The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  But male company, however convivial and stimulating, could not meet all needs. Tolkien, sometimes accused of ignoring women in his fiction, sought them out in life, in their manifold roles as mother, lover, companion, guide: first Mabel, then the Blessed Virgin, then a young pianist with smoldering eyes by the name of Edith Bratt, who stole his heart. She was nineteen, he sixteen, when they met amid the drab hunting prints and overstuffed furniture of a middle-class boardinghouse. That she was older than he troubled them not at all; they shared an orphan’s independent spirit and longing for love. Edith, born in Gloucester in 1889, the illegitimate child of a paper dealer and a governess, lost her mother at the age of fourteen; after some years at school, where she took to music with considerable skill, she moved to lodgings in Edgbaston, close by the Birmingham Oratory. At about this time, in one of those serendipitous acts that makes or breaks a life, Father Francis, casting about for a home for the boys more congenial than that offered by their unwelcoming aunt Beatrice, moved them into the very Edgbaston rooming house in which Edith Bratt resided.

  It took Tolkien and Edith less than a year to fall in love. One wonders why it took a week. A photograph of Edith shows a young woman with dark, intense eyes looking directly at the camera, a mass of thick black hair framing her soft, full face; to someone as unfamiliar with young women as Tolkien, her beauty must have come as a shock and a revelation. In addition, she was lithe and musical, a singer and dancer. He, by contrast, was thin, average in height, athletic (he played rugby at King Edward’s, coming away with a broken nose and a lacerated tongue, the source of his mumbling diction), a careful dresser, a tidy, attractive, but not handsome package; but what he lacked in physical presence, he made up for in kindness, intelligence, and romantic disposition. It was a good match and an early marriage might have been anticipated. There was, however, one insurmountable obstacle. Father Francis sniffed out the relationship and, concerned for Tolkien’s studies and doubtful of any underage passion, separated the couple, forbidding them to meet again until Tolkien turned twenty-one. Despite some minor breaches, the wall Father Francis erected held firm. Edith moved to Cheltenham and Tolkien prepared for Oxford. Romance was in suspension, but the seeds of Tolkien’s future had been sown: a Catholic faith, a love of words, a creative, artistic mind, the promise of connubial bliss.

  2

  HEAVEN IN A BISCUIT TIN

  What a pity there are no color photographs of Clive Staples Lewis. To see just once in all its splendor that balding pate, that bright red face, those sagging pouches beneath the shrewd brown eyes—trademarks of a heavy daily intake, sustained for decades, of tobacco, beef, and beer! Almost every account of Lewis’s appearance mentions his ruddy complexion. Even death could not snatch it away: J. B. Phillips, Anglican clergyman and Bible translator, reports that while watching television in late November 1963, the recently deceased Lewis “‘appeared’ sitting in a chair within a few feet of me … ruddier in complexion than ever, grinning all over his face and … positively glowing with health.” Time magazine’s September 8, 1947, cover drawing by Boris Artzybasheff interprets the florid countenance; Lewis’s head turns slightly to the right, exposing the left side of his face, stained from forehead to chin by a mottled brown-and-red flush. His left cheek is dark, reflecting the gloomy presence of an irate steel-gray demon hovering over his left shoulder—Lewis is being portrayed here as author of The Screwtape Letters, instructional epistles from a senior devil to his apprentice—but the right side of his face, lightened to pale peach and white by the presence of an angel (we glimpse only one wing and a corner of the nimbus) is calm, alert, intent.

  Lewis resembled, many said, the neighborhood butcher. Add the ubiquitous tweed jacket and flannel slacks, and he comes up in the world, but only as far as a midlevel accountant. He dressed like an ordinary man. Some of his friends and colleagues took this at face value: Luke Rigby, a pupil of Lewis’s at Oxford during World War II and later a Benedictine abbot, writes that his teacher wore clothes “verging on the shabby” that “reflected the warmth and geniality of the man … a straightforward and down-to-earth condemnation of the ‘pseudo’—the shoddy and the insincere.” But this is to underestimate Lewis’s canny sense of person. He cultivated an image, that of the ordinary chap, endowed perhaps—one can do nothing about these things—with extraordinary brains, who lived an ordinary life of plain talk, plain food, and plain faith. He called himself Jack, a plain handshake of a name, a far cry from the Clive Staples he had been christened, and to be Jack was the hard work of a lifetime. Lewis longed to be ordinary: as a child, to talk like the other children in schoolboy slang instead of the learned vocabulary that was all he knew; as a youth, to be one of the lads accepted by the Bloods, the school elite, instead of sticking out for his lack of athletic skill and oversized brains; as an adult, to be a “mere Christian,” the next-door neighbor to millions of BBC Radio listeners. As a scholar, he made sure never to be mistaken for an aesthete. What is life’s greatest pleasure? he asked his doctoral student, the future Renaissance scholar Alastair Fowler. Lewis ticked off the possibilities—Fowler remembers them as great art, mystical ecstasy, simultaneous orgasm—rejecting them one by one. “I’ll tell you,” Lewis said. “It’s the pleasure, after walking for hours, of coming to a pub and relieving yourself.”

