradise Lost—but his deeper grasp of their internal structure. Rarely did university lectures both inform and inspire; yet these quickly became the hallmarks of Lewis’s academic lecturing style.
Lewis the Teacher: Oxford Lectures
With such a capacity for memorization, it was perhaps inevitable that Lewis would deliver his lectures without notes. Lewis gave his first lectures at Oxford in October 1924. Even then, he had decided that he would not speak from a full text. Lectures that were simply read out to their audiences, he explained to his father, tend to “send people to sleep.” He would have to learn to talk to his audiences, not to recite his lectures to them.[371] He had to engage their attention, not merely discharge information.
By the end of the 1930s, Lewis had established a reputation as one of Oxford’s finest lecturers, drawing crowds that others could only dream of attracting. His robust, resonant, clear tone—described by one hearer as a “port wine and plum pudding voice”—was ideal for lecture podiums. Lewis spoke only from brief notes, which typically identified quotes that were to be used, and points that were to be made. The fluent performance which followed dazzled most of the audience. Perhaps this was just as well, as Lewis did not allow time for questions at the end of his lectures. His lectures were a rhetorical event, a theatrical performance, complete in their own terms. Like a Renaissance artist, Lewis threw open a window on a larger landscape,[372] extending his audience’s vision.
It was inevitable that Oxford University would formally recognise Lewis’s abilities. Although Lewis held only a college appointment as tutorial fellow in English at Magdalen, the university bestowed additional titles upon him in recognition of his widening academic role. From 1935, he appears in official Oxford University publications as a “faculty lecturer in English literature”;[373] from 1936, as “University lecturer in English literature.”[374] While remaining based at Magdalen College, Lewis was gaining wider recognition within the university as a whole. The publication of his Allegory of Love in 1936 would enhance the esteem in which he was held still further.
Lewis’s most famous Oxford lecture courses were two sets of sixteen lectures, entitled “Prolegomena to Medieval Studies” and “Prolegomena to Renaissance Studies.” These lectures displayed a vast range of reading in the primary sources, arranged and explained in terms that were both accessible and interesting. The substance of these lectures, developed over many years, would eventually appear in his The Discarded Image (1964). Lewis made no secret of the fact that he found deep satisfaction in these older ways of thinking. “The old Model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors.”[375]
7.1 The Examination Schools, close to Magdalen College, where Lewis delivered many of his lectures during his career at Oxford University. Completed in 1892, when this photograph was taken, these buildings acted as both examination rooms and lecture theatres for the university.
Yet it would be unfair to dismiss Lewis as antiquarian and backward looking. His point, as we shall see, is that the study of the past helps us to appreciate that the ideas and values of our own age are just as provisional and transient as those of bygone ages. The intelligent and reflective engagement with the thought of a bygone era ultimately subverts any notion of “chronological snobbery.” Reading texts from the past makes it clear that what we now term “the past” was once “the present,” which proudly yet falsely regarded itself as having found the right intellectual answers or moral values that had eluded its predecessors. As Lewis later put it, “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”[376] The quest for a philosophia perennis—a deeper view of reality that underlies all things at all times—was unquestionably one of the factors in leading Lewis to rediscover the Christian faith.
Yet some at Oxford around this time formed the impression that Lewis saw his obligatory tutoring and lecturing as getting in the way of the thing he really wanted to do—write books. Tutorials and lectures might inform those books; nevertheless, Lewis preferred reading books and discussing them with informed colleagues—the Inklings being a case in point—to listening to somewhat amateurish and uninformed evaluations of their significance from his students. In what follows, we shall look at Lewis’s first prose work, and explore how it both illuminates his past and foreshadows his future.
The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933): Mapping the Landscape of Faith
In January 1933, Lewis wrote to Guy Pocock, an editor at the London publishing firm of J. M. Dent. Would they be interested in publishing a book he had just completed? It would be “a kind of Bunyan up to date”[377]—a reference to John Bunyan’s classic Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–1684). Lewis’s hesitant tone in this letter clearly reflects some embarrassment about the poor sales figures of his earlier work Dymer. He hastens to assure Pocock that this new book would be published under his own name. Within three weeks, Pocock had made the decision to publish The Pilgrim’s Regress.
Lewis wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress, his first novel, in a burst of sustained literary activity between 15 and 29 August 1932, while visiting his close friend and confidant Arthur Greeves at his Belfast home, Bernagh. (This was just across the road from Lewis’s own recently sold childhood home, Little Lea.) Lewis’s first prose book is best understood as an imaginative mapping of the landscape of faith. As both its title and the correspondence with Pocock suggest, this book can be thought of as taking its inspiration from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Yet it is important to approach this work on its own terms, and not to expect it to be either a simple retelling of Bunyan’s allegory for the modern age or a narrative account of Lewis’s own conversion. For Lewis, the key issue he wanted to explore was not the personal story “Lewis meets God,” but the intellectual issue of how reason and imagination may be both affirmed and integrated within a Christian vision of reality.
