He wrote to Warnie again on 11 November 1939 about an Inklings meeting on 9 November:
On Thursday we had a meeting of the Inklings – you and Coghill both absented unfortunately … I have never in my life seen Dyson so exuberant – ‘a roaring cataract of nonsense’. The bill of fare afterwards consisted of a section of the new Hobbit book from Tolkien, a nativity play from Williams* (unusually intelligible for him, and approved by all) and a chapter out of the book on The Problem of Pain from me. It so happened – it would take too long to explain why – that the subject matter produced a really first rate evening’s talk of the usual wide-ranging kind – ‘from grave to gay, from lively to severe’.33
Lewis read more of The Problem of Pain at other meetings of the Inklings. He remembered Charles Williams remarking that, while God had approved Job’s impatience, the ‘weight of divine displeasure had been reserved for the “comforters”, the self-appointed advocates on God’s side, the people who tried to show that all was well – “the sort of people”, he said, immeasurably dropping his lower jaw and fixing me with his eyes – “the sort of people who wrote books on the Problem of Pain”.’34 Lewis had meanwhile discussed the book with Dr Robert (‘Humphrey’) Havard,† who became his doctor in 1934. Jack came down with the flu that winter and Dr Havard remembered that, on visiting his new patient, ‘we spent some five minutes discussing his influenza, which was very straightforward, and then half an hour or more in a discussion of ethics and philosophy’.35 On 1 February 1940 Havard attended his first Inklings meeting and read a paper on his clinical experiences of the effects of pain, a portion of which Lewis afterwards used as an appendix to his book.
When The Problem of Pain was published in October 1940 it was dedicated to ‘The Inklings’. Lewis’s pupil Dom Bede Griffiths wanted to know who they were, and Lewis informed him in a letter of 26 December 1941: ‘Williams, Dyson of Reading, & my brother (Anglicans) and Tolkien and my doctor, Havard (your Church) are the “Inklings” to whom my Problem of Pain was dedicated.’36
It was not long after the publication of The Problem of Pain that the Inklings were rolling out of their seats as they listened to Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, which were being written during the autumn of 1940.
Other new members appeared during the war. Fr Gervase Mathew OP* was a member of the Catholic order of the Dominicans and lived at Blackfriars in St Giles. He lectured in the Modern History, Theology and English faculties of the University. Colin Hardie, the Dante and Virgil scholar, became Magdalen’s Fellow of Classics in 1936. He was at that time drawn towards the ‘progressive’ element in the college. However, as a result of a common interest in Dante – Lewis and Hardie were members of the Oxford Dante Society – they became friends and Hardie was invited to become an Inkling.
Other wartime recruits included James Dundas-Grant, who served in both wars, and in October 1944 became Commander of the Oxford University Naval Division.† The post entitled its holder to reside in Magdalen College, and after becoming friends with Lewis he was urged to join the club. Whereas Commander Dundas-Grant was almost fifty when he became a member of the Inklings, he was followed by the youngest members. John Wain, who was to achieve fame as a novelist and critic, matriculated at St John’s College, Oxford, in 1943. Due to the war, however, he was sent to Magdalen to be tutored in English, and Lewis was his tutor. Wain also ran into Lewis at meetings of the Socratic Club, and shortly after the end of the war Wain was invited to join the Inklings. This was its richest period, and in his autobiography, Sprightly Running (1962), he left one of the most engaging pictures of the Inklings during their great decade:
I can see that room so clearly now, the electric fire pumping heat into the dank air, the faded screen that broke some of the keener draughts, the enamel beer-jug on the table, the well-worn sofa and armchairs, and the men drifting in (those from distant colleges would be later), leaving overcoats and hats in any corner and coming over to warm their hands before finding a chair. There was no fixed etiquette, but the rudimentary honours would be done partly by Lewis and partly by his brother, W.H. Lewis, a man who stays in my memory as the most courteous I have ever met – not with mere politeness, but with a genial, self-forgetting considerateness that was as instinctive to him as breathing. Sometimes, when the less vital members of the circle were in a big majority, the evening would fall flat; but the best of them were as good as anything I shall live to see. This was the bleak period following a ruinous war, when every comfort (and some necessities) seemed to have vanished for ever; Lewis had American admirers who sent him parcels, and whenever one of these parcels had arrived the evening would begin with a distribution. His method was to scatter the tins and packets on his bed, cover them with the counterpane, and allow each of us to pick one of the unidentifiable humps; it was no use simply choosing the biggest, which might turn out to be prunes or something equally dreary. Another admirer used to send a succulent ham now and then; this, too, would be shared out. In winter we sat round the electric fire; in summer, often, on the steps at the back of the ‘New Building’, looking on to the deer-haunted grove.37
Another younger member was Christopher, the son of J.R.R. Tolkien. Christopher had known the Lewis brothers most of his life. He went up to Trinity College, Oxford in 1942 but left in 1944 to join the Royal Air Force. While he was overseas his father sent him chapters of The Lord of the Rings as it was being written. At the end of the war he returned to Trinity College and was invited to join the Inklings.
