The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Nonetheless, Flora possessed a romantic streak, which found its outlet in amateur literary production. She wrote many stories, one of which, “The Princess Rosetta,” appeared in The Household Journal but has since vanished along with all her youthful literary attempts. Her love of novels, according to Lewis, was responsible for most of the fiction in the family library. She was also a gifted mathematician, having passed her examinations in geometry, algebra, and logic at the Royal University (now Queen’s University) in Belfast with first-class honours. She tutored the boys in French and Latin, and she took them on seaside holidays—the highlight of every year, according to Warnie—without Albert, who could not bear to have his daily routines disrupted and joined them on occasional weekends, only to pace the beach in a blue funk.

  These few facts suggest that it was from Flora, if not solely from his own idiosyncratic genius, that Lewis derived his peculiar blend of intellect and imagination, his skill with words, his philosophical dexterity, his willingness to trust his own impressions. The transfer of talents from gifted mother to gifted son was soon truncated, however, when Flora fell ill with what proved to be abdominal cancer. In his autobiography, Lewis re-creates in poignant detail the “strange smells and midnight noises and sinister whispered conversations” of the sickroom and the terror of waking at night “ill and crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me.” When Flora died seven months later at the age of forty-six—Warnie was then thirteen and Lewis nine (three years younger than Tolkien had been when Mabel died)—“all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.” Lewis woke at night in terror, imagining that his father and brother had left for America, in the wake of financial ruin, abandoning him alone and friendless in the great house.

  The Pudaita Bird

  To some degree, Lewis’s mother plays the same role as Tolkien’s father—longer on the stage but notable, like Arthur Tolkien, above all for her passing. There is, however, no counterpart in Tolkien’s biography for Lewis’s father, Albert Lewis (1863–1929), surely one of the more peculiar men to sire a famous author. Albert looms large in both Jack’s and Warnie’s memoirs. He worked all his life as a solicitor, an occupation conventionally considered dry and uninspiring, and yet he was a man of volatile feelings, a spellbinding orator and storyteller, a gifted mime. He loved his wife and two sons dearly, and his sons loved him, too; but the tensions that would lead to their estrangement were evident early on. From his “low Irish” way of saying “pudaita” for “potato,” the boys took to calling him “Pudaitabird” or “P’daytabird”—“P” for short—and later, as young men, collected his aphorisms and anecdotes (“wheezes”) in The Pudaita Pie: An Anthology. Albert exhibited two pronounced traits that drove his children to distraction and then to escape (one of the reasons that both settled in England was to avoid his presence): he meddled and he muddled. The meddling, born from misplaced desire to compensate his boys for the loss of their mother, meant that whenever Jack or Warnie sought solitude, Albert would insert himself and make it a duo, and whenever a friend came to visit, Albert would be sure to make it a crowd. Monday, when he returned to work and could no longer intrude, became for his children “the brightest jewel in the week.”

  The muddling sprang from a short circuit in Albert’s mental processes, leading him to rethink every important choice he faced ad nauseam, until his response was “infallibly and invincibly wrong.” One result, wrote Lewis, was that he “had more capacity for being cheated than any man I have ever known.” Another was that he consistently misinterpreted his sons’ intentions (“It was axiomatic to my father … that nothing was said or done from an obvious motive”) and, more generally, whatever was said to him:

  Tell him that a boy called Churchwood had caught a field mouse and kept it as a pet, and a year, or ten years later, he would ask you, “Did you ever hear what became of poor Chickweed who was so afraid of the rats?” For his own version, once adopted, was indelible, and attempts to correct it only produced an incredulous “Hm! Well, that’s not the story you used to tell.”

  He excelled, too, at non sequiturs—sins against sense of the sort that precocious adolescents find hilarious and rarely have the patience to forgive:

  “Did Shakespeare spell his name with an e at the end?” asked my brother. “I believe,” said I—but my father interrupted: “I very much doubt if he used the Italian calligraphy at all.”

