by A. N. Wilson
Always the same … that frightful woman shape
Besets the dream-way and the soul’s escape.
The tale concerns a young man – Dymer – who escapes from a city – the Perfect City – which is a cross between Plato’s Republic and an English public school, and becomes entangled with a hag-like older woman. She seems gay at first but she is quickly transformed, after a short lovemaking, into a Spenserian crone. From the ecstatic moment when
He opened wide
His arms – the breathy body of a girl
Slid into them
he is penitent. He thinks that if he is only slavish enough in his service of the old hag, the beautiful girl to whom he once made love will come back to him:
I would be content
To drudge in earth, easing my heart’s disgrace
… If at the year’s end I saw her face somewhere.
But he never finds her again, and is imprisoned in his strange mixture of tormented lust and repentance. The fruit of this mysterious union, into which Dymer has drifted, is a monster. In the latter part of the story, the monster and Dymer are involved in an Oedipal struggle, and the father is killed. By then the ‘monster’ has gone through many transformations, unable to decide who he is or which of his many disguises represents the true ‘him’; but he can only find liberty by killing the father who sired him. ‘Of course,’ Lewis insisted, ‘I’m not Dymer.’
Of course not. What troubles the admirer of Lewis the critic – the man who had such an eye for excellence in the poets of past ages – is that he could be capable of stanza after stanza in which the verse is deadened by flat language, repeated clumsy enjambements and sheer technical incompetence. Much of it just fails to scan correctly – very odd for someone who was lecturing and giving tutorials on English poetry. In February 1926, Lewis plucked up courage and showed the poem to his colleague in the English Faculty, Nevill Coghill. He begged Coghill to keep the matter to himself. ‘I don’t want it known here [i.e. at Magdalen] that I am writing “pomes” [sic].’9
Coghill felt that he had discovered a ‘considerable poem’ by ‘a powerful new poet’ (though ‘in the Masefield tradition’), and he wrote back to Lewis in adulatory terms. Lewis felt ‘as if you had given me a bottle of champagne … Your remarks on the Masefieldian lines go to the root of the matter – I should say the bad Masefieldian lines for in some points one would not in the least be ashamed to have learned from him … ’ Lewis was especially grateful that Coghill was so appreciative of Dymer’s ‘spiritual experiences’; and in particular that he approved of the theme of ‘redemption by parricide’ which Lewis feared ‘would seem simply preposterous and shocking’. Coghill did more than heap praises on Dymer. He found a publisher for it. When Guy Pocock of Dent read the poem, he felt ‘there can be no possible question of its greatness … I have not read any new poetry to touch it since the publication of The Everlasting Mercy [by John Masefield].’10 When the book did appear, in beautiful, almost square duodecimo format, it was adorned with a naked figure, the hero, embossed on the end board. He stretches up beyond the sun. He is there again in the frontispiece, like a figure in the Tarot cards, breaking his chains and dancing towards the spheres. Behind him, a winged, helmeted figure leans on a cruciform, phallic-looking sword.
It takes a little while for an author to realize that his book has been a complete failure. He waits and waits. Lewis anxiously opened The Times Literary Supplement every Friday for a year, hoping for a good notice for the poem. A favourable review did appear, but not until a year later. By then, the poem had sunk from public consciousness. It did not sell, and it made almost no impact whatsoever.