Before Christopher returned his father wrote to him about an outburst of energy vitally important to the development of ‘the new Hobbit’. By the beginning of 1944 The Lord of the Rings had been untouched for months, and Tolkien complained of lack of energy. Lewis urged him to go on, and at the beginning of April he resumed work. ‘I have embarked on an effort to finish my book,’ he said in his letter to Christopher of 5 April 1944. On 23 April he wrote excitedly to say: ‘I read my second chapter, Passage of the Dead Marshes, to Lewis and Williams on Wed. morning. It was approved. I have now nearly done a third.’38 He described an Inklings meeting held on 31 May as:
very enjoyable. Hugo was there: rather tired-looking, but reasonably noisy. The chief entertainment was provided by a chapter of Warnie Lewis’s book on the times of Louis XIV* (very good I thought it); and some excerpts from C.S.L.’s ‘Who Goes Home’ – a book on Hell, which I suggested should be called rather ‘Hugo’s Home’.† I did not get back till after midnight. The rest of my time, barring chores in and out doors, has been occupied by the desperate attempt to bring ‘The Ring’ to a suitable pause, the capture of Frodo by Orcs in the passes of Mordor … By sitting up all hours, I managed it: and read the last 2 chapters (Shelob’s Lair and The Choices of Master Samwise) to C.S.L. on Monday morning. He approved with unusual fervour, and was actually affected to tears by the last chapter, so it seems to be keeping up.39
It was about this time that Lewis’s American publishers, Macmillan of New York, begged him for some facts about himself they could put on the cover of their edition of Perelandra to be published on 11 April 1944. He responded with what was his only ‘biography’ until Surprised by Joy was published years later. It appeared on the covers of the Macmillan editions of Perelandra and That Hideous Strength for years, but it has been out of print for a very long time and we reproduce it here for the light it sheds on Lewis’s enjoyment of the ‘adult male laughter’ of the Inklings:
I never remember dates. The principal facts of my life are not (in a form suitable for biography) known to me. I was a younger son, and we lost my mother when I was a child. That meant very long days alone when my father was at work and my brother at boarding school. Alone in a big house full of books. I suppose that fixed a literary bent. I drew a lot, but soon began to write more. My first stories were mostly about mice (influence of Beatrix Potter), but mice usually in armor killing gigantic cats (influence of fairy stories). That is, I wrote the books I should have liked to read if only I could have got them.
That’s always been my reason for writing. People won’t write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself: no rot about ‘self-expression’. I loathed school. Being an infantry soldier in the last war would have been nicer if one had known one was going to survive. I was wounded – by an English shell. (Hence the greetings of an aunt who said, with obvious relief, ‘Oh, so that’s why you were wounded in the back!’) I gave up Christianity at about fourteen. Came back to it when getting on for thirty. An almost purely philosophical conversion. I didn’t want to. I’m not the religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I’m my own master: but since the facts seemed to be the opposite I had to give in. My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs – or else sitting up till the small hours in someone’s college rooms talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes. There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter.