  He possessed, wrote Lewis, “more power of confusing an issue or taking up a fact wrongly than any man I have ever known.” Moreover, Albert’s mood swings—the moments of bonhomie and companionable fun, at which he excelled, could give way without notice to storms of reproach and wounded pride—made emotional displays of any kind seem “uncomfortable and embarrassing and even dangerous.” When the boys committed some small infraction, Albert deployed all his Ciceronian skills as a public speaker and police-court prosecutor—skills Lewis inherited along with a zest for argument—to bring the miscreants to justice. A moment later all was forgiven.

  This brilliant, passionate, capricious domestic god was at the same time uncannily regular in his habits. To the question “What time would you like lunch?” there could only be one answer: 2:00 or 2:30 p.m., a meal of boiled or roasted meat in a dining room facing south. Years later, when Lewis was hospitalized in England for war wounds, Albert, at home in Belfast, refused to disrupt his schedule long enough to visit. In Warnie’s judgment, their father suffered from a crippling obsession (“I never met a man more wedded to a dull routine, or less capable of extracting enjoyment from life”) and became, in his final years, an “inquisitor and tyrant.” Both boys lived in chains while Albert walked the earth.

  “I would not commit the sin of Ham,” Lewis said; yet the portrait of his father in Surprised by Joy is, as A. N. Wilson points out, “devastatingly cruel.” It is less cruel than it might have been, given that Lewis waited until long after his father’s death before skewering him in print. But that he could produce, in his fifties, a send-up so damning, so funny, and so finely wrought, suggests that he never fully escaped his father’s influence. If his mother’s death was the sinking of Atlantis, his struggles with his father wounded him, if anything, more deeply still, perhaps because the relationship suppurated for so many years. The one good thing to come from this slow-motion debacle was the deep, lifelong companionship he would enjoy with Warnie: “the unfortunate man, had he but known it, was really losing his sons as well as his wife. We were coming, my brother and I, to rely more and more exclusively on each other for all that made life bearable; to have confidence only in each other”—and, although Lewis does not mention it in this passage, in the magic worlds they built.

  Boxen

  From their earliest years, the Lewis brothers realized that other worlds, entrancing imaginary creations lying beyond or nestled within the ordinary scheme of things, brought into being by art, will, love, and hard work, could offer incomparable joy and consolation. In an episode that now belongs to the Lewis legend, one day Warnie “brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest.” In Lewis’s memory, the biscuit garden became a simulacrum of Eden, a foretaste of paradise, “the first beauty I ever knew.”

  The house the boys and their father inhabited was another magical realm—or at least the vestibule to one. The family moved into “Little Lea” when Lewis was seven. A rambling, three-story brick building (“to a child it seemed less like a house than a city”) in the suburbs of Belfast, it was drafty, roomy, with defective chimneys and noisy plumbing; delightful, Warnie remembered, precisely because it was “atrociously uneconomical” and full of unused crawl spaces. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis would recast it as the foothills of Parnassus, the p
lace where he first tasted his destiny: “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.” The house groaned with books, jammed into bedrooms, attics, landings, closets, books for children and for adults, books for the naïve and for the sophisticated. “I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.”

  It was at Little Lea that Lewis acquired his passion, not only for reading, but for writing. In one of the empty attics, safe from grown-up interference, he set up an “office” in which he composed reams of juvenilia, including essays, novels, journals, histories, and above all, the chronicles of Animal-Land, a medieval kingdom featuring knights and “dressed animals.” By 1906 (age seven) he had written The King’s Ring, a three-act play set in 1327 during the reign of King Bunny I, involving the theft of the king’s ring by a mouse named Hit and its recovery by Mr. Big the Frog (later Lord Big) and Sir Goose. The dialogue is what one expects from a seven-year-old who had been steeped in Beatrix Potter’s rabbit worlds, Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel, and his brother’s copy of The Three Musketeers:

  KING BUNNY: This wine is good.

