Against the Vigilants
Lewis also published, in 1960, an article in the Cambridge Broadsheet about the characteristic vices of undergraduate literary criticism. These include, he said, favoring radical over time-honored interpretations, lacking a foundation in biblical and classical learning, treating literary texts “as a substitute for religion or philosophy or psychotherapy,” and in all these vices “imitat[ing] that which, in their elders, has far less excuse.” High dudgeon was the inevitable response; an article in Delta: The Cambridge Literary Magazine accused Lewis of “Pecksniffian disingenuousness,” “shabby bluff,” and “self-righteousness,” ad hominem remarks to which Lewis fired back:
Do not misunderstand. I am not in the least deprecating your insults; I have enjoyed these twenty years l’honneur d’etre une cible and am now pachydermatous. I am not even rebuking your bad manners; I am not Mr. Turveydrop and “gentlemanly deportment” is not a subject I am paid to teach. What shocks me is that students, academics, men of letters, should display what I had thought was an essentially uneducated inability to differentiate between a disputation and a quarrel. The real objection to this sort of thing is that it is all a distraction from the issue. You waste on calling me liar and hypocrite time you ought to have spent on refuting my position.
But the fact was that Lewis was growing tired of l’honneur d’être une cible (the honor of being a target). He was sufficiently roused to devote an entire book—An Experiment in Criticism (1961)—to a critique of the Leavisites, under the name of the “Vigilant School.” He would omit the names of his adversaries, “shrinking a little, it may be, from their ‘insular ferocity,’” as Frank Kermode put it in a review, but no one familiar with the period could fail to recognize Lewis’s intent.
Lewis characterizes the Vigilant School as a cultural militia always on patrol, subjecting literary taste to the prejudices of the day (“Tell me the date of your birth and I can make a shrewd guess whether you prefer Hopkins or Housman, Hardy or Lawrence”), placing whole genres (such as fantasy, detective novels, and Westerns) under embargo, and encouraging a suspicion that is fatal to literary experience: “No poem will give up its secret to a reader who enters it regarding the poet as a potential deceiver, and determined not to be taken in. We must risk being taken in, if we are to get anything.”
Lewis’s “experiment,” then, is to turn Vigilant criticism on its head. If literary works must be evaluated, let us evaluate them by the kind of reading they generate. A good book would be one that “permits, invites, or even compels good reading.” A bad book would be one that is incapable of eliciting such a response. Despite the title, Experiment is not a methodology designed to be implemented in salons or schools: it is a manifesto. Lewis exhorts us to become the kind of generous readers he himself was: capable of enjoying works of vastly differing genres, idioms, and periods; quick to appreciate but slow to declare a work unfit; distrusting one’s negative reactions as indications of bias; and extending the franchise of aesthetic judgment to everyone who loves to read. We read, Lewis says, not primarily to appraise an author’s worth, but to seek “an enlargement of our being.” “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality…,” he writes. “In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
Viewed from the distance of half a century or more, Lewis’s paean to reading continues to enchant, but his polemic against Leavisite criticism beats a dead horse. Just two years after Experiment appeared, the Leavisite school received its definitive send-up in The Pooh Perplex: A Student Casebook, a satire by Frederick Crews in which “Simon Lacerous,” editor of the literary journal Thumbscrew, revalues Winnie-the-Pooh, determining that it is “Another Book to Cross Off Your List.” No intellectual movement that has made itself so easy to parody could long survive. Lewis, on the other hand, set up no theory to tilt at and offered no practical technique for disciples to use or abuse. His critical program was largely a corrective against the excesses of other peoples’ programs—and it may be that he overcorrected. Who can really abstain, as Lewis proposed in A Personal Heresy, from all consideration of an author’s biography? Who can really set aside all prior commitments and approach a literary work in naked surrender?
The irony is that Lewis and his Cambridge literary adversaries agree about a good many things: that civilization is in a dire state, that the Industrial Revolution has produced a mechanized consumer culture estranged from its roots, that things have been getting worse since the Great War, that literature, and university study of literature, has a vitally important moral influence, that scientism should be opposed, and more. As a Coleridgean, Richards would come out with statements (“The saner and greater mythologies are not fancies; they are the utterance of the whole soul of man”) that could have been spoken by Lewis himself. Similarly, Leavis could describe the ideal critic of poetry as one who permits himself “not to ‘think about’ and judge but to ‘feel into’ or ‘become’” the poem, and advocated “a kind of responsiveness that is incompatible with the judicial, one-eye-on-the-standard approach.”
A reviewer of Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism in The Times Literary Supplement, citing these words of Leavis, observed that “Professor Lewis’s own credo is not, after all, very far removed from that of Dr. Leavis” and concluded by saying, “By all means let us have an end to acrimony: and if the critical alliance is led by a compound figure, it does not matter whether we call him C.S. Leavis or F.R. Lewis.” But there would be no end to acrimony. Summing up the history of the conflict in a 1962 letter to J. B. Priestley, Lewis had this to say:
The actual history of Eng. Lit. as a “Subject” has been a great disappointment to me. My hope was that it would be primarily a historical study that wd. lift people out of (so to speak) their chronological provincialism by plunging them into the thought and feeling of ages other than their own: for the arts are the best Time Machine we have. But all that side of it has been destroyed at Cambridge and is now being destroyed at Oxford too. This is done by a compact, well-organised group of whom Leavis is the head. It now has a stranglehold on the schools as well as the universities (and the High Brow press). It is too open and avowed to be called a plot. It is much more like a political party—or the Inquisition.
