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. “Ou
r 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.
C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 19