The Inklings often welcomed guests, such as Jack’s ex-pupil, George Sayer, a master at Malvern College, later to write Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis (1988). Another guest was the poet Roy Campbell (1902–57), who happened to be sitting in the inner room of the ‘Bird and Baby’ when the Inklings assembled there on 3 October 1944. As Tolkien wrote to Christopher,
I noticed a strange tall gaunt man half in khaki half in mufti with a large wide-awake hat, bright eyes and a hooked nose sitting in the corner. The others had their backs to him, but I could see in his eye that he was taking an interest in the conversation quite unlike the ordinary pained astonishment of the British (and American) public at the presence of the Lewises (and myself) in a pub … All of a sudden he butted in, in a strange unplaceable accent, taking up some point about Wordsworth. In a few seconds he was revealed as Roy Campbell (of Flowering Rifle and Flaming Terrapin). Tableau! Especially as C.S.L. had not long ago violently lampooned him in the Oxford Magazine … After that things became fast and furious and I was late for lunch. It was (perhaps) gratifying to find that this powerful poet and soldier desired in Oxford chiefly to see Lewis (and myself).40
Tolkien was referring to Lewis’s poem ‘To Roy Campbell’, which begins: ‘Dear Roy – Why should each wowzer on the list / Of those you damn be dubbed Romanticist?’41 But Lewis was probably more surprised than Tolkien to discover the identity of the mysterious stranger. Talking about it years later to Walter Hooper, he said what delighted him most about the man was that ‘He agreed with me totally about the failings in Campbell’s poetry, and in fact pointed out some I’d missed.’ After a good deal more of such criticism, Lewis asked who he was and was delighted to find it was Campbell himself. The poet was given a rapturous welcome when he later came to one of the Thursday evening meetings.
Perhaps the Tolkien letter that reveals most about Lewis’s love of ‘rational opposition’ is that about the meeting on 23 November 1944. Owen Barfield, always an especially strong stimulant to Lewis, was present. Tolkien wrote to Christopher,
C.S.L. was highly flown, but we were also in good fettle; while O.B. is the only man who can tackle C.S.L. making him define everything and interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo’s. The result was a most amusing and highly contentious evening, on which (had an outsider eavesdropped) he would have thought it a meeting of fell enemies hurling deadly insults before drawing their guns. Warnie was in excellent majoral form. On one occasion when the audience had flatly refused to hear Jack discourse on and define ‘Chance’, Jack said: ‘Very well, some other time, but if you die tonight you’ll be cut off knowing a great deal less about Chance than you might have.’ Warnie: ‘That only illustrates what I’ve always said: every cloud has a silver lining.’42
The Second World War ended on 9 May 1945. With the lights coming back on in the country, followed by a relaxation of many wartime restrictions, things looked hopeful to Lewis and his friends. Then, on 11 May, Charles Williams was seized with pain. He was rushed to the Radcliffe Infirmary and on 14 May he was operated on. Lewis learned he was there on Tuesday, 15 May, and while he was on his way to the Infirmary to take him some books, the Inklings gathered in the ‘Bird and Baby’ for their usual meeting. Lewis arrived at the Radcliffe to find that Williams had just died of an intestinal obstruction, an old problem for which he had been operated on in 1933. The shock was so great and so unexpected, said Lewis, that ‘when I joined them with my actual message – it was only a few minutes’ walk from the Infirmary but, I remember, the very streets looked different – I had some difficulty in making them believe or even understand what had happened. The world seemed to us at that moment primarily a strange one.’43
After the funeral, Charles Williams’s body was buried in the Cemetery of St Cross Church, which he attended during his years in Oxford, and it lies there beneath a white stone bearing an epitaph he had written for himself – ‘Under the Mercy’. Lewis expressed his feelings about him in a letter to a former pupil, Mrs Mary Neylan:
I also have become much acquainted with grief now through the death of my great friend Charles Williams, my friend of friends, the comforter of all our little set, the most angelic. The odd thing is that his death has made my faith ten times stronger than it was a week ago. And I find that all that talk about ‘feeling that he is closer to us than before’ isn’t just talk. It’s just what it does feel like – I can’t put it into words. One seems at moments to be living in a new world. Lots, lots of pain, but not a particle of depression or resentment.44
Although the effect of Williams’s death was very great, Lewis had exaggerated his impact on some of the other members. ‘I was and remain wholly unsympathetic to Williams’ mind’, Tolkien wrote to Dick Plotz on 12 September 1965. ‘I knew Charles Williams only as a friend of C.S.L. … We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest) but we had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels … But Lewis was a very impressionable man, and this was abetted by his great generosity and capacity for friendship.’45 In the end Lewis’s introduction of Williams into the Inklings led to some cooling on Tolkien’s part.