The Pilgrim’s Regress can be read at several levels. It is most plausibly read as Lewis’s attempt to clear his mind—to put into words and images the processes of thought that had shattered his settled intellectual world during the previous three years. Lewis’s conversion had forced him to redraw his intellectual maps, renegotiating his “treaty with reality.” The new “treaty with reality,” set out in this early work, creates space for reason and imagination within an ordered world. It offers meaningful norms and criteria of evaluation without degenerating into either the anti-intellectualism of more extreme forms of Romanticism, or the emotionally impoverished forms of rationalism that eliminate the transcendent as a matter of principle.
Lewis was a strongly visual thinker, often using images to make important philosophical and theological points—for example, his famous image of the beam of light in a dark toolshed to make a distinction between “looking along” and “looking at.” The Pilgrim’s Regress is not a philosophical defence of faith, but the construction of an almost medieval mappa mundi—a cosmographical account of the situation in which humanity finds itself and its struggle to find its way to its true goal and destiny. Lewis treats the ability of the map to make sense of human experience as an indication of its reliability.
To many readers today, this work seems opaque and complex, peppered with a needlessly large number of difficult quotations. This sense of an impenetrable text (Lewis himself later admitted the book’s “needless obscurity”[378]) is perhaps heightened by the book’s original title, Pseudo-Bunyan’s Periplus: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism, wisely shortened when Lewis corrected the proofs. Lewis himself seems to have belatedly realised the difficulties that many readers experienced in engaging with his first book, and appears to have learned from this in his later writings.
Most modern readers find The Pilgrim’s Regress to be like a cryptic crossword puzzle. It provides baffling clues about people and movements in English intellectual and cultural life in the 1920s and early 1930s that need to be decoded and disentangled. Whom did Lewis have in mind when he wrote about “Mr. Neo-Angular”? In fact, Lewis had T. S. Eliot in his gunsights here. Yet most readers will wonder what all the fuss is about. By making his book so focussed on intellectual and cultural movements of his own time, Lewis made himself less intelligible to later readers, who don’t know these people or movements, or why they might be important.
Lewis himself realised there was a problem. By 1943, a decade after the work’s original publication, Lewis conceded that there had been a “profound change” in patterns of thought,[379] so that the movements he described were no longer familiar to many readers. The world had moved on; old threats had passed into history, and new ones arisen. In one sense, The Pilgrim’s Regress is likely to be of interest mostly to intellectual historians. It is now one of the least read of Lewis’s works.
Yet the work can be read without the need to make such connections. Indeed, Lewis himself condemned “the pernicious habit of reading allegory as if it were a cryptogram to be translated.”[380] The best way to understand this book is to see it as a quest for the true origins, objects, and goals of human desire. Inevitably, this involves identifying and critiquing “false turns,” which Lewis often engages in such detail that he loses his readers’ attention. In what follows, we shall explore the main themes of the work, without becoming trapped in the fine details of Lewis’s analysis.
The central character of The Pilgrim’s Regress is the pilgrim—“John”—who has visions of an Island that evokes a sense of intense yet transitory longing. At times, John is overwhelmed by this yearning as he struggles to understand it. Where does it come from? What is he yearning for? A subsidiary, yet important, theme concerns a sense of moral obligation. Why do we long to do right? Where does this sense of obligation come from? And what does it signify—if anything? For Lewis, human experience—moral and aesthetic—is littered with false attempts to understand this sense of longing, and equally false understandings of this longing’s true object. The Pilgrim’s Regress is basically an exploration of these false turns along the road of life.
Like many before him, Lewis chose to describe this philosophical quest in terms of a journey. He uses the image of a road leading to the mysterious Island, with badlands on either side. To the north lie objective ways of thinking based on reason; to the south, subjective ways based on emotion. The farther John departs from the central road, the more extreme these positions become.
It is clear that the relationship between reason and imagination is of critical importance to Lewis. The Pilgrim’s Regress defends rational thought against arguments based purely on feeling, yet refuses to accept an exclusively rational approach to faith. For Lewis, there has to be a position which reconciles reason and imagination, as indicated in his sonnet “Reason,” probably written in the 1920s. This poem contrasts the clarity of reason (symbolised by the “maid” Athene) with the creativity of the imagination (symbolised by Demeter, the earth-mother). How, Lewis wondered, might these seemingly opposed forces be reconciled?[381]
As the narrative of The Pilgrim’s Regress proceeds, it becomes clear that such a reconciliation can be provided only by “Mother Kirk”—an allegorical figure which some have interpreted specifically as Catholicism, but which Lewis clearly intended to be an image of nondenominational Christianity. This was the “mere Christianity” of which the Puritan writer Richard Baxter (1615–1691) wrote, and which Lewis increasingly came to expound in the 1940s.
