The main sitting-room is large, and though certainly not dirty it is not particularly clean. Lewis’s ‘scout’, the college servant responsible for the rooms on this staircase, only has time to give it a quick flip of the duster early in the morning; and as for Lewis himself, he never bothers with ashtrays but flicks his cigarette ash (he smokes cigarettes as much as a pipe) on to the carpet wherever he happens to be standing or sitting. He even absurdly maintains that ash is good for carpets. As for chairs – there are several shabbily comfortable armchairs and a big Chesterfield sofa in the middle of the room – their loose covers are never cleaned, nor has it ever occurred to Lewis that they ought to be. Consequently their present shade of grey may or may not bear some relation to their original colour.
Apart from the chairs, there is not much furniture in the room. A plain table stands behind the Chesterfield. It was never a very good table; long ago when Lewis first moved into these rooms, his brother Warnie noticed that Jack had chosen the furniture just as he chose his clothes – by walking into a shop and taking the first thing that he was offered. The table now bears the scars of twenty years’ ruthless use: ink stains, cigarette burns, and ring-shaped marks, the larger of which come from the beer jug that often stands here, and the smaller from ink bottles. Across the room are bookshelves, and (like the table) they are very plain and rather shabby; nor are the books themselves much to look at. Long before, in his adolescent days, Lewis and his friend Arthur Greeves were avid collectors of smart editions with fine bindings. But Lewis gave up this taste when he was a young man, partly because thanks to the expense of the ménage with Mrs Moore he could no longer afford it, and partly because when he began to move towards Christianity he ceased to think that such things were more than vanity. In consequence the books on the shelves are nothing very special, nor are there very many of them, for Lewis uses the Bodleian (the University library) for all but essential volumes. The few that are on his shelves are mainly cheap or second-hand copies of major works, both theological and literary. The Summa Theologiae of Aquinas stands near Beowulf and the Roman de la Rose, while notably absent are The Allegory of Love and Out of the Silent Planet, for Lewis takes no trouble to keep copies of his own books, and gives (or even throws) them away at the slightest opportunity. On the other hand The Hobbit is there, next to Barfield’s children’s story The Silver Trumpet, while there are several of Charles Williams’s books here too. There are also books in the two smaller rooms that open off the main sitting-room. In one of these rooms Warnie Lewis works on weekday mornings, and several rarities can be found on the shelves here, for Warnie collects works relating to the Bourbon court and is always glad to lay his hands on a fine edition. In this room there is also a typewriter, which Warnie uses both for his own work (he is beginning to arrange material for a book of his own on the court of Louis XIV) and for typing his brother’s letters, for he now acts as secretary to Jack. Lying by the typewriter is a packet of cheap typing paper and a large pair of scissors. Warnie dislikes wasting paper (especially under wartime economy conditions) and he refuses to use anything smarter than this stuff for Jack’s correspondence. Moreover if the letter is a short one, Warnie will not use up a complete sheet of paper for it, but will cut off a strip just deep enough to hold the text and his brother’s signature, and will send off this two- or three-inch slip complete with a reference number (‘40/216’) to make it clear to the recipient that Jack Lewis has already written two hundred and sixteen letters this year. Jack is faintly embarrassed by all this.
The other small room is Jack’s bedroom. He sleeps here during term time, rising early on most mornings to go to college prayers before breakfast, or to Communion. The bedroom is bare and looks a little like a monastic cell, for there is nothing in it besides a washstand with a jug and basin, and a pile of books beside the bed. Yet those books include not just the Prayer Book and the Bible but one of the Waverley novels, Trollope’s The Warden, and The Wind in the Willows.
It is dark, being about nine o’clock on a winter evening; and it is also cold, particularly in the big sitting-room which looks north on to Magdalen Grove. The only source of heat is the coal fire, which at the moment is burning very low in the grate, for it is a couple of hours since anyone has been in the room. A faded screen has been set up near the door which leads out on to the staircase, in the hope of muffling the draught; but it makes little difference.