As for Leavis, Lewis concluded that he was
a perfectly sincere, disinterested, fearless, ruthless fanatic. I am sure he would, if necessary, die for his critical principles: I am afraid he might also kill for them. Ultimately, a pathological type—unhappy, intense, mirthless. Incapable of conversation: dead silence or prolonged, passionate, and often irrelevant, monologue are his only two lines. And while he is in fact the head of the most powerful literary Establishment we have ever had since Boileau, he maddeningly regards himself as a solitary martyr with his back to the wall.
A year later, when Lewis died, Leavis announced the fact to his students at Cambridge: “C. S. Lewis is dead … They said in the Times that we will miss him. We will not. We will not.”
The Encircling Darkness
While publishing at a breathless pace, Lewis was engaged in other literary work, including a regular stream of essays, a book on prayer in the form of letters to an imaginary correspondent (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer), and The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, based on lectures dating back to the 1920s and ’30s. Both books would appear posthumously, to friendly reviews that doubled as memorials, Helen Gardner, in The Listener, praising Lewis’s “wonderful gusto, the clarity of his style, the wit of his comments and analogies, the range of his learning and the liveliness of his mind,” commending the gentler style of his rhetoric once the “hot-gospelling” days were past, paying homage to his gift for allegory (ideas became “almost persons” for h
im), and declaring, in high epitaphic style, that “whether we were his pupils in the classroom or no, we are all his pupils and we shall not look upon his like again.”
During these years, he also served on an Anglican commission charged with revising Miles Coverdale’s sixteenth-century translation of the Psalter, used in the Book of Common Prayer. Other commission members included the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and, of all people, T. S. Eliot. The mix of Lewis and Eliot portended a glorious literary duel, but the two adversaries, tired out, one foot already in eternity (Eliot was seventy when the commission first convened at Lambeth Palace in 1959), had sheathed their swords. Writing to Eliot regarding the Psalter, Lewis displayed a level of jocularity unknown in the stiff exchanges of earlier years; he pointed out that the two shared “(a.) Having educated Betjeman, (b.) Not having given evidence about Lady C.” (D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, whose publisher was on trial at the Old Bailey in 1960 for obscenity). He told Walter Hooper that “I never liked Eliot’s poetry, or even his prose. But when we met this time [at Lambeth] I loved him.” Late did Lewis love Eliot—and could have loved him sooner if he had allowed himself to realize that, poetry aside, they were kindred spirits in the fight against philistine secularism.
But to love Eliot now, to love the man who represented almost all one disliked in modern poetry: this as much as anything signaled the beginning of Lewis’s dying. He had achieved a mellow old age at the disconcertingly young age of sixty-two. Heavy smoking played a part in the premature decline, as did a lifelong diet of beef and beer. The primary reason may lie, however, in Joy’s death; with her went his only sustained experience of romantic bliss, and he knew there would never be another. This realization has led more than one man to an early grave. Nonetheless, he soldiered on, with a fortitude inspired less by a traditional British sense of duty than by belief in the importance of kind attention to others. Few events exemplify his devotion to this principle more than his activity on the day after Joy’s death. The musician Donald Swann, unaware of the tragedy, came with a colleague to the Kilns that day to consult with Lewis about a projected opera based on Perelandra: “It was a quiet morning and we went to Lewis’s home in Oxford for breakfast. We strolled around his lovely garden with him, talking about the opera. After about an hour he said: ‘I hope you will excuse me. I must go now because my wife died last night.’ He left us. I was very moved. Quite overcome. It is just another story of this very gracious gentleman who always looked after his guests. I mean, at a time like that! What did we matter?”
Within a week, Lewis was writing to an American correspondent on the nature and knowledge of God; within two weeks, he was advising another American on the best source for secondhand British books. He spent a great deal of time tending to Joy’s two boys—when David, the older, developed a passionate interest in Judaism, Lewis arranged Hebrew lessons for him—and served as a buffer between them and their father, who visited Oxford during the August after Joy’s death (Gresham would commit suicide two years later, after developing cancer of the tongue and throat). Warnie, in stark contrast to his brother, collapsed after Joy’s death, fleeing to his beloved Drogheda, where he drank himself once again into the care of the gentle nuns at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. His journals for these years make painful reading, as he meticulously notes his pattern of intoxication and sobriety: “During the year which ended today I have been a teetotaller for 355 days” (October 20, 1961); “I drank from 22 June until 27 August while I was in Ireland, then was again a teetotaller from 28 August to 31 December, 126 days. So out of 365 days I was T.T. for 298 days. A poor performance compared with 1961” (January 2, 1963). At least Lewis had learned to expect no better and even to joke about his brother’s malady, telling a correspondent on January 17, 1962, of “a dipsomaniac retired major I once knew who refused the suggestion that he shd. try A.A. on the ground that ‘it would be full of retired majors’!”