As John travels north of the road, he encounters ways of thinking which are deeply suspicious of feeling, intuition, and imagination. The coldly and clinically “rational” northern region is the realm of “rigid systems,” wooden orthodoxies characterised by “an arrogant and hasty selectiveness on some narrow a priori basis,” which leads to the incorrect conclusion that “every feeling . . . is suspect.” To the south of the road, however, he encounters “boneless souls whose doors stand open day and night” to anyone, especially those who offer some kind of emotional or mystical “intoxication.” “Every feeling is justified by the mere fact that it is felt.”[382] The rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment, romantic art, modern art, Freudianism, asceticism, nihilism, hedonism, classical humanism, and religious liberalism are all located on this map, only to be tried and found wanting.
This dialectic between “northernness” and “southernness” provides Lewis with a framework to explore the proper relation of reason and imagination, focussing especially on the theme of longing. Some try to explain “Desire” away; others attach it to false objects. Lewis remarks that he has made all these mistakes himself: “I have myself been deluded by every one of these false answers in turn, and have contemplated each of them earnestly enough to discover the cheat.”[383]
So what is the ultimate object of Desire—this “intense longing”? Lewis here anticipates his “argument from desire,” which is central to the Christian apologetic he would develop further in his wartime radio broadcasts a decade later, and subsequently collect together in Mere Christianity. Lewis opens up a line of thought originally employed by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)—namely, that there is an “abyss” within the human soul, which is so great that only God can fill it. Or, to change the imagery, there is a “chair” in the human soul, awaiting some guest who has yet to arrive. “If nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist.”[384]
Our experience of this Desire both discloses our true identity and intimates our true goal. We initially understand this Desire as a yearning for something tangible within the world; then we realise that nothing within the world is able to satisfy our Desire. John, the pilgrim, initially desires the Island. Yet he gradually comes to realise that his true longing is actually for the “Landlord”—Lewis’s way of referring to God. All other explanations and proposed goals for this sense of yearning fail to satisfy, intellectually or existentially. They are “false objects” of Desire, whose falsity is ultimately exposed by their failure to satisfy the deepest yearnings of humanity.[385] There is indeed a chair in the human soul, and its intended occupant is God.
If a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.[386]
In the light of Lewis’s more mature ways of thinking, one further point stands out as being particularly interesting. The Pilgrim’s Regress actually describes two journeys—there, and back again. Having realised the true significance of the Island, the pilgrim now retraces his steps. Yet when the pilgrim walks back through the same landscape after coming to faith—the “regress” of the book’s title—he discovers that its appearance has changed. He sees it in a new way. His Guide explains that he is “seeing the land as it really is.” His discovery of the true state of affairs changes the way he sees things. “Your eyes are altered. You see nothing now but realities.”[387] Lewis here anticipates one of the leading themes of his later writings: that the Christian faith allows us to see things as they really are. There are strong hints here of some images in the New Testament, such as eyes being opened and veils being removed.[388]
It is important not to treat The Pilgrim’s Regress as embodying Lewis’s definitive understanding of the relationship of faith, reason, and imagination. Although some writers have suggested that Lewis’s mature thought appears almost full blown in his earlier writings, it is not quite as straightforward as this. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Lewis was exploring the relationship between reason and the imagination, between “the true” and “the real”—in particular, the relationship between rational argument and the use of imaginative narratives. At this stage, Lewis tends to see the imagination as the primary means by which an individual is brought to a point of giving serious rational attention to the Christian faith; yet he does not see it as the means by which that faith may be entered.
In part, Lewis’s development of these points was due to his interaction with colleagues, who helped him to sharpen and refine his thinking. One of the most significant groups to help him improve and develop his ideas, and their literary expressions, was the small literary group known as the “Inklings,” to which we now turn.
The Inklings: Friendship, Community, and Debate
Lewis’s regular meetings with Tolkien, which date back to 1929, reflected an increasingly close professional and personal bond between the two men. Tolkien developed a habit (not in any way discouraged by Lewis) of dropping in on his friend on Monday mornings for a drink, some gossip (usually about faculty politics), and a swapping of news about each other’s literary works. It was, Lewis declared, “one of the pleasantest spots in the week.”[389] As their personal friendship deepened, they even began to dream about occupying the two Merton Chairs of English and redirecting the course of Oxford’s Faculty of English together.[390] At this stage, Tolkien was Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a fellow of Pembroke College; Lewis was simply a fellow of Magdalen College. But both dreamed of a better and brighter future. And already there were hints of blossoming literary projects. In February 1933, Lewis told Greeves that he had just had a “delightful time reading a children’s story” by Tolkien.[391] This, of course, was The Hobbit, which would eventually be published in 1937.
