The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  One of the more unexpected of Lewis’s literary productions, during his Cambridge years, was his 1956 novel, Till We Have Faces, a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche tale from Apuleius’s second-century Latin fantasy, The Golden Ass. It is the most controversial of Lewis’s fictions, intensely disliked by many of his readers, extravagantly praised by a few, an anomaly among his works with its female narrator, its bleak landscapes, its bitter, ironic tone—more than a few passages might have come from Camus or Sartre—its complex plot, its cultivated obscurities, and its uncertain conclusion. Lewis was aware of the adverse reaction: “A complete flop, the worst flop I’ve ever had,” he described it to a former pupil on August 8, 1959, and a year later, writing to thank Anne Scott (a former pupil and a good friend of Charles Williams) for her appreciative words, he confessed that, while he regarded Till We Have Faces as “far and away the best I have written,” he still ranked it as “my one big failure both with the critics and with the public.”

  The book had a protracted and difficult gestation. Lewis began retooling the myth (which he believed predated Apuleius’s version) while still an undergraduate; by the time it appeared in print, as he wrote in the first edition, he had “worked at it most of his life.” The breakthrough came in the spring of 1955, when Joy was visiting at the Kilns and, in her words, she and Lewis “kicked a few ideas around till one came to light. Then we had another whisky each and bounced it back and forth between us.” In The Golden Ass, Psyche, the youngest and most beautiful of three daughters, falls in love with an unseen god (Cupid), breaks her promise never to look at his face, and consequently undergoes a series of punishing trials, which ends when Cupid forgives her and Jupiter makes her a goddess. In Lewis’s novel, the focus shifts from Psyche to her oldest sister, Orual, queen of the drought-and-plague-ridden land of Glome. Orual, ugly but brilliant, narrates the tale, which amounts to her indictment of the gods, who bring us happiness only “when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us.” Orual is consumed by anger, resentment, and jealousy; where Psyche sees the palace of the god, she sees only barrenness; Orual’s spiritual blindness leads to great suffering for both herself and her sister. The situation, Lewis told Katharine Farrer, is comparable to that of “every nice, affectionate agnostic whose dearest one suddenly ‘gets religion,’ or even every luke warm Christian whose dearest gets a Vocation.” At the end, Orual acquires enough wisdom to understand that God does not reveal himself or his motives readily; directly addressing God, she concedes that “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away.” In her impotence and queenly power, her self-love and self-hate, her consuming rage and final understanding, she is Lewis’s most completely realized character, male or female. And yet the book’s presiding darkness and relentless melancholy make it a struggle to read and nearly impossible to cherish. “Most reviewers,” observed Walter Hooper, “had difficulty understanding the book.” Even T. H. White—a writer deeply sympathetic to modern retellings of ancient myth—caviled over Lewis’s “mumbo-jumbo.” Till We Have Faces remains, for all its brilliances, the Lewis novel most readers turn to last and slog through with grudging admiration.

  By mid-March 1955, Lewis had also finished Surprised by Joy, and sent it to Jocelyn Gibb, managing director at Geoffrey Bles and a devoted custodian of Lewis’s publishing career, to check for libel risk. The title came from Wordsworth: “Surprised by Joy—impatient as the Wind.” It was not an autobiography so much as a spiritual testament, written, Lewis said, “partly in answer to requests that I would tell how I passed from Atheism to Christianity and partly to correct one or two false notions that seem to have got about.”

  The path to writing Surprised by Joy was well grooved. In The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis had already allegorized his conversion, and in the process worked out everything he would ever want to say on the subject of Joy. In his imaginative fiction, Lewis had made preliminary sketches of several memorable characters and themes; as we have seen, Kirkpatrick would step into a role already prepared for him in the Ransom trilogy and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lewis’s favorite arguments for the existence of God—from morality and from reason—accompanied by his favorite Romantic theme, the “dialectic of desire,” are present throughout the narrative of his adolescent moral agonies, his discovery of sound reasoning, and his longing for an elusive Joy. A series of tableaux fans out like a Tarot deck: the first stab of beauty in the biscuit-tin garden, the Green Hills beyond the nursery window, the “long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes” and endless books; the flowering currant bush, Squirrel Nutkin, and “Tégner’s Drapa”; the nightmare sounds and smells of his mother’s dying; the miseries of bad teeth and physical clumsiness; his father’s follies, fits, and “wheezes”; friends, bullies, and idols at school; Joy receding and then returning on wings of Northernness; the deliverance by Kirkpatrick; the discovery of Arthur (“‘Do you like that?’”); the encounter with Barfield, “as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman”; Oxford and war; and finally a succession of philosophical worldviews attempted and abandoned; leading to the picture of Lewis on his knees, checkmated by “My Adversary”—“the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