Even so, there were some good Inkling years ahead. It is impossible to catch the flavour, or the multiplicity of subjects bandied and discussed so brilliantly; but Warnie Lewis’s diary, Brothers and Friends, preserves at least an echo of the later meetings when discussion had largely taken the place of mutual criticism. Writing about an Inklings meeting attended by Christopher Tolkien on 28 March 1946, Warnie said: ‘A good meeting of the Inklings, though scantily attended. Present, J and I, Christopher, Humphrey, Colin Hardie, Gervase Mathew. Interesting discussion on the possibility of dogs having souls.’46
It delighted Lewis that Anglican and Catholic Inklings got on so well together. The exception, curiously, was Hugo Dyson, a ‘high’ Anglican who wanted to limit the number of Catholics in their circle. J.A.W. Bennett,* a Catholic at Queen’s College, was helping Jack with his teaching in Magdalen and Tolkien invited him to the meeting on 15 August 1946. Warnie wrote that evening,
A small Inklings, only Ronald [Tolkien], Humphrey, ourselves, and J’s new lieutenant, brought in by Ronald from Queens, where he had been dining. I hear with dismay that Ronald has since talked of ‘bringing him in occasionally’: with dismay for two reasons, firstly that he is a dull dog, and secondly that he is an R.C. I don’t mind his being one in the least, but Hugo, who has puzzlingly strong views on the matter has several times lately threatened that if any more Papists join the Inklings he will resign.47
Jack Bennett became a member nevertheless, though he mainly attended the Tuesday meetings.
Sometimes the Inklings would meet at the King’s Arms pub, at the corner of Broad Street and Parks Road, instead of or in addition to the ‘Bird and Baby’. The choice of the King’s Arms was particularly convenient during the years when Lewis was working in the Bodleian on his volume for the Oxford History of English Literature (the OHEL – ‘the O Hell!’ as he called it). He would slip out to the King’s Arms about noon; and fle
dgling Inklings usually made their first appearance there. Green, for example, recorded in his diary on 26 September 1947, ‘Worked hard in Bodleian. Met C.S. Lewis there, who asked me out for a drink and talk at “The King’s Arms”; Christopher [Tolkien] joining us.’ These meetings usually took place during the Long Vacation and, it being summer, Lewis and his friends would settle themselves in the yard behind the pub for loud and merry discourse and argument. At the many gatherings which Green attended in 1948 and 1949 Hugo Dyson was usually there also, Professor Tolkien or his son Christopher frequently, Colin Hardie occasionally, and from time to time there was an additional visitor, usually someone whom Lewis had met by chance in the Bodleian.
‘At the Inklings,’ Warnie wrote on 24 October 1946 at the beginning of Michaelmas Term, ‘Tollers read us a couple of exquisite chapters from the “new Hobbit”. Nothing has come my way for a long time which has given me such enjoyment and excitement; as J says, it is more than good, it is great.’48
The next entry from Warnie’s diary requires some explanation. Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860–1939), known as ‘The World’s Worst Writer’, was a Belfast client of Albert Lewis, and through him Jack and Warnie discovered the lady’s appalling poems, Irene Iddlesleigh (1897) and Poems of Puncture (1915). It had become a customary feature of Inklings meetings to bet that no one could read a passage from either of these books with a straight face. On 28 November 1946 there was, Warnie wrote, ‘A pretty full meeting of the Inklings to meet Roy Campbell, now with the BBC, whom I was very glad to see again; he is fatter and tamer than he used to be I think. He read us nothing of his own, except translations of a couple of Spanish poems – none of us understood either of them. Wain won an outstanding bet by reading a chapter of Irene Iddlesleigh without a smile.’49
‘Inklings after dinner,’ wrote Warnie on 6 February 1947, ‘present ourselves, the Tolkiens, Colin, Wain, and Gervase. Colin read an interminable paper on an unintelligible point about Virgil: of which Wain remarked afterwards, “To say I didn’t understand it is a gross understatement”. Chris then gave us an admirable chapter of the “[new] Hobbit”, beautifully read.’50
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