“rotted the curtains … change his collar”: John and Priscilla Tolkien, Tolkien Family Album, 45.
“more like a man”: Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 240–41.
“It is not often in ‘universities,’”: Tolkien, Letters, 56–57.
“his name is a disadvantage”: George Stuart Gordon, The Letters of George S. Gordon, 1902–1942 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), 146.
“industrious little devil … my devoted friend”: Carpenter, Tolkien, 104–105.
Tolkien composed poems and songs for the revels: Douglas A. Anderson, “An Industrious Little Devil: E. V. Gordon as Friend and Collaborator with Tolkien,” in Tolkien the Medievalist, ed. Jane Chance (New York: Routledge, 2003), 23.
“not so much a staff as a Club!”: Mary C. Biggar Gordon, The Life of George S. Gordon 1881–1942 (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), 67.
“team fired not only with a departmental esprit de corps”: Tolkien, Letters, 56–57.
“the proportion of ‘language’ students is very high”: Ibid., 11.
“provide the student”: J.R.R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925).
“clearness, conciseness”: Cyrill Brett, review of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by J.R.R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, The Modern Language Review 22, no. 4 (October 1927): 451–58.
“standing by my bedside”: Carpenter, Tolkien, 106.
“I have never consulted him without gaining an illumination”: Scull and Hammond, J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide, 1.
“there is no philological (or literary) scholar of his generation from whom I have learned so much”: Ibid., 349.
“for many years I have felt strongly”: Eugène Vinaver quoted in Peter H. Sutcliffe, The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 270.
“wickedness and sloth … I regret those days bitterly”: Tolkien, Letters, 340.
“the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford”: Ibid., 26.
“a thousand whispering trees”: Tolkien, “Cottage of Lost Play,” 33.
“The Coming of the Valar”: Book of Lost Tales, part 1, 72–73.
“torture … murder”: In an indignant letter to the editor of The Daily Telegraph, responding to an article in which overgrown forests are described as places of “a kind of Tolkien gloom, where no bird sings.” Tolkien, Letters, 420. See Matthew Dickerson, “Trees,” in Drout, J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, 678.
“a great-limbed poplar”: Tolkien, “Introductory Note,” Tree and Leaf, 5.
“a row of coloured Quink”: John and Priscilla Tolkien, Tolkien Family Album, 56–57.
his speech was often incomprehensible: The authors once heard the following anecdote from a close friend of Tolkien: “I was visiting him one day and asked him what he really thought of C. S. Lewis. He said, ‘I’ll tell you, but let’s go on a walk while I talk.’ So we walked for twenty or thirty minutes around North Oxford, and he spilled out his heart to me, or so I believed, telling me his real views on his close friend. But the truth is, I have no idea what he said. He was mumbling so much I couldn’t make out a word.”
“I do not remember a single word”: W. H. Auden, “Making, Knowing and Judging,” Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Poetry, Oxford, June 11, 1956, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), 41–42.
“could turn a lecture room into a mead hall”: J.I.M. Stewart quoted in Philip Norman, “‘More Than a Campus Craze; It’s Like a Drug Dream; The Prevalence of Hobbits: Thirty Years After They Were Invented by a Bored Oxford Don, the Hobbits—‘a Benevolent, Furry-Footed People’—Have Taken a New Generation by Storm,” The New York Times, January 15, 1967.
earning one hundred pounds by grading exams: Tolkien, Letters, 24.
“the great indiarubber trunks”: J.R.R. Tolkien, Roverandom, ed. Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 59.
“the Mountains of Elvenhome”: Ibid., 74.
“poems and major legends”: Tolkien, Letters, 342.
“Tolkien’s ultimate tree”: Hammond and Scull, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator, 64.
“I have exposed my heart to be shot at”: Tolkien, Letters, 172.
“a new starting-point”: Christopher Tolkien, “The Earliest ‘Silmarillion,’” in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Shaping of Middle-Earth: The Quenta, the Ambarkanta, and the Annals, Together with the Earliest “Silmarillion” and the First Map, vol. 4: The History of Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 11.
“Tinúviel meets with qualified approval”: Scull and Hammond, J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology, 134.
7. WANTED: AN INTELLIGIBLE ABSOLUTE
“purpose of worshipping devoutly”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 468.
“little twinkling man like a bird”: Ibid., 531.
“sham romance”: Ibid., 525.
“I have seldom felt less at my ease … Kod”: Ibid., 565–66. Lewis uses the slang expression “Kod” (or its variants, “cod,” “codotta,” “kodotta”) in many of his early letters, and gave the title “Metrical Meditations of a Cod” to the notebook of poems he wrote at the Kirkpatricks’—including poems that would be incorporated into Spirits in Bondage.
“if he were now alive”: C. S. Lewis, “Preface by the Author to the 1950 Edition” of Dymer, in C. S. Lewis, Narrative Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (San Diego: Harcourt, 1969), 6.
“Poor old Kirk!”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 535.
“is so indelibly stamped”: Ibid., 539–40.
“I wish life and death were not the only alternatives”: Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 18.