It is striking that Lewis did not want it known in College that he wrote ‘pomes’, but only natural that he should have looked outside Magdalen for soulmates within his own Faculty. It is the least satisfactory feature of collegiate universities that for all social and administrative purposes – meals and meetings and life in Common Room – the academics mix not with those who share their intellectual preoccupations but with people of completely different disciplines. In an ideal world this would mean that a lot of clever people, all anxious to communicate enthusiasm for their subject, would talk helpfully about it to their colleagues. In a rosy paragraph of Surprised by Joy, Lewis paid tribute to
Five great Magdalen men who enlarged my very idea of what a learned life should be – P. V. M. Benecke, C. C. J. Webb, J. A. Smith, F. E. Brightman and C. T. Onions … In my earliest years at Magdalen I inhabited a world where hardly anything I wanted to know needed to be found out by my own unaided efforts. One or other of these could always give you a clue. (‘You’ll find something about it in Alanus.’ ‘Macrobius would be the man to try … ’ etc.)11
This is certainly how dons talk in the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers. Whether they did so at Magdalen in the years 1925–1929 there are few alive old enough to remember. The key phrase in Lewis’s paragraph here is ‘my earliest years’. He writes from the perspective of later years when the dons of Magdalen were anything but congenial society to him. Even in those early years, when honest old men were tossing out such useful snippets of information as ‘Macrobius would be the man’, the college did not provide soulmates of the kind Lewis always craved.
Coghill, who had been a friend since they read English together as undergraduates in 1923, was now the English tutor at Exeter College. He probably remained Lewis’s best friend in the English Faculty during the early years at Magdalen. The Faculty in those days was comparatively small, and still dominated by old men who were primarily literary historians. Criticism of the kind which became popular with the pupils of I. A. Richards at Cambridge later in the century was absolutely unknown at Oxford. Reading English was really a literary way of reading History. The sort of scholarship which predominated was textual scholarship, as exemplified by Percy Simpson’s monumental edition of Ben Jonson.
But there was a new broom coming into the English Faculty at this period and, although younger than Simpson, Wilson, Garrod and the rest, he appeared to be more radically reactionary. This was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, who had been appointed to his chair at the age of thirty-two, in the same year that Lewis got his fellowship at Magdalen. His name was J. R. R. Tolkien. It was another medievalist, under Tolkien’s influence, who gave utterance to the view that ‘Literature stops in 1100; after that there’s only books,’ but they were sentiments which in a crude way echoed Tolkien’s own position. A graduate of Exeter College, Oxford, Tolkien had read Classical Mods and then done a version of the English course which was rigidly philological, and did not concern itself with post-medieval literature. Much more important than this was Tolkien’s vast imaginative life, one day to make him famous as author of The Lord of the Rings, but at this date completely hidden from all but his family and close friends. True, Tolkien’s favourite books were the old books – in English, the Anglo-Saxon poets; in Icelandic, those of the Elder Edda; in Celtic, the old Welsh Triads and the Irish legends. But although he had a phenomenal gift as a philologist, and was by far the most distinguished scholar in his field of Old and Middle English, his interest in it all was very far from being ‘purely academic’. It was as though an extraordinary story – a great mythology, with half-forgotten legends, languages and lore – had been unfolding in his head from the time he began to think; and his appreciation of the Old Literature was at the deepest level imaginative and creative.
An example of this can be seen in his youthful discovery of the biblical poems of the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf. In the poem Crist, Tolkien came upon the lines:
Eala Earendel engla berhtast ofer middangeard monnum sended.
(Hail Earendel, brightest of the angels, sent to men upon Middle Earth.)
The dry-as-dust scholar, the Percy Simpson sort of scholar, would merely note here that Earendel meant ‘shining ray’. Tolkien himself thought that this bright ray was the Old English word for Venus, here applied to John the Baptist, herald of the
Christ. But it was not the mere surface meaning of the words which arrested him. ‘I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred within me, half awakening from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.’12
Tolkien brought a response on this level of emotional intensity to those texts which, for the majority of the English Faculty, were the ‘boring part of the course’. Indeed, when Tolkien arrived, he found that the Old English being dished up to the likes of Betjeman was in a grossly truncated form, and the poetry was mainly seen as a quarry for ‘gobbets’ – that is, short passages of a very few lines, used for the purposes of testing the candidates’ knowledge of sound-changes. Tolkien’s suggestion was that the Faculty should reform its syllabus, giving space for a proper study of the Old English poets. Since this would necessarily involve cutting out some other part of the course, he suggested stopping the syllabus at 1830, and removing the study of Victorian literature.