Magdalen clock strikes nine, other college clocks preceding and following it in the distance. Now and then, feet run up and down the stairs outside the door; but it is not until after Great Tom at Christ Church half a mile away has sounded his hundred and one strokes at ten past nine that a more measured tread is heard on the stairs, and the door opens to reveal two men. The first takes off his hat and coat and throws them down on the nearest chair. Then he pulls down the blinds and draws the blackout curtains, after which his companion switches on the light.
The first man is broadly built, with a plump rather red face, a small moustache, and receding hair. He wears a tweed jacket and baggy flannel trousers. He is Warnie Lewis. In the first months of the war he was on active service, stationed at le Havre with the R.A.S.C., but it was soon decided that officers of his age were not needed, and he was allowed to go back on the retired list and return home. Now that he is back in Oxford he is spending a good deal of his time living on his motor boat Bosphorus and cruising up and down the river as part of the Upper Thames Patrol. He has painted his boat battleship-grey and has bought a naval style peaked cap, much to the amusement of Jack.
His companion is R. E. Havard, the Oxford doctor who looks after the Lewis and Tolkien households and who regularly comes to Magdalen on Thursday evenings. He is a few years younger than Warnie and is expecting to be called up for military service fairly soon, albeit as a medical officer. For some reason Havard has always attracted nicknames from the Inklings. Though his Christian names are Robert Emlyn he was once referred to by Hugo Dyson as ‘Humphrey’, either in pure error or because it alliterated with his surname. Some time later, Warnie Lewis was irritated one evening by Havard’s failure to turn up with a car and give him a promised lift home, and dubbed the doctor ‘a useless quack’; and ‘The Useless Quack’ or ‘U.Q.’ Havard has remained. How far this is from being an accurate description of the man may be gauged by Tolkien’s remark to one of his sons: ‘Most doctors are either fools or mere “doctors”, tinkerers with machinery. Havard at any rate is a Catholic who thinks of people as people, not as collections of “works”.’
When the light has been switched on, Warnie Lewis puts some coal on the fire, and grumbles to Havard about the shortage of beer in Oxford – beer is in low supply because of the war, and the Bird and Baby frequently has a ‘No Beer’ sign on its door. ‘My idea of the happy life,’ says Warnie, ‘would be to buy a pub, put up one of those No Beer notices, lock the customers out, and drink the stuff myself.’
The two men talk about beer for a few minutes more, Warnie referring contemptuously to an inferior brew that he and Havard have just been drinking at a hotel down the road – he describes it as ‘varnish’, the term that he and Jack always use for bad beer.
There is no fixed hour at which the Inklings meet on Thursdays, but by general agreement people turn up at any time between nine and half past ten. Nor is there any formal system of membership or election, and in theory it is only necessary for one Inkling to obtain the approval of the others (particularly of Lewis) before introducing somebody new. But in practice this does not happen very often, and on most Thursdays the company consists solely of the Lewis brothers, Tolkien, Havard and Williams, sometimes with the addition of Hugo Dyson, who teaches at Reading University but is often in Oxford. Nevill Coghill used to be quite a regular member of the group, but he is in great demand as a producer of plays for the University dramatic society and other local groups, and he is now rarely seen in Lewis’s rooms on Thursday nights. He is not the only Inkling to have dropped out: Adam Fox, the Magdalen chaplain who
(thanks to the campaign conducted by Tolkien and Lewis) was elected Professor of Poetry in 1938 rarely comes now. Owen Barfield very occasionally turns up on his visits from London, where he still works as a solicitor; and sometimes Charles Wrenn looks in. But for the most part the Thursday party is a small group. A direct result is that usually the only people to read their work aloud are Tolkien, Lewis and Williams. Coghill has once or twice read light verses or lampoons, and Fox (when he comes) generally reads his poetry. Up to the present time Warnie Lewis has had nothing of his own to read to the Inklings, and as for Havard, he always emphasises that he is not a literary man, though he does occasionally contribute some small thing to the group. Readings therefore are in comparatively short supply. Hugo Dyson (when he attends) does not mind this at all, claiming that the conversation is far more enjoyable anyway. But Lewis insists that the readings – the original raison d’etre of the club – must be kept up. Sometimes, as chance will have it, a logical sequence appears, and one reading seems to lead naturally into the next. But this is by no means always the case.