This personal friendship between Lewis and Tolkien was supplemented by the many literary clubs, societies, and circles which existed in Oxford around this time. Sometimes these focussed on a specific college (for example, Nevill Coghill and Hugo Dyson both belonged to the Exeter College Essay Club while they were undergraduates in the 1920s). Sometimes they focussed on literary or linguistic themes (such as the Kolbítar, founded by Tolkien to enhance appreciation of the Old Norse language and its literature). Yet while Lewis and Tolkien were both active members of various literary networks within Oxford, their own friendship transcended these, deepening when Lewis converted to Christianity by the end of 1931. Tolkien read parts of The Hobbit to Lewis; Lewis read parts of The Pilgrim’s Regress to Tolkien.
This small nucleus would expand into a group which has since acquired almost legendary status—the Inklings. There was never any intention that this would become an elite discussion group for matters of faith and literature. Like Topsy, it just “growed”—largely by accident and happenstance. Yet the invention of the Inklings in 1933 was as inevitable as the rising of the sun. That was how Lewis and Tolkien expanded their horizons: through books, through friends, and through friends discussing books.
The first addition to the Lewis-Tolkien axis was Lewis’s brother, Warnie, who was then developing a passion for the history of seventeenth-century France.[392] Like both Lewis and Tolkien, Warnie had served in the British army during the Great War. Tolkien seems to have acquiesced with gradually diminishing reluctance to the inclusion of Warnie in their discussions. Over a period of time, others were drawn in. Most of the early members were already part of Lewis and Tolkien’s circle—such as Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, and Nevill Coghill. Others gradually attached themselves by invitation and mutual consent. There was no formal membership, and no agreed-upon means of electing new members.
There was no solemn initiation of the group, as in Tolkien’s legendary founding of the “Fellowship of the Ring.” There were no oaths, no pledges of allegiance; in fact, there was no name for the group until well after it had been formed. It was, as Tolkien put it, an “undetermined and unelected circle of friends.”[393] The Inklings were basically a group of friends with shared interests. The “gate-crashers” who came unbidden were not encouraged to return. The group’s collective identity was slow to emerge, and shifted over time. Its identity, to the extent that this can be pinpointed, lay in its focus on Christianity and literature—both terms being interpreted generously.
It is not clear at what point (or by whom) the group came to be called the Inklings. For Tolkien, it was always a “literary club.” Charles Williams, a member of the group from 1939 to 1945, does not use the term Inklings to refer to this group in his correspondence with his wife: it is simply the “Tolkien-Lewis group.”[394] The title Inklings—which Tolkien attributes to Lewis—suggested “people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas plus those who dabble in ink.”[395] This name was not original. It seems that Lewis borrowed the name of an earlier literary discussion group with which he had been associated, once it ceased to meet.
The original Inklings were a group of undergraduates who met in the rooms of Edward Tangye Lean (1911–1974)—the younger brother of David Lean, the future film director—at University College to read unpublished papers for discussion and criticism. Lean, who initiated and organised the group, chose the term Inklings to suggest the idea of dabbling with writing. Lewis and Tolkien were both invited to attend these predominantly undergraduate meetings. When Lean left Oxford in June 1933, the group ceased to function. Perhaps for that reason, Lewis felt it was permissible to appropriate the same name for the new group then coalescing around him and Tolkien.
One of the earliest references to the Inklings is found in a letter Lewis wrote to Charles Williams on 11 March 1936. Lewis had just read Williams’s novel The Place of the Lion (1931), and was delighted by it. It was clearly the sort of book he would have liked to have written himself—a philosophical novel, in which Platonic archetypes descend to earth in the form of animals. Oxford University Press then based its more commercial operations—such as the printing of Bibles and educational material—at Amen House in London, not far from St. Paul’s Cathedral, while retaining its academic publications base in Oxford. Lewis extended an invitation to Williams, who was working at Amen House, to visit him in Oxford and meet others who had read the book—himself, his brother, Tolkien, and Coghill, “all buzzing with excited admiration.” Together, they made up “a sort of informal club called the Inklings,”[396] focussing on issues having to do with writing and the Christian faith.
In effect, the group that gathered around Lewis and Tolkien acted as “critical friends” for the discussion and development of works in progress. The Inklings were not strictly a “collaborative group.” Its function was to hear works in progress read aloud and to offer criticism—not to plan such work. The only apparent exception here lies in the collection of essays gathered together to honour Charles Williams. This, however, was clearly a project initiated and driven by Lewis himself. It is important to note that only four other Inklings were involved, and that it included one author from outside the group: Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957). (The high profile of this collection of essays may have fostered the belief that Sayers was herself a member of the Inklings, but she was not.)
There are two cardinal errors that the student of Lewis could make concerning the Inklings: first, in giving them a retrospective significance and internal unity they did not really possess at the time; and second, in assuming that Lewis’s literary contacts and influences were limited to them.