As the post-Joy months ticked by, Lewis’s body went into steady decline. In 1961 his prostate enlarged, his kidneys balked, his blood soured. He wore a catheter, slept in a chair, could not climb stairs, and underwent multiple blood transfusions. When Tolkien in 1962 invited Lewis to his Festschrift celebration, Lewis declined with a dark jest, explaining that “I wear a catheter, live on a low protein diet, and go early to bed. I am, if not a lean, at least a slippered, pantaloon” (a reference to the decrepitude of the sixth age of man, as described in As You Like It, II, vii: “The sixth age shifts / Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon / With spectacles on nose and pouch on side / His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide / For his shrunk shank…”). As Lewis could not travel easily, his friends, including Barfield, Arthur Greeves, Ruth Pitter, John Wain, and George Sayer, came to him at the Kilns. Whenever possible, Havard and Dundas-Grant drove him on Mondays to the Bird and Baby, and, beginning in 1962, to the Lamb and Flag, to meet with Hardie, McCallum, Mathew, and a few others. Lewis called these gatherings “Inklings,” but they lacked the fire, if not the friendship, of former days.
By early 1963, he was fading fast. He continued to teach at Cambridge, however, and this proved his undoing, at least in Dr. Havard’s estimation, as the strain resulted in his bladder poisoning his kidneys. If Lewis had taken a leave of absence, Havard told George Sayer, he might have lived another decade or two. Instead, on July 15, he entered the Acland for a blood transfusion, had a heart attack, and fell into a coma. The Acland staff, convinced he was dying, summoned a priest to administer last rites. However, Lewis recovered sufficiently to return to the Kilns. There he took on a new personal secretary, Walter Hooper, who would become in later years a leading light in Lewis studies, and enjoyed a visit from Tolkien and his son John; the two old Inklings discussed Le Morte d’Arthur and the death of trees. This was their last encounter. Lewis wrote a farewell letter to Arthur: the last sentence of their forty-nine-year-long correspondence runs “But oh Arthur, never to see you again!…”
Now he and Warnie stood alone against the encircling darkness. “By early October it became apparent to both of us that he was facing death,” wrote Warnie. “Once again,—as in the earliest days—we could turn for comfort only to each other. The wheel had come full circle: once again we were together in the little end room at home … ‘I have done all I wanted to do, and I’m ready to go,’ he said to me one evening.” He went on November 22, around 5:30 p.m., collapsing and dying in his bedroom at the Kilns; John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Texas and Aldous Huxley passed away of laryngeal cancer in California on the same day, the former death relegating Lewis’s obituary to the inner pages, if not the next day’s edition, in newspapers around the world. Lewis’s funeral was held four days later at Headington’s Church of the Holy Trinity. Close friends flocked to the service, including Barfield, Havard, Dundas-Grant, and the Farrers. Douglas Gresham turned up, along with Christopher Tolkien and his father, who earlier in the morning had served at a Mass for Lewis at St. Aloysius, the Jesuit church on the Woodstock Road. There was one startling absence: Warnie, who had railed bitterly about those who skipped Joy’s funeral, remained at the Kilns, lost in grief and memories, emptying his bottle.
19
INKLINGS FIRST AND LAST
Moral compass, intellectual catalyst, best of companions: Lewis in his passing was remembered as these and more. Those close to him, reeling with loss, offered tributes brimming with admiration for their fallen friend and with self-pity for themselves. Writing to Priscilla on the day of the funeral, Tolkien recalled the “time of close communion” he and Lewis had shared but emphasized his own pain: “So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age—like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots.” Warnie suffered most, as one would expect, and he poured his anguish into his diary: “My life continues very desolate, and I seem to miss my dear SPB more rather than less as time goes on. I have no one to chat with.” Nor was the “perpetual ache of J’s absence” his only burd
en; deeply depressed, he lost track of finances and discovered again the haunting fear of impoverishment that had afflicted both brothers since childhood, along with new worries about his mental acuity: “I forget quite important names in French history even.” He slept poorly, grew bored, and drank himself in and out of the hospital (in 1964 it was discovered that he had stashed hundreds of empty whiskey bottles in the hollowed-out tops of his bookcases at the Kilns). He prayed that a stroke would kill him while he slept. Barfield, more restrained, apotheosized Lewis as “the absolutely unforgettable friend, the friend with whom I was in close touch for over forty years, the friend you might come to regard hardly as another human being, but almost as a part of the furniture of my existence,” while at the same time composing the pessimistic, self-absorbed “Moira” (Greek: fate, destiny), a poem linking Lewis’s death to his own and contrasting his friend’s posthumous enlightenment to his own earthbound ignorance: “You came to him: when will you come to me? / He knows what matters from what matters not. / I hurry to and fro and seem to be.”
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings Page 59