Warnie begins to make tea – a regular ritual at the start of an Inklings – and in a few minutes Jack Lewis and Tolkien arrive; Lewis has been giving Tolkien dinner on High Table in Magdalen.
Both men are fairly certain of being able to remain in Oxford for the duration of the war. Tolkien is nearly fifty and will definitely not be required for active service; his contribution to the war effort is to take turns of duty as an air raid warden, spending one night every two weeks or so waiting by the telephone in a cheerless concrete hut in the grounds of St Hugh’s College. Lewis is several years younger than Tolkien, but he does not expect to be called up. He declares that his personal war aims are exactly summed up by an entry in the Peter-borough Chronicle: ‘During all this evil time, Abbot Martin retained his abbacy.’ However, he does duty with the Home Guard – and at this moment Havard is asking him how he takes to it.
‘Merrily enough I suppose,’ Lewis answers. ‘I spend one night in nine mooching about the most depressing and malodorous parts of Oxford with a rifle. I think that Dyson has the right idea about the Home Guard. He says it should be conducted on the same principle as Dogberry’s Watch in Much Ado – “Let us go sit on the church bench till two, and then all to bed.”’
Warnie asks his brother if there is any beer to be had. Jack usually brings a big enamel jug of it up from the college buttery, but apparently tonight the college is as short of it as is the Bird and Baby. ‘I think there’s some rum in the cupboard if anybody would like some,’ says Jack, and Warnie goes to look for it, while his brother declares:
‘I think positively the nastiest kind of war service is the thing that Barfield is doing. He’s just taken a part-time job in – would you believe it – the Inland Revenue, of all disgusting things! As I was saying to Tollers just now, he’s very depressed because he’s one of those people who really feels the miseries of the world, and the war is making him terribly gloomy.’
‘One can hardly blame him for that,’ says Tolkien. ‘None of us here has exactly displayed a totally unruffled cheerfulness throughout the year.’ He is thinking of the fall of France in June, when even Oxford’s calm was shaken by what seemed the certain prospect of invasion, and of the Battle of Britain, in which his own son Michael was involved as an anti-aircraft gunner.
‘No,’ says Lewis, ‘one can’t, but that’s not quite what I meant. What I’m trying to say is this: that there’s Barfield, with more than enough in his own and his neighbours’ personal lives to worry about, actually spending a good deal of time being miserable about the terrible sufferings which are being endured by people hundreds or thousands of miles away. Now, terrible as those sufferings are, I’m not quite sure whether it’s really one’s duty as a man and a Christian to be so vividly and continuously aware of them. Should we try, for instance, to be aware of what it’s like, say, to be a fighter pilot being shot down in flames at this moment?’
‘I should imagine Williams would think one ought to be very much aware of it indeed,’ says Harvard. ‘Isn’t that part of his “Co-inherence”?’
‘Yes, of course,’ answers Lewis. (He talks emphatically – ‘in italics’ as a pupil puts it – but does not raise his voice even in the heat of argument. There is just a trace of Ulster still in the vowel-sounds.) ‘Yes. I entirely accept the general principle. We must realise, as Williams would say, that we live in each other. But in purely practical terms, were we meant to know so much about the sufferings of the rest of the world? It seems to me that modern communications are so fast – with the wireless and the newspapers and so on – that there’s a burden imposed on our sympathy for which that sympathy just wasn’t designed.’
‘Give an example,’ says Tolkien.
‘That’s easy. Now, supposing the poor Jones family in your own street are having terrible troubles – sickness and so on – well then, obviously it’s your duty to sympathise with them. But what about the morning paper and the evening news broadcasts on the wireless, in which you hear all about the Chinese and the Russians and the Finns and the Poles and the Turks? Are you expected to sympathise with them in the same way? I really don’t think it’s possible, and I don’t think it’s your duty to try.’