Lewis was part of an extended writing community that went far beyond the Inklings, and expanded further after 1947, during which time the group continued to meet, but shed its more explicit literary functions. The importance of this wider community made up for an obvious shortcoming of the Inklings: there were no female members. In its historical context, this is not surprising; during the 1930s, Oxford University was still a firmly male institution, with its emerging women scholars restricted to a small group of all-women colleges, such as St. Hilda’s College, Somerville College, and Lady Margaret Hall. (Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1935 novel Gaudy Night is set in a fictional all-women college, and brings out well the prevailing university attitudes towards women of that time.)
Nevertheless, there are deeper issues here, reflecting Lewis’s views about women that many now find problematic. Lewis’s later writings—especially The Four Loves (1960)—give expression to the idea that masculine forms of friendship are essentially different from their feminine equivalents, suggesting that the exclusively male membership of the Inklings may have been deliberate, rather than happenstance.
Nevertheless, Lewis’s literary friendships included significant women authors such as Katharine Farrer, Ruth Pitter, Sister Penelope, and Dorothy L. Sayers. His letter to Janet Spens—tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall—offering a detailed appreciation of her Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1934), punctuated with a few fine scholarly quibbles, is one of many indications that, in matters of scholarship, Lewis was alert to erudition and blind to gender.[397]
There was a clear distinction—which at times became a source of tension—between those members of the Inklings who actually wrote, and those who merely commented. Nor did all members attend the meetings. Although nineteen names (all male) are linked with the Inklings throughout their history,[398] serious literary discussion often seems to have been limited to around half a dozen people in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College after dinner on Thursday evenings.
We possess a number of accounts of these meetings during the 1930s, all emphasising their joviality and informality. When half a dozen people were gathered in Lewis’s room, Warnie would make a pot of strong tea, pipes would be lit, and Lewis would ask whether anyone had brought something to read. There was no question of distributing a text for discussion; in fact, there appears to be little question of advance planning. The Inklings read texts aloud to each other for comment and criticism as and when they were ready. This did cause a certain degree of gentlemanly awkwardness, as Tolkien did not read particularly well—perhaps explaining why his university lectures were poorly attended. This problem eventually resolved itself when his son Christopher began to attend, and read his father’s works with a clear and attractive voice.
These Thursday evening sessions were supplemented by Tuesday lunchtime drinking sessions in the “Rabbit Room”—a private lounge at the back of the Eagle and Child (a public house known as the “Bird and Baby” to many Inklings) in St. Giles, made available to them by the pub’s landlord, Charles Blagrove. The Tuesday meetings were clearly understood to have a primarily social, rather than literary, function. These were supplemented from time to time during the summer months by outings to other public houses, such as The Trout, a riverside pub at Godstow, just north of Oxford.
There was never any doubt throughout the 1930s about the identity of the central figures of the group. The Inklings were a system of male planets orbiting its two suns, Lewis and Tolkien (the latter regularly nicknamed “Tollers”). Neither can be said to have dominated or directed the group, as if they had some proprietorial rights over its functions and fortunes. There was a tacit and unchallenged assumption, which was reinforced as their literary reputations grew, that these were the natural focus of the group.
7.2 A group of Inklings at The Trout, Godstow, near Oxford. From left to right: James Dundas-Grant, Colin Hardie, Dr. Robert E. Havard, Lewis, and Peter Havard (not a member of the Inklings).
As Lewis pointed out in his 1944 essay “The Inner Ring,” every group runs the risk of becoming an “Inner Ring,” or seeing itself as the “Important People” or the “People in the Know.” Did the Inklings fall into this trap? Some suspected so. And one event in particular suggests that there might be some substance to this suspicion.
Every five years, Oxford University elects a “Professor of Poetry.” Although sometimes poets of real substance were appointed—such as Matthew Arnold—the position was then usually determined by university politics, rather than poetic ability. The establishment weighed down in favour of Sir Edmund Chambers. One of the Inklings regarded this as an absurd choice. Adam Fox (1883–1977) suggested over breakfast one morning at Magdalen College that even he would make a better candidate. It was more a rhetorical gesture than a definite proposal; Fox was no poet, and had intended merely to criticise Chambers, not to promote himself. But for reasons that remain unclear, Lewis took this outlandish suggestion seriously. Fox’s name duly appeared on the list of three candidates, sponsored by Lewis and Tolkien. Lewis launched an aggressive campaign to get Fox elected over the heads of two other candidates, mobilising Inklings and their circle on Fox’s behalf. In the end, Lewis and his circle succeeded in getting Fox elected. Tolkien saw this as a famous victory for the Inklings. “Our literary club of practising poets,” he wrote, had triumphed over the power of establishment and privilege![399]
Yet it was an unwise move. Fox had indeed written a poem—the “long and childlike” “Old King Cole.” On subsequently hearing Fox lecture, Lewis seems to have realised that he and his colleagues had made something of a blunder. He mistakenly assumed it was simply a literary error, when it was in reality a political mistake. Lewis had alienated the Oxford establishment. And Oxford has a long memory.
