In the obituary she wrote for Lewis to the British Academy, Helen Gardner said:
Perhaps one of the most significant of his contributions to the study of English Literature at Oxford was the part he played with his friend Professor J.R.R. Tolkien in establishing a syllabus for the Final Honour School which embodied his belief in the value of medieval (especially Old English) literature, his conviction that a proper study of modern literature required the linguistic training that the study of earlier literature gave, and his sense of the continuity of English literature and the syllabus, which remained in force for over twenty years, was in many ways an admirable one.14
‘The tap-root, Anglo-Saxon, can never be abandoned’, wrote Lewis in ‘Our English Syllabus’. ‘The man who does not know it remains all his life a child among real English students. There we find the speech-rhythms that we use every day made the basis of metre; there we find the origins of that romanticism for which the ignorant invent such odd explanations. This is our own stuff and its life is in every branch of the tree to the remotest twigs. That we cannot abandon.’15
The only drawback to the English syllabus that Lewis created was the failure to find space for the literature of the Victorian age, ‘1830–1900’ being added merely as an optional paper – which only about five per cent of candidates took, and for which they received little help either from tutors or lecturers. ‘This meant’, concluded Helen Gardner, ‘that in the period when Victorian Literature was coming into the domain of scholarship, Oxford made virtually no contribution to the development of techniques of dealing with the problems presented by this vast, untidy period of genius.’16
Lewis had, of course, no bias against post-1830 literature, indeed the period included authors whom he considered among the ‘very great’ such as Morris and Kipling. He had read some at least of the works even of authors whom he did not admire, such as Henry James and D.H. Lawrence, and he could quote or refer to them knowledgeably on occasion. Lewis did not enjoy the Restoration dramatists either, and Nevill Coghill has recorded that he never heard him quote from any of them.17 But on one occasion at least he quoted Congreve very appositely to Green, and he certainly discussed Dryden’s plays with him, though he did not cross Magdalen Grove to see the Oxford University Dramatic Society perform Marriage-à-la-Mode there. But this was in accordance with his lack of interest in the theatre itself, and his surprising assertion that to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream (acted under his windows in Magdalen Grove in 1942) performed in the open air would spoil it for him: if he was to see it at all, it would have more magic for him in a theatre. But, like Hazlitt, he preferred to read Shakespeare’s plays rather than see them acted.
He did, of course, visit the theatre occasionally, particularly to see all or part of the Ring cycle. His first experience was on 14 June 1918, a few weeks after he returned from the front line. Sir Thomas Beecham was conducting The Valkyrie, and writing to Arthur Greeves afterwards Lewis said, ‘The dream of years has been realized, and without disillusionment … You have my verdict that if the Ring is all like this it quite comes up to our old dreams, and that all Italian opera is merely a pastime compared with the great music-drama of Wagner.’18
After this he saw The Ring whenever there was an opportunity, and woe betide the man whose responsibility it was to acquire tickets for this event and failed. In 1934 Lewis planned to see The Ring with Owen Barfield, Tolkien, Warnie and Cecil Harwood, and the responsibility for purchasing the tickets fell on Harwood. Harwood forgot, the great opportunity was missed, and it brought forth one of Lewis’s most Johnsonesque letters. He wrote to Harwood on 7 May 1934:
I have read your pathetical letter with such sentiments as it naturally suggests and write to assure you that you need expect from me no ungenerous reproach. It would be cruel, if it were possible, and impossible, if it were attempted, to add to the mortification which you must now be supposed to suffer. Where I cannot console, it is far from my purpose to aggravate: for it is part of the complicated misery of your state that while I pity your sufferings, I cannot innocently wish them lighter … As soon as you can, pray let me know through some respectable acquaintance what plans you have framed for the future. In what quarter of the globe do you intend to sustain that irrevocable exile, hopeless penury, and perpetual disgrace to which you have condemned yourself? Do not give in to the sin of Despair: learn from this example the fatal consequences of error and hope, in some humbler station and some distant land, that you may yet become useful to your species.19
Although the literature of the previous hundred years was not taught in Oxford in Lewis’s day, he was as keenly interested in it as any modern student, and more widely read than most. Though not an enthusiastic reader of the more psychological type of novel, and expressing almost as little interest in Fielding and Smollett as in the dramatists of their period, he was an enthusiastic reader of Jane Austen, whose novels he reread again and again. He read Scott with equal enthusiasm, but was more temperate in his admiration for Dickens, and cared much less for Thackeray and George Eliot; Hardy and Henry James he admired but did not enjoy, and he had even less use for Lawrence and Joyce. He proclaimed Kipling to be the greatest prose writer of their generation – though with the reservations detailed in his lecture on ‘Kipling’s World’.20 Nevertheless he was greatly impressed by the Russians, and thought War and Peace the greatest novel ever written.