  BAR-MAN: I shall drink a stiff goblet to the health of King Bunny.

  KING BUNNY: For this good toast much thanks.

  SIR PETER: Draws near the dinner hour so pleas your Magasty.

  Meanwhile, Warnie was devising his own imaginary country, a bustling, modern, industrialized “India” whose “ships and trains and battles” he delighted to draw. Soon the boys fused their two disparate creations into a fantastic über-realm they called Boxen. Lewis furnished this new land with an elaborate if choppy history from medieval to modern times, composed with relentless attention to detail. He proved to be a “systematizer” akin to Trollope; Boxen was his Barsetshire, and he filled it with citizens and statesmen like the frog Lord John Big (a father figure, according to Surprised by Joy, and “a prophetic portrait of Sir Winston Churchill”); Big’s nemesis, the navy lieutenant and bear James Barr (who was, Lewis would later say, remarkably like the poet John Betjeman, who would be his most challenging pupil at Oxford); Orring the lizard MP; and assorted Chessmen of low birth, all drawn with an ungainly realism as mirrors of the adult society Lewis knew best, preoccupied with questions of money, politics, and power.

  There was little enchanting about Boxen itself. Its magic resided in the bond it forged between two brothers, beginning in the idyllic years before their mother’s death. As different as Animal-Land was from India, as different as Jack was from Warnie, they succeeded in creating a common imaginary world that they would share until Lewis’s death. “Neither of us ever made any attempt to keep that vanished world alive,” Warnie recalled, “but we found that its language had become a common heritage of which we could not rid ourselves. Almost up to the end, ‘Boxonian’ remained for Jack a treasured tongue in which he could communicate with me, and with me only. The Harley street specialist of that world had been a small china salmon, by name Dr. Arrabudda; and Jack, during the closing weeks of his life, on the days when his specialist was due to visit him, would say to me with a smile, ‘I’ll be seeing that fellow Arrabudda this morning.’”

  Unlike Tolkien, Lewis didn’t turn to writing to escape from family tragedy. His motive was far more ordinary: writing was the most ready-to-hand amusement for a child confined to the house whenever the weather threatened. He began to write in the limpid dawn of an idyllic childhood, before his mother’s death, when he was little “Jacksie” to his beloved brother “Badgie,” and their parents confided in each other as “Doli” to “dearest old Bear.” He set down, in his first diary, the picture of a household that was settled and secure, though not without its irritants: “Papy of course is the master of the house, and a man in whom you can see strong Lewis features, bad temper, very sensible, nice wen not in a temper. Mamy is like most middle-aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectaciles, kniting her chief industry, etc., etc. I am generaly wearing a jersy…”

  Lewis enjoyed the constant companionship of his brother, and when Warnie went to school in 1905, the two kept up a correspondence. Lewis also wrote about Warnie in his diary: “Hoora!! Warnie comes home this morning. I am lying in bed waiting for him and thinking of him, before I know where I am I hear his boots pounding on the stairs, he comes into the room, we shake hands and begin to talk … Well I was glad to have him but of course we had our rows afterwards…”

  This loving companionship would prosper, despite separations and occasional rows, for the rest of Lewis’s life. Three years older than his brother, heavier, and more earthbound in his hobbies and interests, Warnie comes across in letters and diaries—his own as well as his brother’s—as a gentle man forever devoted to Lewis (though sometimes exasperated by him), with a character more gracious to others and less assertive of his own interests than his famous sibling possessed. John Wain, not the most tender-minded of Inklings, described Warnie as “the most courteous [man] I have ever met—and not with mere politeness, but with a genial, self-forgetful considerateness that was as instinctive to him as breathing.” Warnie would become an active Inkling in his own right, the author of several books on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French history, a dedicated diarist, a career military officer, and a chronic alcoholic. For now, it is enough to think of him as Lewis’s closest companion, and his first collaborator in literary pursuits.