  Many readers were puzzled by the disproportionate attention Lewis gave to his boyhood, the searing light shone on his besetting sins, the comparative neglect of his wartime experience and his romantic entanglements, and the abrupt, unsentimental ending. As Dorothy L. Sayers noted in her review for Time and Tide, the “latter stages of that journey, from Rationalism, through Philosophic Idealism and Pantheism, to Theism and finally to Christianity, are … related with a businesslike brevity.” But it was by no means Lewis’s intention to pour his experiences uncensored onto the page; the book is, rather, a carefully shaped literary meditation, much like Augustine’s Confessions, though Lewis declined the comparison; and like the Confessions, its theme is the disordering and reordering of desire. “In a sense,” Lewis said, “the central story of my life is about nothing else.” Had Lewis been a less gifted memoirist, Surprised by Joy would have followed the dialectic of desire along conventional lines, as a journey from experience to experience in search of God. Instead, Lewis opted to make himself the object of God’s pursuit, so that he could say, with Chesterton, “I am the fool of this story.” He falters, though, Sayers noted, in introducing his “hound of heaven” theme too peremptorily at the end.

  These minor flaws notwithstanding, Surprised by Joy is a spiritual masterpiece and enjoyed a warm reception in the mainstream and church press. The Anglican poet Norman Cornthwaite Nicholson, reviewing it in The Times Literary Supplement, was thrilled by the chess-game ending: “God moves, indeed, in a mysterious way, and this book gives a brilliant account of one of the oddest and most decisive end-games He has ever played.” Praising the “delightful and humorous candour” of Surprised by Joy, Sayers concluded her review by saying, “The limpidity of these waters may disguise their depth, so clearly do they reveal the bottom. But any illusions about this can be quickly dispelled by stepping into the river.”

  The Sweet Humiliation of Incarnation

  Despite the manifold pleasures of Cambridge, Lewis’s heart remained in Oxford. Nostalgia was not the cause. He had little interest in memories for their own sake; in writing Surprised by Joy, he had revisited the past not for the pleasure of reminiscence but to understand for himself and to convey to others a conversion that was still unfolding. Even Charles Williams, for most of the Inklings little more now than a fading set of images and words, remained for Lewis a living event, someone whose presence in eternity had become a central fact of his own Christian faith.

  He cared for Oxford, in part, because Warnie lived there. The fraternal bond had never frayed, despite the strain of Warnie’s drinking and his own departure to Cambridge. The presence of
other Inklings counted, too. But the real reason for his undying attachment to this city was Joy Davidman, who had worked (some would say wormed) her way into his life and was now awakening in him, not just affection, but love. A watershed arrived in late summer 1955, when she and her two boys moved from London to Headington, passing a hot August at the Kilns—she could see nearby stucco houses “shimmering in the heat haze on a cloudless day”—and then, in September, settling about a mile away at 10 Old High Street, a drab semidetached house with a pleasant garden producing tomatoes and cabbages, apples and plums. There she patched together a small income from typing, checks sent by Bill, and the rare small advance from her agent. It wasn’t enough, but this didn’t really matter, as Lewis paid the rent and helped with other expenses. He visited her every day and often stayed until late in the evening. A casual onlooker might have assumed that Joy was Lewis’s mistress; this onlooker could not know that, given the couple’s mutually reinforced Christian principles, the relationship was chaste, nor that Lewis, who had almost no extended experience of women apart from Mrs. Moore, was feeling his way like a blind man beginning to see. Eva Walsh, who had visited Lewis with her husband, Chad, during the summer, “smelled marriage in the air.” To Warnie, “it was now obvious what was going to happen.”