  But this sensuous side of Lewis’s nature was a late development. Though Lewis the Oxford don would delight in bathing nude in the secluded “Parson’s Pleasure” section of the River Cherwell or in a flooded clay pit near his Headington home, Lewis as a youth was extraordinarily uncomfortable in his body. Dances were a torment, sports a nightmare. This is hardly unusual among the young of either sex. Lewis, however, made much of it, more than do most people reminiscing about their youth; for he was aware not only of his body, but of the image he projected to others. He describes himself as having been an outsized, awkward lout. His face betrayed him, broadcasting arrogance or anger in just those moments when he was feeling particularly meek or contrite. In an early autobiographical scrap he speaks contemptuously of the “thick lips” he shared with his father. Above all, he singles out his hands, indicting them as the source of his early pessimism, his sense that the inanimate world and he did not conform. Each thumb had only one joint, a defect that led, when shaving, tying laces, or attempting other normal manipulations, to fury and tears. He inhabited his young body as if it were a suit of armor; and if his face was doomed to miscommunicate his true feelings, he would have to learn to play the parts assigned to him, until, as an adult, he could assume his chosen part as Everyman.

  Ulster-Born

  Everyman or not, Lewis was Anglo-Irish by birth, born in Belfast on November 29, 1898. As a young child he lived in a Belfast suburb surrounded by glens and meadows, permeated by the salt tang of the Irish Sea, with the Antrim mountains dissolving into mist in the distance. He fell in love with Northern Ireland’s basalt slopes and steep granite tors—“I have seen landscapes … which, under a particular light, made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge”—and the Belfast Lough, teeming with ships and shipbuilding. Distances of sight or sound enchanted him. He thrilled to the call of a far-off steamer’s horn at night. Through the nursery windows he could gaze at the green Castlereagh Hills: “They were not very far off but they were to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing … made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.”

  Filled with romantic urgings, he identified in his youth with the Celtic Revival, proclaiming Yeats “an author exactly after my own heart,” and confessing to his friend Arthur Greeves, “I am often surprised to find how utterly ignored Yeats is among the men I have met: perhaps his appeal is purely Irish—if so, then thank the gods that I am Irish.” Yet this ardor for things Irish, like much else in his makeup, was tinged with irony. The leading lights of the Celtic Revival—not only Yeats but Lady Gregory, “AE” (George William Russell), and J. M. Synge—had been, lik
e Lewis, Anglo-Irish and Protestant by birth and upbringing, Gaelic by aspiration and choice. Lewis found himself at the crossroads Yeats and AE also faced: one could choose to cultivate a poetic and political Irishness or “go native” as a self-conscious Englishman; an uncomplicated identity was not an option for the Ulster-born.

  Lewis experienced these ambiguities from an early age. Thanks to being half reared by an Irish nursemaid named Lizzie Endicott, “in whom even the exacting memory of childhood can discover no flaw—nothing but kindness, gaiety, and good sense,” he began life furnished with a fine store of Irish folktales and fairy traditions, a promising beginning for a future storyteller and mythologist. “Through Lizzie we struck our roots into the peasantry of County Down,” he wrote, and inspired by Lizzie’s peasant wisdom, he and his older brother Warnie tracked the end of a rainbow to their own front garden and dug deep, but in vain, for the crock of gold. On returning home from work that night, their father fell in the hole, scattering his legal papers and roughing up his fine suit. Nothing could convince him that his sons had not been deliberately plotting against him. It was not the last time that the boys’ intentions would be misconstrued; as a lesson in the futility of nursery room Faërie, the incident speaks volumes. Lewis longed to inhabit a world of myth, but he was prepared from an early age to be disappointed.

  He would have liked to believe that the gods and fairies were returning at last; he acknowledged, with Yeats and AE, that compared to the Celtic world, England was lacking in a native mythology. “I see the great tree of English literature arising out of roast beef and watered with much rum and beer,” AE had said. But Lewis loved roast beef and beer, and his craving for Anglo-Saxon steadiness and common sense (as the stereotype has it) trumped his craving for Celtic enchantment. If Irishness opened a door to visions of the Other World, of magical springs, holy mountains, and fantastic sea voyages, Englishness grounded him. He warned a friend not to be overly attached to the Irish mystique: “Remember that the great minds, Milton, Scott, Mozart and so on, are always sane before all and keep in the broad highway of thought and feel what can be felt by all men, not only by a few.” Once he overcame his initial antipathy to English manners and the English landscape (“The flatness! The interminableness!”), he gradually acquired the spoken accent that to his young ears had “seemed like the voices of demons” and immersing himself as scholar, soldier, philosopher, and literary historian in the central currents of English culture.