The Inklings would finally begin to decline in 1947—not in a blaze of argument, nor in an agreed act of noble dissolution because their artistic mission had been successful. It simply petered out as a literary discussion group, even though its members continued to socialise and discuss issues of university politics and literature. But while it lasted, it was a crucible of literary creativity and energy. As John Wain observed, “In a very dead period of Oxford’s history, Lewis and his friends provided a stir of life.”[400] Whatever their faults, the Inklings arguably gave rise to one canonical classic of English literature, as well as other lesser works. The classic? Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Despite many statements to the contrary in popular works about Lewis, the Narnia Chronicles were never presented to the group for discussion. On 22 June 1950, Lewis passed around proofs of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to those who had turned up to drink and chat at the Eagle and Child. Yet this was not an occasion for formal discussion or debate. It was more a case of “show and tell” for a work in proof, not serious criticism of a work in draft.
Yet this is to run ahead of our narrative. We must now consider the work which established Lewis’s reputation as a serious literary scholar—and which remains widely read to this day—the 1936 classic The Allegory of Love.
The Allegory of Love (1936)
Writing to an old friend in 1935, Lewis summarised his present situation in three short statements: “I am going bald. I am a Christian. Professionally I am chiefly a medievalist.”[401] There is little of interest to be said about the first point, except to note that photographs of Lewis from this period confirm his own diagnosis. We have already devoted a chapter to the second point. But what of the third? Lewis’s Allegory of Love is his first major work to deal with his professional field of activity. It fully deserves discussion, not least because it develops literary themes that find religious transposition in so many of Lewis’s subsequent writings.
7.3 Duke Humfrey’s Library, the oldest part of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, in 1902. This reading room, reserved for manuscripts and early printed works, has changed little since Lewis’s time.
Lewis had been planning The Allegory of Love for some time, but had been held back in completing it by his duties as an examiner. He had begun to draft the first chapter of his study of “mediaeval love poetry and the mediaeval idea of love” by July 1928.[402] He spent hours in Duke Humfrey’s Library, the oldest part of the Bodleian Library, wishing he were allowed to smoke, which would have helped his faltering concentration. Yet Lewis, like all readers in the Bodleian Library, had been required to promise “not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library.” The project stalled.
By February 1933, however, things were clearly moving apace once more. Lewis wrote to Guy Pocock, asking for a change to his contract with Dent for The Pilgrim’s Regress. He wanted the “option clause” to be revised, so that he could offer his next book to the Clarendon Press, Oxford.[403] This, he explained, would be an academic work, dealing with the subject of allegory, which he thought would be of little interest to Pocock or his readership. He suggested that the option clause should refer to his “next work of a popular character,” rather than his “next book.”[404]
Pocock appears to have agreed to this suggestion. Lewis submitted the typescript of The Allegory of Love to Kenneth Sisam, an English scholar who served as assistant secretary to Oxford University Press. The work was duly accepted by the press, who later sent a proof copy to their Amen House office in London so that one of their editors could develop promotional material for it. The editor entrusted with it—unknown to Lewis—was Charles Williams. Indeed, on the very same day in March 1936 that Lewis decided to write to Williams to tell him how much he liked his novel The Place of the Lion, Williams had resolved to write to Lewis to tell him how much he admired The Allegory of Love. “I regard your book as practically the only one that I have ever come across, since Dante, that shows the slightest understanding of what this very peculiar identity of love and religion means.”[405]
The Allegory of Love was dedicated to Owen Barfield, who Lewis declares taught him “not to patronise the past” and “to see the present as itself a ‘period.’” Even on the first page of the work, Lewis sets out a theme that recurs throughout his writings:
Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.[406]
Where some argue that humanity must embrace a synthesis of contemporary science and social attitudes as “the truth”—to be contrasted with the “superstitions” of the past—Lewis declares that this simply leads to humanity becoming a by-product of its age, shaped by its predominant cultural moods and intellectual conventions. We must, Lewis argues, break free from the shallow complacency of “chronological snobbery,” and realise that we can learn from the past precisely because it liberates us from the tyranny of the contemporaneous.
The focus of The Allegory of Love is the idea of “courtly love,” which Lewis defines as “love of a highly specialised sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love.”[407] The emergence of “courtly love” reflects a change in attitude towards women that began in the late eleventh century, and was shaped by the ideals of chivalry emerging around this time. Courtly love is the expression of the noble, knightly worship of a refining ideal, which is embodied in the person of the woman who is loved.
This act of loving was seen as ennobling and refining, allowing expression of some of the deepest values and virtues of human nature. It is possible that the prevalence of arranged marriages in the twelfth century necessitated some means of expressing romantic love. Such a love expressed itself in terms that were simultaneously feudal and religious. Just as a vassal was expected to honour and serve his lord, so a lover was expected to serve his lady with absolute obedience, obeying her commands. Courtly love affirmed the ennobling potential of human love, the elevation of the beloved above the lover, and depicted love as an ever-increasing desire which could never be satisfied.