  Happen it did, a few months later, after the British Home Office denied Joy a renewal of her visa. (According to Sheldon Vanauken, an American friend of Lewis, this was because of Joy’s Communist background.) Deportation loomed—unless she married a British citizen. Lewis, who had anticipated the quandary, made swift arrangements, and on April 23, 1956, he and Joy were married at the Oxford Registry Office. In Lewis’s mind, the wedding was no more than an official convenience, a ceremony doubling as a visa stamp. He informed few friends (and no Inklings apart from Warnie) of the event, assuring those in the know that things remained as before, that he and Joy had married in name only and would retain separate addresses and lives. Warnie, a wily observer of human motives, knew better. He noted that “Joy, whose intentions were obvious from the outset, soon began to press for her rights.” By now he felt great affection for this boisterous American, whose warm informality and cutting intelligence he enjoyed as much as his brother did. But the irony of the situation—Joy as the new, albeit more favored, Mrs. Moore—did not escape him, and he remarked that “the gap between the end of the Ancien Regime and the Restoration had lasted for less than four years.”

  Joy, just turned forty-one, basked in her new marital status, the end of eight years of upheaval, the culmination—perhaps—of eight years of planning. Lewis continued to visit her at 10 Old High Street but, worried about neighborhood gossip, soon agreed that she and the boys should move into the Kilns. Meanwhile, Joy worked on a new book, The Seven Deadly Virtues, but made snail-like progress. She doubted its worth and had written Bill Gresham to ask, “How did I get into this theology racket anyway? The trouble is that while I like Christianity well enough, I hate Churchianity.” History seemed a viable alternative, and she researched a life of Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s second wife, tentatively entitled Queen Cinderella, but this project made little headway also. The problem lay in a mismatch between her talents and her chosen subjects. Her novels, although dotted with religious imagery, reveal her real strength to lie in raw, rich portraits of village life. She switched to theology under Lewis’s spell, while the idea for a book on Madame de Maintenon came from Warnie, who originally proposed it as a collaboration. But if Joy’s literary career took a wrong turn when she encountered the Lewis brothers, the sacrifice paled beside the reward. She was Lewis’s wife and would soon become his housemate, and she and Warnie enjoyed a warm, merry friendship, admiring one another and loving the same man.

  Meanwhile, Joy’s circle of friends enlarged. The Inklings continued to avoid her, rudely and blatantly, but those among Lewis’s intimates who had been told of the marriage welcomed her, especially Katharine Farrer and her theologian husband, Austin Farrer. Joy landed a job typing Katharine’s latest mystery novel, Gownsman’s Gallows. She started to make her mark on the university community; in February, she had addressed undergraduates on Charles Williams and had the students doubled over with laughter. Her family was blossoming, especially David, who was learning to read the Greek New Testament under Lewis’s enthusiastic tutelage. To crown this burgeoning happiness, Lewis approached the Bishop of Oxford—Harry James Carpenter, father of the future biographer Humphrey Carpenter—for permission to be wed in the Church of England. Previously, Lewis had rejected such a marriage, believing, in keeping with ancient Christian tradition, that Joy, as a divorcée, could not remarry. But he had reassessed the situation and now believed that Joy’s first marriage had been invalid, as Bill had been married and divorced before marrying her, and that therefore she was free to marry in the church. Bishop Carpenter disagreed, however, and the matter was dropped for now.