  * * *

  Lewis’s boyhood reading early coalesced around fantasy literature, with its fabulous lands, mutations of time and space, and metaphysical conceits, along with a secondary concentration in sentimental historical fiction. By the age of twelve, he had scouted Edith Nesbit, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, F. Anstey, H. Rider Haggard, and H. G. Wells, along with Henryk Sienkiewicz and Lewis Wallace; but he also swallowed large doses of poetry, especially by Longfellow and Milton. Intensive, at times compulsive, reading became for him a lifelong habit. By his late teens he was extraordinarily well versed in classical literature and English, so much so that one of his teachers, William T. Kirkpatrick, indicated that “he has read more classics in the time than any boy I ever had, and that too, very carefully and exactly.” Lewis was already acquiring the skill and taste to claim, one day, the mantle of twentieth-century heir to Samuel Johnson, the most widely read man in eighteenth-century England. To generations of students, astonished by his prodigious literary memory, he would give this simple counsel: “The great thing is to be always reading but never to get bored—treat it not like work, more as a vice!”

  Lewis’s early reading delivered more than excitement, knowledge, or even deepening analytic and imaginative skills. On rare occasions, an image, a tone, a rhythm, an unexpected juxtaposition, would lift him clean out of himself, out of Little Lea, Belfast, and Boxen, translating him to the threshold of a new state of being. He called this state “Joy” and identified it with the German Sehnsucht: the infinitely desirable, sweetly wounding, ungraspable and unforgettable, the apotheosis of longing itself: “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Joy would become for Lewis a siren, a mirage, a lodestone, a signpost, and finally, a way to God. It came in the form of a series of shocks or epiphanies, fleeting in duration but marking Lewis forever. He first experienced it on a spring day when, standing by a flowering currant bush, he was swept up in “a memory of a memory” of Warnie carrying his miniature garden in a biscuit tin into the nursery. The recollection flooded him with a sensation he could only compare to “Milton’s ‘enormous bliss of Eden.’”

  Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin administered the next shock: “It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn.” Was it a sense of things passing, even passing away, of waning sunlight, cooling air, leaves erupting in color before crumpling to the ground? Lewis doesn’t say; but it is noteworthy that the minimal plot in
volves Squirrel Nutkin challenging Old Owl with a series of riddles, all left unsolved, evoking the mystery of existence, felt most keenly as dark and cold usurp sun and light.

  The third shock came while thumbing through a volume of Longfellow, when Lewis stumbled upon the opening lines of “Tegnér’s Drapa”: “I heard a voice that cried, / Balder the Beautiful / Is dead, is dead!” and immediately found himself immersed in “Northernness,” a sensation “cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote”—spring had given way to Nutkin’s autumn, and autumn to winter as the season of epiphany. Balder is, of course, a dying-and-rising god (an idea Lewis encountered in Frazer’s The Golden Bough), a mythic anticipation of Christ. To have his child’s heart stirred by Balder’s death may be, then, an anticipation of his later Christian faith; in any event, it shows Lewis’s critical perspicacity at a precocious age, selecting deeply evocative lines from a sometimes thumpingly overblown Norse-inspired cycle of poems (“The Saga of King Olaf,” which initially attracted Lewis to Longfellow, begins “I am the God Thor, / I am the War God, / I am the Thunderer! / Here in my Northland, / My fastness and fortress, / Reign I forever!”).

  Like the Romantic poets, Lewis sensed the numinous in words that pointed to a realm beyond, to empty sky, open landscapes, things passing, things beyond reach, dim foreshadowings of a God who is wholly Other. That the young Lewis would be so stirred by fall and winter, by the advent of cold and dark; by the death of beauty, by death itself, speaks to his essential Romanticism. Each of the epiphanies he experienced contained within it, as part of its evanescent loveliness, a memento mori: the death of Balder; the near death of Squirrel Nutkin, whom Old Owl captures and almost skins alive; and, most poignantly, the death of the happy early childhood of Warnie and himself, builder and beholder of the miniature Eden. Underlying all was the one great death: that of his mother.