Yet what Lewis depicted as a historical actuality has come to be seen by others as a literary fiction. During the 1970s, many scholars began to interpret “courtly love” as an essentially nineteenth-century invention, reflecting the aspirations of that later age, which were then read back into the earlier Middle Ages. Lewis, who luxuriated in the writings of Victorian medieval revivalists, such as William Morris (1834–1896), might therefore be seen as reading the works of the Middle Ages through Victorian spectacles.[408] However, as more recent studies have made clear, the situation is not quite as straightforward as these critics have suggested.[409] In any case, Lewis’s concern is actually with the poetic conventions developed to express “courtly love,” rather than the historical notion itself. Lewis’s book is really about texts, not about history.
The crowning glory of The Allegory of Love is its chapter on the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser (ca. 1522–1599). Lewis’s book radically altered critical perceptions of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, while also reinvigorating discussion and debate about the role and meaning of both “courtly love” and the genre of allegory in the medieval tradition. Lewis shows how the use of allegory is a matter of philosophical necessity, reflecting the nature and limits of human language, rather than representing some conceited desire for stylistic ornamentation or sentimental attachment to the literary conventions of earlier ages. Allegory, Lewis argues, is far better placed to represent such complex notions as “pride” and “sin” than abstract concepts. It provides a handle on such realities, without which discussion of some of the most fundamental themes of life becomes difficult.
From today’s perspective, Lewis’s achievement in The Allegory of Love actually rests more on his highly perceptive discussion of Spenser than his account of courtly love. His analysis of the 34,695 lines of Spenser’s vast poem The Faerie Queene—particularly the nature and status of its imagery—remains both winsome and plausible. As a recent definitive work on the reception of Spenser in the twentieth century remarked, “Lewis’s chapter makes more original observations about the Faerie Queene—sources, prosody, philosophy and design—than all of nineteenth-century criticism laid end to end.”[410]
Some Lewis biographies suggest that The Allegory of Love won the Hawthornden Prize, the oldest major British literary prize awarded annually to an English writer for “the best work of imaginative literature.” This is not correct; it did, however, win the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Prize in 1937.[411] This prestigious prize, administered by the British Academy, was awarded for outstanding published work either “on subjects connected with Anglo-Saxon, Early English Language and Literature, English Philology, or the History of English Language,” or for original “investigations connected with the history of English Literature or the works of English writers, with preference for the earlier period.” This was a considerable accolade for Lewis, marking out The Allegory of Love as a work of distinction from a highly promising younger scholar. What stands out in this work is its remarkable ability to summarise, to explain, to synthesise, and to engage. As Lewis’s Oxford colleague Helen Gardner later observed, it is clearly “written by a man who loved literature and had an extraordinary power of stimulating his readers to curiosity and enthusiasm.”[412]
Perhaps it is this, when taken along with his obvious gifts as a lecturer—his ability to communicate, to enthuse, and to excite—which explains the reason for Lewis’s drawing such large audiences in Oxford lecture rooms in the 1930s and 1940s. Lewis draws his readers along with him as he offers informed and enthusiastic readings of texts (whether familiar or obscure), and attempts to “rehabilitate” authors, texts, and themes which have been ignored through ignorance or marginalised through prejudice.[413] Lewis was, quite simply, a champion of literature and its place in human culture and learning.
Lewis on the Place and Purpose of Literature
Throughout his career, Lewis devoted much thought and ink to the place and purpose of literature, whether in relation to the enriching of human culture, the cultivation of religious sensibilities, or the forging of personal wisdom and character. Although some of Lewis’s ideas about literature developed further during the 1940s and 1950s, most of them were firmly in place by 1939.
Lewis’s understanding of how literature is to be approached and understood differs significantly from the dominant viewpoints of contemporary literary theory. For Lewis, the reading of literature—above all, the reading of older literature—is an important challenge to some premature judgements based on “chronological snobbery.” Owen Barfield had taught Lewis to be suspicious of those who declaimed the inevitable superiority of the present over the past.
Lewis makes this point with particular force in his essay “On the Reading of Old Books” (1944). Here Lewis argues that a familiarity with the literature of the past provides readers with a standpoint which gives them critical distance from their own era. Thus, it allows them to see “the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.”[414] The reading of old books enables us to avoid becoming passive captives of the Spirit of the Age by keeping “the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.”[415]
Lewis here clearly has Christian theological debates in mind; he is writing in particular about the importance of past theological resources to enrich and stimulate the present. Yet his argument has a broader significance. “A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it.”[416] Since we cannot read the literature of the future, we can at least read the literature of the past, and realise the powerful implicit challenge that this makes to the ultimate authority of the present. For sooner or later, the present will become the past, and the self-evident authority of its ideas will be eroded—unless that authority is grounded in the intrinsic excellence of those ideas, rather than their mere chronological location.