Lewis was strongly opposed to this move. But on his first proper encounter with Tolkien – at a meeting with English Faculty colleagues at Merton College in May 1926 – he could not help being charmed by this ‘smooth, pale, fluent little chap’. At that date, as Lewis himself tells us, he had two very marked prejudices. ‘At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.’13
One of the first things Tolkien did after his return to Oxford in 1925 was to set up an Icelandic reading group such as he had enjoyed during his last job, as Professor of English at Leeds. The idea was that the few men in the University who could read the original language of the Edda and the Sagas should group together with those who wished to learn, and read their way through the principal texts. They called the group the Kolbitar (coal-biters), an Icelandic kenning which means those who sit around a fire. The group was quite large. It included Nevill Coghill from the beginning, and also John Bryson and George Gordon, who had supported Lewis as a candidate for the fellowship at Magdalen and became President of the college in 1928. C. T. Onions, the philologist, another fellow of Magdalen, was a founder member of the Kolbitar, and not long after it was founded two other fellows of Magdalen were asked to join: Jack Lewis and Bruce McFarlane, the historian.
It was very much Kirkpatrick’s method of learning a language. Never having read a word of Norse (Old Icelandic) before, Lewis plunged in and attempted a few lines of Laxdaela Saga. For someone with a good reading knowledge of German and Anglo-Saxon, the cognate tongue of Norse offered few difficulties. Lewis, who had known the sagas in translation since Gastons days, was very happy with this further enrichment of the pleasures of reading. But he was soon to find that Tolkien had more to offer him than the chance to learn Old Norse.
Lewis himself represents the summer of 1929 as the turning point of his whole life. The fluency with which he himself wrote about this period was born out of a particular requirement. A publisher had asked him to explain, some quarter of a century after the event, how he passed from scepticism to religious belief. Minds more subtle than Lewis’s would probably have shrunk from the attempt. And those who have made similar attempts at spiritual self-chronicling have hedged their story about with provisos. ‘It was not logic that carried me on,’ wrote J. H. (later Cardinal) Newman in his Apologia. ‘As well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years and I find my mind in a new place: how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it.’14
There can be no doubt that the ‘whole man’ Lewis moved from a position of atheism in his undergraduate years to an acceptance in the early 1930s of ‘mere Christianity’. In his autobiography, he tries to see how this happened to ‘the whole man’ – to the man who had been haunted since youth by a sense of ‘Joy’, to the man whose love of Autumn, of Northernness, even of his own mother, was always, as he came to feel, a longing for one without whom our hearts will find no rest. But for a handful of obvious reasons, Lewis does not draw a picture of ‘the whole man’ in Surprised by Joy. It is partly that a natural reticence made him draw a veil over the two greatest facts of his emotional history: his relationships with his father and Mrs Moore. Probably, by the time he came to write Surprised by Joy, his way of looking at himself had become so idiosyncratic that he was not able to see the significance of these two relationships in his religious, as well as in his whole emotional, development. His old friend Barfield ruefully suggested that ‘at a certain stage in his life he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual animus taking stock of his moral faults … Self knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own weaknesses and shortcomings and nothing more.’15 This, no doubt, was what enabled Lewis, in telling the story of his life, to separate the departments of his life, telling us only the ‘spiritual’ story and leaving that part of himself which Newman would have called ‘the concrete man’ hidden in shadows. So of his falling in love with Mrs Moore we are merely informed that ‘even if I were free to tell the story, I doubt if it has much to do with the subject of this book,’ and of his father’s death in the late summer of 1929 that this ‘does not really come into the story I am telling’.
If either of these sentences were true, the story would not have been worth telling, since the conversion would have been a purely fanciful affair which bore no relevance to Lewis at the deepest levels of his being. His reluctance to tell the full story is all of a piece with his extreme slowness, after his religious conversion, to accept Christianity, a religion which tries the heart, which searches us out and knows us. His embarrassment about self-disclosure gives the impression, belied by his other books, that he knew nothing of the mystery that grace works by means of human weakness, not by side-stepping it.