  A professorship, a wife, a surfeit of love, a season of glorious fecundity during which Lewis had published Surprised by Joy, Till We Have Faces, The Magician’s Nephew, and The Last Battle, the latter completing the Chronicles of Narnia, and was now hard at work on several more projects. He had rarely been happier. In August 1956, leaving Joy in Oxford, he and Warnie vacationed in Ireland, staying at a bungalow in a “place of unearthly beauty,” across a bay from “the most fairy-tale mountains you cd. ask for.” He then joined up with Arthur in Donegal, “a v. fine, wild country with green mountains, rich secretive valleys, and Atlantic breakers on innumerable desolate sands.” Hidden valleys, mysterious mountains; Lewis now was seeing life as a fulfilled fairy tale. He returned to England in mid-September. A month later, he found himself charmed by a season tinged by magic: “a ‘St. Luke’s summer’: which means autumn at its very best—warm, coloured days, but cold nights, and usually misty mornings, every cobweb on the hedge turned into a necklace by the heavy dew.” The idyll ended, as idylls must. On October 18, the same day that Lewis was reveling in “autumn at its very best,” Joy tripped over a telephone wire and was unable to get up. She had been suffering from hip aches, which she attributed to rheumatism, but the fall opened a new abyss of pain. “I have got something really hellish the matter with my left hip and am being carted off to the hospital this afternoon on a stretcher,” she managed to write Bill. In Wingfield-Morris Orthopaedic Hospital, an old Headington army clinic, doctors discovered cancer in her left femur, left breast, right shoulder, and right leg. “The X-rays showed the bone looking ‘moth-eaten,’” she told Bill, “and they are talking of carcinomas or leukemia. In short, it is fairly probable that I am going to die.” She was only forty-one.

  Joy underwent radiation and three operations, during which doctors removed her ovaries and a small tumor in her breast and patched up her femur. “I never have loved her more than since she was struck down,” wrote Warnie, putting the best possible face on the nightmare. “Her pluck and cheerfulness are beyond praise, and she talks of her disease and its fluctuations as if she was describing the experiences of a friend of hers.” The truth is that during these months of treatment, Joy shuttled headlong between hope and despair, now trusting in the radiation to work a cure, now praying for grace, now feeling the grave close in, now undergoing “physical agony … combined with a strange spiritual ecstasy,” so that she knew “how martyrs felt.” When the radiation therapy failed, the demon of doubt wreaked havoc: “I am trying very hard to hold on to my faith, but I find it difficult; there seems such a gratuitous and merciless cruelty in this.” Lewis, however, refused to give up. He contacted Peter W. Bide, a former pupil of his, an Anglican priest in Sussex with a reputation as a faith healer, and asked him to visit Joy and perform a laying on of hands. When Bide arrived in Headington, Lewis immediately raised the possibility of a Christian wedding. Bide—a theological liberal—complied, thereby violating church regulations in what Warnie described as “a notable act of charity, for he is not of this Diocese, and had no right to do so without the Bp’s authority.” The wedding
took place at 11:00 a.m. on March 21, 1957, at Joy’s hospital bedside. “I found it heartrending,” Warnie wrote, “and especially Joy’s eagerness for the pitiable consolation of dying under the same roof as J: though to feel pity for anyone so magnificently brave as Joy is almost an insult.”

  The laying on of hands took place the same day. It proved but an early stage in Lewis’s quest for a miraculous cure. He began to pray that he might be allowed to assume Joy’s pain, in the sort of substitutionary miracle that Charles Williams had taught his followers to seek. Shortly after initiating these prayers, Lewis came down with osteoporosis—not an uncommon problem, especially among those who smoke heavily and weigh too much, as Lewis did. More puzzling was the simultaneous improvement in Joy’s condition. According to Nevill Coghill, hardly the most gullible of men, Lewis’s disease and Joy’s healing both issued from Lewis’s substitutionary action. It was, Coghill later reported, “a power which Lewis found himself … to possess, and which, he told me, he had been allowed to use to ease the suffering of his wife, a cancer victim, of whom the doctors had despaired.” Coghill asked him point-blank, “You mean that her pain left her, and that you felt it for her in your body?” Lewis replied, “Yes, in my legs. It was crippling. But it relieved hers.” At times the pain was so bad that Lewis screamed. He ceased his beloved rambles and took to wearing a surgical belt, a sort of corset that, he joked, “gives me a wonderfully youthful figure.” Photos of him and Joy taken at the time reveal the ravages of illness on both their faces; Lewis described one such image, which appeared in The Observer, as “a spiritualist picture of the ectoplasms of a dyspeptic orangutan and an immature Sorn.”