  Yet it would be wrong to view Lewis’s Englishness as a rejection of his roots. The Ireland of Lewis’s birth and boyhood was wholly if not wholeheartedly British. The counties that made up the Ulster region in the north were predominantly Protestant, home to Church of Ireland Anglicans and Presbyterian Ulster Scots, groups not always in harmony with each other but ready to close ranks against their Catholic neighbors. Belfast, in particular, depended on its close ties to England to sustain the prosperity of its linen mills and dockyards; the bond was economic as well as spiritual. Considering, too, that Lewis’s Welsh, Scottish, and Anglo-Norman ancestors had settled in Ireland at different times and under different political auspices, it’s understandable that he never decided precisely how Irish God had made him.

  He valued, too, the Welsh within him. “I’m more Welsh than anything,” he told George Sayer, “and for more than anything else in my ancestry I’m grateful that on my father’s side I’m descended from a practical Welsh farmer. To that link with the soil I owe whatever measure of physical energy and stability I have. Without it I should have turned into a hopeless neurotic.” The connection to the soil was remote, however; not since his great-great-grandfather Richard had the Lewises been farmers. Great-grandfather Joseph gave up tilling the soil to harvest souls for Christ as a Methodist minister. Grandfather Richard rose from a menial occupation as dockworker at the Mersey shipyard to master boilermaker in Cork and eventually to partnership in a Belfast shipbuilding firm. Welsh farmer practicality notwithstanding, Lewis felt that his paternal lineage revealed its Welsh character by being “sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent for happiness.” Grandfather Richard’s extreme mood swings and religious brooding made life a trial for his family, but he raised his sons with high expectations, providing Albert, Lewis’s father, with the schooling needed to achieve a respectable professional post as police-court solicitor, to hold his own in the political and cultural life of Belfast, and to marry significantly above his class.

  Lewis’s mother, Florence (“Flora”) Augusta Lewis (1862–1908), was the daughter of the Reverend Thomas R. Hamilton (1826–1905), a prominent Church of Ireland clergyman and former chaplain to the Royal Navy. Hamilton was the first rector of St. Mark’s, Dundela, Belfast, an imposing parish church designed by the English architect William Butterfield in a Tractarian Gothic style similar to that of his masterpiece, Keble College, Oxford. The Lewis family worshipped here, Albert married Flora here, and the boys were baptized here by their distinguished grandfather. On the door to the old rectory, where the Reverend Thomas Hamilton resided, is a circular brass handle depicting the head of a majestic lion, emblem of St. Mark; eager pilgrims to this landmark at the starting point of the Belfast “C. S. Lewis Trail” believe they are face-to-face with the prototype of Aslan, the lion-god, Lewis’s most celebrated literary invention.

  “The Hamiltons were a cooler race,” Lewis would observe in his 1955 autobiography, Surprised by Joy. But there was nothing cool about Grandfather Thomas’s robustious oratory, whether in the pulpit or the pub; he was fond of good company and good argument and loved to hold forth on his favorite prejudice: the superstition and perfidy of the Church of Rome. Lewis’s grandmother, Mary Warren Hamilton, matched her husband in strong opinions. But Mary was a liberal who favored Home Rule, staffed her household with southern Irish servants, and neglected the housekeeping to indulge her political interests. All this shocked her Belfast neighbors and relations, most of whom, like the Lewises, strongly supported the Unionist (pro-British) cause, convinced that Ireland under Home Rule would be Ireland under “Rome Rule,” with the Protestant minority marginalized and abused. Over dinner and at family gatherings, conversation would turn inevitably to the ever-present threat of Irish nationalism; at age ten, Lewis was writing essays on “the Irish problem,” though for a while he declared himself a Home Ruler. Ultimately, he wearied of the debate; from the unedifying spectacle of grown-ups carrying on “an endless and one-sided torrent of grumble and vituperation” (as Warnie described it), he acquired a loathing of politics, newspapers, and sectarian partisanship of all kinds. This led him to temper his inherited anti-Catholicism as well; his deepest wish as an adult convert was to be all things to all men, to unite in himself the warring factions and reclaim for English-speaking Christendom a unified literary and spiritual past.

  Flora passes through her children’s memoirs without leaving a detailed portrait. She appears in photographs as small and squat, with a likable but forgettable elfin face. As a child of twelve, she witnessed a “miracle” in a Catholic church in Rome, as the preserved body of a young female saint encased in glass “slowly lifted her eyelids and looked at me.” When her mother scoffed at the miracle, Flora refused to retract what she had seen but only reconsidered how the effect had been produced: it must have been “all done by cords.” The episode suggests an imaginative disposition as well as a capacity for analytical reasoning. She was not easily persuaded to doubt the evidence of her senses (one thinks of Lucy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). She knew her own mind, as Albert would discover when, emboldened by long-standing close relations between the Lewis and Hamilton families, he proposed marriage to her in 1886. “I always thought you knew that I had nothing but friendship to give you,” Flora said. When she finally accepted him, it was more as a companion than as a lover. She explained that the Hamiltons dislike effusion; no swooning should be expected. While Albert�
�s letters to Flora ardently praise her virtues, Flora’s to Albert remain calm and analytical: “I wonder do I love you? I am not quite sure. I know that at least I am very fond of you, and that I should never think of loving anyone else.” The marriage, if not an idyll, was happy and stable.