Since Lewis buried the secrets, first from himself and then from others, there is not much hope that those coming after will be able to follow the story of his conversion. He gives us a few outlines of ‘paper logic’ followed by a paragraph or two describing some of the religious experiences themselves.
The logical crisis went back to the time when he first started to read philosophy as an undergraduate and related to his reading of the English Idealist philosophers, as well as to his return (for the purposes of passing his exams, and later as a tutor) to the English empiricists of the eighteenth century. He had slowly, and unwillingly, come to feel the necessity of believing in an Absolute. He was driven into something ‘like Berkleyanism’; and he took to feeling that there was no harm in positing the existence of some form of Absolute Spirit, so long as this was firmly distinguished from the God ‘of popular religion’.
Something which focused his intellectual uncertainties at this time was reading Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity, which introduces ‘enjoyment’ and ‘contemplation’ as technical terms. ‘We do not “think a thought” in the same sense in which we “think Herodotus is unreliable”. When we think a thought, “thought” is a cognate accusative (like “blow” in “strike a blow”). We enjoy the thought that Herodotus is unreliable and in so doing, contemplate the unreliability of Herodotus. I accepted this distinction at once and have ever since regarded it as an indispensable tool of thought.’16
It was a linchpin of Lewis’s theism that thought itself was a metaphysical act; his exploration of this theme in his book Miracles and the subsequent heated debate between himself and a fellow-Christian philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, provided one of the great academic sideshows in the Oxford of the late 1940s. But of course, had Alexander’s argument and Lewis’s interpretation of it been irrefutable, had it been the kind of thing which compelled religious certainty, then all the philosophers in Oxford would have fallen to their knees when they had finished reading it. They did not do so. The fact that Lewis did is not a sign that he was illogical, merely that he was caught up in a
spiritual drama which involved more than ‘paper logic’. There were, primarily, the tugs of sympathy. His closest friend from childhood, Arthur Greeves, was religious. His closest undergraduate friend, Owen Barfield, was also a believer. When he visited Lewis at Magdalen (Barfield was now working as a solicitor in London), the two friends often reverted to their ‘Great War’ and there was no doubt, any longer, who was going to be the victor. Someone who occasionally joined in these discussions was a pupil of Lewis’s, Alan Griffiths, who had also become a friend. He, like Lewis, had not yet reached a position of religious faith, but he was dissatisfied with purely materialistic explanations for life’s mysteries, and he found the conversation of Barfield intoxicating. Once, when the three of them were sitting in Lewis’s rooms, Lewis happened to refer to philosophy as ‘a subject’. ‘It wasn’t a subject to Plato,’ said Barfield, ‘it was a way.’ ‘The quiet but fervent agreement of Griffiths and the quick glance of understanding between those two revealed to me my own frivolity. Enough had been thought, and said and felt and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.’17 Among the circle of people he found most sympathetic, Lewis was in fact beginning to feel an odd man out. Coghill and Tolkien were both Christians. Chesterton, always a favourite author, was a Christian; it was at this period that Lewis read The Everlasting Man, and it made a profound impression on him.
But there was something, or, as Lewis came to feel, someone, else. No doubt there were many contributory external or psychological factors in what was happening to the way he perceived his own personality. It could be said that some sort of crisis was going to force itself up in the life of a strongly emotional young man who was so strictly engaged in compartmentalizing his life: a father who was never meant to know about Janie Moore; Minto herself cut off from college; almost all his friends kept in darkness about his emotional history, and most of them at this period unaware of his religious interests; pupils who were discussing with him the things he cared about most – books – but in a fashion which prevented his strength of feeling breaking through. Griffiths for instance, only came across Lewis’s children’s stories after he had died, and he ‘recognized in them a power of imaginative invention and insight of which I had no conception before. It must be remembered that Lewis always affected (I think it was deliberate) to be a plain, honest man with no nonsense about him, usually wearing, when out on a walk, an old tweed hat and coat and accompanied with a pipe and a dog.’