He seemed to know all the greater poets of the nineteenth century well – and probably knew the majority of minor poets to some extent. A chance conversation proved, for example, that he had read and could often quote from most of the Lang – Henley – Dobson group, and that he was well versed in the ‘Georgians’ – among whom, indeed, ‘Clive Hamilton’ should probably be classed. Perhaps on account of this affinity he ranked Yeats, Bridges and Masefield among the major poets, and spoke in praise of de la Mare. But, as we have seen, he struggled to come to terms with ‘modern’ poetry. Most ‘modern poetry’ was a ‘cult engineered by cranks with money, via Horizon’, he remarked in 1949 at a lunch party where his guests included Ruth Pitter* and Owen Barfield, and he went on to maintain that ‘they could engineer a “Romantic Revival” themselves – if they had the money to start and run a paper’.
Lewis had been approached three years earlier by Laurence Whistler* who, in association with Andrew Young,† was hoping to found a periodical to challenge Horizon, and already had Ruth Pitter and Richard Church in favour of the scheme, with T.S. Eliot ‘sitting on the fence, metaphorically’.21 Lewis was enthusiastic about the idea. ‘I am pleased, to the point of being excited, by your suggestion’, he wrote to Whistler on 9 January 1947:
I have said again and again that what we very badly need is a new, frankly high-brow periodical not in the hands of the Left. I have usually added ‘If only we could find a right-minded capitalist.’ Money, I take it, is the first essential. I entirely agree that it should not be specifically Christian, much less Anglican: the Tao (in that sense) is to be the ring fence. In almost all existing periodicals one knows in advance how a certain book will be reviewed: the personal and political bias is no longer even disguised. That is what must be avoided.22
Lewis was not able to be present at the second meeting on 9 May 1947 but sent a ‘memorandum’, the most relevant section of which reads:
I think the Periodical ought to come before the public with no explicitly religious pretensions at all; its offer should be simply an offer of good poems, good stories, good articles, and good reviews. On the other hand, those who run it should in fact all be Christians. The standard they actually apply in admitting or rejecting contributions should not be that of agreement or disagreement with the Christian Faith, but that of agreement or disagreement with what may be called the ‘good Pagan’ range of rationality and virtue. Thus while many, perhaps most, contributors would be explicitly Christian, we would freely admit good work which was not, and might even admit work opposed to the Faith provided the opposition was based on appeal to reaso
n and ethics. What would be definitely and always excluded (a) Total Scepticism: i.e. attacks on reason and natural morality. (b) Pornography, however high brow. (c) Cynicism and Sadism however well disguised as ‘Realism’. Thus, if they were all now alive, we should admit Aristotle (but not Heraclitus), Lucretius (but not Petronius), Voltaire (but not Anatole France), Hardy (but not Oscar Wilde) …23
‘Nothing came of the idea,’ wrote Laurence Whistler, ‘probably because there was no general agreement; certainly because there was no money; and I suspect because it was thought, despite our disclaimers, that Young and I really did want to run it. C.S. Lewis believed us, I think, or he would not have been enthusiastic, but I doubt if some of the others did.’24 And so Portico never opened.
Indeed Lewis, with his loathing and distrust of ‘inner rings’, could never have been comfortable for long in what must have developed to some extent into a clique, however open a ring-fence was designed for it. His interests were too wide and his tastes too individual – and he was essentially too modest a man – to set himself up as the head of any kind of literary ‘school’, or even to gather one about him.
Nothing could be less like a ‘mutual admiration society’ than the club that gathered round Lewis – the Inklings. The origins of it are indistinct but the chief impetus behind it was Lewis’s delight in hearing things read aloud. The first to share this with him was Owen Barfield. From the time they met in 1919 they began meeting to read aloud and criticize their poetry. Even after Barfield left Oxford in 1930 to work in London they met when they could to discuss their writings or to engage in that ‘rational opposition’ they both liked so much.
Then came J.R.R. Tolkien who, from 1929, began going to Lewis’s college rooms for late-night talk following meetings of the Kolbítar. It was at these late-night sessions that Tolkien would read aloud the stories and histories he was writing about his invented world of Middle-Earth, later to be published as The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. By 1930 they were meeting regularly in Lewis’s rooms on Monday mornings.