“whiff of what I used to call the ‘real joy’”: Ibid., 406.
“A greater bore I have never met”: Ibid., 115.
“Smudge”: Ibid., 65.
they would send her off to church by herself: A. N. Wilson mentions this as a personal communication from Maureen (Lady Dunbar), C. S. Lewis, 66.
“In the midst of all this confusion”: Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 104.
“very characteristically”: Ibid., 427.
“Found D and Dorothy”: Ibid., 245–46.
“we sat in judgement on Headington”: Ibid., 145.
“that foul hag … the Bitch”: Ibid., 85 et passim.
“was generous”: Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis, 155.
“that fatal tomb”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 528.
“hostility to the emotions”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 198.
an admirer of Tolkien: Three years earlier, Coghill had sat in the audience as Tolkien introduced his mythology in March 1920 to the Exeter College Essay Club.
“[Coghill] was a big man built on generous lines”: John Wain, quoted in Nevil Coghill, The Collected Papers of Nevill Coghill: Shakespearian and Medievalist, ed. Douglas Gray (Sussex: Harvester, 1988), vii.
“you countenanced”: W. H. Auden, “To Professor Nevill Coghill upon his retirement in A.D. 1966,” in To Nevill Coghill from Friends, collected by John Lawlor and W. H. Auden (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 155.
“a tutor in whom”: Auden, Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, vii.
“a good looking fellow”: Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 189.
Coghill’s accusation: Ibid., 190.
“In Oxenford”: Nevill Coghill’s minutes, quoted by Walter Hooper in the preface to C. S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), x–xii.
“combative pleasure … was certainly the best”: Nevill Coghill, “The Approach to English,” in Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis, 52.
“was a world he could inhabit and believe in”: Ibid., 51–52.
Even the gods: Ibid., 55.
“a continuous intoxication … we were uninhibitedly happy”: Ibid., 52.
Coghill … was a Christian: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 212.
the Real Presence: N.K.H.A. Coghill, “The Sacraments of the Church and the Presence of God in Nature,” Report of the Anglo-Catholic Congress, Subject: The Holy Eucharist, London, July, 1927 (London: Society of SS. Peter and Paul, 1927; Milwaukee: Morehouse Publishing, 1927), 32–43. Other lay speakers included Evelyn Underhill, A. E. Taylor, and Will Spens.
“You stranger”: Lewis, Narrative Poems, 7.
“development by self-destruction … redemption by parricide”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 664.
“At Dymer’s birth no comets scared the nation”: Lewis, Dymer, in C. S. Lewis, Narrative Poems, 8.
“that country clothed with dancing flowers”: Ibid., 91.
“To ‘get it again’”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 169.
“new psychology … unmask and defeat”: C. S. Lewis, “Preface by the Author to the 1950 Edition” of Dymer, in C. S. Lewis, Narrative Poems, 4.
“My desire then contains two elements”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 929–30.
AE … had kind things to say: “Note from Coghill today saying that the ‘V.O.,’ whose favourable review of Dymer in the Irish Statesman had seemed to me not ‘good’ in any sense except that of being favourable, is really A.E. (Russell),” in Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 453.
“great poem”: “A good review from G.K’s Weekly arrived by the morning post, signed by a man called Crofte-Cooke, where Dymer figures as ‘a great poem’ for the first time* in print”; “* and last” reads a note Lewis added later. Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 436.
“notable because it is in the epic tradition”: The Times Literary Supplement (January 13, 1927), 27. Lewis told his father,
Fausset’s review really says as big things as I could, with any reason, wish for. The question “Is epic now possible?” has been a stock question for years. Taking the word “epic” to mean his sense, there is no candidate between Milton and our own times. He puts up Masefield as a possible, and prefers me. He says I have brought back under modern conditions something that has seemed impossible since the days of myth—for I think he includes the Miltonic along with the Spenserian … I don’t mean of course that he thinks I am better than Milton and Spenser, but that I have brought back something lost before (and during) their time. If what he said were true, it wd. mean that I was a very considerable turning point. Of course he is wrong …
Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 680.
“silly”: Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 446.
“the metrical level is good”: Ibid., 438.
“Pre-Raphaelite stained glass”: Coghill, “Approach to English,” 58–59.
“from the age of sixteen onwards I had one single ambition”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 925.
“The Queen of Drum”: Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide, 160.
“a meaningless dance”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 172.
“an old, dirty, gabbling … The whole question of immortality”: Ibid., 201–202.
the descent into madness of Mrs. Moore’s brother, John “Doc” Askins: Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 202–18.
“a sort of horrible sympathy”: Ibid., 203.
An ardent spiritualist friend: Ibid., 221.
“it was to this … Safety first”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 203.
“Keep clear of introspection”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 605–606.
“satisfied an emotional need … No more Avalon”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 204.
art was a sphere of its own: This was a Romantic axiom; Lewis found it in Schopenhauer, among others, and wrote to tell Arthur about this discovery in October 1918. Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 407.
“as rock-bottom reality”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 208–209.
hard philosophical work: As he later acknowledged: “I have been astray among second rate ideas too long…” (January 19, 1927), in Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 432.