As Lewis pointed out, with the rise of the ideologies of the twentieth century in mind, someone who “has lived in many places” is not likely to be taken in by the “local errors of his native village.” The scholar, Lewis declares, has “lived in many times” and can thus challenge the automatic presumption of finality inherent in present judgements and trends:
We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.[417]
Lewis insists that to understand the literature of the classical or Renaissance periods, it is necessary to “suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits” that result from “reading modern literature”[418]—such as an unquestioning assumption of the innate superiority of our own situation. Lewis uses a familiar cultural stereotype to help make his point—the English tourist abroad, so heavily pilloried in works such as E. M. Forster’s Room with a View (1908). Lewis asks us to imagine an Englishman travelling abroad, fully persuaded of the superiority of English cultural values to those of the savages of Western Europe. Instead of seeking out the local culture, enjoying the local food, and allowing his own presuppositions to be challenged, he mixes only with other English tourists, insists on seeking out English food, and sees his “Englishness” as something to be preserved at all costs. He thus takes his “Englishness” that he brought with him, and “brings it home unchanged.”[419]
There is another way of visiting a foreign country, and a correspondingly different way of reading an older text. Here, the tourist eats the local food and drinks the local wine, seeing “the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourist, but to its inhabitants.” As a result, Lewis argues, the English tourist comes home “modified, thinking and feeling” in different ways. His travel has enlarged his vision of things.
The point Lewis is making here is that literature offers us a different way of seeing things. It opens our eyes, offering new perspectives for evaluation and reflection:
My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. . . . In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.[420]
Literature, for Lewis, enables us “to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.”[421] It offers us an imaginative representation of reality which challenges our own.
To read literature is thus potentially to make ourselves open to change: to open ourselves up to new ideas, or force us to revisit those we once believed we were right to reject. As Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked, “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”[422] Lewis thus insists that texts challenge us as much as they inform us. Insisting that the text conform to our presuppositions, to our way of thinking, is to force it into a mould of our own making, and deny it any opportunity to transform, enrich, or change us. Reading works of literature is about “entering fully into the opinions, and therefore also the attitudes, feelings and total experience” of other people.[423] It is about what Plato termed psychagogia—an “enlargement of the soul.”
For Lewis, it is more important to note what has been said than to become preoccupied with who said it. For Lewis, literary “criticism” consisted in understanding the intentions of the writer, receiving the work, and thus experiencing an inner enlargement. We see this best expressed in his Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942), which sets out superbly the background to Milton’s epic poem, and considers its meaning. Lewis argued forcefully that what mattered in poetry was not the poet but the poem. A totally opposing view was set out by the Cambridge scholar E. M. W. Tillyard (1889–1962). For Tillyard, Paradise Lost was “really about the true state of Milton’s mind when he wrote it.”
This led to the famous debate of the 1930s, usually dubbed “The Personal Heresy.” To simplify a complex debate, Lewis argued for an objective, or impersonal, point of view, that poetry is about something “out there”; whereas Tillyard defended a subjective, or personal, point of view, that poetry is about something that is inside the poet. Lewis would later term this view “the poison of subjectivism.” For Lewis, poetry works not by directing attention to the poet, but to what the poet sees: “The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points.” The poet is thus not a “spectacle” to be viewed, but a “set of spectacles” through which things are to be seen.[424] The poet is someone who enables us to see things in a different way, who points out things we otherwise might not notice. Or again, the poet is not someone who is to be looked at, but someone who is to be looked through.
We could summarise all this by saying that Lewis understands reading literature as a process of imagining and entering an alternative world, which has the ability to illuminate the empirical world in which we really live. Lewis regularly offers himself as a travel guide to others engaged on such a pilgrimage. For many, he is at his best when he introduces Spenser and Milton to those encountering them for the first time.
Yet Lewis was not merely the recorder of other writers’ imaginary worlds. He himself became a creator of such worlds—worlds that are clearly influenced by the ideas and images of those who went before him. We must never forget that one possible outcome of engaging with great literature is not merely a desire to write such works oneself, but to incorporate the wisdom, wit, and elegance of the past into forms that can engage the present. Lewis turned out to be rather good at that, as we shall see when we explore the creation of Narnia and consider how Lewis uses an imaginary world to illuminate our own.
But Narnia lay in the future. Events in the real world at this point began to take a disturbing turn. On 1 September 1939, German forces invaded Poland. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, initially tried to negotiate peace terms between Germany and Poland. After a parliamentary revolt against this move, Chamberlain presented Hitler with an ultimatum: Adolf Hitler must withdraw his forces from Poland. On 3 September, having failed to secure any response from Adolf Hitler, Britain declared war on Germany. The Second World War had begun.