‘You certainly can’t do them any good by being miserable about them,’ says Warnie.
‘Ah, but while that’s perfectly true it’s not the point. In the case of the Jones family next door, you’d think pretty poorly of the man who felt nothing in the way of sympathy for them because that feeling “wouldn’t do them any good”.’
‘Are you saying’, asks Havard, ‘that when we read the newspapers we shouldn’t try to sympathise with the sufferings of people we don’t know?’
‘Jack is probably saying’, remarks Warnie, ‘that we shouldn’t read the newspapers at all. You know he never bothers to look at anything other than the crossword.’
‘Perfectly true,’ answers his brother. ‘And I have two very good reasons for it. First of all I deplore journalism - I can’t abide the journalist’s air of being a specialist in everything, and of taking in all points of view and always being on the side of the angels. And I hate the triviality of journalism, you know, the sort of fluttering mentality that fills up the page with one little bit about how an actress has been divorced in California, and another little bit about how a train was derailed in France, and another about the birth of quadruplets in New Zealand.’
‘Well, I think it’s irresponsible of you not to read the war news, at least,’ says Warnie, and Havard grunts in agreement.
‘It might be, if the news was in any way accurate, or if I was qualified to interpret it. But instead here I am, without any military knowledge, being asked to read an account of the fighting that was distorted before it reached the Divisional general, and was further distorted before it left him, and then was “written up” out of all recognition by a journalist, and which will all be contradicted next day anyway – well, I ask you!’
‘Do you know,’ chimes in Tolkien, ‘I was coming back in a train from Liverpool the other week, and there was a Canadian and his wife in the opposite seat, and they drank neat gin out of aluminium cups all the way to Crewe, by which time their eyes had certainly become rather dewy.’
‘What on earth has that got to do with journalism?’ asks Lewis, who hates the conversation to degenerate into anecdote or mere chat.
‘Only that the man was labelled “War Correspondent”, so I shan’t wonder in future why these people’s despatches are so fatuous!’
Lewis roars with laughter.
‘What’s your other reason for not reading the papers?’ asks Havard. ‘I thought you said you had another?’
‘It’s this,’ answers Lewis, ‘though I’m almost ashamed to admit it. You see, I simply don’t understand most of what I find in them. I reckon that the world as it’s now becoming is simply too much for people of the old square-rigged type like me. I don’t understand its economics, or its politi
cs, or any damn thing about it.’
‘Well, I imagine you understand its theology,’ says Warnie, handing round cups of tea.
‘Not a bit of it. In fact it’s very distressing. I always thought that when I got among Christians I’d have reached somewhere that was safe from that horrid thing modern thought. But did I? Oh no, not at all. I blundered straight into it. I thought I was an upholder of the old stern doctrines against modern quasi-Christian slush, but it’s beginning to look as if what I call sternness is slush to most of them. Or at least that’s what it was like when I was talking to a group of Christian undergraduates the other day. They’d all been reading a dreadful man called Karl Barth, who seemed to be a kind of opposite number to Karl Marx. They all talked like Covenanters or Old Testament prophets. They don’t think human reason or human conscience is of any value at all, and they maintain just as stoutly as Calvin that there’s no reason why God’s dealings should appear just to us, let alone merciful. They hold on to the doctrine that all our righteousness is just filthy rags so fiercely and sincerely that I can tell you it’s like a blow in the face.’
‘If there’s really a religious revival, that’s probably what it’ll be like,’ says Warnie. ‘Does everyone want rum?’
‘Oh, do we really need any?’ answers his brother. ‘I thought you needed blackcurrant or something to go with it.’ The question of drink at an Inklings is a slightly delicate matter between the Lewis brothers. Warnie likes it to flow freely, but Jack maintains that regular drinking on Thursday nights alters the character of the club. (There is another factor, in that Jack is concerned about Warnie’s occasional bouts of heavy drinking, which have been going on sporadically for some years.) But tonight as the bottle is already open and Tolkien suggests adding hot water to the rum, Warnie wins and the glasses are handed round.
The Inklings Page 17