“as if the Absolute came to eat out of your hand”: Bernard Bosanquet, Some Suggestions in Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1918), 80.
“out here, where I see spirit continually dodging matter”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 371.
For further reflections from Lewis on his journey from realism to idealism and beyond, see C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, preface to 3rd ed. (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943; reprint ed., London: HarperCollins, 1977), 9–12. See also Mathieu Marion, “Oxford Realism: Knowledge and Perception I,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 299–338.
a disproportionate swath: See J. M. Winter, The Great War and the British People, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), on the demographic data that supports the widespread belief that there were disproportionate numbers of casualties among the officers (drawn from the educated upper classes), and especially among young officers.
On the generational shifts in English philosophy, see the famous essay by Gilbert Ryle, “Fifty Years of Philosophy and Philosophers,” Philosophy 51, no. 198 (October 1976): 383.
“WANTED IMMEDIATELY, for Teaching Purposes, an INTELLIGIBLE ABSOLUTE”: Mind! A Unique Review of Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. A. Troglodyte [F.C.S. Schiller] (London: Williams and Norgate, 1901), 142.
“the Absolute cannot be made clear … mystifications”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 222–23.
“quasi-religion … We could talk religiously”: Ibid., 210. See Barfield, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, 8.
“cannot be lived”: Ibid., 226.
“wasn’t a subject to Plato”: Ibid., 225.
“pure applesauce … constitutionally incapable”: Barfield, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, 10. It’s a typical rhetorical strategy on Lewis’s part, to make himself look the fool, or the callow worldling, in order to set off an insight more effectively, or heighten the dramatic tension of his conversion narrative.
“mind was no late-come epiphenomenon”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 209.
“And so the great Angler”: Ibid., 211.
“very attractive”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 625.
“in a strange state of excitement”: Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 293.
“I went up to [Jack’s] room”: Albert Lewis, diary, May 20, 1925, quoted by Walter Hooper in Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 642.
“my audience had dwindled to two”: Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 348. This “old parson” must be the same as the “aged parson” Lewis speaks of in a letter to his father of February 11, 1925 (Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 638). The “aged parson” was the Reverend Frank Nightingale, ordained an Anglican priest in 1894, now in retirement, auditing classes at Oxford.
“I have come to think if I had the mind, I have not the brain”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 648.
“It will be a comfort to me”: Ibid., 649.
“annihilated … I was off once more”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 217.
Space, Time, and Deity: Discussed by Lewis in All My Road Before Me, 301, and Surprised by Joy, 217–18.
“bearded and deaf … cosmic creation”: Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 403–404.
“My class was completely unruffled”: Ibid., 394.
“I saw that all my waitings … all images and sensations”: Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 219–20. “It appeared to me,” Lewis had written long ago in a preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress,
that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience. This Desire was, in the soul, as the Siege Perilous in Arthur’s castle—the chair in which only one could sit. And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist.
Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress, preface to 3rd ed., 15.
“I asked the earth”: Augustine, Confessions 10:6, trans. Sheed.
“beautiful beyond expectation”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 650.
“a kneeling affair”: Ibid., 647.
“Contempt is his ruling passion”: From an account Lewis gave of nine of his Magdalen colleagues, quoted by Walter Hooper in an appendix to All My Road Before Me, 482–83.
“rowing, drinking”: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 1, 778.
“a pleasant change”: Ibid., 661. His first lecture at the University College, “The Good, its position among values,” had only four in the audience.
His most famous lectures: Lewis’s twice weekly “Prolegomena lectures” formed the basis of The Discarded Image (published posthumously in 1964); and in a letter to Sister Mary Madeleva (Wolff), C.S.C., Lewis says that they were a runoff from material he collected for The Allegory of Love: Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, 140–41.
red face and booming voice: John Wain, “C. S. Lewis as a Teacher,” in Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers, ed. Joseph Epstein (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 250.
a trademark style: George Watson, who attended Lewis’s lectures in 1948 (against his tutor’s wishes), recalls, “You could have taken dictation from his lectures, and some (including myself) did.” Watson, “The Art of Disagreement: C. S. Lewis (1898–1963),” The Hudson Review 48, 2 (Summer 1995): 229. A detailed record is preserved in the notes of William Jarvis, catalogued in the Bodleian Library as “Notes on C. S. Lewis’s lectures for undergraduates, ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Medieval Poetry,’ taken by William Jarvis, 1936” (shelfmark: MS. Eng. D. 2567).
“Thickening”: Walter Hooper, “The Lectures of C. S. Lewis in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge,” Christian Scholars Review 27, no. 4 (1998): 441.
“girls squatting”: Paul Johnson, “A.J.P. Taylor: A Saturnine Star Who Had Intellectuals Rolling in the Aisles,” The Spectator (March 11, 2006): 31.
“as a lecturer he was the biggest ‘draw’”: Harry Blamires, quoted in Warren Lewis, “Memoir of C. S. Lewis,” 38.
Sister Mary Madeleva: From a letter to Holy Cross Superior General Mother Vincentia Fannon. Gail Porter Mandell, Madeleva: A Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 136.
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings Page 67