According to Professor Tolkien, the Inklings developed from a literary society of that name founded in University College in the Thirties by an undergraduate called Edward Tangye Lean* who wished to have a few senior members and was able to interest both Lewis and Tolkien. Lewis and Lean had met as fellow members of the Martlets before Lean invited them to join the Inklings. Meetings took place in Lean’s college rooms, and, said Tolkien, ‘its procedure was that at each meeting members should read aloud unpublished compositions. These were supposed to be open to immediate criticism.’25 The name ‘Inkling’ was a kind of pun: the usual meaning of having a distant notion of something doubling with some such recollection of a scribbler and his works as the ‘paper pellets of inky boys’ in Kipling’s Stalky & Co. It was probably intended to be a modern version of the famous Scriblerus Club of very similar constitution whose original members were Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot and Parnell. Tolkien continues of the Inklings:
The Club soon died, but C.S.L. and I at least survived. Its name was then transferred (by C.S.L.) to the undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered about C.S.L., and met in his rooms in Magdalen. Although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!), this association and its habit would in fact have come into being at this time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not. C.S.L. had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism, none of which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by his friends.26
We have no record of what Lewis read to Lean’s club, but Tolkien remembered that one of the unpublished works he read to the club was his poem ‘Errantry’, afterwards published in The Oxford Magazine.27 Meanwhile, Lewis read on his own a longer work by Tolkien – The Hobbit, which Tolkien had begun in 1930. In a letter to Arthur Greeves of 4 February 1933, Lewis said: ‘Reading his fairy tale has been uncanny – it is so exactly like what we would both have longed to write (or read) in 1916: so that one feels he is not making it up but merely describing the same world into which all three of us have the entry.’28
It wasn’t long before Lewis and Tolkien were joined by Hugo Dyson. He was still teaching at Reading University, but they saw him when he was in Oxford. When he was elected to a fellowship in English at Merton College in 1945 he became a regular member. By the mid-1930s ‘our own club’, as Lewis called it, was meeting on Thursday evenings during term in Lewis’s college rooms and on Tuesday mornings in the back parlour of the Eagle and Child pub in St Giles, Oxford, commonly known as the ‘Bird and Baby’ – though the inn-sign over the door shows Ganymede as quite a ‘lusty juvenile’. Here Lewis was usually to be found from 11.30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on most Tuesdays. The regularity of these meetings was even noticed in a popular detective novel of the time, Edmund Crispin’s Swan Song (1947). In Chapter 8 Crispin’s hero, Gervase Fen, and others are sitting at a table near the entrance of the ‘Bird and Baby’ discussing a murder. ‘“There goes C.S. Lewis,” said Fen suddenly. “It must be Tuesday.”’
Warnie became a regular member when he retired from the Army in 1932, and his diary was to become one of the chief sources of information about this remarkable gathering. The Inklings had no constitution or committee, but was simply a group of friends who met to discuss literary matters and read for criticism the latest instalments of work which they happened to have in progress: ‘membership’ was solely a matter of invitation. Others who joined in the 1930s were Adam Fox, by then Dean of Divinity at Magdalen; Nevill Coghill, Fellow of English at Exeter College since 1925; and Lord David Cecil,* Fellow of English at Wadham College and later New College. Helping Tolkien with the teaching of Anglo-Saxon was Charles Leslie Wrenn, who joined the group in the mid-thirties.*
By the time The Hobbit was published in 1937, Tolkien had begun work on the next, and greatest, of his books, The Lord of the Rings. The Inklings heard chapters of what they called ‘the new Hobbit book’ read aloud at their meetings. Meanwhile, Tolkien and Lewis were planning a joint project. Dissatisfied with much they found in modern stories, they decided to write stories of their own. They liked tales that were ‘mythopoeic’ – having the quality of myth – and the plan was to disguise theirs as thrillers. Tolkien wrote The Lost Road29 – a story of a journey through time – while Lewis saw this as an opportunity to put into effect a technique which became the hallmark of his novels – a ‘Supposal’. Suppose there are rational creatures on other planets? Suppose they are unfallen? The result was his first science-fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet (1938). When Tolkien recommended it to his publishers, Allen & Unwin, on 18 February 1938 he mentioned that, besides hearing it read aloud himself, ‘I have since heard it pass a rather different test: that of being read aloud to our local club (which goes in for reading things short and long aloud). It proved an exciting serial, and was highly approved. But of course we are all rather like-minded.’30 Shortly before Out of the Silent Planet was published Lewis began writing The Problem of Pain, another book read to and commented on by the Inklings.
Warnie was recalled to the Army at the outbreak of war in September 1939, but that year ushered in one of their most important recruits. This was Charles Williams, who had read the proofs of Lewis’s Allegory of Love for the Oxford University Press and whose ‘theological thrillers’ Lewis enjoyed so much. Williams was among the staff that Oxford University Press transferred to Southfield House in Oxford a few days before war was declared against Germany. On 7 September he moved into 9 South Parks Road, while Mrs Williams and their son, Michael, remained in London. Lewis was delighted to see Williams and lost no time in inviting him to become an Inkling. Beginning in September 1939, said Lewis, ‘we met one another about twice a week, sometimes more: nearly always on Thursday evenings in my rooms and on Tuesday mornings in the best of all public houses for draught cider, whose name it would be madness to reveal.’31 Writing to War
nie on 5 November 1939, Jack told him of Williams’s first experience of the club on 2 November:
I had a pleasant evening on Thursday with Williams, Tolkien, and Wrenn, during which Wrenn almost seriously expressed a strong wish to burn Williams, or at least maintained that conversation with Williams enabled him to understand how inquisitors had felt it right to burn people. Tolkien and I agreed afterwards that we just knew what he meant … The occasion was a discussion of the most distressing text in the Bible (‘narrow is the way and few they be that find it’)* and whether one really could believe in a universe where the majority were damned and also in the goodness of God. Wrenn, of course, took the view that it mattered precisely nothing whether it conformed to our ideas of goodness or not, and it was at that stage that the combustible possibilities of Williams revealed themselves to him in an attractive light. The general sense of the meeting was in favour of a view on the lines taken in Pastor Pastorum – that Our Lord’s replies are never straight answers and never gratify curiosity, and that whatever this one meant its purpose was certainly not statistical.32
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